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
#7201
Jürgen Klinsmann
#7211
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jürgen Klinsmann is a German professional football manager and former player who is currently manager of the South Korea national football team. Klinsmann played for several prominent clubs in Europe including VfB Stuttgart, Inter Milan, Monaco, Tottenham Hotspur, and Bayern Munich. He was part of the West German team that won the 1990 FIFA World Cup and the unified German team that won the UEFA Euro 1996. As a manager, he managed the German national team to a third-place finish at the 2006 FIFA World Cup and was subsequently coach of a number of other teams including, notably, Bundesliga clu...
Go to Profile#7202
Merritt Ruhlen
#7212
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Merritt Ruhlen was an American linguist who worked on the classification of languages and what this reveals about the origin and evolution of modern humans. Amongst other linguists, Ruhlen's work was recognized as standing outside the mainstream of comparative-historical linguistics. He was the principal advocate and defender of Joseph Greenberg's approach to language classification.
Go to Profile#7203
Alan Weinstein
#7213
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Alan David Weinstein is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, working in the field of differential geometry, and especially in Poisson geometry. Education and career After attending Roslyn High School, Weinstein obtained a bachelor's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964. His teachers included, among others, James Munkres, Gian-Carlo Rota, Irving Segal, and, for the first senior course of differential geometry, Sigurður Helgason.
Go to Profile#7204
Sylvia Wynter
#7214
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Sylvia Wynter, O.J. is a Jamaican novelist,[1] dramatist,[2] critic, philosopher, and essayist.[3] Her work combines insights from the natural sciences, the humanities, art, and anti-colonial struggles in order to unsettle what she refers to as the "overrepresentation of Man". Black studies, economics, history, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, literary analysis, film analysis, and philosophy are some of the fields she draws on in her scholarly work.
Go to Profile#7205
Theo Vennemann
#7215
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Theo Vennemann genannt Nierfeld is a German historical linguist known for his controversial theories of a "Vasconic" and an "Atlantic" stratum in European languages, published since the 1990s. He was professor of Germanic and theoretical linguistics at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich from 1974 .
Go to Profile#7206
Ken Ono
#7216
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
#7207
Madeleine Leininger
#7217
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Madeleine Leininger was a nursing theorist, nursing professor and developer of the concept of transcultural nursing. First published in 1961, her contributions to nursing theory involve the discussion of what it is to care.
Go to Profile#7208
Sadie Plant
#7218
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Sadie Plant is a British philosopher, cultural theorist, and author. Education She earned her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Manchester in 1989 and subsequently taught at the University of Birmingham's Department of Cultural Studies before going on to found the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit with colleague Nick Land at the University of Warwick, where she was a faculty member. Her original research was related to the Situationist International before turning to the social and political potential of cyber-technology. Her writing in the 1990s would prove influential in the developm...
Go to Profile#7209
John Ashcroft
#7219
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
John David Ashcroft is an American lawyer, lobbyist, and former politician who served as the United States Attorney General in the George W. Bush administration from 2001 to 2005. He previously held various positions in Missouri politics; as Auditor of Missouri , Attorney General of Missouri , Governor of Missouri , and as a United States Senator representing Missouri . He later founded The Ashcroft Group, a Washington D.C. lobbying firm.
Go to Profile#7210
David Theo Goldberg
#7220
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
#7211
Luis Echeverría
#7221
Overall Influence
1922 - 2022 (100 years)
Luis Echeverría Álvarez was a Mexican lawyer, academic, and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party , who served as the 57th president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Previously, he was Secretary of the Interior from 1963 to 1969. At the time of his death in 2022, he was his country's oldest living former head of state.
Go to Profile#7212
George Weah
#7222
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
George Manneh Oppong Weah is a Liberian politician and former professional footballer who is the outgoing president of Liberia, serving in office between 2018 and 2024. Prior to his election to the presidency, Weah served as Senator from Montserrado County. He played as a striker in his prolific 18-year professional football career, which ended in 2003. Weah is the first African former professional footballer to become a head of state.
Go to Profile#7213
David Koresh
#7223
Overall Influence
1959 - 1993 (34 years)
David Koresh was an American cult leader who played a central role in the Waco siege of 1993. As the head of the Branch Davidians, a religious sect and offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventists, Koresh claimed to be its final prophet. His apocalyptic Biblical teachings, including interpretations of the Book of Revelation and the Seven Seals, attracted various followers.
Go to Profile#7214
Allen Iverson
#7224
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Allen Ezail Iverson is an American former professional basketball player. Nicknamed "the Answer", he played 14 seasons in the National Basketball Association at both the shooting guard and point guard positions. Iverson won NBA Rookie of the Year Award in 1997 and was an 11-time NBA All-Star, won the All-Star game MVP award in 2001 and 2005, and was the NBA's Most Valuable Player in 2001. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016. In October 2021, he was named to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team. Iverson is often regarded as one of the greatest scorers, shootin...
Go to Profile#7215
Michele Tafoya
#7225
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Michele Tafoya is a freelance reporter and retired sports broadcaster and advisor. She hosts the podcast Sideline Sanity. From 2011 to 2022, she was a reporter for NBC Sports, primarily as a sideline reporter for NBC Sunday Night Football. She currently works as a political advisor and makes television appearances on talk shows discussing the state of American politics and culture.
Go to Profile#7216
Marian Jaworski
#7226
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Marian Franciszek Jaworski was a Cardinal Priest and Archbishop of Lviv of the Latins in the Roman Catholic Church. He was a close friend of Pope John Paul II. Biography Early Years Born the son of Wincenty and Stanisława Łastowiecka in Lwów, Poland , his family was expelled from Ukraine in 1945 when the Soviets directed a "repatriation drive" for Poles living within the former borders of Poland in the entire Kresy region. Jaworski began his studies in Poland at the Lwów Major Seminary and was ordained in Kraków on 25 June 1950. He served as a priest for two years at a parish near the Ukrainian border before returning to the Jagiellonian University to complete a Doctorate in Philosophy.
Go to Profile#7217
Betsey Stevenson
#7227
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Betsey Ayer Stevenson is an economist and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Additionally, she is a fellow of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and servers on the board of the American Economic Association. The Obama Administration announced her appointment as a Member of the Council of Economic Advisers, a post she served from 2013 through 2015. She previously served as Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor under Secretary Hilda Solis from 2010 to 2011.
Go to Profile#7218
Mary Tsingou
#7228
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Mary Tsingou is an American physicist and mathematician of Greek descent. She was one of the first programmers on the MANIAC computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory and is best known for having coded the celebrated computer experiment with Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, and Stanislaw Ulam which became an inspiration for the fields of chaos theory and scientific computing and was a turning point in soliton theory.
Go to Profile#7219
Kenneth Pargament
#7229
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kenneth I. Pargament is an emeritus professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University . Biography Born in 1950 in Washington, D.C., Pargament received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1977. He currently studies various relationships between religion, psychological well-being and stress, as well as other closely related subjects. He is also licensed in Clinical Psychology and has a private practice.
Go to Profile#7220
Richard Noll
#7230
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Richard Noll is an American clinical psychologist and historian of medicine. He has published on the history of psychiatry, including two critical volumes on the life and work of Carl Gustav Jung, books and articles on the history of dementia praecox and schizophrenia, and on anthropology on shamanism. His books and articles have been translated into fifteen foreign languages and he has delivered invited presentations in nineteen countries on six continents.
Go to Profile#7221
Stephanie Seneff
#7231
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Stephanie Seneff is a senior research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Working primarily in the Spoken Language Systems group, her research at CSAIL relates to human-computer interaction, and algorithms for language understanding and speech recognition. In 2011, she began publishing controversial papers in low-impact, open access journals on biology and medical topics; the articles have received "heated objections from experts in almost every field she's delved into," according to the food columnist Ari Le...
Go to Profile#7222
Walter Kerr
#7232
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Walter Francis Kerr was an American writer and Broadway theatre critic. He also was the writer, lyricist, and/or director of several Broadway plays and musicals as well as the author of several books, generally on the subject of theater and cinema.
Go to Profile#7223
Jeffrey Elman
#7233
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Jeffrey Locke Elman was an American psycholinguist and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego . He specialized in the field of neural networks. In 1990, he introduced the simple recurrent neural network , also known as the 'Elman network', which is capable of processing sequentially ordered stimuli, and has since become widely used.
Go to Profile#7224
Alejandro Aravena
#7234
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Alejandro Gastón Aravena Mori is a Chilean architect and executive director of the firm Elemental S.A. He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2016, and was the director and curator of the Architecture Section of the 2016 Venice Biennale.
Go to Profile#7225
James Munkres
#7235
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
James Raymond Munkres is a Professor Emeritus of mathematics at MIT and the author of several texts in the area of topology, including Topology , Analysis on Manifolds, Elements of Algebraic Topology, and Elementary Differential Topology. He is also the author of Elementary Linear Algebra.
Go to Profile#7226
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
#7236
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Areas of Specialization: Social Anthropology Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is a scholar of identity politics, cultural dynamics, the global response to accelerating change and crisis, and the Creole world. He has published numerous works, including Common Denominators: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Politics of Compromise in Mauritius, Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual Biography, and Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. He has also published many research artic...
Go to Profile#7227
Harry Ostrer
#7237
Overall Influence
Harry Ostrer is a medical geneticist who investigates the genetic basis of common and rare disorders. In the diagnostic laboratory, he translates the findings of genetic discoveries into tests that can be used to identify people's risks for disease prior to occurrence, or for predicting its outcome once it has occurred. He is also known for his study, writing and lectures on the origins of the Jewish people.
Go to Profile#7228
Sylvain Lazarus
#7238
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Sylvain Lazarus is a French sociologist, anthropologist and political theorist. He has also written under the pseudonym Paul Sandevince. Lazarus is a professor at the Paris 8 University. Life and work Sylvain Lazarus worked out a theory of the social function of political categorizations , exploring in the anthropological field what his Lacanianian friends Alain Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner worked out, respectively, in the fields of philosophy, of linguistics and of psychoanalytic theory.
Go to Profile#7229
Boris Spassky
#7239
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Boris Vasilievich Spassky is a Russian chess grandmaster who was the tenth World Chess Champion, holding the title from 1969 to 1972. Spassky played three world championship matches: he lost to Tigran Petrosian in 1966; defeated Petrosian in 1969 to become world champion; then lost to Bobby Fischer in a famous match in 1972.
Go to Profile#7230
Alexander Esenin-Volpin
#7240
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin was a Russian-American poet and mathematician. A dissident, political prisoner and a leader of the Soviet human rights movement, he spent a total of six years incarcerated and repressed by the Soviet authorities in psikhushkas and exile. In mathematics, he is known for his foundational role in ultrafinitism.
Go to Profile#7231
Nile Rodgers
#7241
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Nile Gregory Rodgers Jr. is an American record producer, guitarist, composer, and philanthropist. The co-founder of Chic, he has written, produced, and performed on records that have sold more than 500 million albums and 75 million singles worldwide.
Go to Profile#7232
Giovanni Trapattoni
#7242
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Giovanni Trapattoni , sometimes popularly known as Trap or Il Trap, is an Italian football manager and former player, considered the most successful club coach of Italian football. A former defensive midfielder, as a player he spent almost his entire club career with AC Milan, where he won two Serie A league titles , and two European Cups, in 1962–63 and 1968–69. Internationally, he played for Italy, earning 17 caps and being part of the squad at the 1962 FIFA World Cup in Chile.
Go to Profile#7233
Arthur F. Holmes
#7243
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Arthur Frank Holmes was an English philosopher who served as Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College in Illinois, US from 1951 to 1994. He built the philosophy department at Wheaton where he taught, wrote about the philosophy of Christian education, and participated in the creation of the Society of Christian Philosophers. Wheaton College President Philip Ryken said "It would be hard to think of anyone who has had a greater impact on Christian higher education than Arthur Holmes." Holmes died in Wheaton, Illinois, on October 8, 2011, at age 87.
Go to Profile#7234
John Martin Fischer
#7244
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
#7235
Gamal Hamdan
#7245
Overall Influence
1928 - 1993 (65 years)
Gamal Hamdan was an Egyptian scholar and geographer. Among his most prominent books are The Personality of Egypt, Studies of the Arab World, and The Contemporary Islamic World Geography, which form the trilogy on Egypt's natural, economic, political, and cultural character and its position in the world.
Go to Profile#7236
John Miles Foley
#7246
Overall Influence
1947 - 2012 (65 years)
John Miles Foley was a scholar of comparative oral tradition, particularly medieval and Old English literature, Homer and Serbian epic. He was the founder of the academic journal Oral Tradition and the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri, where he was Curators' Professor of Classical Studies and English and W. H. Byler Endowed Chair in the Humanities.
Go to Profile#7237
N. Scott Momaday
#7247
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Navarre Scott Momaday is a Kiowa novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance. His follow-up work The Way to Rainy Mountain blends folklore with memoir. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work's celebration and preservation of indigenous oral and art tradition. He holds 20 honorary degrees from colleges and universities and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#7238
Prince Joachim of Denmark
#7248
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Prince Joachim of Denmark, Count of Monpezat, is a member of the Danish royal family. The younger son of Queen Margrethe II, he is sixth in the line of succession to the Danish throne, following his elder brother, Crown Prince Frederik, and his four children.
Go to Profile#7239
Hod Lipson
#7249
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Hod Lipson is an Israeli - American robotics engineer. He is the director of Columbia University's Creative Machines Lab. Lipson's work focuses on evolutionary robotics, design automation, rapid prototyping, artificial life, and creating machines that can demonstrate some aspects of human creativity. His publications have been cited more than 43,000 times, and he has an h-index of 86, . Lipson is interviewed in the 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence Do You Trust This Computer?
Go to Profile#7240
Stanley Kunitz
#7250
Overall Influence
1905 - 2006 (101 years)
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz was an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000. Biography Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the youngest of three children, to Yetta Helen and Solomon Z. Kunitz, both of Jewish Russian Lithuanian descent.
Go to Profile#7241
Vaikom Muhammad Basheer
#7251
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
Vaikom Muhammad Basheer , popularly referred to as Beypore Sulthan, was an Indian writer of Malayalam literature, a humanist and an Indian independence activist. He was a novelist and short story writer noted for his path-breaking, down-to-earth style of writing that made him equally popular among literary critics as well as the common man. His notable works include Balyakalasakhi, Shabdangal, Pathummayude Aadu, Ntuppuppakkoranendarnnu, Mathilukal, Janmadinam and Anargha Nimisham and the translations of his works into other languages have earned him worldwide acclaim. The Government of India awarded him the fourth highest civilian honor of the Padma Shri in 1982.
Go to Profile#7242
Albert Borgmann
#7252
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Albert Borgmann was a German-born American philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of technology. Borgmann was born in Freiburg, Germany, and was a professor of philosophy at the University of Montana. In 2013 Borgmann received the Golden Eurydice Award for his contributions to philosophy. Borgmann died in Missoula, Montana on May 7, 2023, at the age of 85.
Go to Profile#7243
Benjamin Zablocki
#7253
Overall Influence
1941 - 2020 (79 years)
Benjamin Zablocki was an American professor of sociology at Rutgers University where he taught sociology of religion and social psychology. He published widely on the subject of charismatic religious movements, cults, and brainwashing.
Go to Profile#7244
Rosario Ferré
#7254
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
Rosario Ferré Ramírez de Arellano was a Puerto Rican writer, poet, and essayist. Her father, Luis A. Ferré, was the third elected Governor of Puerto Rico and the founding father of the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico. When her mother, Lorenza Ramírez de Arellano, died in 1970 during her father's term as governor, Rosario fulfilled the duties of First Lady until 1972.
Go to Profile#7245
Carmen Puliafito
#7255
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Carmen Anthony Puliafito is an American ophthalmologist and former academic administrator. From 2007 until March 2016, he was dean of the Keck School of Medicine of USC. In 2017, the Los Angeles Times revealed that Puliafito had engaged in parties with young recreational drug users and prostitutes, including at the Keck School's offices, and that Puliafito had smoked methamphetamine at these events.
Go to Profile#7246
Katharine Jefferts Schori
#7256
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Katharine Jefferts Schori is the former Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church of the United States. Previously elected as the 9th Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada, she was the first woman elected as a primate in the Anglican Communion. Jefferts Schori was elected at the 75th General Convention on June 18, 2006, and invested at Washington National Cathedral on November 4, 2006, and continued until November 1, 2015, when Michael Bruce Curry was invested in the position. She took part in her first General Convention of the Episcopal Church as Presiding Bishop of The Episc...
Go to Profile#7247
Elaine Weyuker
#7257
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Elaine Jessica Weyuker is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow , and an AT&T Fellow at Bell Labs for research in software metrics and testing as well as elected to the National Academy of Engineering. She is the author of over 130 papers in journals and refereed conference proceedings.
Go to Profile#7248
Andrew Bacevich
#7258
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Andrew J. Bacevich Jr. is an American historian specializing in international relations, security studies, American foreign policy, and American diplomatic and military history. He is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. He is also a retired career officer in the Armor Branch of the United States Army, retiring with the rank of colonel. He is a former director of Boston University's Center for International Relations , now part of the Pardee School of Global Studies. Bacevich is the co-founder and pr...
Go to Profile#7249
James V. Schall
#7259
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
James Vincent Schall was an American Jesuit Roman Catholic priest, teacher, writer, and philosopher. He was Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He retired from teaching in December 2012, giving his final lecture on December 7, 2012, at Georgetown; it was entitled "The Final Gladness," and was sponsored by the Tocqueville Forum. has been described as "a reflection on different aspects of lifelong learning" by the National Catholic Register.
Go to Profile#7250
Thomas Trautmann
#7260
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Thomas Roger Trautmann is an American historian, cultural anthropologist, and Professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is considered a leading expert on the Arthashastra, the ancient Hindu text on statecraft, economic policy, and military strategy, written in Sanskrit. Trautmann has mentored many students during his tenure at the University of Michigan. His studies focus on ancient India, the history of anthropology, and other related subjects. Trautmann's work in Indology has been credited with illuminating the underlying economic philosophy that governed ancient Indian kinship.
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