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
#7101
Dave Cockrum
#7111
Overall Influence
1943 - 2006 (63 years)
David Emmett Cockrum was an American comics artist known for his co-creation of the new X-Men characters Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, and Mystique, as well as the antiheroine Black Cat. Cockrum was a prolific and inventive costume designer who updated the uniforms of the Legion of Super-Heroes. He did the same for the new X-Men and many of their antagonists in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Go to Profile#7102
Lester R. Brown
#7112
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Lester Russel Brown is an American environmental analyst, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, and founder and former president of the Earth Policy Institute, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C. BBC Radio commentator Peter Day referred to him as "one of the great pioneer environmentalists."
Go to Profile#7103
Robin DiAngelo
#7113
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Robin Jeanne DiAngelo is an American author working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies. She formerly served as a tenured professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University and is currently an affiliate associate professor of education at the University of Washington. She is known for her work pertaining to "white fragility", an expression she coined in 2011 and explored further in a 2018 book entitled White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.
Go to Profile#7104
Harry Hinsley
#7114
Overall Influence
1918 - 1998 (80 years)
Sir Francis Harry Hinsley, was an English historian and intelligence officer. He worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and wrote widely on the history of international relations and British Intelligence during the Second World War. He was known as Harry Hinsley.
Go to Profile#7105
E. R. Braithwaite
#7115
Overall Influence
1912 - 2016 (104 years)
Eustace Edward Ricardo Braithwaite , publishing as E. R. Braithwaite, was a Guyanese-born British-American novelist, writer, teacher and diplomat best known for his stories of social conditions and racial discrimination against black people. He was the author of the 1959 autobiographical novel To Sir, With Love, which was made into a 1967 British drama film of the same title, starring Sidney Poitier and Lulu. The narrator is an engineer, but to make ends meet, he accepts the job of teacher in a rough London school.
Go to Profile#7106
M. S. Raghunathan
#7116
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Madabusi Santanam Raghunathan FRS is an Indian mathematician. He is currently Head of the National Centre for Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Formerly Professor of eminence at TIFR in Homi Bhabha Chair. Raghunathan received his PhD in Mathematics from , University of Mumbai; his advisor was M. S. Narasimhan. Raghunathan is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Third World Academy of Sciences, and of the American Mathematical Society and a recipient of the civilian honour of Padma Bhushan. He has also been on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2016.
Go to Profile#7107
Jimmy Carr
#7117
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
James Anthony Patrick Carr is a British-Irish comedian, presenter, writer, and actor. He is known for his deadpan delivery of controversial one-liners, for which he has been both praised and criticised, and his distinctive laugh. He began his comedy career in 1997, and he has regularly appeared on television as the host of Channel 4 panel shows such as 8 Out of 10 Cats, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and The Big Fat Quiz of the Year.
Go to Profile#7108
Ian Almond
#7118
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Ian Almond is a literary scholar. He is professor of world literature at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. Biography Ian Almond was born in 1969 in Skipton, England. He received his PhD in literature at Edinburgh University, and worked for University of Bari in Italy, Erciyes University and Boğaziçi University in Turkey, Frei University in Germany, and Georgia State University in the US, before coming to Georgetown University School of Foreign Service Qatar in 2013.
Go to Profile#7109
David Crosby
#7119
Overall Influence
1941 - 2023 (82 years)
David Van Cortlandt Crosby was an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He first found fame as a member of the Byrds, with whom he helped pioneer the genres of folk rock and psychedelia in the mid-1960s, and later as part of the supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash, who helped popularize the California sound of the 1970s. In addition to his music, Crosby was known for his outspoken personality, politics, and personal troubles; he was sometimes depicted as emblematic of the counterculture of the 1960s.
Go to Profile#7110
Giulio Andreotti
#7120
Overall Influence
1919 - 2013 (94 years)
Giulio Andreotti was an Italian politician and statesman who served as the 41st prime minister of Italy in seven governments , and was leader of the Christian Democracy party and its right-wing; he was the sixth-longest-serving prime minister since the Italian unification and the second-longest-serving post-war prime minister. Andreotti is widely considered the most powerful and prominent politician of the First Republic.
Go to Profile#7111
John Carrington Cox
#7121
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
John Carrington Cox is the Nomura Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is one of the world's leading experts on options theory and one of the inventors of the Cox–Ross–Rubinstein model for option pricing, as well as of the Cox–Ingersoll–Ross model for interest rate dynamics. He was named Financial Engineer of the Year by the International Association of Financial Engineers in 1998.
Go to Profile#7112
Jack Buck
#7122
Overall Influence
1924 - 2002 (78 years)
John Francis Buck was an American sportscaster, best known for his work announcing Major League Baseball games of the St. Louis Cardinals. His play-by-play work earned him recognition from numerous halls of fame . He has also been inducted as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame Museum.
Go to Profile#7113
Lauren Berlant
#7123
Overall Influence
1957 - 2021 (64 years)
Lauren Gail Berlant was an American scholar, cultural theorist, and author who is regarded as "one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States." Berlant was the George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, where they taught from 1984 until 2021. Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.
Go to Profile#7114
Nicolas Cage
#7124
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Nicolas Kim Coppola , known by his stage name Nicolas Cage, is an American actor and film producer. Born into the Coppola family, he is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Golden Globe Award.
Go to Profile#7115
Richard Williams
#7125
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Richard Williams is a British music and sports journalist. As a writer, then deputy editor, of the weekly music newspaper Melody Maker , he became an influential commentator on the rise of new forms of rock music at the end of the 1960s. Williams and MM, as it was known, helped promote and contextualise the progressive in pop music. In particular, Williams wrote several key articles around 1970 that increased UK attention to the Velvet Underground. Melody Maker still covered jazz and Williams wrote about the more progressive developments in this field also.
Go to Profile#7116
Adrian Furnham
#7126
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Adrian Frank Furnham is a South African-born British BPS chartered occupational psychologist and chartered health psychologist. He is currently an adjunct professor at BI Norwegian Business School and professor at University College London. Throughout his career, he has lectured in the following post-secondary institutions: Pembroke College, Oxford, University of New South Wales, University of West Indies, Hong Kong University Business School, and the Henley Management College.
Go to Profile#7117
James G. Stavridis
#7127
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
James George Stavridis is a retired United States Navy admiral, currently vice chair, global affairs and managing director of the global investment firm the Carlyle Group, and chair of the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation. Stavridis serves as the chief international diplomacy and national security analyst for NBC News in New York. He is also chair emeritus of the board of directors of the United States Naval Institute and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Go to Profile#7118
Richard A. Falk
#7128
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Richard Anderson Falk is an American professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, and Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor's Chairman of the Board of Trustees. In 2004, he was listed as the author or coauthor of 20 books and the editor or coeditor of another 20 volumes. Falk has published extensively with multiple books written about international law and the United Nations.
Go to Profile#7119
Howard Hodgkin
#7129
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Sir Gordon Howard Eliott Hodgkin was a British painter and printmaker. His work is most often associated with abstraction. Early life Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin was born on 6 August 1932 in Hammersmith, London, the son of Eliot Hodgkin , a manager for the chemical company ICI and an amateur horticulturist, and his wife Katherine, a botanical illustrator. During the Second World War, Eliot Hodgkin was an RAF officer, rising to Wing Commander, and was assistant to Sefton Delmer in running his black propaganda campaign against Nazi Germany.
Go to Profile#7120
Julie A. Nelson
#7130
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#7121
Gabriel Salazar
#7131
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Gabriel Salazar Vergara is a Chilean historian. He is known in his country for his study of social history and interpretations of social movements, particularly the recent student protests of 2006 and 2011–12.
Go to Profile#7122
Michael Flatley
#7132
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michael Ryan Flatley is an Irish-American dancer. He became known for creating and performing in Irish dance shows Riverdance, Lord of the Dance, Feet of Flames, Celtic Tiger Live and Michael Flatley's Christmas Dance Spectacular. Flatley's shows have played to more than 60 million people in 60 countries and have grossed more than $1 billion. His career also includes work as an actor, writer, director, producer, and philanthropist.
Go to Profile#7123
O. N. V. Kurup
#7133
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Ottaplakkal Neelakandan Velu Kurup was a Malayalam poet and lyricist from Kerala, India, who won the Jnanpith Award, the highest literary award in India for the year 2007. He received the awards Padma Shri in 1998 and Padma Vibhushan in 2011, the fourth and second highest civilian honours from the Government of India. In 2007 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by University of Kerala, Trivandrum. O. N. V. was known for his leftist leaning. He was a leader of All India Students Federation . He died on 13 February 2016 at KIMS hospital in Thiruvananthapuram due to age-related illnesses, ag...
Go to Profile#7124
Terry McMillan
#7134
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Terry McMillan is an American novelist. Her work centers around the experiences of Black women in the United States. Early life McMillan was born in Port Huron, Michigan. She received a B.A. degree in journalism in 1977 from the University of California, Berkeley. She also attended the Master of Fine Arts program in film at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#7125
Charles W. Mills
#7135
Overall Influence
1951 - 2021 (70 years)
#7126
John Sallis
#7136
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
John Sallis is an American philosopher well known for his work in the tradition of phenomenology. Since 2005, he has been the Frederick J. Adelmann Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He has previously taught at Pennsylvania State University , Vanderbilt University , Loyola University of Chicago , Duquesne University and the University of the South .
Go to Profile#7127
Lionel Jospin
#7137
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Lionel Robert Jospin is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France from 1997 to 2002. Jospin was First Secretary of the Socialist Party from 1995 to 1997 and the party's candidate for President of France in the 1995 and 2002 elections. In 1995, he was narrowly defeated in the second round by Jacques Chirac. In 2002, he was eliminated in the first round after finishing behind both Chirac and far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, prompting him to announce his retirement from politics. In 2015, he was appointed to the Constitutional Council by National Assembly President Claude...
Go to Profile#7128
Antonio Conte
#7138
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Antonio Conte is an Italian professional football manager and former player who was most recently the head coach of Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur. Playing as a midfielder, Conte began his career at local club Lecce and later became one of the most decorated and influential players in the history of Juventus having won, among others, five Serie A titles, one Coppa Italia, one UEFA Champions League and one UEFA Cup, becoming also the team's captain from 1996 until 2001. He also played for the Italy national team and was a participant at the 1994 FIFA World Cup and UEFA Euro 2000, where...
Go to Profile#7129
Saul Sternberg
#7139
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Saul Sternberg is a professor emeritus of psychology and former Paul C. Williams Term Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a pioneer in the field of cognitive psychology in the development of experimental techniques to study human information processing. Sternberg received a B.A. in mathematics in 1954 from Swarthmore College and a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University in 1959. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in mathematical statistics at the University of Cambridge in 1960, and he subsequently worked as a research scientist in the linguistics and artificial ...
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Susan Rogers
#7140
Overall Influence
Susan Rogers is an American professor, sound engineer, and record producer best known for being Prince's staff engineer during his commercial peak , including on albums like Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign o' the Times, and The Black Album." During this time, Rogers laid the foundations for Prince's now-famous vault by beginning the process of collecting and cataloguing all his studio and live recordings. She has also worked as a sound engineer and record producer for other musical artists such as Barenaked Ladies , David Byrne, Robben Ford, Jeff Black, Rusted Root, Tricky, Michael Penn, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and Tevin Campbell.
Go to Profile#7131
Gananath Obeyesekere
#7141
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Gananath Obeyesekere is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and has done much work in his home country of Sri Lanka. His research focuses on psychoanalysis and anthropology and the ways in which personal symbolism is related to religious experience, in addition to the European exploration of Polynesia in the 18th century and after, and the implications of these voyages for the development of ethnography. His books include Land Tenure in Village Ceylon, Medusa's Hair, The Cult of the Goddess Pattini, Buddhism Transformed , The Work of Culture, The Apotheosis of Captain Co...
Go to Profile#7132
K. R. Rao
#7142
Overall Influence
1961 - 2021 (60 years)
Kamisetty Ramamohan Rao was an Indian-American electrical engineer. He was a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington . Academically known as K. R. Rao, he is credited with the co-invention of discrete cosine transform , along with Nasir Ahmed and T. Natarajan due to their landmark publication, Discrete Cosine Transform.
Go to Profile#7133
Charles Kuralt
#7143
Overall Influence
1934 - 1997 (63 years)
Charles Bishop Kuralt was an American television, newspaper and radio journalist and author. He is most widely known for his long career with CBS, first for his "On the Road" segments on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and later as the first anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning, a position he held for fifteen years. In 1996, Kuralt was inducted into Television Hall of Fame of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
Go to Profile#7134
Corinna Cortes
#7144
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Corinna Cortes is a Danish computer scientist known for her contributions to machine learning. She is a Vice President at Google Research in New York City. Cortes is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of the Paris Kanellakis Award for her work on theoretical foundations of support vector machines.
Go to Profile#7135
Abraham Moles
#7145
Overall Influence
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Abraham Moles was a pioneer in information science and communication studies in France, He was a professor at Ulm school of design and University of Strasbourg. He is known for his work on kitsch. Biography Moles studied electrical and acoustics engineering at the University of Grenoble while preparing a bachelor in sciences of nature. He became a research assistant at the Laboratory of metal physics, under the direction of Félix Esclangon, then of Louis Néel. There he learned techniques of metal work, then electric and electronic tools. He wrote reports on material properties or technical analysis.
Go to Profile#7136
John Legend
#7146
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
John Roger Stephens , known professionally as John Legend, is an American singer, songwriter, pianist, record producer, and actor. He began his musical career working behind the scenes for other artists, playing piano on Lauryn Hill's "Everything Is Everything", and making uncredited guest appearances on Jay-Z's "Encore" and Alicia Keys's "You Don't Know My Name". He was the first artist signed to Kanye West's GOOD Music, on which he released his debut album Get Lifted , which reached the top ten on the Billboard 200 and was certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of Am...
Go to Profile#7137
Nigel Thrift
#7147
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
#7138
Stanley Rachman
#7148
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Stanley Jack Rachman was a South African-born psychologist who worked primarily with obsessive-compulsive disorder and other anxiety disorders. He spent much of his career based in the UK and Canada.
Go to Profile#7139
Carolyn Forché
#7149
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, professor, translator, and human rights advocate. She has received many awards for her literary work. Biography Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Michael Joseph and Louise Nada Blackford Sidlosky. Forché earned a bachelor's degree in Creative Writing at Michigan State University in 1972, and Master of Fine Arts at Bowling Green State University in 1975.
Go to Profile#7140
Bruce Willis
#7150
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Walter Bruce Willis is an American retired actor. He achieved fame with a leading role on the comedy-drama series Moonlighting and has appeared in over a hundred films, gaining recognition as an action hero for his portrayal of John McClane in the Die Hard franchise .
Go to Profile#7141
Jack Joseph Puig
#7151
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jack Joseph Puig is an American audio engineer, A&R executive, and record producer. He has worked with Tonic, Hole, Jellyfish, The Black Crowes, John Mayer, Weezer, Fiona Apple, Roger Hodgson, Taxiride, Green Day, Counting Crows, No Doubt, Klaxons, Rancid, Panic! at the Disco, Stone Temple Pilots, U2, and many others. Puig has shared Grammy Awards with The Goo Goo Dolls, Sheryl Crow, Vanessa Carlton, John Mayer, Fergie , U2, and No Doubt.
Go to Profile#7142
Mario Szegedy
#7152
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Mario Szegedy is a Hungarian-American computer scientist, professor of computer science at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1989 from the University of Chicago. He held a Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , a postdoc at the University of Chicago, 1991–92, and a postdoc at Bell Laboratories .
Go to Profile#7143
Ann Taves
#7153
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ann Taves is Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a former president of the American Academy of Religion . From July 2005–December 2017, she held the Cordana Chair in Catholic Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Taves is especially known for her work Religious Experience Reconsidered , stressing the importance of the findings and theoretical foundations of cognitive science for modern religionists.
Go to Profile#7144
Mark Wigley
#7154
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mark Antony Wigley is a New Zealand-born architect and author based in the United States. From 2004 to 2014, he was the Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
Go to Profile#7145
Yitzhak Zamir
#7155
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Yitzhak Zamir is a professor of public law and Dean of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Faculty of Law, a former Attorney General of Israel, first Dean of the University of Haifa's Law Faculty, and a former Judge of the Supreme Court of Israel.
Go to Profile#7146
John Tsitsiklis
#7156
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
John N. Tsitsiklis is a Clarence J. Lebel Professor of Electrical Engineering with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He serves as the director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and is affiliated with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society , the Statistics and Data Science Center and the MIT Operations Research Center.
Go to Profile#7147
Bruce Greyson
#7157
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Charles Bruce Greyson is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia. He is author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond , co-author of Irreducible Mind and co-editor of The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences . Greyson has written many journal articles and has given media interviews on the subject of near death experiences.
Go to Profile#7148
Frankie Boyle
#7158
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Francis Martin Patrick Boyle is a Scottish comedian and writer. He is known for his cynical, surreal, graphic and dark sense of humour. A stand-up comedian since 1995, Boyle first gained widespread recognition as a regular panellist on the comedy show Mock the Week from its beginning in June 2005 until his departure in September 2009. After he left Mock the Week, Boyle created and starred in the Channel 4 sketch show Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights and BBC Two's chat show Frankie Boyle's New World Order . In 2020, he presented a four-part series on BBC Two, Frankie Boyle's Tour of Scotland. ...
Go to Profile#7149
Keith L. Moore
#7159
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Keith Leon Moore was a professor in the division of anatomy, in the faculty of Surgery, at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Moore was associate dean for Basic Medical Sciences in the university's faculty of Medicine and was Chair of Anatomy from 1976 to 1984. He was a founding member of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists and was President of the AACA between 1989 and 1991.
Go to Profile#7150
Jack Thompson
#7160
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
John Bruce Thompson is an American activist and disbarred attorney. As an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. Thompson gained recognition as an anti-video game activist, criticizing the content of video games and their alleged effects on children. He also targeted rap music and radio personality Howard Stern.
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