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).
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List of the most influential people
#6801
Edmund Snow Carpenter
#6810
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Edmund "Ted" Snow Carpenter was an American anthropologist best known for his work on tribal art and visual media. Early life Born in Rochester, New York to the artist and educator Fletcher Hawthorne Carpenter and Agnes "Barbara" Wight , he was one of four children.
Go to Profile#6802
Bob Monkhouse
#6811
Overall Influence
1928 - 2003 (75 years)
Robert Alan Monkhouse was an English comedian, writer and actor. He was the host of television game shows including The Golden Shot, Celebrity Squares, Family Fortunes and Wipeout. Early life and career Monkhouse was born on 1 June 1928 at 168 Bromley Road, Beckenham, Kent, the son of chartered accountant Wilfred Adrian Monkhouse and Dorothy Muriel Monkhouse . Monkhouse had an elder brother, John, who was born in 1922. Monkhouse's grandfather John Monkhouse was a prosperous Methodist businessman who co-founded Monk and Glass, which made custard powder and jelly. In a 2015 documentary, it w...
Go to Profile#6803
J. Clyde Mitchell
#6812
Overall Influence
1918 - 1995 (77 years)
James Clyde Mitchell was a British sociologist and anthropologist. In 1937 Mitchell helped found the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute group of social anthropologists/sociologists, now a part of the University of Zambia. He was influenced by Max Gluckman and conducted important research on social network analysis at the University of Manchester . In the 1940s he carried out field research into social systems and social conditions in Central Africa interviewing heads of households in villages and urban areas and observing customs. In 1952 he was on the editorial committee of the Northern Rhodesia...
Go to Profile#6804
Ira Levin
#6813
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Ira Marvin Levin was an American novelist, playwright, and songwriter. His works include the novels A Kiss Before Dying , Rosemary's Baby , The Stepford Wives , This Perfect Day , The Boys from Brazil , and Sliver . Levin also wrote the play Deathtrap . Many of his novels and plays have been adapted into films. He received the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award and several Edgar Awards.
Go to Profile#6805
Harry Binswanger
#6814
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Harry Binswanger is an American professor and author. He is an Objectivist and a board member of the Ayn Rand Institute. He was an associate of Ayn Rand, working with her on The Ayn Rand Lexicon and helping her edit the second edition of Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. He is the author of How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation .
Go to Profile#6806
Constantine II of Greece
#6815
Overall Influence
1940 - 2023 (83 years)
Constantine II was the last king of Greece, reigning from 6 March 1964 until the abolition of the Greek monarchy on 1 June 1973. Constantine was born in Athens as the only son of Crown Prince Paul and Crown Princess Frederica of Greece. Being of Danish descent, he was also born as a prince of Denmark. As his family was forced into exile during the Second World War, he spent the first years of his childhood in Egypt and South Africa. He returned to Greece with his family in 1946 during the Greek Civil War. After Constantine's uncle George II died in 1947, Paul became the new king and Constantine the crown prince.
Go to Profile#6807
Sandy Koufax
#6816
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Sanford Koufax , nicknamed "the Left Arm of God" and "Dandy Sandy", is an American former baseball pitcher who played 12 seasons in Major League Baseball for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers from 1955 to 1966. Widely regarded as one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history, Koufax was the first three-time winner of the Cy Young Award, each time winning unanimously and the only pitcher to do so when a single award was given for both the leagues, and was also named the National League Most Valuable Player in 1963. Retiring at the age of 30 due to arthritis in his pitching elbow, Koufax was e...
Go to Profile#6808
Edward N. Zalta
#6817
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Edward Nouri Zalta is an American philosopher who is a senior research scholar at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. He received his BA from Rice University in 1975 and his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1981, both in philosophy. Zalta has taught courses at Stanford University, Rice University, the University of Salzburg, and the University of Auckland. Zalta is also the Principal Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#6809
Mason Gaffney
#6818
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Merrill Mason Gaffney was an American economist and a major critic of Neoclassical economics from a Georgist point of view. Gaffney first read Henry George's masterwork Progress and Poverty as a high school junior. This interest led him to Harvard University in 1941 but, unimpressed with their approach to economics he left in 1942 to join the war effort. After serving in the southwest Pacific during World War II he earned his B.A. in 1948 from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In 1956 he gained a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. There he addressed his teachers' sk...
Go to Profile#6810
Yakubu Gowon
#6819
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Yakubu Dan-Yumma "Jack" Gowon is a retired Nigerian army general and military leader. As head of state of Nigeria, Gowon presided over a controversial Nigerian Civil War and delivered the famous "no victor, no vanquished" speech at the war's end to promote healing and reconciliation. The Nigerian Civil War is listed as one of the deadliest in modern history, with some accusing Gowon of crimes against humanity and genocide. Gowon maintains that he committed no wrongdoing during the war and that his leadership saved the country.
Go to Profile#6811
Per-Ingvar Brånemark
#6820
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Per-Ingvar Brånemark was a Swedish physician and research professor, acknowledged as the "father of modern dental implantology". The Brånemark Osseointegration Center , named after its founder, was founded in 1989 in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Go to Profile#6812
Howard Wainer
#6821
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Howard Charles Wainer is an American statistician, past principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service, adjunct professor of statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and author, known for his contributions in the fields of statistics, psychometrics, and statistical graphics.
Go to Profile#6813
Kathy Keller
#6822
Overall Influence
Kathy Louise Keller is an author, lecturer, church founder, and Christian theologian from New York City who has appeared on the New York Times best seller list. She was the wife of pastor Tim Keller of New York's Redeemer Presbyterian Church, which the former couple then co-founded.
Go to Profile#6814
Christopher Isham
#6823
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Christopher Isham , usually cited as Chris J. Isham, is a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London. Research Isham's main research interests are quantum gravity and foundational studies in quantum theory. He was the inventor of an approach to temporal quantum logic called the HPO formalism, and has worked on loop quantum gravity and quantum geometrodynamics. Together with other physicists, such as John C. Baez, Isham is known as a proponent of the utility of category theory in theoretical physics. In recent years, since at least 1997, he has been working on a new approach to quantum t...
Go to Profile#6815
George B. Field
#6824
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
George B. Field is an American astrophysicist. Early life, family and education Field was born in Providence, Rhode Island. His father Winthrop Brooks Field and mother Pauline Woodworth Field were Harvard and Radcliffe graduates, respectively. He became interested in astronomy at an early age, but at the urging of his father he studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Disliking engineering, he later switched to astrophysics. After MIT, he attended the graduate school at Princeton University. When working at Princeton he had his first child, Christopher Field in 1957.
Go to Profile#6816
Daniel Friedan
#6825
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Harry Friedan is an American theoretical physicist and one of three children of the feminist author and activist Betty Friedan. He is a professor at Rutgers University. Biography Education and career Friedan earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980 and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1987.
Go to Profile#6817
Lawrence Venuti
#6826
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Lawrence Venuti is an American translation theorist, translation historian, and a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. Career Born in Philadelphia, Venuti graduated from Temple University. In 1980 he completed a Ph.D. in English at Columbia University, where he studied with historically oriented literary scholars such as Joseph Mazzeo and Edward Tayler as well as theoretically engaged cultural and social critics such as Edward Said and Sylvere Lotringer. That year he received the Renato Poggioli Award for Italian Translation for his translation of Barbara Alberti's novel Delirium.
Go to Profile#6818
Christopher Peterson
#6827
Overall Influence
1950 - 2012 (62 years)
Christopher Peterson was the Arthur F. Thurnau professor of psychology and organizational studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the former chair of the clinical psychology area. He was science director of the VIA Institute on Character, and co-author of Character Strengths and Virtues for the classification of character strengths. He was a member of the Positive Psychology Steering Committee and the International Positive Psychology Association board of directors, a senior fellow at the Positive Psychology Center and a lecturer for the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#6819
Rudolf Vrba
#6828
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
Rudolf Vrba was a Slovak-Jewish biochemist who, as a teenager in 1942, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. He escaped from the camp in April 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, and co-wrote the Vrba-Wetzler report, a detailed report about the mass murder taking place there. Distribution of the report by George Mantello in Switzerland is credited with having halted the mass deportation of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz in July 1944, saving more than 200,000 lives. After the war, Vrba trained as a biochemist, working mostly in England and Canada.
Go to Profile#6820
Susan Bassnett
#6829
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Susan Edna Bassnett, is a translation theorist and scholar of comparative literature. She served as pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Warwick for ten years and taught in its Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, which closed in 2009. As of 2016, she is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Universities of Glasgow and Warwick. Educated around Europe, she began her career in Italy and has lectured at universities in the United States. In 2007, she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Go to Profile#6821
Junichiro Koizumi
#6830
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Junichiro Koizumi is a Japanese retired politician who was Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party from 2001 to 2006. He retired from politics in 2009. He is the sixth-longest serving Prime Minister in Japanese history.
Go to Profile#6822
Jill Abramson
#6831
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jill Ellen Abramson is an American author, journalist, and academic. She is best known as the former executive editor of The New York Times; Abramson held that position from September 2011 to May 2014. She was the first female executive editor in the paper's 160-year history. Abramson joined the New York Times in 1997, working as the Washington bureau chief and managing editor before being named as executive editor. She previously worked for The Wall Street Journal as an investigative reporter and a deputy bureau chief.
Go to Profile#6823
Matthew Rolston
#6832
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Matthew Russell Rolston is an American artist, photographer, director and creative director, known for his lighting techniques and detailed approach to art direction and design. Rolston has been identified throughout his career with the revival and modern expression of Hollywood glamour.
Go to Profile#6824
Judi Dench
#6833
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Dame Judith Olivia Dench is an English actress. Widely considered one of Britain's greatest actors, she is noted for her versatile work in various films and television programmes encompassing several genres, as well as for her numerous roles on the stage. Dench has garnered various accolades throughout a career spanning over six decades, including an Academy Award, a Tony Award, two Golden Globe Awards, four British Academy Television Awards, six British Academy Film Awards and seven Olivier Awards.
Go to Profile#6825
Harold James
#6834
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Harold James is an economic historian specialising in the history of Germany and European economic history. He is a Professor of History at Princeton University as well as the university's Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He currently writes monthly columns for Project Syndicate covering economic history. He is also a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
Go to Profile#6826
Jerrold Katz
#6835
Overall Influence
1932 - 2002 (70 years)
Jerrold Jacob Katz was an American philosopher and linguist. Biography After receiving a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, Katz became a Research Associate in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy there in 1963, and became Professor in 1969. From 1975 until his death, he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the City University of New York.
Go to Profile#6827
Robert Longo
#6836
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Robert Longo is an American artist, filmmaker, photographer and musician. Longo became first well known in the 1980s for his Men in the Cities drawing and print series, which depict sharply dressed men and women writhing in contorted emotion. He lives in New York and East Hampton.
Go to Profile#6828
David Eppstein
#6837
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
David Arthur Eppstein is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine. He is known for his work in computational geometry, graph algorithms, and recreational mathematics. In 2011, he was named an ACM Fellow.
Go to Profile#6829
Richard Ford
#6838
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story writer, best known for his novels featuring Frank Bascombe. Early in his career, Ford established himself as a master of the short story genre when his first collection Rock Springs was published to immediate acclaim in 1987.
Go to Profile#6830
Christopher Buckley
#6839
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Christopher Taylor Buckley is an American author and political satirist. He also served as chief speechwriter to Vice President George H. W. Bush. He is known for writing God Is My Broker, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, The White House Mess, No Way to Treat a First Lady, Wet Work, Florence of Arabia, Boomsday, Supreme Courtship, Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, and The Judge Hunter.
Go to Profile#6831
Robert Bloch
#6840
Overall Influence
1917 - 1994 (77 years)
Robert Albert Bloch was an American fiction writer, primarily of crime, psychological horror and fantasy, much of which has been dramatized for radio, cinema and television. He also wrote a relatively small amount of science fiction. His writing career lasted 60 years, including more than 30 years in television and film. He began his professional writing career immediately after graduation from high school, aged 17. Best known as the writer of Psycho , the basis for the film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock, Bloch wrote hundreds of short stories and over 30 novels. He was a protégé of H. P.
Go to Profile#6832
Hajime Nakamura
#6841
Overall Influence
1912 - 1999 (87 years)
Hajime Nakamura was a Japanese Orientalist, Indologist, philosopher and academic of Vedic, Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. Biography Nakamura was born in Matsue, Shimane Prefecture, Japan. In 1943 he graduated from the Department of Literature at Tokyo Imperial University on a study on "The History of Early Vedanta Philosophy" under the supervision of Prof. Hakuju Ui. In 1943 he succeeded Prof. Ui and was appointed Associate Professor of Tokyo Imperial University.
Go to Profile#6833
Neal Gabler
#6842
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Neal Gabler is an American journalist, writer and film critic. Gabler graduated from Lane Tech High School in Chicago, Illinois, class of 1967, and was inducted into the National Honor Society. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan and holds advanced degrees in both film and American culture.
Go to Profile#6834
Geoffrey Brennan
#6843
Overall Influence
1944 - 2022 (78 years)
Geoffrey Brennan was an Australian philosopher. He was professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, professor of political science at Duke University, and faculty member in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He was the Director of the Research School from 1991-1996.
Go to Profile#6835
Éva Tardos
#6844
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Éva Tardos is a Hungarian mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Tardos's research interest is algorithms. Her work focuses on the design and analysis of efficient methods for combinatorial optimization problems on graphs or networks. She has done some work on network flow algorithms like approximation algorithms for network flows, cut, and clustering problems. Her recent work focuses on algorithmic game theory and simple auctions.
Go to Profile#6836
Yaroslav Kuzminov
#6845
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Yaroslav Kuzminov is a Russian economist. He was the rector of the Higher School of Economics from 1992 to 2021.
Go to Profile#6837
Mikheil Saakashvili
#6846
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Mikheil Saakashvili is a Georgian and Ukrainian politician and jurist. He was the third president of Georgia for two consecutive terms from 25 January 2004 to 17 November 2013. From May 2015 until November 2016, Saakashvili was the governor of Ukraine's Odesa Oblast. He is the founder and former chairman of the United National Movement party. Saakashvili heads the executive committee of Ukraine's National Reform Council since 7 May 2020. In 2021 he began serving a six-year prison sentence in Georgia on charges of abuse of power and organization of an assault occasioning grievous bodily harm a...
Go to Profile#6838
Curtis Callan
#6847
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Curtis Gove Callan Jr. is an American theoretical physicist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He has conducted research in gauge theory, string theory, instantons, black holes, strong interactions, and many other topics. He was awarded the Sakurai Prize in 2000 and the Dirac Medal in 2004.
Go to Profile#6839
Mike Fraser
#6848
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mike Fraser is a Canadian record producer, engineer, and mixer. Fraser has recorded and mixed six records for AC/DC: The Razors Edge, Ballbreaker, Stiff Upper Lip, Black Ice, Rock or Bust, and Power Up. Fraser recorded and mixed the classic AC/DC anthem "Thunderstruck".
Go to Profile#6840
Hans Bender
#6849
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Hans Bender was a German lecturer on the subject of parapsychology, who was also responsible for establishing the parapsychological institute Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg. For many years his pipe smoking, contemplative figure was synonymous with German parapsychology. He was an investigator of 'unusual human experience', e.g. poltergeists and clairvoyants. One of his most famous cases was the Rosenheim Poltergeist.
Go to Profile#6841
Oksana Zabuzhko
#6850
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Oksana Stefanivna Zabuzhko is a Ukrainian novelist, poet, and essayist. Her works have been translated into several languages. Life Born 19 September 1960 in Lutsk, Ukraine. The writer's father, Stefan Ivanovych Zabuzhko was a teacher, literary critic, and translator, the first to translate the stories of the Czech composer and writer Ilja Hurník into Ukrainian, and was repressed during Stalin's regime.
Go to Profile#6842
David Botstein
#6851
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David Botstein is an American biologist serving as the chief scientific officer of Calico. He served as the director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University from 2003 to 2013, where he remains an Anthony B. Evnin Professor of Genomics.
Go to Profile#6843
Evander Holyfield
#6852
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Evander Holyfield is an American former professional boxer who competed between 1984 and 2011. He reigned as the undisputed champion at cruiserweight in the late 1980s and at heavyweight in the early 1990s, and is the only boxer in history to win the undisputed championship in two weight classes in the three belt era. Nicknamed "the Real Deal", Holyfield is the only four-time world heavyweight champion, having held the unified WBA, WBC, and IBF titles from 1990 to 1992, the WBA and IBF titles again from 1993 to 1994, the WBA title a third time from 1996 to 1999; the IBF title a third time fro...
Go to Profile#6844
Aaron Antonovsky
#6853
Overall Influence
1923 - 1994 (71 years)
Aaron Antonovsky was an Israeli American sociologist and academic whose work concerned the relationship between stress, health and well-being . Biography Antonovsky was born in the United States in 1923. After completing his PhD at Yale University, he emigrated to Israel in 1960. For a time he held positions in Jerusalem at the Israeli Institute for Applied Social Research and in the Department of Medical Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During this period his early work emphasized social class differences in morbidity and mortality.
Go to Profile#6845
Edwin Locke
#6854
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Edwin A. Locke is an American psychologist and a pioneer in goal-setting theory. He is a retired Dean's Professor of Motivation and Leadership at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was also affiliated with the Department of Psychology. As stated by the Association for Psychological Science, "Locke is the most published organizational psychologist in the history of the field. His pioneering research has advanced and enriched our understanding of work motivation and job satisfaction. The theory that is synonymous with his name—goal-setting theory—is perhaps the most widely-respected theory in industrial-organizational psychology.
Go to Profile#6846
Peter Weibel
#6855
Overall Influence
1944 - 2023 (79 years)
Peter Weibel was an Austrian post-conceptual artist, curator, and new media theoretician. He started out in 1964 as a visual poet, then later moved from the page to the screen within the sense of post-structuralist methodology. His work includes virtual reality and other digital art forms. From 1999 he was the director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.
Go to Profile#6847
Uri Gneezy
#6856
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Uri Hezkia Gneezy is an Israeli-American behavioral economist, known for his work on incentives. He currently holds the Epstein/Atkinson Endowed Chair in Behavioral Economics at the University of California, San Diego's Rady School of Management. He is also a visiting research professor at the University of Amsterdam and NHH in Bergen.
Go to Profile#6848
Hans-Peter Dürr
#6857
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Hans-Peter Dürr was a German physicist. He worked on nuclear and quantum physics, elementary particles and gravitation, epistemology, and philosophy, and he advocated responsible scientific and energy policies. In 1987, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for "his profound critique of the Strategic Defense Initiative and his work to convert high technology to peaceful uses."
Go to Profile#6849
Maria da Conceição Tavares
#6858
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Maria da Conceição Tavares is a Portuguese naturalized Brazilian economist. She is a full professor at the State University of Campinas and professor emeritus of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro . Her students have included the former president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff. Tavares is affiliated with the Workers' Party, and she was a Federal Deputy representing the state of Rio de Janeiro between 1995 and 1999. Left-wing focused, she is the author of several books on Brazil's economic development as well as numerous journal articles.
Go to Profile#6850
Kit Fine
#6859
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Kit Fine is a British philosopher, currently university professor and Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at New York University. Prior to joining the philosophy department of NYU in 1997, he taught at the University of Edinburgh, University of California, Irvine, University of Michigan and UCLA. The author of several books and dozens of articles in international academic journals, he has made notable contributions to the fields of philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language and also has written on ancient philosophy, in particular on Aristotle's account of log...
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