Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people

#6551

Peter Dale Scott

Peter Dale Scott

#6560

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Peter Dale Scott is a Canadian-born poet, academic, and former diplomat. A son of the Canadian poet and constitutional lawyer F. R. Scott and painter Marian Dale Scott, he is best known for his critiques of deep politics and American foreign policy since the era of the Vietnam War. Notably, he was a signatory in 1968 of the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, in which participants vowed to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Although trained as a political scientist, Scott holds an atypical academic appointment as a poet-scholar in an English department.

#6552

Hersh Shefrin

#6561

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Hersh Shefrin is a Canadian economist best known for his pioneering work in behavioral finance. Shefrin received his B.S. from University of Manitoba in 1970. At the University of Waterloo in 1971 he received his M.S. in mathematics. He then obtained a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics in 1974, after which he became assistant professor at the University of Rochester. In 1979 he was appointed professor at the Santa Clara University, first in the department of economics and then in 1990 to the department of finance.

#6553

Ed Koch

#6562

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Edward Irving Koch was an American politician, lawyer, political commentator, film critic, and television personality. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1969 to 1977 and was mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989.

#6554

P. V. Narasimha Rao

P. V. Narasimha Rao

#6563

Overall Influence

1921 - 2004 (83 years)

Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao , popularly known as P. V. Narasimha Rao, was an Indian lawyer, statesman and politician who served as the 9th prime minister of India from 1991 to 1996. He is known for introducing various liberal reforms to India's economy. His ascendancy to the prime ministership was politically significant because he was the second holder of this office from a non-Hindi-speaking region and the first from South India . He led an important administration, overseeing a major economic transformation and several home incidents affecting national security of India. Rao, who he...

#6555

Louise Erdrich

#6564

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Karen Louise Erdrich is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.

#6556

Dennis Lindley

#6565

Overall Influence

1923 - 2013 (90 years)

Dennis Victor Lindley was an English statistician, decision theorist and leading advocate of Bayesian statistics. Biography Lindley grew up in the south-west London suburb of Surbiton. He was an only child and his father was a local building contractor. Lindley recalled that the family had "little culture" and that both his parents were "proud of the fact that they had never read a book." The school Lindley attended, Tiffin School, introduced him to "ordinary cultural activities." From there Lindley went to read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1941. During the war the degree cou...

#6557

Paul Verhaeghe

#6566

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Paul Verhaeghe is a Belgian professor of clinical psychology and psychoanalysis. Studies In 1978, Verhaeghe graduated with a master's degree in psychology from the University of Ghent . In 1985, he obtained his PhD in clinical psychology and in 1992 a special doctorate in psychodiagnostics . He received his initial psychoanalytical training at the Belgian School for Psychoanalysis and then at the École de la Cause Freudienne .

#6558

Edwin Cameron

#6567

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Edwin Cameron is a retired judge who served as a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He is well known for his HIV/AIDS and gay-rights activism and was hailed by Nelson Mandela as "one of South Africa's new heroes". President Ramaphosa appointed him as Inspecting Judge of Correctional Services from 1 January 2020 and in October 2019 he was elected Chancellor of Stellenbosch University.

#6559

Reinhold Remmert

Reinhold Remmert

#6568

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Reinhold Remmert was a German mathematician. Born in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, he studied mathematics, mathematical logic and physics in Münster. He established and developed the theory of complex-analytic spaces in joint work with Hans Grauert. Until his retirement in 1995, he was a professor for complex analysis in Münster.

#6560

Joshua Fishman

#6569

Overall Influence

1926 - 2015 (89 years)

Joshua Fishman was an American linguist who specialized in the sociology of language, language planning, bilingual education, and language and ethnicity. Early life and education Joshua Fishman was born and raised in Philadelphia. His sister was the poet Rukhl Fishman. He attended public schools while also studying Yiddish at elementary and secondary levels. As he grew up, his father would ask his children at the dinner table, "What did you do for Yiddish today?" He studied Yiddish in Workmen's Circle Schools, which emphasized mastery of the Yiddish language along with a focus on literature, history, and social issues.

#6561

Kenneth Appel

#6570

Overall Influence

1932 - 2013 (81 years)

Kenneth Ira Appel was an American mathematician who in 1976, with colleague Wolfgang Haken at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the four-color theorem. They proved that any two-dimensional map, with certain limitations, can be filled in with four colors without any adjacent "countries" sharing the same color.

#6562

Paula Zahn

#6571

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Paula Ann Zahn is an American journalist and newscaster who has been an anchor at ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, and CNN. She currently produces and hosts the true crime documentary series On the Case with Paula Zahn on the Investigation Discovery channel.

#6563

Neil Druckmann

#6572

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Neil Druckmann is an Israeli-American writer, creative director, designer, and programmer. He has been co-president of the video game developer Naughty Dog since 2020 and head of creative since 2023, and is best known for his work on the game franchises Uncharted and The Last of Us, having co-created the latter.

#6564

Benjamin S. Blanchard

#6573

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Benjamin Seaver Blanchard, Jr. was an American systems engineer and Emeritus Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech, who was awarded the INCOSE Pioneer Award jointly with Wolt Fabrycky as "practitioner, teacher, and advocate of Systems Engineering."

#6565

Svetlana Savitskaya

#6574

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya is a Russian former aviator and Soviet cosmonaut who flew aboard Soyuz T-7 in 1982, becoming the second woman in space. On her 1984 Soyuz T-12 mission she became the first woman to fly to space twice, and the first woman to perform a spacewalk.

#6566

John Swartzwelder

John Swartzwelder

#6575

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

John Joseph Swartzwelder Jr. is an American comedy writer and novelist, best known for his work on the animated television series The Simpsons. Born in Seattle, Washington, Swartzwelder began his career working in advertising. He was later hired to work on comedy series Saturday Night Live in the mid-1980s as a writer. He later contributed to fellow writer George Meyer's short-lived Army Man magazine, which led him to join the original writing team of The Simpsons, beginning in 1989.

#6567

Evandro Agazzi

#6576

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Evandro Agazzi is an Italian philosopher and professor at the University of Genoa. His fields of interest are ethics of science and technology, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology, and systems theory.

#6568

Philippe C. Schmitter

Philippe C. Schmitter

#6577

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Philippe C. Schmitter is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is Emeritus Professor of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute.

#6569

Michel Hénon

#6578

Overall Influence

1931 - 2013 (82 years)

Michel Hénon was a French mathematician and astronomer. He worked for a long time at the Nice Observatory. In astronomy, Hénon is well known for his contributions to stellar dynamics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he made important contributions on the dynamical evolution of star clusters, in particular globular clusters. He developed a numerical technique using Monte Carlo methods to follow the dynamical evolution of a spherical star cluster much faster than the so-called n-body methodss.

#6570

Didier Deschamps

#6579

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Didier Claude Deschamps is a French professional football manager and former player who has been managing the France national team since 2012. He played as a defensive midfielder for several clubs, in France, Italy, England and Spain, namely Marseille, Juventus, Chelsea and Valencia, as well as Nantes and Bordeaux. Nicknamed "the water-carrier" by former France teammate Eric Cantona, Deschamps was an intelligent and hard-working defensive midfielder who excelled at winning back possession and subsequently starting attacking plays, and also stood out for his leadership throughout his career. ...

#6571

Pepetela

#6580

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos is a major Angolan writer of fiction. He writes under the name Pepetela. A Portuguese Angolan, Pepetela was born in Benguela, Portuguese Angola, and fought as a member of the MPLA in the long guerrilla war for Angola's independence. Much of his writing deals with Angola's political history in the 20th century. Mayombe, for example, is a novel that portrays the lives of a group of MPLA guerrillas who are involved in the anti-colonial struggle in Cabinda, Yaka follows the lives of members of a white settler family in the coastal town of Benguela, and A G...

#6572

George Siemens

#6581

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

George Siemens is a Canadian expatriate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington and professor and director of the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning at the University of South Australia. He is known for his theory of connectivism, which seeks to understand learning in the digital age. He played a role in the early development of massive online open courses .

#6573

Saeed Sohrabpour

#6582

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Saeed Sohrabpour , , Full Professor of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, has been the vice president and chief adviser of Islamic Republic of Iran’s National Elites Foundation since 2011. He has also been elected as Iranian Science and Culture Hall of Fame and was the chancellor of Sharif University of Technology from 1997 to 2010. He is a member of the board of trustees of Iran’s National Library and Archives of I.R.. Furthermore, during his professional life, Sohrabpour has published prolific scientific papers in various high-ranked journals. Prof Sohr...

#6574

Rakesh Agrawal

#6583

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Rakesh Agrawal is a computer scientist who until recently was a Technical Fellow at the Microsoft Search Labs. Rakesh is well known for developing fundamental data mining concepts and technologies and pioneering key concepts in data privacy, including Hippocratic Database, Sovereign Information Sharing, and Privacy-Preserving Data Mining. IBM's commercial data mining product, Intelligent Miner, grew out of his work. His research has been incorporated into other IBM products, including DB2 Mining Extender, DB2 OLAP Server and WebSphere Commerce Server, and has influenced several other commercial and academic products, prototypes and applications.

#6575

Paul Starr

#6584

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Paul Elliot Starr is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. He is also the co-editor and co-founder of The American Prospect, a notable liberal magazine created in 1990. In 1994, he founded the Electronic Policy Network, or Moving Ideas, an online public policy resource. In 1993, Starr was the senior advisor for President Bill Clinton's proposed health care reform plan. He is also the president of the Sandra Starr Foundation.

#6576

Sam Allardyce

#6585

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Samuel Allardyce is an English football manager and former professional player who was most recently manager of Leeds United. Allardyce made 578 league and cup appearances in a 21-year career spent mostly in the Football League, as well as brief spells in the North American Soccer League and League of Ireland. He was signed by Bolton Wanderers from Dudley Town in 1969 and spent nine years at Bolton, helping the club to win the Second Division title in 1977–78. He spent the 1980s as a journeyman player, spending time with Sunderland, Millwall, Tampa Bay Rowdies, Coventry City, Huddersfield Town, Bolton Wanderers , Preston North End, and West Bromwich Albion .

#6577

Tanya Luhrmann

#6586

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is an American psychological anthropologist known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and studies of how culture shapes psychotic, dissociative, and related experiences. She has also studied culture and morality, and the training of psychiatrists. She is Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. Luhrmann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

#6578

Maurice Nivat

#6587

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Maurice Paul Nivat was a French computer scientist. His research in computer science spanned the areas of formal languages, programming language semantics, and discrete geometry. A 2006 citation for an honorary doctorate called Nivat one of the fathers of theoretical computer science. He was a professor at the University Paris Diderot until 2001.

#6579

John Wain

#6588

Overall Influence

1925 - 1994 (69 years)

John Barrington Wain CBE was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group known as "The Movement". He worked for most of his life as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio.

#6580

Ira Katznelson

#6589

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Ira I. Katznelson is an American political scientist and historian, noted for his research on the liberal state, inequality, social knowledge, and institutions, primarily focused on the United States. His work has been characterized as an "interrogation of political liberalism in the United States and Europe—asking for definition of its many forms, their origins, their strengths and weaknesses, and what kinds there can be".

#6581

Helen Fisher

#6590

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Helen Elizabeth Fisher is an American anthropologist, human behavior researcher, and self-help author. She is a biological anthropologist, is a senior research fellow, at The Kinsey Institute, Indiana University, and a member of the Center For Human Evolutionary Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Prior to Rutgers University, she was a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

#6582

Walter Lewin

#6591

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Walter Hendrik Gustav Lewin is a Dutch astrophysicist and retired professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lewin earned his doctorate in nuclear physics in 1965 at the Delft University of Technology and was a member of MIT's physics faculty for 43 years beginning in 1966 until his retirement in 2009.

#6583

Richard R. Nelson

#6592

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Richard R. Nelson is an American professor of economics at Columbia University. He is one of the leading figures in the revival of evolutionary economics thanks to his seminal book An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change written jointly with Sidney G. Winter. He is also known for his work on industry, economic growth, the theory of the firm, and technical change.

#6584

Javad Nurbakhsh

Javad Nurbakhsh

#6593

Overall Influence

1926 - 2008 (82 years)

Javad Nurbakhsh was the Master of the Nimatullahi Sufi Order from 1953 until his death. He was also a psychiatrist and a successful writer in the fields of both psychiatry and Sufi mysticism. Life Iran Nurbakhsh was born in the city of Kerman, Iran on 10 December 1926. He was initiated into the Nimatullahi Sufi order at the age of sixteen and appointed its sheikh at twenty. Nurbakhsh studied at University of Tehran's medical school, receiving his doctorate in psychiatry in 1952, from the Sorbonne. He began his professional career as a medical doctor at the age of 26 when he became head of a local hospital in the southeastern town of Bam, Iran.

#6585

Yinyu Ye

#6594

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Yinyu Ye is a Chinese American theoretical computer scientist working on mathematical optimization. He is a specialist in interior point methods, especially in convex minimization and linear programming. He is a professor of Management Science and Engineering and Kwoh-Ting Li Chair Professor of Engineering at Stanford University. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Ye also is a co-founder of minMax Optimization Inc.

#6586

Frances Allen

#6595

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Frances Elizabeth Allen was an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing Award. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, program optimization, and parallelization. She worked for IBM from 1957 to 2002 and subsequently was a Fellow Emerita.

#6587

Lloyd Bitzer

#6596

Overall Influence

1931 - 2016 (85 years)

Lloyd Bitzer was an American rhetorician. In 1962, Lloyd Bitzer received his doctorate from the University of Iowa. He held the title of Associate Professor of speech at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early 1960s. He continued to be a professor at the institution in the school of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture until 1994, when he retired. Bitzer was involved with many organizations including the National Communication Association and the National Development Project in Rhetoric. In 1968, Bitzer published his famous theory of situational rhetoric.

#6588

Alex Krizhevsky

#6597

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Alex Krizhevsky is a Ukrainian-born Canadian computer scientist most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. Shortly after having won the ImageNet challenge in 2012 with AlexNet, he and his colleagues sold their startup, DNN Research Inc., to Google. Krizhevsky left Google in September 2017 after losing interest in the work, to work at the company Dessa in support of new deep-learning techniques. Many of his numerous papers on machine learning and computer vision are frequently cited by other researchers. He is the creator of the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets.

#6589

Anne L'Huillier

Anne L'Huillier

#6598

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Anne Geneviève L'Huillier is a French-Swedish physicist, and professor of atomic physics at Lund University in Sweden. She leads an attosecond physics group which studies the movements of electrons in real time, which is used to understand the chemical reactions on the atomic level. Her experimental and theoretical research are credited with laying the foundation for the field of attochemistry. In 2003 she and her group beat the world record for the shortest laser pulse, of 170 attoseconds.

#6590

Lars Gustafsson

Lars Gustafsson

#6599

Overall Influence

1936 - 2016 (80 years)

Lars Erik Einar Gustafsson was a Swedish poet, novelist, and scholar. Among his awards were the in 2006, the Goethe Medal in 2009, the Thomas Mann Prize in 2015, and the International Nonino Prize in Italy in 2016.

#6591

Susan Athey

#6600

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Susan Carleton Athey is an American economist. She is the Economics of Technology Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to joining Stanford, she has been a professor at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the first female winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. She served as the consulting chief economist for Microsoft for six years and was a consulting researcher to Microsoft Research. She is currently on the boards of Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo, Ripple, and non-profit Innovations for Poverty Action.

#6592

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde

#6601

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde was a German legal scholar and a justice on Germany's Federal Constitutional Court. He was a professor at the University of Freiburg and the author of more than 20 books and 80 articles dealing with legal and constitutional theory, as well as political theory, political philosophy and Catholic political thought. Böckenförde was considered a member of the Ritter School.

#6593

David Schweickart

#6602

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

David Schweickart is an American mathematician and philosopher. He holds a BS in Mathematics from the University of Dayton, a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Virginia, and a PhD in Philosophy from Ohio State University. He currently is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago.

#6594

Morton Deutsch

#6603

Overall Influence

1920 - 2017 (97 years)

Morton Deutsch was an American social psychologist and researcher in conflict resolution. Deutsch was one of the founding fathers of the field of conflict resolution. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Deutsch as the 63rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

#6595

Wiebe Bijker

#6604

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Wiebe E. Bijker is a Dutch professor Emeritus, former chair of the Department of Social Science and Technology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Early life Bijker's father was an engineer involved in implementing the Delta Plan after a disastrous dike breach in the Netherlands in 1953 when young Bijker was two years old and later became deputy director of the Delft Hydraulics Laboratory. Presumably, the unique fact of parts of the Netherlands being below sea level, the well-known concerns in innovation surrounding this condition for centuries, and his father's involvement all contr...

#6596

Angelina Jolie

#6605

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Angelina Jolie is an American actress, filmmaker and humanitarian. The recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award and three Golden Globe Awards, she has been named Hollywood's highest-paid actress multiple times.

#6597

Robert M. Price

Robert M. Price

#6606

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Robert McNair Price is an American New Testament scholar who argues in favor of the Christ myth theorythe claim that a historical Jesus did not exist. Price is the author of a number of books on biblical studies and the historicity of Jesus.

#6598

Alexander Zamolodchikov

#6607

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Alexander Borisovich Zamolodchikov is a Russian physicist, known for his contributions to condensed matter physics, two-dimensional conformal field theory, and statistical mechanics, and is currently the C.N. Yang – Wei Deng Endowed Chair of Physics at Stony Brook University.

#6599

Moshe Vardi

#6608

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Moshe Ya'akov Vardi is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, United States. and a faculty advisor for the Ken Kennedy Institute. His interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite model theory, knowledge of multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification and reasoning, and teaching logic across the curriculum. He is an expert in model checking, constraint satisfaction and database theory, common knowledge , and theoretical...

#6600

John Neumeier

#6609

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

John Neumeier is an American ballet dancer, choreographer, and director. He has been the director and chief choreographer of Hamburg Ballet since 1973. Five years later he founded the Hamburg Ballet School, which also includes a boarding school for students. In 1996, Neumeier was made ballet director of Hamburg State Opera.

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