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
#6751
Clifford Shull
#6760
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Clifford Glenwood Shull was a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist. Biography Shull attended Schenley High School in Pittsburgh, received his BS from Carnegie Institute of Technology and PhD from New York University. He worked for The Texas Company at Beacon, New York during the wartime, followed by a position in the Clinton Laboratory , and finally joined MIT in 1955, and retired in 1986.
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Seamus Deane
#6761
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Seamus Francis Deane was an Irish poet, novelist, critic, and intellectual historian. He was noted for his debut novel, Reading in the Dark, which won several literary awards and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1996.
Go to Profile#6753
Sylvester James Gates
#6762
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Sylvester James Gates Jr. , known as S. James Gates Jr. or Jim Gates, is an American theoretical physicist who works on supersymmetry, supergravity, and superstring theory. He currently holds the Clark Leadership Chair in Science with the physics department at the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He is also affiliated with the University Maryland's School of Public Policy. He served on former President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#6754
Ted Cruz
#6763
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Rafael Edward Cruz is an American politician, attorney, and political commentator serving as the junior United States senator from Texas since 2013. A member of the Republican Party, Cruz was the solicitor general of Texas from 2003 to 2008.
Go to Profile#6755
Steven Horwitz
#6764
Overall Influence
1964 - 2021 (57 years)
Steven G. Horwitz was an American economist of the Austrian School. Horwitz was the Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the department of economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 2017, he retired as the Dana Professor of Economics Emeritus at St. Lawrence University.
Go to Profile#6756
Alick Glennie
#6765
Overall Influence
1925 - 2003 (78 years)
Alick Edwards Glennie was a British computer scientist, most famous for having developed Autocode, which many people regard as the first ever computer compiler. Glennie worked with Alan Turing on several projects, including the Manchester Mark 1.
Go to Profile#6757
Deepak Pandya
#6766
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Deepak Pandya was a neuroanatomist who is best known for his contributions to the understanding of cortical and subcortical brain connectivity in the macaque using tract-tracing methods. He is the father of NASA astronaut Sunita Williams.
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Alice Gast
#6767
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Alice Petry Gast is an American researcher, was the 16th president of Imperial College London, and sits on the board of directors of Chevron. Gast was named one of the top 100 "Modern Era" engineers in the US under the category of "Leadership" by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
Go to Profile#6759
Janna Levin
#6768
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Janna J. Levin is an American theoretical cosmologist and a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in astronomy and physics with a concentration in philosophy at Barnard College in 1988 and a PhD in theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. Much of her work deals with looking for evidence to support the proposal that our universe might be finite in size due to its having a nontrivial topology. Other work includes black holes and chaos theory. She joined the faculty at Barnard College in January 2004 and is currentl...
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Harry Harrison
#6770
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Harry Max Harrison was an American science fiction author, known mostly for his character The Stainless Steel Rat and for his novel Make Room! Make Room! . The latter was the rough basis for the motion picture Soylent Green . Long resident in both Ireland and the United Kingdom, Harrison was involved in the foundation of the Irish Science Fiction Association, and was, with Brian Aldiss, co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group.
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Hector Avalos
#6771
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Hector Avalos was a professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, cultural anthropologist, and the author of several books on religion. Avalos was an atheist and advocate of secular humanist ethics.
Go to Profile#6763
Peter Zoller
#6772
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Peter Zoller is a theoretical physicist from Austria. He is professor at the University of Innsbruck and works on quantum optics and quantum information and is best known for his pioneering research on quantum computing and quantum communication and for bridging quantum optics and solid state physics.
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Harry R. Lewis
#6773
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Essentially all of Lewis's career has been at Harvard, where he has been honored for his "particularly distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching"; his students have included future entrepreneurs Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and numerous future faculty members at Harvard and other schools. The website "Six Degrees to Harry Lewis", created by Zuckerberg while at Harvard, was a precursor to Facebook.
Go to Profile#6765
Carlos Kenig
#6774
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Carlos Eduardo Kenig is an Argentine-American mathematician and Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago. He is known for his work in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. He was President of the International Mathematical Union between 2019 and 2022.
Go to Profile#6766
Gesine Schwan
#6775
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Gesine Schwan is a German political science professor and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The party has nominated her twice as a candidate for the federal presidential elections. On 23 May 2004, she was defeated by the Christian Democrat Horst Köhler. On 23 May 2009, Köhler beat her again to win his second term.
Go to Profile#6767
Daniel Z. Freedman
#6776
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Daniel Zissel Freedman is an American theoretical physicist. He is an Emeritus Professor of Physics and Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and is currently a visiting professor at Stanford University. He is mainly known for his work in supergravity. He is a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#6768
Gérard Diffloth
#6777
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Gérard Diffloth was a French linguist known as a leading specialist in the Austroasiatic languages. As a linguistics professor, he was employed at the University of Chicago and Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA, after a dissertation on the Irula language. He was an advocate of immersion fieldwork for linguistic research.
Go to Profile#6769
Michael Howard
#6778
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Sir Michael Eliot Howard was an English military historian, formerly Chichele Professor of the History of War, Honorary Fellow of All Souls College, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, and founder of the Department of War Studies, King's College London. In 1958, he co-founded the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
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Richard Jeffrey
#6779
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Richard Carl Jeffrey was an American philosopher, logician, and probability theorist. He is best known for developing and championing the philosophy of radical probabilism and the associated heuristic of probability kinematics, also known as Jeffrey conditioning.
Go to Profile#6771
Jonathan Borofsky
#6780
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jonathan Borofsky is an American sculptor and printmaker who lives and works in Ogunquit, Maine. Early life and education Borofsky was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in 1964, after which he continued his studies at France's Ecole de Fontainebleau and received his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1966. He lived in Manhattan until a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts brought him to Los Angeles in 1977. He resided in Venice and Tuna Canyon, Los Angeles from 1977 to 1992, In the 1960s, Borofsky'...
Go to Profile#6772
Elaine Ingham
#6781
Overall Influence
Elaine Ingham is an American microbiologist and soil biology researcher and founder of Soil Foodweb Inc. She is known as a leader in soil microbiology and research of the soil food web, She is an author of the USDA's Soil Biology Primer.
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Ray Johnson
#6782
Overall Influence
1927 - 1995 (68 years)
Raymond Edward "Ray" Johnson was an American artist. Known primarily as a collagist and correspondence artist, he was a seminal figure in the history of Neo-Dada and early Pop art and was described as "New York's most famous unknown artist". Johnson also staged and participated in early performance art events as the founder of a far-ranging mail art network – the New York Correspondence School – which picked up momentum in the 1960s and is still active today. He is occasionally associated with members of the Fluxus movement but was never a member. He lived in New York City from 1949 to 1968,...
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Fred Forest
#6783
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Fred Forest is a French new media artist making use of video, photography, the printed press, mail, radio, television, telephone, telematics, and the internet in a wide range of installations, performances, and public interventions that explore both the ramifications and potential of media space. He was a cofounder of both the Sociological Art Collective and the Aesthetics of Communication movement .
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Douglas Wolk
#6784
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Douglas Wolk is a Portland, Oregon-based author and critic. He has written about comics and popular music for publications including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, Salon.com, Pitchfork Media, Vanity Fair, and The Believer. Wolk was the managing editor of CMJ New Music Monthly from 1993 to 1997, and hosted a radio show on WFMU from 1999 to 2001. He has four published books. The most recent, All of the Marvels, tours the Marvel comics universe via his project of reading all 27,000 Marvel superhero comics. In support of that project, in Jan...
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Yoshiki Sasai
#6785
Overall Influence
1962 - 2014 (52 years)
Yoshiki Sasai was a Japanese stem cell biologist. He developed methods to guide human embryonic stem cells into forming brain cortex, eyes , and other organs in tissue culture. Sasai worked at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, and was Director of the Laboratory for Organogenesis and Neurogenesis. Following his involvement in the 2014 STAP cell controversy, Sasai was found dead at Riken from an apparent suicide.
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Sheldon Wolin
#6786
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Sheldon Sanford Wolin was an American political theorist and writer on contemporary politics. A political theorist for fifty years, Wolin became Professor of Politics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he taught from 1973 to 1987.
Go to Profile#6778
Noel Malcolm
#6787
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Sir Noel Robert Malcolm, is an English political journalist, historian and academic, currently a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. A King's Scholar at Eton College, Malcolm read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and received his doctorate in history from Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a Fellow and College Lecturer of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before becoming a political and foreign affairs journalist for The Spectator and the Daily Telegraph.
Go to Profile#6779
Diana Deutsch
#6788
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Diana Deutsch is a British-American psychologist from London, England. She's a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and is a prominent researcher on the psychology of music. Deutsch is primarily known for her discoveries in music and speech illusions. She also studies the cognitive foundation of musical grammars, which consists of the way people hold musical pitcheses in memory, and how people relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. In addition, she is known for her work on absolute pitch , which she has shown is far more prevalent among speakers of tonal languages.
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Jason Wu
#6789
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Jason Wu is a Taiwanese-Canadian artist and fashion designer based in New York City. Born in Taiwan and raised in Vancouver, he studied fashion design at Parsons School of Design, and trained under Narciso Rodriguez before launching his own line.
Go to Profile#6781
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono
#6790
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono , commonly referred to by his initials SBY, is an Indonesian politician and retired army general who served as the sixth president of Indonesia from 2004 to 2014. A member of the Democratic Party of Indonesia, he served as the 4th leader of the Democratic Party from 2014 until 2020, 8th and 10th coordinating minister of politics and security affairs of Indonesia from 2000 until 2001, and again from 2001 until 2004. He also served as the president of the Assembly and chair of the Council of the Global Green Growth Institute. He was also the former chairman of ASEAN due ...
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Felipe Massa
#6791
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Felipe Massa is a Brazilian racing driver. He competed in 15 seasons of Formula One between 2002 and 2017, where he scored 11 Grand Prix victories, 41 podiums and finished as championship runner-up in 2008. He currently competes full-time in the Brazilian Stock Car Pro Series, driving the Chevrolet Cruze for Lubrax Podium with the number 19.
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Teodor Shanin
#6792
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Teodor Shanin was a British sociologist who was for many years Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He was credited with pioneering the study of Russian peasantry in the West, and is best known for his first book, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society, Russia, 1910–25 . After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Shanin moved to Russia where, with funding from The Open Society Institute, Ford Foundation and others, he founded the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences in 1995. Shanin was President of the Moscow School, Profess...
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Andrei Pleșu
#6793
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Andrei Gabriel Pleșu is a Romanian philosopher, essayist, journalist, literary and art critic. He has been intermittently involved in politics, having been appointed Minister of Culture , Minister of Foreign Affairs and presidential counsellor for external affairs .
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Brad A. Myers
#6794
Overall Influence
Brad Allan Myers is a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto in 1987, under Bill Buxton.
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Nicolas Berggruen
#6795
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Nicolas Berggruen is a US-based billionaire investor and philanthropist. Born in Paris, France, he is a dual German and American citizen. He is the co-founder and president of Berggruen Holdings, a private investment company and the co-founder and chairman of the Berggruen Institute, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank that works to address global governance issues. In 2014, through the Institute, Berggruen launched Noema Magazine, formerly the WorldPost, a digital and print publication dedicated to exploring global issues.
Go to Profile#6787
Branko Grünbaum
#6796
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Branko Grünbaum was a Croatian-born mathematician of Jewish descent and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
Go to Profile#6788
Babrak Karmal
#6797
Overall Influence
1929 - 1996 (67 years)
Babrak Karmal was an Afghan communist revolutionary and politician who was the leader of Afghanistan, serving in the post of general secretary of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1986.
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Efim Zelmanov
#6798
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Efim Isaakovich Zelmanov is a Russian-American mathematician, known for his work on combinatorial problems in nonassociative algebra and group theory, including his solution of the restricted Burnside problem. He was awarded a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich in 1994.
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Spencer C. Tucker
#6799
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Spencer C. Tucker is a Fulbright scholar, retired university professor, and author of works on military history. He taught history at Texas Christian University for 30 years and held the John Biggs Chair of Military History at the Virginia Military Institute for six years.
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Richard Boyatzis
#6800
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Richard Eleftherios Boyatzis is a Greek-American organizational theorist and Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, Adjunct Professor in People/Organizations at ESADE, as well as HR Horvitz Professor of Family Business. He is considered an expert in the field of emotional intelligence, behavior change, and competence.
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Thom Gunn
#6801
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
Thomson William "Thom" Gunn was an English poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement, and his later poetry in America, even after moving towards a looser, free-verse style. Gunn wrote about his experience moving to San Francisco from England. He received numerous literary honors, and his best poems are reputed to possess a restrained elegance of philosophy.
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Philip Leder
#6802
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Philip Leder was an American geneticist. Early life and education Leder was born in Washington, D.C., and studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1956. In 1960, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed his medical residency at the University of Minnesota.
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Carlos Cruz-Diez
#6803
Overall Influence
1923 - 2019 (96 years)
Carlos Cruz-Diez was a Venezuelan artist said by some scholars to have been "one of the greatest artistic innovators of the 20th century." Career In 2020, the Pérez Art Museum Miami acquired Chromosaturation , a site specific installation initially conceived in 1965, and presented in venues all over the globe, such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston , United States; Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris ; and Museo Würth La Rioja, Spain .
Go to Profile#6795
Henry McKean
#6804
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Henry P. McKean, Jr. is an American mathematician at the Courant Institute in New York University. He works in various areas of analysis. He obtained his PhD in 1955 from Princeton University under William Feller.
Go to Profile#6796
Mohamed El Naschie
#6805
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Mohamed El Naschie is an Egyptian engineer and the former editor of a controversial journal, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. The controversy concerned El Naschie's publication, over many years, of over 300 papers of questioned scientific merit authored by himself in his own journal with little or no apparent peer review. Published reports of his eventual departure from the editorship of the journal led to a lengthy libel court case that raised questions about the libel laws in Great Britain. The controversy has also played a role in discussions of the "impact factor" as a quality measure for sci...
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Deborah Mayo
#6806
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Deborah G. Mayo is an American philosopher of science and author. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Philosophy at Virginia Tech and holds a visiting appointment at the Center for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science of the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#6798
Peter Whittle
#6807
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Peter Whittle was a mathematician and statistician from New Zealand, working in the fields of stochastic nets, optimal control, time series analysis, stochastic optimisation and stochastic dynamics. From 1967 to 1994, he was the Churchill Professor of Mathematics for Operational Research at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#6799
Chi-Huey Wong
#6808
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Chi-Huey Wong is a Taiwanese-American biochemist. He is currently the Scripps Family Chair Professor at the Scripps Research Institute, California in the department of chemistry. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, as awarded the 2014 Wolf Prize in Chemistry and 2015 RSC Robert Robinson Award. Wong is also the holder of more than 100 patents and publisher of more 700 scholarly academic research papers under his name.
Go to Profile#6800
Gregory Peck
#6809
Overall Influence
1916 - 2003 (87 years)
Eldred Gregory Peck was an American actor and one of the most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1970s. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Peck the 12th-greatest male star of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
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