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
#7051
Mihajlo D. Mesarovic
#7061
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Mihajlo D. Mesarovic is a Serbian scientist, who is a professor of Systems Engineering and Mathematics at Case Western Reserve University. Mesarovic has been a pioneer in the field of systems theory, he was UNESCO Scientific Advisor on Global change and also a member of the Club of Rome.
Go to Profile#7052
Nitin Nohria
#7062
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Nitin Nohria is an Indian-American academic. He was the tenth dean of Harvard Business School. He is also the George F. Baker Professor of Administration. He is a former non-executive director of Tata Sons.
Go to Profile#7053
Ernesto Zedillo
#7063
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León is a Mexican economist and politician. He was the 61st president of Mexico from 1 December 1994 to 30 November 2000, as the last of the uninterrupted 71-year line of Mexican presidents from the Institutional Revolutionary Party .
Go to Profile#7054
Neil Shubin
#7064
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Neil Shubin is an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer. He is the Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, Associate Dean of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and Professor on the Committee of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago along with being the Provost of the Field Museum of Natural History. He is best known for his co-discovery of Tiktaalik roseae with Ted Daeschler and Farish Jenkins.
Go to Profile#7055
Augusto Roa Bastos
#7065
Overall Influence
1917 - 2005 (88 years)
Augusto Roa Bastos was a Paraguayan novelist and short story writer. As a teenager he fought in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia, and he later worked as a journalist, screenwriter and professor. He is best known for his complex novel Yo el Supremo and for winning the Premio Miguel de Cervantes in 1989, Spanish literature's most prestigious prize. Yo el Supremo explores the dictations and inner thoughts of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the eccentric dictator of Paraguay who ruled with an iron fist, from 1814 until his death in 1840.
Go to Profile#7056
William M. LeoGrande
#7066
Overall Influence
William M. LeoGrande is a professor of government and former dean of the American University School of Public Affairs. He is an expert on Latin America. Biography Dean of the American University School of Public Affairs and a specialist in Latin American politics and U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, LeoGrande has been a frequent adviser to government and private sector agencies.
Go to Profile#7057
Ulli Beier
#7067
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Chief Horst Ulrich Beier, commonly known as Ulli Beier , was a German editor, writer and scholar who had a pioneering role in developing literature, drama and poetry in Nigeria, as well as literature, drama and poetry in Papua New Guinea.
Go to Profile#7058
David Cesarani
#7068
Overall Influence
1956 - 2015 (59 years)
David Cesarani was a British historian who specialised in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He also wrote several biographies, including Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind . Early life Cesarani was born in London to Henry, a hairdresser, and Sylvia . An only child, he won a scholarship to Latymer Upper School in west London and went to Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1976, where he gained a first in history. A master's degree in Jewish history at Columbia University, New York, working with the scholar of Judaism Arthur Hertzberg, shaped the rest of his career. His doctorate at St Anto...
Go to Profile#7059
Bill Walton
#7069
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
William Theodore Walton III is an American television sportscaster and former professional basketball player. He played college basketball for coach John Wooden and the UCLA Bruins, winning three consecutive national college player of the year awards , while leading UCLA to NCAA championships in 1972 and 1973 and an 88-game winning streak. After being selected as the first overall pick in the 1974 NBA draft, Walton led the Portland Trail Blazers to an NBA championship in 1977, earning the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award that season. He won another NBA title in 1986 as a member of the Boston Celtics.
Go to Profile#7060
Michael Todaro
#7070
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Michael Paul Todaro is an American economist and a pioneer in the field of development economics. Todaro earned a PhD in economics from Yale University in 1968 for a thesis titled The Urban Employment Problem in Less Developed Countries – An Analysis of Demand and Supply. Todaro was Professor of Economics at New York University for eighteen years and Senior Associate at the Population Council for thirty years. He lived and taught in Africa for six years. He appears in Who's Who in Economics and Economists of the Twentieth Century. He is also the author of eight books and more than fifty professional articles.
Go to Profile#7061
Harry Cleaver
#7071
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Harry Cleaver Jr. is an American scholar, Marxist theoretician, and professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. He is best known as the author of Reading Capital Politically, an autonomist reading of Karl Marx's Capital. Cleaver is currently active in the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico.
Go to Profile#7062
Richard Leibler
#7072
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Richard A. Leibler was an American mathematician and cryptanalyst. Richard Leibler was born in March 1914. He received his A.M. in mathematics from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1939. While working at the National Security Agency, he and Solomon Kullback formulated the Kullback–Leibler divergence, a measure of similarity between probability distributions which has found important applications in information theory and cryptology. Leibler is also credited by the NSA as having opened up "new methods of attack" in the celebrated VENONA code-breaking pro...
Go to Profile#7063
Natalia Makarova
#7073
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Natalia Romanovna Makarova is a Russian prima ballerina and choreographer. The History of Dance, published in 1981, notes that "her performances set standards of artistry and aristocracy of dance which mark her as the finest ballerina of her generation in the West."
Go to Profile#7064
Robert B. Leighton
#7074
Overall Influence
1919 - 1997 (78 years)
Robert Benjamin Leighton was a prominent American experimental physicist who spent his professional career at the California Institute of Technology . His work over the years spanned solid state physics, cosmic ray physics, the beginnings of modern particle physics, solar physics, the planets, infrared astronomy, and millimeter- and submillimeter-wave astronomy. In the latter four fields, his pioneering work opened up entirely new areas of research that subsequently developed into vigorous scientific communities.
Go to Profile#7065
Richard Tol
#7075
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Richard S. J. Tol is a professor of economics at the University of Sussex. He is also professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a member of the Academia Europaea.
Go to Profile#7066
Jorge E. Hirsch
#7076
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jorge Eduardo Hirsch is an Argentine American professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. Hirsch received a PhD in physics from the University of Chicago in 1980 and completed his postdoctoral research at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1983. He is known for inventing the h-index in 2005, an index for quantifying a scientist's publication productivity and the basis of several scholar indices.
Go to Profile#7067
William Karush
#7077
Overall Influence
1917 - 1997 (80 years)
William Karush was an American professor of mathematics at California State University at Northridge and was a mathematician best known for his contribution to Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions. In his master's thesis he was the first to publish these necessary conditions for the inequality-constrained problem, although he became renowned after a seminal conference paper by Harold W. Kuhn and Albert W. Tucker. He also worked as a physicist for the Manhattan Project, although he signed the Szilárd petition and became a peace activist afterwards.
Go to Profile#7068
Margaret Court
#7078
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Margaret Court , also known as Margaret Smith Court, is an Australian former world No. 1 tennis player and a Christian minister. Considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time, her 24 women's singles major titles and total of 64 major titles are the most in women's tennis history.
Go to Profile#7069
Ulrich K. Laemmli
#7079
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Ulrich K. Laemmli, real name Lämmli, is a Professor in the biochemistry and molecular biology departments at University of Geneva. He is known for the refinement of SDS-PAGE, a widely used method for separating proteins based on their electrophoretic mobility. His paper describing the method is among the most cited scholarly journal articles of all time. His current research involves studying the structural organization of nuclei and chromatin within the cell.
Go to Profile#7070
David Epston
#7080
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David Epston is a New Zealand social worker and therapist, co-director of the Family Therapy Centre in Auckland, New Zealand, visiting professor at the John F. Kennedy University, an honorary clinical lecturer in the Department of Social Work, University of Melbourne, and an affiliate faculty member in the Ph.D program in Couple and Family Therapy at North Dakota State University. Epston and his late friend and colleague Michael White are known as originators of narrative therapy.
Go to Profile#7071
Gregory Chow
#7081
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Gregory Chi-Chong Chow is a Chinese-American economist at Princeton University and Xiamen University. The Chow test, commonly used in econometrics to test for structural breaks, was invented by him. He has also been influential in the economic policy of China, including being an adviser for the Economic Planning and Development Council of the Executive Yuan in Taiwan, and being an adviser for the Chinese State Commission for Restructuring the Economic System on economic reform.
Go to Profile#7072
Willis Harman
#7082
Overall Influence
1918 - 1997 (79 years)
Willis W. Harman was an American engineer, futurist, and author associated with the human potential movement. He was convinced that late industrial civilization faced a period of major cultural crisis which called for a profound transformation of human consciousness. Over a career lasting some four decades, he worked to raise public awareness on the subject through his writings and to foster relevant research through the nonprofit research institute SRI International, the Institute of Noetic Sciences , and the World Business Academy . He served as president of IONS for two decades, and he was a cofounder of the WBA.
Go to Profile#7073
Francisco Mojica
#7083
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica is a Spanish molecular biologist and microbiologist at the University of Alicante in Spain. He is known for his discovery of repetitive, functional DNA sequences in bacteria which he named CRISPR . These were later developed into the first widespread genome editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9.
Go to Profile#7074
Clifford Taubes
#7084
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Clifford Henry Taubes is the William Petschek Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University and works in gauge field theory, differential geometry, and low-dimensional topology. His brother is the journalist Gary Taubes.
Go to Profile#7075
Dana Gioia
#7085
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist. Since the early 1980s, Gioia has been considered part of the literary movements within American poetry known as New Formalism, which advocates the continued writing of poetry in rhyme and meter, and New Narrative, which advocates the telling of non-autobiographical stories. Gioia has also argued in favor of a return to the past tradition of poetry translators replicating the rhythm and verse structure of the original poem.
Go to Profile#7076
Mel Allen
#7086
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Mel Allen was an American sportscaster, best known for his long tenure as the primary play-by-play announcer for the New York Yankees. During the peak of his career in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, Allen was arguably the most prominent member of his profession, his voice familiar to millions. Years after his death, he is still promoted as having been "The Voice of the Yankees."
Go to Profile#7077
Gernot Zippe
#7087
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Gernot Zippe was an Austrian born German mechanical engineer and a nuclear physicist who is widely credited with leading the team which developed the Zippe-type centrifuge, a centrifuge machine for the enrichment and collection of Uranium-235, during his time in the Soviet program of nuclear weapons.
Go to Profile#7078
Howard Winant
#7088
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Howard Winant is an American sociologist and race theorist. Winant is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Winant is best known for developing the theory of racial formation along with Michael Omi. Winant's research and teachings revolve around race and racism, comparative historical sociology, political sociology, social theory, and human rights.
Go to Profile#7079
Jerome A. Cohen
#7089
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Jerome Alan Cohen is a professor of law at New York University School of Law, an expert in Chinese law, a adjunct senior fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves as "of counsel" at the international law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.
Go to Profile#7080
Nicholas Mackintosh
#7090
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Nicholas John Seymour Mackintosh, was a British experimental psychologist and author, specialising in intelligence, psychometrics and animal learning. Education Mackintosh was born in London, the son of Ian Mackintosh and his wife Daphne Cochrane. He was educated at Winchester College and the University of Oxford where he was a student of Magdalen College, Oxford and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree followed by a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1963 supervised by Stuart Sutherland.
Go to Profile#7081
Brian Charlesworth
#7091
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Brian Charlesworth is a British evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, and editor of Biology Letters. Since 1997, he has been Royal Society Research Professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Edinburgh. He has been married since 1967 to the British evolutionary biologist Deborah Charlesworth.
Go to Profile#7082
John Laws
#7092
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Richard John Sinclair Laws CBE is an Australian radio announcer. For 50 years, until 2007, he was the host of an Australian morning radio program combining music with interviews, opinion, live advertising readings and listener talkback. His distinctive voice earned him the nickname "the Golden Tonsils". Although officially retired between 2007 and 2011, he returned in February 2011 to host a morning program on 2SM and the Super Radio Network.
Go to Profile#7083
Bertil Andersson
#7093
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Bertil Andersson is a Swedish college administrator and academic who served as the third president of Nanyang Technological University . Andersson received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science at Umeå University and his PhD and DSc at Lund University. He started his research career at Lund University, after which he became a professor of biochemistry at Stockholm University, Sweden, in 1986. From 1996 to 1999, he served as the Dean of the Faculty of Chemical Sciences at Stockholm University. In 1999, Andersson became the Rector of Linköping University, Sweden, where he served until t...
Go to Profile#7084
Albie Sachs
#7094
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Albert "Albie" Louis Sachs is a South African lawyer, activist, writer, and former judge appointed to the first Constitutional Court of South Africa by Nelson Mandela. Early life and education Albie Sachs was born in Johannesburg at the Florence Nightingale Hospital to Emile Solomon "Solly" Sachs, General Secretary to the Garment Workers' Union of South Africa, and Rachel "Ray" Sachs . Both his mother and father fled to South Africa as children with parents who were escaping persecution against Jews in Lithuania. Sachs shared that at the time they left, the antisemitism had become so violen...
Go to Profile#7085
Benjamin Wittes
#7095
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Benjamin Wittes is an American legal journalist and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is the Research Director in Public Law, and Co-Director of the Harvard Law School–Brookings Project on Law and Security. He works principally on issues related to American law and national security.
Go to Profile#7086
John Humphrys
#7096
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Desmond John Humphrys is a Welsh broadcaster. From 1981 to 1987 he was the main presenter of the Nine O'Clock News, the flagship BBC News television programme, and from 1987 until 2019 he presented on the BBC Radio 4 breakfast programme Today. He was the host of the BBC Two television quiz show Mastermind from 2003 to 2021, for a total of 735 episodes. Humphrys now presents a regular Sunday afternoon show on Classic FM, where he also sometimes fills in on the weekday More Music Breakfast show.
Go to Profile#7087
Neil Kinnock
#7097
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Neil Gordon Kinnock, Baron Kinnock, , is a Welsh politician who served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992. He served as a Member of Parliament from 1970 to 1995, first for Bedwellty and then for Islwyn. He was Vice-President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004. Kinnock was considered to be on the soft left of the Labour Party.
Go to Profile#7088
David Rosenhan
#7098
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
David L. Rosenhan was an American psychologist. He is best known for the Rosenhan experiment, a study challenging the validity of psychiatry diagnoses. Biography Rosenhan received his Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1951 from Yeshiva College, his master's degree in economics in 1953 and his doctorate in psychology in 1958, both from Columbia University. As further described in his obituary published by the American Psychological Association , "Rosenhan was a pioneer in applying psychological methods to the practice of law, including the examination of expert witnesses, jury selectio...
Go to Profile#7089
David Forbes Hendry
#7099
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Sir David Forbes Hendry, FBA CStat is a British econometrician, currently a professor of economics and from 2001 to 2007 was head of the economics department at the University of Oxford. He is also a professorial fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.
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Gerd R. Puin
#7100
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Gerd Rüdiger Puin is a German scholar of Oriental studies, specializing in Quranic palaeography, Arabic calligraphy and orthography. He was a lecturer of Arabic language and literature at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. In regards to his approach of historical research, Puin is considered a representative of the "Saarbrücken School", which is part of the Revisionist School of Islamic Studies.
Go to Profile#7091
Richard Bruce Silverman
#7101
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Richard Bruce Silverman is the Patrick G. Ryan/Aon Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University. His group's main focus is basic and translational research into central nervous system disorders and cancer. He is known for the discovery of pregabalin, which is marketed by Pfizer under the brand name Lyrica.
Go to Profile#7092
Heinrich Harrer
#7102
Overall Influence
1912 - 2006 (94 years)
Heinrich Harrer was an Austrian mountaineer, explorer, writer, sportsman, geographer, and SS sergeant. He was a member of the four-man climbing team that made the first ascent of the North Face of the Eiger, the "last problem" of the Alps. While on expedition in the Indian Himalayas, Harrer and his group were arrested by British forces because of the outbreak of World War II and he escaped to Tibet, staying there until 1951 and never seeing active combat. He wrote the books Seven Years in Tibet and The White Spider .
Go to Profile#7093
Chuck Eddy
#7103
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Chuck Eddy is an American music journalist. Life and career Chuck Eddy was born in Detroit, Michigan. After starting his journalism career with The Village Voice and Creem, where he published one of the first national interviews with the Beastie Boys in the mid-1980s, Eddy then wrote for Rolling Stone, Spin, Entertainment Weekly and other national and local publications. He has authored four books: Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, The Accidental Evolution of Rock and Roll, Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism, and Terminated for ...
Go to Profile#7094
Rita R. Colwell
#7104
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Rita Rossi Colwell is an American environmental microbiologist and scientific administrator. Colwell holds degrees in bacteriology, genetics, and oceanography and studies infectious diseases. Colwell is the founder and Chair of CosmosID, a bioinformatics company. From 1998 to 2004, she was the 11th Director and 1st female Director of the National Science Foundation. She has served on the board of directors of EcoHealth Alliance since 2012.
Go to Profile#7095
Mark Bauerlein
#7105
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mark Weightman Bauerlein is an English professor emeritus at Emory University and a senior editor of First Things. He also serves as a visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college in Savannah.
Go to Profile#7096
Duane Gish
#7106
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
Duane Tolbert Gish was an American biochemist and a prominent member of the creationist movement. A young Earth creationist, Gish was a former vice-president of the Institute for Creation Research and the author of numerous publications about creation science.
Go to Profile#7097
Sara Paretsky
#7107
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sara Paretsky is an American author of detective fiction, best known for her novels focused on the protagonist V. I. Warshawski. Life and career Paretsky was born in Ames, Iowa. Her father was a microbiologist and moved the family to Kansas in 1951 after taking a job at the University of Kansas, where Paretsky eventually graduated. The family rented an old farm house. Her relationship with her parents was strained; her mother was an alcoholic and her father was a harsh disciplinarian.
Go to Profile#7098
Eugenie Clark
#7108
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Eugenie Clark , popularly known as The Shark Lady, was an American ichthyologist known for both her research on shark behavior and her study of fish in the order Tetraodontiformes. Clark was a pioneer in the field of scuba diving for research purposes. In addition to being regarded as an authority in marine biology, Clark was popularly recognized and used her fame to promote marine conservation.
Go to Profile#7099
Moshe Idel
#7109
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Moshe Idel is a Romanian-born Israeli historian and philosopher of Jewish mysticism. He is Emeritus Max Cooper Professor in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and a Senior Researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute.
Go to Profile#7100
Heinrich August Winkler
#7110
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Heinrich August Winkler is a German historian. With his mother he joined the westward flight in 1944, after which he grew up in southern Germany, attending a Gymnasium in Ulm. He then studied history, political science, philosophy and public law at Münster, Heidelberg and Tübingen. In 1970 he became professor at the Free University of Berlin. From 1972 to 1991 he was professor at the University of Freiburg. Since 1991 he has held a chair of modern history at the Humboldt University Berlin. He has been a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany since 1962, and has ties to numerous prominent politicians within that party, including former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder.
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