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
#701
Desmond Morris
#701
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Desmond John Morris FLS hon. caus. is an English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter, as well as a popular author in human sociobiology. He is known for his 1967 book The Naked Ape, and for his television programmes such as Zoo Time.
Go to Profile#702
John Ashbery
#702
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet and art critic. Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in poetry, the standard tones of the age." Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008, "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery" and "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound." Stephanie Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, ...
Go to Profile#703
Andrew Sullivan
#703
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Andrew Michael Sullivan is a British-American author, editor, and blogger. Sullivan is a political commentator, a former editor of The New Republic, and the author or editor of six books. He started a political blog, The Daily Dish, in 2000, and eventually moved his blog to platforms, including Time, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and finally an independent subscription-based format. He announced his retirement from blogging in 2015. From 2016 to 2020, Sullivan was a writer-at-large at New York. His newsletter The Weekly Dish was launched in July 2020.
Go to Profile#704
William Baumol
#704
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
William Jack Baumol was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at New York University, Academic Director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He was a prolific author of more than eighty books and several hundred journal articles. He is the namesake of the Baumol effect.
Go to Profile#705
Michio Kaku
#705
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#706
W. D. Hamilton
#706
Overall Influence
1936 - 2000 (64 years)
William Donald Hamilton was a British evolutionary biologist, recognised as one of the most significant evolutionary theorists of the 20th century. Hamilton became known for his theoretical work expounding a rigorous genetic basis for the existence of altruism, an insight that was a key part of the development of the gene-centered view of evolution. He is considered one of the forerunners of sociobiology. Hamilton published important work on sex ratios and the evolution of sex. From 1984 to his death in 2000, he was a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University.
Go to Profile#707
George Emil Palade
#707
Overall Influence
1912 - 2008 (96 years)
George Emil Palade was a Romanian-American cell biologist. Described as "the most influential cell biologist ever", in 1974 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine along with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve. The prize was granted for his innovations in electron microscopy and cell fractionation which together laid the foundations of modern molecular cell biology, the most notable discovery being the ribosomes of the endoplasmic reticulum – which he first described in 1955.
Go to Profile#708
Richard Serra
#708
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Richard Serra is an American artist known for his large-scale sculptures made for site-specific landscape, urban, and architectural settings. Serra's sculptures are notable for their material quality and exploration of the relationship between the viewer, the work, and the site. Since the mid-1960s, Serra has worked to radicalize and extend the definition of sculpture beginning with his early experiments with rubber, neon, and lead, to his large-scale steel works.
Go to Profile#709
Raghuram Rajan
#709
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Raghuram Govind Rajan is an Indian economist and the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Between 2003 and 2006 he was Chief Economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund. From September 2013 through September 2016 he was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. In 2015, during his tenure at the RBI, he became the Vice-Chairman of the Bank for International Settlements.
Go to Profile#710
Louis Freeh
#710
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Louis Joseph Freeh is an American attorney and former judge who served as the fifth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from September 1993 to June 2001. Graduated from Rutgers University and New York University School of Law, Freeh began his career as a special agent in the FBI, and was later an Assistant United States Attorney and United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. A Republican, he was later appointed as FBI director by President Bill Clinton. He is now a lawyer and consultant in the private sector.
Go to Profile#711
Roy Lichtenstein
#711
Overall Influence
1923 - 1997 (74 years)
Roy Fox Lichtenstein was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody. Inspired by the comic strip, Lichtenstein produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a tongue-in-cheek manner. His work was influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style. His artwork was considered to be "disruptive". He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". His paintings we...
Go to Profile#712
Carl Woese
#712
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Carl Richard Woese was an American microbiologist and biophysicist. Woese is famous for defining the Archaea in 1977 through a pioneering phylogenetic taxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique that has revolutionized microbiology. He also originated the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by that name. Woese held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and was professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.
Go to Profile#713
Ernst Nolte
#713
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Ernst Nolte was a German historian and philosopher. Nolte's major interest was the comparative studies of fascism and communism . Originally trained in philosophy, he was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Berlin, where he taught from 1973 until his 1991 retirement. He was previously a professor at the University of Marburg from 1965 to 1973. He was best known for his seminal work Fascism in Its Epoch, which received widespread acclaim when it was published in 1963. Nolte was a prominent conservative academic from the early 1960s and was involved in many controvers...
Go to Profile#714
Serge Lang
#714
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Serge Lang was a French-American mathematician and activist who taught at Yale University for most of his career. He is known for his work in number theory and for his mathematics textbooks, including the influential Algebra. He received the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in 1960 and was a member of the Bourbaki group.
Go to Profile#715
Martin Hellman
#715
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Martin Edward Hellman is an American cryptologist and mathematician, best known for his invention of public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman is a longtime contributor to the computer privacy debate, and has applied risk analysis to a potential failure of nuclear deterrence.
Go to Profile#716
Andrew Wakefield
#716
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Andrew Jeremy Wakefield is a British anti-vaccine activist, former physician, and discredited academic who was struck off the medical register for his involvement in The Lancet MMR autism fraud, a 1998 study that fraudulently claimed a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and autism. He has subsequently become known for anti-vaccination activism. Publicity around the 1998 study caused a sharp decline in vaccination uptake, leading to a number of outbreaks of measles around the world. He was a surgeon on the liver transplant programme at the Royal Free Hospital in London and b...
Go to Profile#717
Anna Hazare
#717
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Kisan Baburao "Anna" Hazare is an Indian social activist who led movements to promote rural development, increase government transparency, and investigate and punish corruption in public life. In addition to organising and encouraging grassroots movements, Hazare frequently conducted hunger strikes to further his causes—a tactic reminiscent, to many, of the work of Mahatma Gandhi. Hazare also contributed to the development and structuring of Ralegan Siddhi, a village in Parner taluka of Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra, India. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan—the third-highest civilian award—...
Go to Profile#718
Butler Lampson
#718
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Butler W. Lampson, ForMemRS, is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing. Education and early life After graduating from the Lawrenceville School , Lampson received an A.B. in physics from Harvard University in 1964 and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967.
Go to Profile#719
Oliver North
#719
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Oliver Laurence North is an American political commentator, television host, military historian, author, and retired United States Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. A veteran of the Vietnam War, North was a National Security Council staff member during the Iran–Contra affair, a political scandal of the late 1980s. It involved the illegal sale of weapons to the Khomeini regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran to encourage the release of American hostages then held in Lebanon. North formulated the second part of the plan, which was to divert proceeds from the arms sales to support the Contra rebel groups in Nicaragua, sales which had been specifically prohibited under the Boland Amendment.
Go to Profile#720
Jonathan Haidt
#720
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#721
Robert Todd Carroll
#721
Overall Influence
1945 - 2016 (71 years)
Robert Todd Carroll was an American author, philosopher and academic, best known for The Skeptic's Dictionary. He described himself as a naturalist, an atheist, a materialist, a metaphysical libertarian, and a positivist. In 2010 he was elected a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He was a professor of philosophy at Sacramento City College from 1977 until his retirement in 2007.
Go to Profile#722
Bob Barker
#722
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (101 years)
Robert William Barker was an American media personality and animal rights advocate. He hosted CBS's The Price Is Right, the longest-running game show in North American television history, from 1972 to 2007. He also hosted Truth or Consequences from 1956 to 1975.
Go to Profile#723
David M. Schneider
#723
Overall Influence
1918 - 1995 (77 years)
David Murray Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology. Biography He received his B.S. in 1940 and his M.S. from Cornell University in 1941. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard in 1949, based on fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap.
Go to Profile#724
Stephen Barrett
#724
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Stephen Joel Barrett is an American retired psychiatrist, author, co-founder of the National Council Against Health Fraud , and the webmaster of Quackwatch. He runs a number of websites dealing with quackery and health fraud. He focuses on consumer protection, medical ethics, and scientific skepticism.
Go to Profile#725
Ram Dass
#725
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Ram Dass , also known as Baba Ram Dass, was an American spiritual teacher, guru of modern yoga, psychologist, and writer. His best-selling 1971 book Be Here Now, which has been described by multiple reviewers as "seminal", helped popularize Eastern spirituality and yoga in the West. He authored or co-authored twelve more books on spirituality over the next four decades, including Grist for the Mill , How Can I Help? , and Polishing the Mirror .
Go to Profile#726
P. F. Strawson
#726
Overall Influence
1919 - 2006 (87 years)
Sir Peter Frederick Strawson was an English philosopher. He was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1968 to 1987. Before that, he was appointed as a college lecturer at University College, Oxford, in 1947, and became a tutorial fellow the following year, until 1968. On his retirement in 1987, he returned to the college and continued working there until shortly before his death.
Go to Profile#727
Jennifer Doudna
#727
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Areas of Specialization: Biochemistry, Molecular Biology Jennifer Doudna is a Li Ka Shing Chancellor Chair Professor for the Department of Chemistry and Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, she has been a professor at the University of California, San Francisco and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes. She earned a B.A. in biochemistry from Pomona College and a Ph.D. in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Medical School. She is best known for her work with CRISPR.
Go to Profile#728
C. Everett Koop
#728
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Charles Everett Koop was an American pediatric surgeon and public health administrator who served as the 13th surgeon general of the United States under President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989. According to the Associated Press, "Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name" due to his frequent public presence around the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
Go to Profile#729
Simone Veil
#729
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Simone Veil was a French magistrate, Holocaust survivor, and politician who served as Health Minister in several governments and was President of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1982, the first woman to hold that office. As health minister, she is best remembered for advancing women's rights in France, in particular for the 1975 law that legalized abortion, today known as the Veil Act . From 1998 to 2007, she was a member of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest legal authority.
Go to Profile#730
Richard D. Wolff
#730
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I , and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
Go to Profile#731
Bob Hope
#731
Overall Influence
1903 - 2003 (100 years)
Leslie Townes "Bob" Hope was a British-born American comedian, actor, entertainer, and producer with a career that spanned nearly 80 years and achievements in vaudeville, network radio, television, and USO Tours. He appeared in more than 70 short and feature films, starring in 54. These included a series of seven Road to ... musical comedy films with long-time friend Bing Crosby as his partner.
Go to Profile#732
David Horowitz
#732
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
David Joel Horowitz is an American conservative writer and activist. He is a founder and president of the right-wing David Horowitz Freedom Center ; editor of the Center's website FrontPage Magazine; and director of Discover the Networks, a website that tracks individuals and groups on the political left. Horowitz also founded the organization Students for Academic Freedom.
Go to Profile#733
Patrick O'Brian
#733
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Patrick O'Brian, CBE , born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series of sea novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and centred on the friendship of the English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish–Catalan physician Stephen Maturin. The 20-novel series, the first of which is Master and Commander, is known for its well-researched and highly detailed portrayal of early 19th-century life, as well as its authentic and evocative language. A partially finished 21st novel in the series was published posthumously contain...
Go to Profile#734
Arieh Warshel
#734
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Arieh Warshel is an Israeli-American biochemist and biophysicist. He is a pioneer in computational studies on functional properties of biological molecules, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and holds the Dana and David Dornsife Chair in Chemistry at the University of Southern California. He received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Martin Karplus for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".
Go to Profile#735
Narendra Modi
#735
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Narendra Damodardas Modi is an Indian politician who has served as the 14th prime minister of India since May 2014. Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014 and is the Member of Parliament for Varanasi. He is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party and of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh , a right wing Hindu nationalist paramilitary volunteer organisation. He is the longest-serving prime minister from outside the Indian National Congress.
Go to Profile#736
Albert W. Tucker
#736
Overall Influence
1905 - 1995 (90 years)
Albert William Tucker was a Canadian mathematician who made important contributions in topology, game theory, and non-linear programming. Early life and education Albert Tucker was born in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, and earned his B.A. at the University of Toronto in 1928 and his M.A. at the same institution in 1929. In 1932, he earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University under the supervision of Solomon Lefschetz, with a dissertation entitled An Abstract Approach to Manifolds. In 1932–33 he was a National Research Fellow at Cambridge, Harvard, and then University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#737
Hans Küng
#737
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Hans Küng was a Swiss Catholic priest, theologian, and author. From 1995 he was president of the Foundation for a Global Ethic . Küng was ordained a priest in 1954, joined the faculty of the University of Tübingen in 1960, and served as a theological adviser during the Second Vatican Council. In 1978, after he rejected the doctrine of papal infallibility, he was not allowed to continue teaching as a Catholic theologian, but he remained at Tübingen as a professor of ecumenical theology until he retired with the title professor emeritus in 1996. He remained a Catholic priest until his death. He supported the spiritual substance of religion, while questioning traditional dogmatic Christianity.
Go to Profile#738
Hugh Trevor-Roper
#738
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. In the view of John Kenyon, "some of [Trevor-Roper's] short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books". This is echoed by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman in the introduction to One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper : "The bulk of his publications is formidable...
Go to Profile#739
Eldridge Cleaver
#739
Overall Influence
1935 - 1998 (63 years)
Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was an American writer, political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party. In 1968, Cleaver wrote Soul on Ice, a collection of essays that, at the time of its publication, was praised by The New York Times Book Review as "brilliant and revealing". Cleaver stated in Soul on Ice: "If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America."
Go to Profile#740
Henry Giroux
#740
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Henry Armand Giroux is an American-Canadian scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period.
Go to Profile#741
John Updike
#741
Overall Influence
1932 - 2009 (77 years)
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once , Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
Go to Profile#742
Jason Josephson Storm
#742
Overall Influence
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is an American academic, philosopher, social scientist, and author. He is currently Professor and chair in the Department of Religion and chair in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College. He also holds affiliated positions in Asian studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College. Storm's research focuses on Japanese religions, European intellectual history from 1600 to the present, and theory in religious studies. His more recent work has discussed disenchantment and philosophy of social science.
Go to Profile#743
James Samuel Coleman
#743
Overall Influence
1926 - 1995 (69 years)
James Samuel Coleman was an American sociologist, theorist, and empirical researcher, based chiefly at the University of Chicago. He served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1991–1992. He studied the sociology of education and public policy, and was one of the earliest users of the term social capital. He may be considered one of the original neoconservatives in sociology. His work Foundations of Social Theory influenced countless sociological theories, and his works The Adolescent Society and "Coleman Report" were two of the most cited books in educational sociology.
Go to Profile#744
Suharto
#744
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Suharto was an Indonesian army officer and politician, who served as the second and the longest serving president of Indonesia. Widely regarded as a military dictator by international observers, Suharto led Indonesia as an authoritarian regime from the fall of his predecessor Sukarno in 1967 until his resignation in 1998 following nationwide unrest. His 32-year dictatorship is considered one of the most brutal and corrupt of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#745
Anne Rice
#745
Overall Influence
1941 - 2021 (80 years)
Anne Rice was an American author of gothic fiction, erotic literature, and Christian literature. She was best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles. The first book became the subject of a film adaptation—Interview with the Vampire .
Go to Profile#746
Rainer Weiss
#746
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Rainer Weiss currently holds the title of Emeritus Professor of Physics at MIT and also works as an adjunct professor at LSU. He previously also held positions at Tufts University and Princeton University. He was also chair of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) Science Working Group. Weiss completed his bachelor of science degree in 1955 at MIT (after having dropped out briefly), and his PhD in 1962. Native to Berlin, Germany, Weiss’ family emigrated to Prague and then to the U.S. fleeing persecution from the Nazis. Weiss is known as a leading name in gravitational physics and astrophysics....
Go to Profile#747
Oriana Fallaci
#747
Overall Influence
1929 - 2006 (77 years)
Oriana Fallaci was an Italian journalist and author. A partisan during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career. Fallaci became famous worldwide for her coverage of war and revolution, and her "long, aggressive and revealing interviews" with many world leaders during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Go to Profile#748
Edward C. Prescott
#748
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Edward Christian Prescott was an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the IDEAS/RePEc rankings, he was the 19th most widely cited economist in the world in 2013. In August 2014, Prescott was a...
Go to Profile#749
Vince Gilligan
#749
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
George Vincent Gilligan Jr. is an American screenwriter, producer, and director. He is known for his television work, specifically as creator, head writer, executive producer, and director of AMC's Breaking Bad and its spin-off prequel series Better Call Saul . He was a writer and producer for The X-Files and was the co-creator of its spin-off, The Lone Gunmen .
Go to Profile#750
Alice Munro
#750
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Munro's work has been described as revolutionizing the architecture of short stories, especially in its tendency to move forward and backward in time. Her stories have been said to "embed more than announce, reveal more than parade."
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