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
#6901
A. A. Long
#6910
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Anthony Arthur Long FBA is a British-American classical scholar who is the Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Classics, Irving Stone Professor of Literature Emeritus, and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#6902
Alfred Spector
#6911
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Alfred Zalmon Spector is an American computer scientist and research manager. He is a visiting scholar in the MIT EECS Department and was previously CTO of Two Sigma Investments. Before that, he was Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google.
Go to Profile#6903
Danny Baker
#6912
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Danny Baker is an English comedy writer, journalist, radio DJ and screenwriter. Throughout his career he has largely presented for London's regional radio and television. Baker was born in Deptford to a working-class family and raised in Bermondsey. From 1977, he wrote for the punk zine Sniffin' Glue, and from there was hired by the New Musical Express, where he worked as a writer, reviewer, and interviewer. Moving into television in 1980, he began presenting London Weekend Television's Twentieth Century Box and reporting for The Six O'Clock Show. In 1989 he began radio presenting for BBC Radio London and in 1990 joined the newly established BBC Radio 5.
Go to Profile#6904
Jeff Bonwick
#6913
Overall Influence
Jeff Bonwick invented and led development of the ZFS file system, which was used in Oracle Corporation's ZFS storage products as well as startups including Nexenta, Delphix, Joyent, and Datto, Inc. Bonwick is also the inventor of slab allocation, which is used in many operating systems including MacOS and Linux, and the LZJB compression algorithm.
Go to Profile#6905
Harold S. Shapiro
#6914
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Harold Seymour Shapiro was a professor of mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, best known for inventing the so-called Shapiro polynomials and for work on quadrature domains.
Go to Profile#6906
Georgy Shchedrovitsky
#6915
Overall Influence
1929 - 1994 (65 years)
Georgy Petrovich Shchedrovitsky was a Russian philosopher and methodologist, public and cultural figure. The creator of the system-thinking methodology, the founder and leader of the Moscow methodological circle, the ideological inspirer of the "methodological movement."
Go to Profile#6907
Marcus Raichle
#6916
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Marcus E. Raichle is an American neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis, Missouri. He is a professor in the Department of Radiology with joint appointments in Neurology, Neurobiology and Biomedical Engineering. His research over the past 40 years has focused on the nature of functional brain imaging signals arising from PET and fMRI and the application of these techniques to the study of the human brain in health and disease. He received the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience “for the discovery of specialized brain networks for memory and cognition", together wit...
Go to Profile#6908
Michael Sela
#6917
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Michael Sela was an Israeli immunologist of Polish Jewish origin. He was the W. Garfield Weston Professor of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. He was a president of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Go to Profile#6909
Michael Douglas
#6918
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Michael Kirk Douglas is an American actor and film producer. He has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and the AFI Life Achievement Award.
Go to Profile#6910
Jeff Jarvis
#6919
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jeff Jarvis is an American journalist, associate professor, public speaker and former television critic. He advocates the Open Web and argues that there are many social and personal benefits to living a more public life on the Internet.
Go to Profile#6911
Barry Moser
#6920
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Barry Moser is an American visual artist and educator, known as a printmaker specializing in wood engravings, and an illustrator of numerous works of literature. He is also the owner and operator of the Pennyroyal Press, an engraving and small book publisher founded in 1970.
Go to Profile#6912
Bert Sutherland
#6921
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
William Robert Sutherland was an American computer scientist who was the longtime manager of three prominent research laboratories, including Sun Microsystems Laboratories , the Systems Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC , and the Computer Science Division of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc. which helped develop the ARPANET.
Go to Profile#6913
George Piranian
#6922
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
George Piranian was a Swiss-American mathematician. Piranian was internationally known for his research in complex analysis, his association with Paul Erdős, and his editing of the Michigan Mathematical Journal.
Go to Profile#6914
Vladimir Demikhov
#6923
Overall Influence
1916 - 1998 (82 years)
Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov was a Soviet scientist and organ transplantation pioneer, who performed several transplants in the 1940s and 1950s, including the transplantation of a heart into an animal and a heart–lung replacement in an animal. He is also well known for his dog head transplants, which he conducted during the 1950s, resulting in two-headed dogs. This ultimately led to the head transplants in monkeys by Dr. Robert White, who was inspired by Demikhov's work.
Go to Profile#6915
Charles A. Ferguson
#6924
Overall Influence
1921 - 1998 (77 years)
Charles Albert Ferguson was an American linguist who taught at Stanford University. He was one of the founders of sociolinguistics and is best known for his work on diglossia. The TOEFL test was created under his leadership at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC. Ferguson was also the leader of a team of linguists in Ethiopia under the Ford Foundation's Survey of Language Use and Language Teaching. One of the many publications that came out of this was his article proposing the Ethiopian Language Area , an article that has become widely cited and an important milestone in th...
Go to Profile#6916
Yasutaka Ihara
#6925
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Yasutaka Ihara is a Japanese mathematician and professor emeritus at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences. His work in number theory includes Ihara's lemma and the Ihara zeta function. Career Ihara received his PhD at the University of Tokyo in 1967 with thesis Hecke polynomials as congruence zeta functions in elliptic modular case.
Go to Profile#6917
Chen Guangcheng
#6926
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Chen Guangcheng is a Chinese civil rights activist who has worked on human rights issues in rural areas of the People's Republic of China. Blind from an early age and self-taught in the law, Chen is frequently described as a "barefoot lawyer" who advocates for women's rights, land rights, and the welfare of the poor.
Go to Profile#6918
Hew Strachan
#6927
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sir Hew Francis Anthony Strachan , is a British military historian, well known for his leadership in scholarly studies of the British Army and the history of the First World War. He is currently professor of international relations at the University of St Andrews. Before that Strachan was the Chichele Professor of the History of War at All Souls College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#6919
David Berlinski
#6928
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David Berlinski is an American author who has written books about mathematics and the history of science as well as fiction. An opponent of evolution, he is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, an organization which promotes the pseudoscience of intelligent design.
Go to Profile#6920
Larry Guth
#6929
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
#6921
Andrew Bolt
#6930
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Andrew Bolt is an Australian right-wing social and political commentator. He has worked at the News Corp-owned newspaper company The Herald and Weekly Times for many years, for both The Herald and its successor, the Herald Sun. His current roles include blogger and columnist at the Herald Sun and host of television show The Bolt Report each weeknight. In Australia, Bolt is a controversial public figure, who has frequently been accused of abrasive demeanour, racist views and inappropriate remarks on various political and social issues.
Go to Profile#6922
Lisa Jardine
#6931
Overall Influence
1944 - 2015 (71 years)
Lisa Anne Jardine was a British historian of the early modern period. From 1990 to 2011, she was Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies and director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary University of London. From 2008 to January 2014 she was Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority .
Go to Profile#6923
Ben Pimlott
#6932
Overall Influence
1945 - 2004 (59 years)
Benjamin John Pimlott FBA was a British historian of the post-war period in Britain. He made a substantial contribution to the literary genre of political biography. Background Pimlott was born in Merton, Surrey on 4 July 1945. His father was John Pimlott, a civil servant at the Home Office and former private secretary to Herbert Morrison. His mother, Ellen Dench Howes Pimlott, was American; her ancestors were Pilgrims, and she was a descendant of a victim of the Salem witch trials. Pimlott held dual citizenship. He grew up in Wimbledon and was educated at Rokeby School , Marlborough College ...
Go to Profile#6924
Harry Huskey
#6933
Overall Influence
1916 - 2017 (101 years)
Harry Douglas Huskey was an American computer design pioneer. Early life and career Huskey was born in Whittier, in the Smoky Mountains region of North Carolina and grew up in Idaho. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics at the University of Idaho. He was the first member of his family to attend college. He gained his Master's and then his PhD in 1943 from the Ohio State University on Contributions to the Problem of Geöcze. Huskey taught mathematics to U.S. Navy students at the University of Pennsylvania and then worked part-time on the early ENIAC and EDVAC computers in 1945.
Go to Profile#6925
John Dalgleish Donaldson
#6934
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
John Dalgleish Donaldson is a Scottish-Australiann professor and the father of Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark, the wife of the heir apparent to the throne of Denmark, Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark.
Go to Profile#6926
Rod Thornton
#6935
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Rod Thornton is a Senior Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department of King's College London. He previously taught at the University of Kurdistan Hewler in Erbil, Iraq and in the University of Nottingham's department of Politics and International Relations. He was suspended from the University of Nottingham in spring 2011 after publishing an article critical of the University's handling of the arrest of one of its students. He subsequently left the university by "mutual agreement" with the university.
Go to Profile#6927
Don Kulick
#6936
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Don Kulick is a Swedish anthropologist and linguist who is the professor of anthropology at Uppsala University. Kulick works within the frameworks of both cultural and linguistic anthropology, and has carried out field work in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Italy and Sweden. Kulick is also known for his extensive fieldwork on the Tayap people and their language in Gapun village of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea.
Go to Profile#6928
Nicolas Werth
#6937
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nicolas Werth is a French historian. Biography Werth is a scholar of communist studies. He is the son of Alexander Werth, a Russian born British journalist and writer who lived in the USSR during World War II.
Go to Profile#6929
Michael Bierut
#6938
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Michael Bierut is a graphic designer, design critic and educator, who has been a partner at design firm Pentagram since 1990. He designed the logo for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. Early life and education Michael Bierut was born in 1957 in Cleveland, Ohio. His family lived in Garfield Heights and he attended Saturday morning classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art where he developed his drawing skills. The family moved to the suburb Parma in 1967, and he attended Normandy High School, graduating in 1975.
Go to Profile#6930
Adolfo Nicolás
#6939
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Adolfo Nicolás Pachón was a Spanish Jesuit priest of the Catholic Church. He was the 30th Superior General of the Society of Jesus from 2008 to 2016. Before being elected Superior General, he worked primarily in Japan; he taught at Sophia University in Tokyo for twenty years and then headed educational institutions in Manila from 1978 to 1984 and in Tokyo from 1991 to 1993. He led the Jesuits in Japan from 1993 to 1996 and, after four years of pastoral work in Tokyo, led the Jesuits in Asia from 2004 to 2008.
Go to Profile#6931
Suzan-Lori Parks
#6940
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Suzan-Lori Parks is an American playwright, screenwriter, musician and novelist. Her play Topdog/Underdog won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002; Parks was the first African-American woman to receive the award for drama. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Go to Profile#6932
Rahul Pandharipande
#6941
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Rahul Pandharipande is a mathematician who is currently a professor of mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich working in algebraic geometry. His particular interests concern moduli spaces, enumerative invariants associated to moduli spaces, such as Gromov–Witten invariants and Donaldson–Thomas invariants, and the cohomology of the moduli space of curves. His father Vijay Raghunath Pandharipande was a renowned theoretical physicist who worked in the area of nuclear physics.
Go to Profile#6933
Ramesh Sitaraman
#6942
Overall Influence
Ramesh Sitaraman is an Indian American computer scientist known for his work on distributed algorithms, content delivery networks, streaming video delivery, and application delivery networks. He helped build the Akamai content delivery network, one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms. He is currently in the computer science department at University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Go to Profile#6934
Douglas Preston
#6943
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Douglas Jerome Preston is an American journalist and author. Although he is best known for his thrillers in collaboration with Lincoln Child , he has also written six solo novels, including the Wyman Ford series and a novel entitled Jennie, which was made into a movie by Disney. He has authored a half-dozen nonfiction books on science and exploration and writes occasionally for The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and other magazines.
Go to Profile#6935
Larry King
#6944
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Larry King was an American author, radio and television host, whose awards included two Peabodys, an Emmy and 10 Cable ACE Awards. During his career, King conducted over 60,000 interviews on radio and TV.
Go to Profile#6936
Albert Hourani
#6945
Overall Influence
1915 - 1993 (78 years)
Albert Habib Hourani was a Lebanese British historian, specialising in the history of the Middle East and Middle Eastern studies. Background and education Hourani was born in Manchester, England, the son of Soumaya Rassi and Fadlo Hourani, immigrants from Marjeyoun in what is now South Lebanon . Fadlo had studied at what later became the American University of Beirut and settled in Manchester as a cotton merchant. Albert's brothers were George Hourani, philosopher, historian, and classicist, and Cecil Hourani, economic adviser to President of Tunisia Habib Bourguiba. His family had converted...
Go to Profile#6937
Gerd Theissen
#6946
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Gerd Theißen is a German Protestant theologian and New Testament scholar. He is Professor of New Testament Theology at the University of Heidelberg. Early life and education Theissen obtained his doctorate in theology in Protestant theology from the University of Bonn in 1968. He then took a position studying Evangelical Theology at the University of Bonn. He obtained his habilitation in 1972 in Bonn, with a form-critical work on early Christian miracle stories.
Go to Profile#6938
Helen Sharman
#6947
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Helen Patricia Sharman, CMG, OBE, HonFRSC is a British chemist and cosmonaut who became the first British person, first Western European woman and first privately funded woman in space, as well as the first woman to visit the Mir space station, in May 1991.
Go to Profile#6939
Charlton Heston
#6948
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Charlton Heston was an American actor and political activist. He received his first Golden Globe Award nomination for playing Moses in The Ten Commandments , and won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in the title role of Ben-Hur . Heston would go on to receive a second Academy Award statuette in 1978, but this time in the form of a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his considerable charitable work. He also starred in The Greatest Show on Earth , Secret of the Incas , Touch of Evil , The Big Country , El Cid , The Greatest Story Ever Told , Khartoum , Planet of the Apes , ...
Go to Profile#6940
Brian Wilson
#6949
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Brian Wilson is a British systems scientist and honorary professor at Cardiff University, known for his development of soft systems methodology and enterprise modelling. Biography After graduating from University of Nottingham with a B.Sc. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering, nuclear power engineering and control system design, Wilson joined the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority where he was concerned with the control and spatial stability of gas-cooled reactors and power plants. In 1966, he left the world of nuclear power engineering and control system design, and became a founder memb...
Go to Profile#6941
Amotz Zahavi
#6950
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Amotz Zahavi was an Israeli evolutionary biologist, a Professor in the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University, and one of the founders of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. His main work concerned the evolution of signals, particularly those signals that are indicative of fitness, and their selection for "honesty".
Go to Profile#6942
Allan Hobson
#6951
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
John Allan Hobson was an American psychiatrist and dream researcher. He was known for his research on rapid eye movement sleep. He was Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School, and Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Go to Profile#6943
Roberto Ierusalimschy
#6952
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Roberto Ierusalimschy is a Brazilian computer scientist, known for creating the Lua programming language. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro where he has an appointment as a full professor of informatics. He did a post-doc at University of Waterloo in 1992 and was visiting professor at Stanford University in 2012. He is the leading architect and the author of Programming in Lua. He also created LPeg, a Lua library for implementing parsing expression grammars.
Go to Profile#6944
Maxine Hong Kingston
#6953
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Maxine Hong Kingston is an American novelist. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated with a BA in English in 1962. Kingston has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese Americans.
Go to Profile#6945
Ann Oakley
#6954
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Ann Rosamund Oakley is a British sociologist, feminist, and writer. She is professor and founder-director of the Social Science Research Unit at the UCL Institute of Education of the University College London, and in 2005 partially retired from full-time academic work to concentrate on her writing, especially on new novels.
Go to Profile#6946
Milton Obote
#6955
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
Apollo Milton Obote was a Ugandan politician who led Uganda to independence from British colonial rule in 1962. He served as the second prime minister of Uganda from 1962 to 1966 and later as the second president of Uganda from 1966 to 1971 and from 1980 to 1985.
Go to Profile#6947
Robert Scholes
#6956
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Robert E. Scholes was an American literary critic and theorist. He is known for his ideas on fabulation and metafiction. Education and career Robert Scholes was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1929. After taking his A.B. at Yale University in 1950, he served as a gunnery officer in the U. S. Navy from 1952-1955. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1959, and he taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Iowa, before joining the Brown faculty in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature in 1970. After his retirement from full-time teaching in 1999, Prof...
Go to Profile#6948
Dilma Rousseff
#6957
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Dilma Vana Rousseff is a Brazilian economist and politician who served as the 36th president of Brazil, holding the position from 2011 until her impeachment and removal from office on 31 August 2016. She is the first woman to have held the Brazilian presidency and had previously served as chief of staff to former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from 2005 to 2010. She has been chair of the New Development Bank since March 2023.
Go to Profile#6949
Basil Davidson
#6958
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Basil Risbridger Davidson was a British journalist and historian who wrote more than 30 books on African history and politics. According to two modern writers, "Davidson, a campaigning journalist whose first of many books on African history and politics appeared in 1956, remains perhaps the single-most effective disseminator of the new field to a popular international audience".
Go to Profile#6950
Eric P. Hamp
#6959
Overall Influence
1920 - 2019 (99 years)
Eric Pratt Hamp was an American linguist widely respected as a leading authority on Indo-European linguistics, with particular interests in Celtic languages and Albanian. Unlike many Indo-Europeanists, who work entirely on the basis of written materials, he conducted extensive fieldwork on lesser-known Indo-European languages and dialects, such as Albanian, Arbëresh and Arvanitika; Breton; Welsh; Irish; Resian and Scots Gaelic.
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