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
#6851
Randall Schweller
#6860
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Randall L. Schweller is Professor of Political Science at the Ohio State University, where he has taught since 1994. He earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1993 and was as an Olin Fellow at Harvard University in 1993-94. His primary teaching and research interests include international security and international relations theory, and he is perhaps best known for his Balance of Interests theory, a revision to Kenneth Waltz's Balance of Power theory and Stephen Walt's Balance of Threat theory. His work on this subject includes: Randall Schweller, "Tripolarity and the Second World War", ...
Go to Profile#6852
Judith Regan
#6861
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Judith Regan is an American editor, producer, book publisher, and television and radio talk show host. She is the head of Regan Arts. Early life and education Regan grew up in Fitchburg, Massachusetts and Bay Shore, New York. She graduated from Bay Shore High School in 1971. She graduated from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1975 with a bachelor's degree in English and art history. She went on to study art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Go to Profile#6853
Dore Gold
#6862
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Dore Gold is an American-Israeli political scientist and diplomat who served as Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations from 1997 to 1999. He is currently the President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was also an advisor to the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term in office. In May 2015, Netanyahu named him Director-General of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a position he held until October 2016.
Go to Profile#6854
Edward George Bowen
#6863
Overall Influence
1911 - 1991 (80 years)
Edward George "Taffy" Bowen, CBE, FRS was a Welsh physicist who made a major contribution to the development of radar. He was also an early radio astronomer, playing a key role in the establishment of radioastronomy in Australia and the United States.
Go to Profile#6855
Lant Pritchett
#6864
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Lant Pritchett is an American development economist. He is the RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. He was born in Utah in 1959 and raised in Boise, Idaho. He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1983 with a B.S. in economics, after serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Argentina . He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988 with a PhD in economics.
Go to Profile#6856
Andrzej Ehrenfeucht
#6865
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Andrzej Ehrenfeucht is a Polish-American mathematician and computer scientist. Life Andrzej Ehrenfeucht formulated the Ehrenfeucht–Fraïssé game, using the back-and-forth method given in Roland Fraïssé's PhD thesis. Also named for Ehrenfeucht is the Ehrenfeucht–Mycielski sequence.
Go to Profile#6857
David Haussler
#6866
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
David Haussler is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome.
Go to Profile#6858
Nils Christie
#6867
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Nils Christie was a Norwegian sociologist and criminologist. He was a professor of criminology at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. Personal life Christie was born in Oslo on 24 February 1928, a son of Ragnvald Christie and Ruth Hellum. He married Vigdis Margit Moe in 1951, and was later married to .
Go to Profile#6859
Burt Bacharach
#6868
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Burt Freeman Bacharach was an American composer, songwriter, record producer, and pianist who is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential figures of 20th-century popular music. Starting in the 1950s, he composed hundreds of pop songs, many in collaboration with lyricist Hal David. Bacharach's music is characterized by unusual chord progressions and time signature changes, influenced by his background in jazz, and uncommon selections of instruments for small orchestras. He arranged, conducted, and produced much of his recorded output.
Go to Profile#6860
Henrik, Prince Consort of Denmark
#6869
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
#6861
Leo Panitch
#6870
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Leo Victor Panitch was a distinguished research professor of political science and a Canada Research Chair in comparative political economy at York University. From 1985 until the 2021 edition, he served as co-editor of the Socialist Register, which describes itself as "an annual survey of movements and ideas from the standpoint of the independent new left". Panitch himself saw the Register as playing a major role in developing Marxism's conceptual framework for advancing a democratic, co-operative and egalitarian socialist alternative to capitalist competition, exploitation, and insecurity.
Go to Profile#6862
Benjamin Isaac
#6871
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Benjamin Henri Isaac is the Fred and Helen Lessing Professor of Ancient History Emeritus at Tel Aviv University. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and of the American Philosophical Society
Go to Profile#6863
Drew Goddard
#6872
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Andrew Brion Hogan Goddard is an American filmmaker. He began his career writing episodes for the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Alias, and Lost. After moving into screenwriting in film, he wrote Cloverfield , World War Z , and The Martian , the latter earning him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2011, he made his directorial debut with The Cabin in the Woods.
Go to Profile#6864
Evelyn Hooker
#6873
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Evelyn Hooker was an American psychologist most notable for her 1956 paper "The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual" in which she administered several psychological tests to groups of self-identified male homosexuals and heterosexuals and asked experts to identify the homosexuals and rate their mental health. The experiment, which other researchers subsequently repeated, argues that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, as there was no detectable difference between homosexual and heterosexual men in terms of mental adjustment.
Go to Profile#6865
Susan P. Crawford
#6874
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Susan P. Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She served as President Barack Obama's Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy and is a columnist for WIRED. She is a former Board Member of ICANN, the founder of OneWebDay, and a legal scholar. Her research focuses on telecommunications and information law.
Go to Profile#6866
Donald Worster
#6875
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Donald Worster is an American environmental historian who was, until his retirement, the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He is one of the founders of, and leading figures in, the field of environmental history. In 2009, he was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After retirement from University of Kansas, he became Distinguished Foreign Expert and senior professor in the School of History of Renmin University of China.
Go to Profile#6867
Dustin Hoffman
#6876
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Dustin Lee Hoffman is an American actor. As one of the key actors in the formation of New Hollywood, Hoffman is known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and emotionally vulnerable characters. He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards. Hoffman has received numerous honors, including the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1997, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1999, and the Kennedy Center Honors Award in 2012. Actor Robert De Niro has described him as "an actor with the everyman's face who ...
Go to Profile#6868
Christine Buci-Glucksmann
#6877
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Christine Buci-Glucksmann is a French philosopher and Professor Emeritus from University of Paris VIII specializing in the aesthetics of the Baroque and Japan, and computer art. Her best-known work in English is Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity.
Go to Profile#6869
Sheila Miyoshi Jager
#6878
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Sheila Miyoshi Jager is an American historian. She is a Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College, author of two books on Korea, co-editor of a third book on Asian nations in the post-Cold War era, and a forthcoming book on great power competition in northeast Asia at the turn of the 19th-20th century. She is a well-known historian of Korea and East Asia.
Go to Profile#6870
Billy Wilder
#6879
Overall Influence
1906 - 2002 (96 years)
Billy Wilder was an Austrian-born filmmaker. His career in Hollywood spanned five decades, and he is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Classic Hollywood cinema. He received seven Academy Awards , a BAFTA Award, the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and two Golden Globe Awards.
Go to Profile#6871
Svetlana Kuznetsova
#6880
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Svetlana Aleksandrovna Kuznetsova is a Russian former professional tennis player. She is a two-time major singles champion, winning the 2004 US Open and 2009 French Open, and finishing runner-up at two other majors. In doubles, Kuznetsova reached the finals of each major at least once, winning the Australian Open twice.
Go to Profile#6872
Roy D'Andrade
#6881
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Roy Goodwin D'Andrade was one of the founders of cognitive anthropology. Roy D'Andrade grew up in Metuchen, New Jersey, D'Andrade matriculated at Rutgers University but left to fulfill his military service. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Connecticut. He then studied in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, from which he received his PhD in Social Anthropology. He taught at Stanford University from 1962-1969. He then moved to the University of California, San Diego, where he was professor of Anthropology until 2003 and served as department chair for three separate terms.
Go to Profile#6873
Howie Carr
#6882
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Howard Louis Carr Jr. is an American conservative radio talk-show host, political author, news reporter and award-winning writer. He hosts The Howie Carr Show originating from his studios in Wellesley, MA and broadcast on weekdays on WRKO in Boston as well as to an audience based in New England, in addition to writing three columns a week for the Boston Herald.
Go to Profile#6874
Neil Risch
#6883
Overall Influence
Neil Risch is an American human geneticist and professor at the University of California, San Francisco . Risch is the Lamond Family Foundation Distinguished Professor in Human Genetics and Director of the Institute for Human Genetics and Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF.
Go to Profile#6875
Ian Agol
#6884
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Ian Agol is an American mathematician who deals primarily with the topology of three-dimensional manifolds. Education and career Agol graduated with B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1992 and obtained his Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of California, San Diego. At UCSD, his advisor was Michael Freedman and his thesis was Topology of Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds. He is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Go to Profile#6876
Mike Lesk
#6885
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Michael E. Lesk is an American computer scientist. Biography In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as obtaining a BA degree in Physics and Chemistry from Harvard College in 1964 and a PhD from Harvard University in Chemical Physics in 1969.
Go to Profile#6877
Ben Ferencz
#6886
Overall Influence
1920 - 2023 (103 years)
Benjamin Berell Ferencz was an American lawyer. He was an investigator of Nazi war crimes after World War II and the chief prosecutor for the United States Army at the Einsatzgruppen trial, one of the 12 subsequent Nuremberg trials held by US authorities at Nuremberg, Germany. When the Einsatzgruppen reports were discovered, Ferencz pushed for a trial based on their evidence. When confronted with a lack of staff and resources, he personally volunteered to serve as the prosecutor.
Go to Profile#6878
Per Kirkeby
#6887
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Per Kirkeby was a Danish painter, poet, film maker and sculptor. His works have been exhibited worldwide and are represented in many important public collections, including the Tate, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou.
Go to Profile#6879
Gabriella Coleman
#6888
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Enid Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist, academic and author whose work focuses on cultures of hacking and online activism, particularly Anonymous. She previously held the Wolfe Chair in Scientific & Technological Literacy at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada and is currently a full professor at Harvard University's Department of Anthropology.
Go to Profile#6880
Rudolf Bayer
#6889
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Rudolf Bayer is a German computer scientist. He is professor emeritus of Informatics at the Technical University of Munich where he had been employed since 1972. He is noted for inventing three data sorting structures: the B-tree , the UB-tree and the red–black tree.
Go to Profile#6881
Harvey Lodish
#6890
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Harvey Franklin Lodish is a molecular and cell biologist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Founding Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and lead author of the textbook Molecular Cell Biology. Lodish's research focused on cell surface proteins and other important areas at the interface between molecular cell biology and medicine.
Go to Profile#6882
Christa Wolf
#6891
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Christa Wolf was a German novelist and essayist. She is considered one of the most important writers to emerge from the former East Germany. Biography Wolf was born the daughter of Otto and Herta Ihlenfeld, in Landsberg an der Warthe, then in the Province of Brandenburg. After World War II, her family, being Germans, were expelled from their home on what had become Polish territory. They crossed the new Oder-Neisse border in 1945 and settled in Mecklenburg, in what would become the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany.
Go to Profile#6883
Mitch McConnell
#6892
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Addison Mitchell McConnell III is an American politician and retired attorney who has been serving as Senate Minority Leader since 2021 and the senior United States senator from Kentucky since 1985. He previously served as minority leader from 2007 to 2015, majority leader from 2015 to 2021 and was majority whip from 2003 to 2007. McConnell has been the leader of the Senate Republican Conference since 2007 and is the longest serving Senate party leader in US history.
Go to Profile#6884
Jerzy Grotowski
#6893
Overall Influence
1933 - 1999 (66 years)
Jerzy Marian Grotowski was a Polish theatre director and theorist whose innovative approaches to acting, training and theatrical production have significantly influenced theatre today. He is considered one of the most influential theatre practitioners of the 20th century as well as one of the founders of experimental theatre.
Go to Profile#6885
James R. Hines Jr.
#6894
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
James R. Hines Jr. is an American economist and a founder of academic research into corporate-focused tax havens, and the effect of U.S. corporate tax policy on the behaviors of U.S. multinationals. His papers were some of the first to analyse profit shifting, and to establish quantitative features of tax havens. Hines showed that being a tax haven could be a prosperous strategy for a jurisdiction, and controversially, that tax havens can promote economic growth. Hines showed that use of tax havens by U.S. multinationals had maximized long-term U.S. exchequer tax receipts, at the expense of other jurisdictions.
Go to Profile#6886
Murray Gerstenhaber
#6895
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Murray Gerstenhaber is an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, best known for his contributions to theoretical physics with his discovery of Gerstenhaber algebra. He is also a lawyer and a lecturer in law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Go to Profile#6887
Seymour Ginsburg
#6896
Overall Influence
1928 - 2004 (76 years)
Seymour Ginsburg was an American pioneer of automata theory, formal language theory, and database theory, in particular; and computer science, in general. His work was influential in distinguishing theoretical Computer Science from the disciplines of Mathematics and Electrical Engineering.
Go to Profile#6888
Michael Waterman
#6897
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Michael Spencer Waterman is a Professor of Biology, Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Southern California , where he holds an Endowed Associates Chair in Biological Sciences, Mathematics and Computer Science. He previously held positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho State University.
Go to Profile#6889
Arno J. Mayer
#6898
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Arno Joseph Mayer is an American historian who specializes in modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust, and is currently the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#6890
Charles DeLisi
#6899
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Charles Peter DeLisi is an American biomedical scientist and the Metcalf Professor of Science and Engineering at Boston University. He is noted for major contributions to the initiation of the Human Genome Project, for transformative academic leadership, and for research contributions to mathematical and computational immunology, cell biophysics, genomics and protein and nucleic acid structure and function. Recent activities include mathematical finance and climate change.
Go to Profile#6891
Anna M. M. Vetticad
#6900
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Anna Marie Mathew Vetticad is an Indian journalist, film critic, and cultural commentator. She has been in the field of journalism since 1994. Vetticad is known for her political critiques of Indian cinema and the Indian film industry. She is an advocate for women's empowerment and the representation of marginalised communities in popular entertainment.
Go to Profile#6892
Melanie Mitchell
#6901
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Melanie Mitchell is an American scientist. She is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute. Her major work has been in the areas of analogical reasoning, complex systems, genetic algorithms and cellular automata, and her publications in those fields are frequently cited.
Go to Profile#6893
Susan Cain
#6902
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Susan Horowitz Cain is an American writer and lecturer. She is the author of the 2012 non-fiction book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which argues that modern Western culture misunderstands and undervalues the traits and capabilities of introverted people. In 2015, she co-founded Quiet Revolution, a mission-based company with initiatives in the areas of children , lifestyle, and the workplace. Her 2016 follow-on book, Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts, focused on introverted children and teens, the book also being directed to their educators a...
Go to Profile#6894
Fredson Bowers
#6903
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Fredson Thayer Bowers was an American bibliographer and scholar of textual editing. Career Bowers was a graduate of Brown University and Harvard University . He taught at Princeton University before moving to the University of Virginia in 1938.
Go to Profile#6895
Chandrashekhara Kambara
#6904
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Chandrashekhara Basavanneppa Kambara is a prominent Indian poet, playwright, folklorist, film director in Kannada language and the founder-vice-chancellor of Kannada University in Hampi also president of the Sahitya Akademi, country's premier literary institution, after Vinayak Krishna Gokak and U.R. Ananthamurthy . He is known for effective adaptation of the North Karnataka dialect of the Kannada language in his plays, and poems, in a similar style as in the works of D.R. Bendre.
Go to Profile#6896
Francis O. Schmitt
#6905
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Francis Otto Schmitt was an American biologist and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Schmitt was born November 23, 1903, to Otto and Clara Schmitt, in South St. Louis, Missouri. He had two siblings, Otto and Viola. Schmitt's father owned and operated a paint and wallpaper supply store that he established with his father in-law. The store was located on the first floor of the three story family home. The family rented out the second floor apartments and lived in the eight rooms on the third floor .
Go to Profile#6897
David Jeremiah
#6906
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
David Jeremiah is an American evangelical Christian author, founder of Turning Point Radio and Television Ministries and senior pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church, a Southern Baptist megachurch in El Cajon, California, a suburb of San Diego.
Go to Profile#6898
Lawrence Freedman
#6907
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sir Lawrence David Freedman, is a British academic, historian and author specialising in foreign policy, international relations and strategy. He has been described as the "dean of British strategic studies" and was a member of the Iraq Inquiry. He is an Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London.
Go to Profile#6899
Vlado Meller
#6908
Overall Influence
Vlado Meller is a Slovak audio mastering engineer, currently with Vlado Meller Mastering in Charleston, South Carolina. Meller works across many genres of music, with credits on rock, hip-hop, pop, jazz, metal, dance, opera, Broadway, and classical albums over 50+ year career. Albums that he engineered have won two Grammy Awards.
Go to Profile#6900
Li Yining
#6909
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Li Yining was a Chinese economist. He was a leading voice for the privatization of state-owned companies, and his advocacy led to the reestablishment of China's stock exchanges in 1990. For this reason, he was nicknamed "" , while Wu Jinglian is known as . Along with Yu Guangyuan and Wu Jinglian, Li was credited with providing the theoretical basis for the market-oriented reform that has propelled China's economic growth.
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