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
#6951
Stephen D. Krasner
#6960
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Stephen David Krasner is an American academic and former diplomat. Krasner has been a professor of international relations at Stanford University since 1981, and served as the Director of Policy Planning from 2005 to April 2007 while on leave from Stanford.
Go to Profile#6952
Cormac Murphy-O'Connor
#6961
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Cormac Murphy-O'Connor was a British cardinal, the Archbishop of Westminster and president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. He was made cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2001. He submitted his resignation as archbishop on reaching his 75th birthday in 2007; Pope Benedict XVI accepted it on 3 April 2009.
Go to Profile#6953
James Marcia
#6962
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
James E. Marcia is a clinical and developmental psychologist. He taught at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada and the State University of New York at Buffalo in Upstate New York. He is also active in clinical private practice, clinical psychology supervision, community consultation, and international clinical-developmental research and teaching.
Go to Profile#6954
Bernard Malgrange
#6963
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Bernard Malgrange is a French mathematician who works on differential equations and singularity theory. He proved the Ehrenpreis–Malgrange theorem and the Malgrange preparation theorem, essential for the classification theorem of the elementary catastrophes of René Thom. He received his Ph.D. from Université Henri Poincaré in 1955. His advisor was Laurent Schwartz. He was elected to the Académie des sciences in 1988. In 2012 he gave the Łojasiewicz Lecture at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
Go to Profile#6955
Maria Rita Kehl
#6964
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Maria Rita Kehl, ORB is a Brazilian psychoanalyst, journalist, poet, essayist, cronista and literary critic. In 2010, she won the Jabuti Award in the Education, Psychology and Psychoanalysis category and the Human Rights Award from the Brazilian government in the Media and Human Rights category.
Go to Profile#6956
Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan
#6965
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan is the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the United Arab Emirates. He is a son of the founder of the United Arab Emirates, Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. In 2020, he was a signatory of the Abraham Accords on behalf of the UAE.
Go to Profile#6957
Janet Street-Porter
#6966
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Janet Vera Street-Porter is an English broadcaster, journalist, writer, producer, and media personality. She began her career as a fashion writer and columnist at the Daily Mail and was later appointed fashion editor of the Evening Standard in 1971. In 1973, she co-presented a mid-morning radio show with Paul Callan on LBC.
Go to Profile#6958
Deirdre Barrett
#6967
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Deirdre Barrett is an American author and psychologist known for her research on dreams, hypnosis and imagery, and has written on evolutionary psychology. Barrett is a teacher at Harvard Medical School, and a past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and of the American Psychological Association’s Div. 30, the Society for Psychological Hypnosis. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Dreaming: The Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams and a consulting editor for Imagination, Cognition, and Personality and The International Journal for Clinical and Ex...
Go to Profile#6959
Song Jiang
#6968
Overall Influence
Song Jiang was a Chinese historical figure who led an armed rebellion against the ruling Song Dynasty in the early 12th century. His band marauded over a region straddling the present-day Chinese provinces of Shandong and Henan. They eventually surrendered to the Imperial Court. The historical Song Jiang was turned into a fictional character in Water Margin, which became one of the four famous Classic Chinese Novels. He is the central figure in the book, and the leader of the 108 Heroes who come together as bandits in Shandong's Liangshan Marsh.
Go to Profile#6960
Géza Vermes
#6969
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Géza Vermes, was a British academic, Biblical scholar, and Judaist of Jewish–Hungarian descent—one who also served as a Roman Catholic priest in his youth—and scholar specialized in the field of the history of religion, particularly ancient Judaism and early Christianity. He is best known for his complete translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls into English; his research focused on the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Ancient Hebrew writings in Aramaic such as the Targumim, and on the life and religion of Jesus. Vermes was one of the most important voices in contemporary Jesus research, and he has been described as the greatest Jesus scholar of his time.
Go to Profile#6961
Renato Corona
#6970
Overall Influence
1948 - 2016 (68 years)
Renato Tereso Antonio Coronado Corona was a Filipino judge who was the 23rd chief justice of the Philippines from 2010 to 2012. He served as an associate justice after being appointed by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on April 9, 2002, and later as Chief Justice on May 12, 2010, upon the retirement of Chief Justice Reynato Puno.
Go to Profile#6962
Jean Starobinski
#6971
Overall Influence
1920 - 2019 (99 years)
Jean Starobinski was a Swiss literary critic. Biography Starobinski was born in Geneva in 1920, the son of Jewish physicians Aron Starobinski of Warsaw and Sulka Frydman of Lublin. Both his parents left Poland in 1913. Aron Starobinski chose to study humanities as well as medicine, and his son Jean, who received his Swiss citizenship only in 1948, would follow his example, eventually becoming a practicing psychiatrist. Yet even in Switzerland, the Starobinski family could not escape reminders of a legacy of Europe-wide oppression. In November 1932, when Starobinski was 11 years old, in his f...
Go to Profile#6963
Ihab Hassan
#6972
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Ihab Habib Hassan was an Egypt-born American literary theorist and writer. Biography Ihab Hassan was born in Cairo, Egypt, and emigrated to the United States in 1946. He was Emeritus Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His writings include Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel , The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett , The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature , Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times , The Right Promethean Fire: Imagination, Science, and Cultural Change , The Postmodern Turn...
Go to Profile#6964
Michael Fisher
#6973
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Michael Ellis Fisher was an English physicist, as well as chemist and mathematician, known for his many seminal contributions to statistical physics, including but not restricted to the theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena. He was the Horace White Professor of Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics at Cornell University. Later he moved to the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, where he was University System of Maryland Regents Professor, a Distinguished University Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.
Go to Profile#6965
Yee Whye Teh
#6974
Overall Influence
Yee-Whye Teh is a professor of statistical machine learning in the Department of Statistics, University of Oxford. Prior to 2012 he was a reader at the Gatsby Charitable Foundation computational neuroscience unit at University College London. His work is primarily in machine learning, artificial intelligence, statistics and computer science.
Go to Profile#6966
Itamar Rabinovich
#6975
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Itamar Rabinovich is the president of the Israel Institute . He was Israel's Ambassador to the United States in the 1990s and former chief negotiator with Syria between 1993 and 1996, and the former president of Tel Aviv University . Currently he is professor emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University, distinguished global professor at New York University and a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Go to Profile#6967
Wayne Isham
#6976
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Wayne Isham is an American film director and music video director who has directed films and music videos of many popular artists. Early life and education Isham was born in December 2, 1958. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1970s. While at UC Santa Barbara, David Bowie's music video for "Ashes to Ashes" was released. Costing £250,000, it was the most expensive music video made at the time. Isham has cited this music video as his inspiration to start producing music videos.
Go to Profile#6968
Frank Shu
#6977
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Frank Hsia-San Shu was a Chinese-American astrophysicist, astronomer, and author. He served as a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Diego. He is best known for proposing the density wave theory to explain the structure of spiral galaxies, and for describing a model of star formation, where a giant dense molecular cloud collapses to form a star.
Go to Profile#6969
William Schabas
#6978
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
William Anthony Schabas, OC is a Canadian academic specialising in international criminal and human rights law. He is professor of international law at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom, professor of international human law and human rights at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and an internationally respected expert on human rights law, genocide and the death penalty. Schabas has been described as "the world expert on the law of genocide and international law."
Go to Profile#6970
Robyn Dawes
#6979
Overall Influence
1936 - 2010 (74 years)
Robyn Mason Dawes was an American psychologist who specialized in the field of human judgment. His research interests included human irrationality, human cooperation, intuitive expertise, and the United States AIDS policy. He applied linear models to human decision making, including models with equal weights, a method known as unit-weighted regression. He co-wrote an early textbook on mathematical psychology .
Go to Profile#6971
Neymar
#6980
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior , known as Neymar Júnior or mononymously as Neymar, is a Brazilian professional footballer who plays as a forward for Saudi Pro League club Al Hilal and the Brazil national team. A prolific goalscorer and playmaker renowned for his flamboyant style of play, he is widely regarded as one of the best players in the world and the best Brazilian player of his generation. Neymar has scored at least 100 goals for three different clubs, making him one of the few players to achieve this feat.
Go to Profile#6972
Hua Guofeng
#6981
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Hua Guofeng was a Chinese politician who served as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and Premier of the People's Republic of China. The designated successor of Mao Zedong, Hua held the top offices of the government, party, and the military after the deaths of Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai, but was gradually forced out of supreme power by a coalition of party leaders between December 1978 and June 1981, and subsequently retreated from the political limelight, though still remaining a member of the Central Committee until 2002.
Go to Profile#6973
Maria Klawe
#6982
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Maria Margaret Klawe is a computer scientist and the fifth president of Harvey Mudd College . Born in Toronto in 1951, she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2009. She was previously Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University. She is known for her advocacy for women in STEM fields.
Go to Profile#6974
Edward Ruscha
#6983
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. He is also noted for creating several artist's books. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California.
Go to Profile#6975
Paul W. Taylor
#6984
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Paul W. Taylor was an American philosopher best known for his work in the field of environmental ethics. Biography Taylor's theory of biocentric egalitarianism, related to but not identical with deep ecology, was expounded in his 1986 book Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, and has been taught in university courses on environmental ethics. Taylor taught philosophy for four decades at Brooklyn College, City University of New York and was professor emeritus there at the time of his death.
Go to Profile#6976
Susan Curtiss
#6985
Overall Influence
Susan Curtiss is an American linguist. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles. Curtiss' main fields of research are psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Her 1976 UCLA PhD dissertation centered on the study of the grammatical development of Genie, a famous feral child. Her subsequent work has been on grammatical development in children with SLI; maturational constraints on first-language development ; hemispheric specialization for language and language acquisition; and the cognitive modularity of grammar.
Go to Profile#6977
Veena Das
#6986
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Veena Das, FBA in India is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her areas of theoretical specialisation include the anthropology of violence, social suffering, and the state. Das has received multiple international awards including the Ander Retzius Gold Medal, delivered the prestigious Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture and was named a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#6978
Arogyaswami Paulraj
#6987
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Arogyaswami J. Paulraj is an Indian-American electrical engineer, academic. He is a Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Elect. Engg. at Stanford University. Early life Paulraj was born in Pollachi near Coimbatore, British India in 1944, one of six children of Sinappan Arogyaswami and his wife Rose. He attended Montfort Boys' High School in Yercaud, Tamil Nadu. He joined the Indian Navy at age 15 through the National Defense Academy, Khadakvasla and served the Indian Navy for 26 years. Paulraj received a B.E. in electrical engineering from the Naval College of Engineering, Lonavala, India, and a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#6979
Emily Wilson
#6988
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Emily Rose Caroline Wilson is a British American classicist, author, translator, and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, she became the first woman to publish an English translation of Homer's Odyssey. Her translation of the Iliad was released in September 2023.
Go to Profile#6980
Gar Alperovitz
#6989
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Gar Alperovitz is an American historian and political economist. Alperovitz served as a fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics; a founding Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution; and the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland Department of Government and Politics from 1999 to 2015. He also served as a legislative director in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and as a special assistant in the US Department of State. Alperovitz is a distin...
Go to Profile#6981
Donald Griffin
#6990
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Donald Redfield Griffin was an American professor of zoology at various universities who conducted seminal research in animal behavior, animal navigation, acoustic orientation and sensory biophysics. In 1938, while an undergraduate at Harvard University, he began studying the navigational method of bats, which he identified as animal echolocation in 1944. In The Question of Animal Awareness , he argued that animals are conscious like humans. Griffin was the originator of the concept of mentophobia: the denial of the consciousness of other animals by scientists.
Go to Profile#6982
Frederick C. Beiser
#6991
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Frederick Charles Beiser is an American philosopher who is professor of philosophy at Syracuse University. He is one of the leading English-language scholars of German idealism. In addition to his writings on German idealism, Beiser has also written on the German Romantics and 19th-century British philosophy. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research in 1994, and was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2015.
Go to Profile#6983
Jasper Carrott
#6992
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Robert Norman Davis , best known by his stage name, Jasper Carrott, is an English comedian, actor, and television presenter. He starred in the sitcoms The Detectives and All About Me, and presented the game show Golden Balls.
Go to Profile#6984
Stevie Nicks
#6993
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Stephanie Lynn Nicks is an American singer, songwriter, and producer known for her work with the band Fleetwood Mac and as a solo artist. After starting her career as a duo with her then-boyfriend Lindsey Buckingham, releasing the album Buckingham Nicks to little success, Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975, helping the band to become one of the best-selling music acts of all time with over 120 million records sold worldwide. Rumours, the band's second album with Nicks, became one of the best-selling albums worldwide, being certified 20× platinum in the US. In 1981, while remaining a member of...
Go to Profile#6985
Nicholas Sand
#6994
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Nicholas Sand was a cult figure known in the psychedelic community for his work as a clandestine chemist from 1966 to 1996 for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Sand was part of the League for Spiritual Discovery at the Millbrook estate in New York, has been credited as the "first underground chemist on record to have synthesized DMT" and is known for manufacturing large amounts of LSD.
Go to Profile#6986
Yuri Orlov
#6995
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov was a particle accelerator physicist, human rights activist, Soviet dissident, founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a founding member of the Soviet Amnesty International group, and professor of physics at Cornell University. He was declared a prisoner of conscience while serving nine years in prison and internal exile for monitoring the Helsinki human rights accords as a founder of the human rights movement in the Soviet Union.
Go to Profile#6987
Rudolf Bing
#6996
Overall Influence
1902 - 1997 (95 years)
Sir Rudolf Bing, KBE was an Austrian-born British opera impresario who worked in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, most notably being General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City from 1950 to 1972. He was naturalized as a British subject in 1946 and was knighted in 1971, although he spent decades living in the United States, where he died.
Go to Profile#6988
Keith Lehrer
#6997
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Keith Lehrer is Emeritus Regent's Professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona and a research professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, where he spends half of each academic year. Education and career Lehrer received his PhD in philosophy from Brown University where he studied under Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm. He joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1973, where he helped build a major graduate program. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Rochester.
Go to Profile#6989
Paul Weyrich
#6998
Overall Influence
1942 - 2008 (66 years)
Paul Michael Weyrich was an American religious conservative political activist and commentator associated with the New Right. He co-founded The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council , and coined the term "moral majority," the name of the political action group Moral Majority that he co-founded in 1979 with Jerry Falwell.
Go to Profile#6990
Manfred K. Warmuth
#6999
Overall Influence
Manfred Klaus Warmuth is a computer scientist known for his pioneering research in computational learning theory. He is a Distinguished Professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Go to Profile#6991
David Finkelstein
#7000
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
David Ritz Finkelstein was an emeritus professor of physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Biography Born in New York City, Finkelstein obtained his Ph.D. in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953 and taught at Stevens Institute of Technology through 1960, while he also held a Ford Foundation Fellowship at the European Organization for Nuclear Research from 1959 to 1960. From 1964 to 1976, he was professor of physics at Yeshiva University. He became a member of the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1980.
Go to Profile#6992
John Bayley
#7001
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
John Oliver Bayley, CBE, FBA, FRSL was a British academic, literary critic and writer. He was the Warton Professor of English at the University of Oxford from 1974 to 1992. His first marriage was to the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch.
Go to Profile#6993
Braham Murray
#7002
Overall Influence
1943 - 2018 (75 years)
Braham Sydney Murray, OBE was an English theatre director. In 1976, he was one of five founding Artistic Directors of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, and the longest-serving . Early years Braham Goldstein was born in north London, the son of Samuel Goldstein. His name became Murray when his mother remarried and Philip Murray became his stepfather. He attended Clifton College, Bristol, at the age of 13 where he acted in The Bespoke Overcoat by Wolf Mankowitz and directed Ibsen's Brand in school productions. He read English at University College, Oxford, from 1961.
Go to Profile#6994
Stuart Dreyfus
#7003
Overall Influence
A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Stuart E. Dreyfus is professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. While at the Rand Corporation he was a programmer of the JOHNNIAC computer. While at Rand he coauthored Applied Dynamic Programming with Richard Bellman. Following that work, he was encouraged to pursue a Ph.D. which he completed in applied mathematics at Harvard University in 1964, on the calculus of variations. In 1962, Dreyfus simplified the Dynamic Programming-based derivation of backpropagation using only the chain rule.
Go to Profile#6995
Joe Lieberman
#7004
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Joseph Isadore Lieberman is an American politician, lobbyist, and attorney who served as a United States senator from Connecticut from 1989 to 2013. A former member of the Democratic Party, he was its nominee for vice president of the United States in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. During his final term in office, he was officially listed as an independent Democrat and caucused with and chaired committees for the Democratic Party.
Go to Profile#6996
Glenn W. Most
#7005
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Glenn Warren Most is an American classicist and comparatist originating from the US, but also working in Germany and Italy. Most studied classics at Harvard University from 1968 on and received a B.A. Summa Cum Laude in Classics in 1972. He then took a Masters course at Corpus Christi College at Oxford University until 1973, when he continued at the Department of Comparative Literature of Yale University, receiving a M. Phil. in 1978. Two years later, he received a Ph.D. under Paul de Man with a thesis called "The Bait of Falsehood: Studies in the Rhetorical Strategy of Poetic Truth in the Romantic Period".
Go to Profile#6997
Janet Reno
#7006
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
Janet Wood Reno was an American lawyer and public official who served as the first female and 78th United States attorney general. Reno, a member of the Democratic Party, held the position from 1993 to 2001, making her the second-longest serving attorney general, behind only William Wirt.
Go to Profile#6998
Ronald Coifman
#7007
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Ronald Raphael Coifman is the Sterling professor of Mathematics at Yale University. Coifman earned a doctorate from the University of Geneva in 1965, supervised by Jovan Karamata. Coifman is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and the National Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the 1996 DARPA Sustained Excellence Award, the 1996 Connecticut Science Medal, the 1999 Pioneer Award of the International Society for Industrial and Applied Science, and the 1999 National Medal of Science.
Go to Profile#6999
Gianluigi Buffon
#7008
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Gianluigi Buffon , also known as Gigi Buffon, is an Italian former professional footballer who played as a goalkeeper. Widely regarded as one of the greatest goalkeepers of all time, he is one of the few recorded players to have made over 1,100 professional career appearances and holds the record for the most appearances in the Serie A.
Go to Profile#7000
Matt Busby
#7009
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Sir Alexander Matthew Busby was a Scottish football player and manager, who managed Manchester United between 1945 and 1969 and again for the second half of the 1970–71 season. He was the first manager of an English team to win the European Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest managers of all time.
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