The Most Influential People Across History
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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#6701
Michael Lovell
#6710
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Michael R. Lovell is an American engineer and academic administrator, currently serving as President of Marquette University. Lovell assumed office on July 1, 2014. Education Lovell received his Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and Ph.D in mechanical engineering from University of Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#6702
Ben Green
#6711
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Ben Joseph Green FRS is a British mathematician, specialising in combinatorics and number theory. He is the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford. Early life and education Ben Green was born on 27 February 1977 in Bristol, England. He studied at local schools in Bristol, Bishop Road Primary School and Fairfield Grammar School, competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1994 and 1995. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1995 and completed his BA in mathematics in 1998, winning the Senior Wrangler title. He stayed on for Part III and earned his do...
Go to Profile#6703
Douglas Massey
#6712
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Douglas Steven Massey is an American sociologist. Massey is currently a professor of Sociology at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and is an adjunct professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#6704
Roger Corman
#6713
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Roger William Corman is an American film director, producer, and actor. Known under various monikers such as "The Pope of Pop Cinema", "The Spiritual Godfather of the New Hollywood", and "The King of Cult", he is known as a trailblazer in the world of independent film. Many of Corman's films are low-budget cult films including some which are adapted from the tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
Go to Profile#6705
Liam Donaldson
#6714
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sir Liam Joseph Donaldson is a British doctor. He was formerly the Chief Medical Officer for England, being the 15th occupant of the post since it was established in 1855. As such, he was principal advisor to the United Kingdom Government on health matters and one of the most senior officials in the National Health Service .
Go to Profile#6706
Sarah Kofman
#6715
Overall Influence
1934 - 1994 (60 years)
Sarah Kofman was a French philosopher . Biography Kofman began her teaching career in Toulouse in 1960 at the Lycée Saint-Sernin, and worked with both Jean Hyppolite and Gilles Deleuze. Her abandoned primary thesis for her State doctorate, later published as Nietzsche et la métaphore, was supervised by Deleuze. In 1969 Kofman met Jacques Derrida and began attending his seminars at the École Normale Supérieure.
Go to Profile#6707
Driss Chraïbi
#6716
Overall Influence
1926 - 2007 (81 years)
Driss Chraïbi was a Moroccan author whose novels deal with colonialism, culture clashes, generational conflict and the treatment of women and are often perceived as semi-autobiographical. Born in El Jadida and educated in Casablanca, Chraïbi went to Paris in 1945 to study chemistry before turning to literature and journalism. His works have been translated into English, Arabic, Italian, German and Russian. He viewed himself as an anarchist, writing on issues such as immigration, patriarchy and the relation between the west and the Arab world
Go to Profile#6708
Bharathan
#6717
Overall Influence
1947 - 1998 (51 years)
Bharathan was an Indian film maker, artist, and art director. Bharathan is noted for being the founder of a new school of film making in Malayalam cinema, along with Padmarajan and K. G. George, in the 1980s, which created films that were widely received while also being critically acclaimed. A train of directors, and screenwriters followed this school onto the 1990s including Sibi Malayil, Kamal, Lohithadas and Jayaraj.
Go to Profile#6709
Jon Kleinberg
#6718
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Jon Michael Kleinberg is an American computer scientist and the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University known for his work in algorithms and networks. He is a recipient of the Nevanlinna Prize by the International Mathematical Union.
Go to Profile#6710
Martin Indyk
#6719
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Martin Sean Indyk is an American diplomat and foreign relations analyst with expertise in the Middle East. He was a distinguished fellow in International Diplomacy and later executive vice president at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C from 2001-2018. He took leave from the Brookings Institution to serve as the U.S. Special Envoy for Israeli–Palestinian Negotiations from 2013 to 2014. He is currently a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Go to Profile#6711
Maria Reiche
#6720
Overall Influence
1903 - 1998 (95 years)
Maria Reiche Grosse-Neumann was a German-born Peruvian mathematician, archaeologist, and technical translator. She is known for her research into the Nazca Lines, which she first saw in 1941 together with American historian Paul Kosok. Known as the "Lady of the Lines", Reiche made the documentation, preservation and public dissemination of the Nazca Lines her life's work.
Go to Profile#6712
Radley Balko
#6721
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Radley Prescott Balko is an American journalist, author, blogger, and speaker who writes about criminal justice, the drug war, and civil liberties. In 2022, he began publishing his work on Substack after being let go from The Washington Post, where he had worked as an opinion columnist for nine years. Balko has written several books, including The Rise of the Warrior Cop and The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist.
Go to Profile#6713
Steven Knapp
#6722
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Steven Knapp is an American academic who served as the 16th President of the George Washington University, in Washington, DC, succeeding Stephen Joel Trachtenberg. He currently serves on the boards of the World Affairs Council, the Economic Club of Washington, DC, the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, and the National Symphony Orchestra, as well as serving as a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Modern Language Association.
Go to Profile#6714
Daniel Benjamin
#6723
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Daniel Benjamin is an American diplomat and journalist and was the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the United States Department of State from 2009 to 2012, appointed by Secretary Hillary Clinton. Benjamin was the director of the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. In July 2020, he became president of the American Academy in Berlin, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independent transatlantic institution in the German capital.
Go to Profile#6715
Vladimir Tismăneanu
#6724
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Vladimir Tismăneanu is a Romanian American political scientist, political analyst, sociologist, and professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. A specialist in political systems and comparative politics, he is director of the University of Maryland's Center for the Study of Post-Communist Societies, having served as chairman of the editorial committee and editor of the East European Politics and Societies academic review. Over the years, Tismăneanu has been a contributor to several periodicals, including Studia Politica, Journal of Democracy, Sfera Politicii, Revista 22, Evenimentul Zilei, Idei în Dialog and Cotidianul.
Go to Profile#6716
David Pines
#6725
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
David Pines was the founding director of the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter and the International Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter , distinguished professor of physics, University of California, Davis, research professor of physics and professor emeritus of physics and electrical and computer engineering in the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign , and a staff member in the office of the Materials, Physics, and Applications Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#6717
Simon Schaffer
#6726
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
#6718
John Madden
#6727
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
John Earl Madden was an American football coach and sports commentator in the National Football League . He served as the head coach of the Oakland Raiders from 1969 to 1978, who he led to eight playoff appearances, seven division titles, seven AFL/AFC Championship Game appearances, and the franchise's first Super Bowl title in Super Bowl XI. Madden, who never had a losing season, holds the highest winning percentage among NFL head coaches.
Go to Profile#6719
Sadako Ogata
#6728
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Sadako Ogata, née Nakamura, was a Japanese academic, diplomat, author, administrator, and professor emerita at the Roman Catholic Sophia University. She was widely known as the head of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 1991 to 2000, as well as in her capacities as Chair of the UNICEF Executive Board from 1978 to 1979 and as President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency from 2003 to 2012. She also served as Advisor of the Executive Committee of the Japan Model United Nations .
Go to Profile#6720
Norman Thagard
#6729
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Norman Earl Thagard , is an American scientist and former U.S. Marine Corps officer and naval aviator and NASA astronaut. He is the first American to ride to space on board a Russian vehicle, and can be considered the first American cosmonaut. He did this on March 14, 1995, in the Soyuz TM-21 spacecraft for the Russian Mir-18 mission.
Go to Profile#6721
Roger Hilsman
#6730
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
Roger Hilsman Jr. was an American soldier, government official, political scientist, and author. He saw action in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II, first with Merrill's Marauders, getting wounded in combat, and then as a guerilla leader for the Office of Strategic Services. He later became an aide and adviser to President John F. Kennedy, and briefly to President Lyndon B. Johnson, in the U.S. State Department while he served as Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in 1961 to 1963 and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs in 1963 to 1964.
Go to Profile#6722
Lowell Bergman
#6731
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Lowell Bergman is an American journalist, television producer, and professor of journalism. In a career spanning nearly five decades, Bergman worked as a producer, a reporter, and then the director of investigative reporting at ABC News and as a producer for CBS's 60 Minutes, leaving in 1998 as the senior producer of investigations for CBS News. He was also the founder of the investigative reporting program at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and, for 28 years, taught there as a professor. He was also a producer and correspondent for the PBS documentary series Frontline. In 20...
Go to Profile#6723
Francesco Clemente
#6732
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Francesco Clemente is an Italian contemporary artist. He has lived at various times in Italy, India and New York City. Some of his work is influenced by the traditional art and culture of India. He has worked in various artistic media including drawing, fresco, graphics, mosaic, oils and sculpture. He was among the principal figures in the Italian Transavanguardia movement of the 1980s, which was characterised by a rejection of Formalism and conceptual art and a return to figurative art and Symbolism.
Go to Profile#6724
Kurt Rudolph
#6733
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Kurt Rudolph was a German researcher of Gnosticism and Mandaeism. Education Born in Dresden, Rudolph studied Protestant theology, religion, history and Semitology at the universities of Greifswald and Leipzig in the years 1948 to 1953. Subsequently, for six years, he was research assistant while he worked in parallel towards doctorates in theology and religious history. In 1961, he received his habilitation in religious history and comparative religion.
Go to Profile#6725
Katerina Tikhonova
#6734
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova is a Russian scientist, manager, and former acrobatic dancer. She is the second daughter of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Tikhonova heads the Innopraktika company, which unites two initiatives of Moscow State University: the National Intellectual Development Foundation and the National Intellectual Reserve Centre . She is also Deputy Director of the Institute for Mathematical Research of Complex Systems at Moscow State University.
Go to Profile#6726
Beryl Bainbridge
#6735
Overall Influence
1932 - 2010 (78 years)
Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge was an English writer. She was primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often macabre tales set among the English working class. She won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996, and was nominated five times for the Booker Prize. She was described in 2007 as a national treasure. In 2008, The Times named Bainbridge on their list of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Go to Profile#6727
Susan Gubar
#6736
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Susan D. Gubar is an American author and distinguished Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at Indiana University. She is best known for co-authoring the landmark feminist literary study The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination with Sandra Gilbert. She has also written a trilogy on women's writing in the 20th century. Her honours include the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
Go to Profile#6728
Joe Namath
#6737
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Joseph William Namath is an American former football quarterback who played in the American Football League and National Football League for 13 seasons, primarily with the New York Jets. He played college football at the University of Alabama, where he won the national championship as a senior, and was selected by the Jets first overall in the 1965 AFL Draft. During his five AFL seasons, he was a two-time MVP and twice led the league in passing yards, while leading the Jets to win one AFL championship and one Super Bowl. Both victories remain the Jets' only championships. Following the 1970...
Go to Profile#6729
Liu Cixin
#6738
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Liu Cixin is a Chinese computer engineer and science fiction writer. He is a nine-time winner of China's Galaxy Award and has also received the 2015 Hugo Award for his novel The Three-Body Problem as well as the 2017 Locus Award for Death's End. He is also a winner of the Chinese Nebula Award. In English translations of his works, his name is given as Cixin Liu. He is a member of China Science Writers Association and the vice president of Shanxi Writers Association. He is sometimes called "Da Liu" by his fellow science fiction writers in China.
Go to Profile#6730
Scottie Pippen
#6739
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Scotty Maurice Pippen Sr. , usually spelled Scottie Pippen, is an American former professional basketball player. He played 17 seasons in the National Basketball Association , winning six NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls. Considered one of the greatest small forwards of all time, Pippen, along with Michael Jordan, played an important role in transforming the Bulls into a championship team and popularizing the NBA around the world during the 1990s.
Go to Profile#6731
Lars Vilks
#6740
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
Lars Endel Roger Vilks was a Swedish visual artist and activist who was known for the controversy surrounding his drawings of Muhammad. Many years earlier he had created the sculptures Nimis and Arx, made of driftwood and rock, respectively. The area where the sculptures are located was proclaimed by Vilks as an independent country, "Ladonia".
Go to Profile#6732
Jasper Fforde
#6741
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jasper Fforde is an English novelist, whose first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001. He is known mainly for his Thursday Next novels, but has published two books in the loosely connected Nursery Crime series and the first books of two other independent series: The Last Dragonslayer and Shades of Grey. Fforde's books abound in literary allusions and wordplay, tightly scripted plots and playfulness with the conventional, traditional genres. They usually contain elements of metafiction, parody, and fantasy.
Go to Profile#6733
Andreas Floer
#6742
Overall Influence
1956 - 1991 (35 years)
Andreas Floer was a German mathematician who made seminal contributions to symplectic topology, and mathematical physics, in particular the invention of Floer homology. Floer's first pivotal contribution was a solution of a special case of Arnold's conjecture on fixed points of a symplectomorphism. Because of his work on Arnold's conjecture and his development of instanton homology, he achieved wide recognition and was invited as a plenary speaker for the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Kyoto in August 1990. He received a Sloan Fellowship in 1989.
Go to Profile#6734
Natalie Angier
#6743
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Natalie Angier /ænˈdʒɪər/ is an American nonfiction writer and a science journalist for The New York Times. Her awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting in 1991 and the AAAS Westinghouse Science Journalism Award in 1992. She is also noted for her public identification as an atheist and received the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s Emperor Has No Clothes Award in 2003.
Go to Profile#6735
Joseph Henrich
#6744
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Joseph Henrich is an American professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Before arriving at Harvard, Henrich was a professor of psychology and economics at the University of British Columbia. He is interested in the question of how humans evolved from "being a relatively unremarkable primate a few million years ago to the most successful species on the globe", and how culture shaped our species' genetic evolution.
Go to Profile#6736
Sergey Yablonsky
#6745
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
Sergey Vsevolodovich Yablonsky was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, one of the founders of the Soviet school of mathematical cybernetics and discrete mathematics. He is the author of a number of classic results on synthesis, reliability, and classification of control systems , the term used in the USSR and Russia for a generalization of finite state automata, Boolean circuits and multi-valued logic circuits.
Go to Profile#6737
Maṇḍana Miśra
#6746
Overall Influence
Mandana Mishra was a Hindu philosopher who wrote on the Mīmāṃsā and Advaita systems of thought. He was a follower of the Karma Mimamsa school of philosophy and a staunch defender of the holistic sphota doctrine of language. He was a contemporary of Adi Shankara, and while it is said that he became a disciple of Adi Sankara, he may actually have been the most prominent Advaitin of the two until the 10th century CE. He is often identified with Sureśvara, though the authenticity of this is doubtful. Still, the official Sringeri documents recognises Mandana Mishra as Sureśvara.
Go to Profile#6738
Cornelio Fabro
#6747
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Cornelio Fabro CSS was an Italian Catholic priest of the Stigmatine Order and a scholastic Thomist philosopher. He was the founder of the Institute for Higher Studies on Unbelief, Religion and Cultures.
Go to Profile#6739
Michael Denton
#6748
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Michael John Denton is a British proponent of intelligent design and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. He holds a PhD degree in biochemistry. Denton's book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, inspired intelligent design proponents Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe.
Go to Profile#6740
Gunduz Caginalp
#6749
Overall Influence
Gunduz Caginalp was a mathematician whose research has also contributed over 100 papers to physics, materials science and economics/finance journals, including two with Michael Fisher and nine with Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith. He began his studies at Cornell University in 1970 and received an AB in 1973 "Cum Laude with Honors in All Subjects" and Phi Beta Kappa. In 1976 he received a Master's degree, and in 1978 a PhD, both also at Cornell. He held positions at The Rockefeller University, Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh , where he was a Professor of Mathematics until his death on December 7, 2021.
Go to Profile#6741
Christopher Durang
#6750
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Christopher Ferdinand Durang is an American playwright known for works of outrageous and often absurd comedy. His work was especially popular in the 1980s, though his career seemed to get a second wind in the late 1990s.
Go to Profile#6742
Daniel Bensaïd
#6751
Overall Influence
1946 - 2010 (64 years)
Daniel Bensaïd was a philosopher and a leader of the Trotskyist movement in France. He became a leading figure in the student revolt of 1968, while studying at the University of Paris X: Nanterre. Life and career Bensaïd was born in Toulouse, France, to a father who was a Sephardic Jew from Algeria, and who had moved from Oran, where he met Bensaïd's mother, to Vichy Toulouse. In response to the 8 February 1962 Charonne massacre of Algerians in Paris, Bensaïd joined the Union of Communist Students. Irritated by the party orthodoxy he swiftly became part of a left opposition within the union, ...
Go to Profile#6743
Albert Mohler
#6752
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Richard Albert Mohler Jr. is an American evangelical theologian, the ninth president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and host of the podcast The Briefing, where he daily analyzes the news and recent events from an evangelical perspective.
Go to Profile#6744
Cynthia Breazeal
#6753
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Cynthia Breazeal is an American robotics scientist and entrepreneur. She is a former chief scientist and chief experience officer of Jibo, a company she co-founded in 2012 that developed personal assistant robots. Currently, she is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the director of the Personal Robots group at the Media Lab. Her most recent work has focused on the theme of living everyday life in the presence of AI, and gradually gaining insight into the long-term impacts of social robots.
Go to Profile#6745
Klaus Klostermaier
#6754
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Klaus K. Klostermaier is a Catholic priest and scholar of Hinduism, Indian history and culture. Life and career Klostermaier obtained a PhD in philosophy from the Gregorian University in Rome in 1961, and another in "Ancient Indian History and Culture" from the University of Bombay in 1969.
Go to Profile#6746
Claus Offe
#6755
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Claus Offe is a political sociologist of Marxist orientation. He received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt and his Habilitation at the University of Konstanz. In Germany, he has held chairs for Political Science and Political Sociology at the Universities of Bielefeld and Bremen , as well as at the Humboldt-University of Berlin . He has worked as fellow and visiting professor at the Institutes for Advanced Study in Stanford, Princeton, and the Australian National University as well as Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and The New School University, New York.
Go to Profile#6747
Fred Rosner
#6756
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Fred Rosner is a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the director of the Department of Medicine at Queens Hospital Center. He is also the chairman of the Medical Ethics Committee of the State of New York. He is, moreover, an expert on Jewish medical ethics and on the medical writings of Moses Maimonides.
Go to Profile#6748
Declan McCullagh
#6757
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Declan McCullagh is an American entrepreneur, journalist, and software engineer. He is the CEO and co-founder, with computer scientist Celine Bursztein, of Recent Media Inc., a startup in Silicon Valley that has built a recommendation engine and iOS and Android news app. Recent, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning for its recommendation engine, was released to early users in June 2015.
Go to Profile#6749
Frank McGuinness
#6758
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Professor Frank McGuinness is an Irish writer. As well as his own plays, which include The Factory Girls, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, Someone Who'll Watch Over Me and Dolly West's Kitchen, he is recognised for a "strong record of adapting literary classics, having translated the plays of Racine, Sophocles, Ibsen, Garcia Lorca, and Strindberg to critical acclaim". He has also published six collections of poetry, and two novels. McGuinness was Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin from 2007 to 2018.
Go to Profile#6750
Noli de Castro
#6759
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Manuel Leuterio de Castro Jr. , professionally known as Noli de Castro, is a Filipino journalist, news anchor and politician who served as the 12th vice president of the Philippines from 2004 until 2010, under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. He was elected to the Senate of the Philippines in 2001 after receiving the most votes of any senator in the 2001 election.
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