The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people
#701
Jessica Mink
#30297
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Jessica Mink is an American software developer and a data archivist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. She was part of the team that discovered the rings around the planet Uranus.
Go to Profile#702
Jack Yang
#30312
Overall Influence
Jack Y. Yang is an American computer scientist and biophysicist. As of 2011, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design. Biography Yang received his Ph.D. and MS degrees from Purdue University, West Lafayette, under the supervision of Okan Ersoy and Albert Overhauser , receiving the grade of summa cum laude and the award of Ph.D. thesis of the year in the USA. His post-doctoral training was from Harvard Medical School and Indiana University School of Medicine, and he received training in biostatistics and bioinformatics from Johns Hopkins University, and in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Go to Profile#703
David Agard
#30355
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
David A. Agard is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. He earned his B.S. in molecular biochemistry and biophysics from Yale University and his Ph.D. in biological chemistry from California Institute of Technology. His research is focused on understanding the basic principles of macromolecular structure and function. He is a scientific director of the Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology, and Quantitative Biomedical Research and has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1986.
Go to Profile#704
Bo Lawergren
#30366
Overall Influence
Bo Lawergren is a Professor Emeritus of physics at Hunter College, The City University of New York. He is also a music archaeologist. He received his PhD in nuclear physics from the Australian National University of Canberra, Australia.
Go to Profile#705
Sheldon M. Ross
#30461
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Sheldon M. Ross is the Daniel J. Epstein Chair and Professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He is the author of several books in the field of probability. Biography Ross received his B. S. degree in mathematics from Brooklyn College in 1963, his M.S. degrees in mathematics from Purdue University in 1964 and his Ph.D. degree in Statistics from Stanford University in 1968, studying under Gerald Lieberman and Cyrus Derman. He served as a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1976 until joining the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in 2004. He serves as the Editor for several journals, among which Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences.
Go to Profile#706
Piyare Jain
#30485
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Piyare Lal Jain was a particle physicist at University at Buffalo. On December 6, 2006, he claimed the discovery of the long-sought axion subatomic particle. Biography On December 6, 2006, he claimed discovery of the long-sought axion subatomic particle.
Go to Profile#707
Andrew H. Knoll
#30520
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Andrew Herbert Knoll is the Fisher Research Professor of Natural History and a Research Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1951, Andrew Knoll graduated from Lehigh University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1973 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977 for a dissertation titled "Studies in Archean and Early Proterozoic Paleontology." Knoll taught at Oberlin College for five years before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1982. At Harvard, he serves in the departments of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and...
Go to Profile#708
Brenda Andrews
#30521
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Brenda Jean Andrews is a Canadian academic, researcher and biologist specializing in systems biology and molecular genetics. Andrews is known for her studies on cell cycle-regulated transcription and protein kinase function in yeast and for pioneering work with Charles Boone on genetic networks. As an example, in 2015, Andrews co-led a team of biology scientists at the University of Toronto's Donnelly Centre to create the first ever fully detailed protein map of a cell, the map showed the location of all protein in a cell, the project aimed to benefit and help increase research for cancer cells.
Go to Profile#709
Donald E. Brownlee
#30657
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Donald Eugene Brownlee is a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington at Seattle and the principal investigator for NASA's Stardust mission. In 2000, along with his co-author Peter Ward, he co-originated the term Rare Earth, in reference to the possible scarcity of life elsewhere in the universe. His primary research interests include astrobiology, comets, and cosmic dust. He was born in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Go to Profile#710
Chih-Kung Jen
#30670
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Chih-Kung Jen was a Chinese physicist who emigrated to the U.S. and participated in some of the 20th century's major scientific, political and social developments in both the United States and China.
Go to Profile#711
James L. Hoard
#30710
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
James Lynn Hoard was an American chemist, a member of the Manhattan Project. Hoard was internationally recognized for his research of boron. Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize laureate, said that Hoard "contributed significantly to ... the chemistry of certain elements such as boron, and the structure of regions of hemoglobins where oxygen molecules are bonded to iron."
Go to Profile#712
Chris Hirata
#30758
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Christopher Michael Hirata is an American cosmologist and astrophysicist. Hirata was 13 years old when he won the gold medal in 1996 at the International Physics Olympiad. He received a bachelor's degree in Physics at Caltech in 2001, at the age of 18. He received his PhD under the supervision of Uroš Seljak in 2005 from Princeton University in Astrophysics . From 2005 to 2007 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study. From 2006 to 2012 he was assistant professor and then full professor at Caltech before moving to the Ohio State University the following academic year in the same capacity.
Go to Profile#713
Michael Shur
#30812
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Michael Shur is a Russian and American physicist and a professor of solid state electronics and electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Background Shur was born on November 13, 1942, in Kamensk-Uralsky, Sverdlovsk, USSR. He received his master's degree in Electrical Engineering from St. Petersburg Electrotechnical Institute. In 1967 he received his Ph.D. in physics from the A.F. Ioffe Institute in Petersburg, Russia. In 1993, he received Dr. Sc. degree from A.F. Ioffe Institute.
Go to Profile#714
Christopher T. Russell
#30824
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Christopher Thomas Russell is head of the Space Physics Center at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCLA, professor in UCLA's Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, and Director of the UCLA Branch of the California Space Grant Consortium. He received a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1964 and a Ph.D. from UCLA in 1968. In 1977 he was awarded the James B. Macelwane Medal and in 2003 the John Adam Fleming Medal by the American Geophysical Union . He is also a Fellow of the AGU. Asteroid 21459 Chrisrussell was named after him in 2008. In 2017, he was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.
Go to Profile#715
Roger Angel
#30842
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
James Roger Prior Angel is a British-born American astronomer. He is Regents Professor and Professor of Astronomy and Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona. Education He graduated from St Peter's College, Oxford, with a BA, in 1963, from California Institute of Technology, with an MA in 1966, and from the University of Oxford, with a D Phil, in 1967.
Go to Profile#716
Karlis Kaufmanis
#30908
Overall Influence
1910 - 2003 (93 years)
Kārlis Kaufmanis was a Latvian-American astronomer. He is noted for his theory, on which he delivered a public lecture more than a thousand times, that the Star of Bethlehem was a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn that took place in 7 BC. He was also the author of several textbooks on astronomy, mathematics, and cosmology.
Go to Profile#717
Mark E. Davis
#30926
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Mark E. Davis is the Warren and Katherine Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He is a member of the City of Hope National Medical Center. He earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in chemical engineering all from the University of Kentucky. His lab focuses on the synthesis of materials for catalysis and biocompatible materials for drug delivery.
Go to Profile#718
Valentine Telegdi
#30955
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Valentine Louis Telegdi was a Hungarian-born American physicist. He was the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Service Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago before he moved to ETH Zürich. After retiring from ETH he divided his time between CERN and the California Institute of Technology. Telegdi chaired CERN's scientific policy committee from 1981 to 1983.
Go to Profile#719
Peter J. Bickel
#30986
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Peter John Bickel is an American statistician and Professor of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Education and career Bickel studied physics at the California Institute of Technology. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley, with a Ph.D., in 1963, where he studied under Erich Leo Lehmann.
Go to Profile#720
Christopher Stubbs
#30991
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Christopher Stubbs is an experimental physicist currently on the faculty at Harvard University in both the Department of Physics and the Department of Astronomy. He is the current Dean of Science at Harvard University and a former Chair of Harvard's Department of Physics.
Go to Profile#721
Theodore Porter
#31001
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Theodore M. Porter is a professor who specializes in the history of science in the Department of History at UCLA. He has authored several books, including The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900; and Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, the latter a vast reference for sociology of quantification. His most recent book, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, is Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity. He graduated from Stanford University with an A.B. in history in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981.
Go to Profile#722
Jed Buchwald
#31023
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Jed Zachary Buchwald is Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at Caltech. He was previously director of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT. He won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011.
Go to Profile#723
Mark Reed
#31036
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Mark Arthur Reed was an American physicist and professor at Yale University. He is noted particularly for seminal research on quantum dots. Career and education He coined the term quantum dots, for demonstrating the first zero-dimensional electronic device that had fully quantized energy states. Reed did research in electronic transport in nanoscale and mesoscopic systems, artificially structured materials and devices, molecular electronics, biosensors and bioelectronic systems, and nanofluidics. He was the author of more than 200 publications, had given over 75 plenary and over 400 invited talks, and held 33 U.S.
Go to Profile#724
Bernard Moss
#31102
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Bernard Moss is a virologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the United States National Institutes of Health. He is the Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Viral Diseases and of the NIAID Genetic Engineering Section. He is known for his work on poxviruses.
Go to Profile#725
Jesse L. Greenstein
#31206
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
Jesse Leonard Greenstein was an American astronomer. His parents were Maurice G. and Leah Feingold. He earned a Ph.D, with thesis advisor Donald H. Menzel, from Harvard University in 1937, having started there at age 16. Before leaving Harvard, Greenstein was involved in a project with Fred Lawrence Whipple to explain Karl Jansky's discovery of radio waves from the Milky Way and to propose a source. He began his professional career at Yerkes Observatory under Otto Struve and later went to Caltech. With Louis G. Henyey he invented a new spectrograph and a wide-field camera. He directed th...
Go to Profile#726
Kathryn Zeiler
#31330
Overall Influence
Kathryn M. Zeiler is the Nancy Barton Scholar and Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. Zeiler's work primarily focuses on health law, torts law, law and economics, medical malpractice, and disclosure law.
Go to Profile#727
Alexandra Navrotsky
#31343
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Alexandra Navrotsky is a physical chemist in the field of nanogeoscience. She is an elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society . She was a board member of the Earth Sciences and Resources division of the NAS from 1995 until 2000. In 2005, she was awarded the Urey Medal, by the European Association of Geochemistry. In 2006, she was awarded the Harry H. Hess Medal, by the American Geophysical Union. She is currently the director of NEAT ORU , a primary program in nanogeoscience. She is distinguished professor at University of Calif...
Go to Profile#728
Maria Zuber
#31388
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Maria T. Zuber is an American geophysicist who is the vice president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also holds the position of the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Zuber has been involved in more than half a dozen NASA planetary missions aimed at mapping the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and several asteroids. She was the principal investigator for the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory Mission, which was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Go to Profile#729
William Dichtel
#31490
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (47 years)
William Dichtel is the Robert L. Letsinger Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University and a 2015 MacArthur Fellow who has helped pioneer the development of porous polymers known as covalent organic frameworks. Dichtel was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. In 2020, Dichtel was selected as the 2020 Laureate in Chemistry of the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists. He also founded Cylopure, a university spin-off that seeks to bring to market water filtration with cyclodextrin polymers.
Go to Profile#730
Robert Ladislav Parker
#31578
Overall Influence
Robert L. Parker is an American geophysicist and mathematician, currently holding a Professor Emeritus of Geophysics position at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, California.
Go to Profile#731
Gary Miller
#31590
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Gary Lee Miller is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States. In 2003 he won the ACM Paris Kanellakis Award for the Miller–Rabin primality test. He was made an ACM Fellow in 2002 and won the Knuth Prize in 2013.
Go to Profile#732
Gary Stormo
#31656
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Gary Stormo is an American geneticist and currently Joseph Erlanger Professor in the Department of Genetics and the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis. He is considered one of the pioneers of bioinformatics and genomics. His research combines experimental and computational approaches in order to identify and predict regulatory sequences in DNA and RNA, and their contributions to the regulatory networks that control gene expression.
Go to Profile#733
Charles T. Kowal
#31690
Overall Influence
1940 - 2011 (71 years)
Charles Thomas Kowal was an American astronomer known for his observations and discoveries in the Solar System. As a staff astronomer at Caltech's Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain observatories between 1961 and 1984, he found the first of a new class of Solar System objects, the centaurss, discovered two moons of the planet Jupiter, and discovered or co-discovered a number of asteroids, comets and supernovae. He was awarded the James Craig Watson Medal for his contributions to astronomy in 1979.
Go to Profile#734
Ares J. Rosakis
#31713
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Ares J. Rosakis, Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He was also the fifth Director of the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories, known as , and formerly known as Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, and was the Otis Booth Leadership Chair, of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science.
Go to Profile#735
Paul J. Nahin
#31860
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Paul J. Nahin is an American electrical engineer and author who has written 20 books on topics in physics and mathematics, including biographies of Oliver Heaviside, George Boole, and Claude Shannon, books on mathematical concepts such as Euler's formula and the imaginary unit, and a number of books on the physics and philosophical puzzles of time travel.
Go to Profile#736
Marc Kuchner
#31865
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Marc Kuchner is an American astrophysicist, a staff member at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center known for work on images and imaging of disks and exoplanets. Together with Wesley Traub, he invented the band-limited coronagraph, a design for the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder telescope, also to be used on the James Webb Space Telescope . He is also known for his novel supercomputer models of planet-disk interactions and for developing the ideas of ocean planets, carbon planets, and helium planets. Kuchner appears as an expert commentator in the National Geographic television show "Alien Earths" and frequently answers the "Ask Astro" questions in Astronomy Magazine.
Go to Profile#737
Richard M. Friedberg
#31871
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Richard M. Friedberg is a theoretical physicist who has contributed to a wide variety of problems in mathematics and physics. These include mathematical logic, number theory, solid state physics, general relativity, particle physics, quantum optics, genome research, and the foundations of quantum physics.
Go to Profile#738
Frank Haig
#31964
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (97 years)
Frank Rawle Haig, S.J. is an American Jesuit priest, physicist and academic administrator. He served as the third President of Wheeling Jesuit University from 1966 to 1972 and the seventh president of Le Moyne College from 1981 until 1987.
Go to Profile#739
Malcolm C. Smith
#31970
Overall Influence
Malcolm Clive Smith FREng, FIEEE is a British electrical engineer. He is a professor of control engineering at the University of Cambridge. He is notable for his contributions to feedback control and systems theory. He is also the inventor of the inerter, used in mechanical network synthesis.
Go to Profile#740
Michael Elowitz
#31992
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Michael B. Elowitz is a biologist and professor of Biology, Bioengineering, and Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2007 he was the recipient of the Genius grant, better known as the MacArthur Fellows Program for the design of a synthetic gene regulatory network, the Repressilator, which helped initiate the field of synthetic biology. He was the first to show how inherently random effects, or 'noise', in gene expression could be detected and quantified in living cells, leading to a growing recognition of the many roles that noise plays in living cells.
Go to Profile#741
Kenneth Lane
#32140
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Kenneth Douglas Lane is an American theoretical particle physicist and professor of physics at Boston University. Lane is best known for his role in the development of extended technicolor models of physics beyond the Standard Model.
Go to Profile#742
Jack Pettigrew
#32227
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
John Douglas "Jack" Pettigrew was an Australian neuroscientist. He was Emeritus Professor of Physiology and Director of the Vision, Touch and Hearing Research Centre at the University of Queensland in Australia.
Go to Profile#743
Paul Chien
#32327
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Paul Kwan Chien is a Chinese-American biologist known for his research on the physiology and ecology of intertidal organisms and his support for intelligent design. Biography Chien was born on 1 January 1947 in Hong Kong and earned bachelor's degrees in Biology and Chemistry from Chung Chi College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1971 from the University of California at Irvine in the laboratory of marine invertebrate physiologist, Grover C. Stephens. After a brief postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Wheeler J. North at the Kerckhoff marine laboratory ...
Go to Profile#744
James Gunn
#32339
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
James Edward Gunn is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy at Princeton University. Gunn's early theoretical work in astronomy has helped establish the current understanding of how galaxies form, and the properties of the space between galaxies. He also suggested important observational tests to confirm the presence of dark matter in galaxies, and predicted the existence of a Gunn–Peterson trough in the spectra of distant quasars.
Go to Profile#745
Paul T. Bateman
#32385
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Paul Trevier Bateman was an American number theorist, known for formulating the Bateman–Horn conjecture on the density of prime number values generated by systems of polynomials and the New Mersenne conjecture relating the occurrences of Mersenne primes and Wagstaff primes.
Go to Profile#746
Shubha Tole
#32463
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Shubha Tole is an Indian neuroscientist, professor and principal Investigator at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. Her research investigates the development and evolution of the mammalian brain. In 2014, she won the Infosys Prize in the Life Sciences category.
Go to Profile#747
Peter John Wyllie
#32469
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Peter John Wyllie is a British petrologist and academic. He was Professor of Geology at the California Institute of Technology from 1983 until his retirement in 1999. Prior to this, he held positions at the University of St Andrews , Pennsylvania State University , the University of Leeds , and the University of Chicago . He is well known for his many contributions to the understanding of magmatism, particularly through his work on the experimental petrology of magmas and volatiles. In the early 1970s, Wyllie wrote two widely used textbooks; The Dynamic Earth and The Way the Earth Works which integrated the new understanding of magmatism and plate tectonics.
Go to Profile#748
Robert Zwanzig
#32562
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Robert Walter Zwanzig was an American theoretical physicist and chemist who made important contributions to the statistical mechanics of irreversible processes, protein folding, and the theory of liquids and gases.
Go to Profile#749
Jessica Watkins
#32678
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (37 years)
Jessica Andrea Watkins is an American NASA astronaut, geologist, aquanaut and former international rugby player. Watkins was announced as the first Black woman who completed an International Space Station long-term mission in April 2022. On June 9, 2022, at 7:38 UTC, she became the African American woman with the most time in space, surpassing Stephanie Wilson's 42 day, 23 hour and 46 minute record.
Go to Profile#750
William Jencks
#32683
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
William Platt Jencks was an American biochemist. He was noted particularly for his work on enzymes, using concepts drawn from organic chemistry to understand their mechanisms. Career Jencks graduated from Harvard College in 1947 with a degree in English, and earned a Doctor of Medicine from Harvard University in 1951. He interned at the Peter Bent Brigham hospital. Jencks conducted his first postdoctoral research for two years with Fritz Lipmann at Harvard Medical School. Jencks was drafted into the Army Medical Corps and was assigned to the Army Medical Service Graduate School at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, DC.
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