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
#7251
Gerhard Weikum
#7261
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Gerhard Weikum is a Research Director at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he is leading the databases and information systems department. His current research interests include transactional and distributed systems, self-tuning database systems, data and text integration, and the automatic construction of knowledge bases. He is one of the creators of the YAGO knowledge base. He is also the Dean of the International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science .
Go to Profile#7252
Geoffrey Nunberg
#7262
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Geoffrey Nunberg was an American lexical semantician and author. In 2001 he received the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistic Society of America for his contributions to National Public Radio's Fresh Air, and he has published a number of popular press books including Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Controversial Times . Nunberg is primarily known for his public-facing work interpreting linguistic science for lay audiences, though his contributions to linguistic theory are also well regarded.
Go to Profile#7253
Terry Brown
#7263
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Terry Brown is a British record producer involved in a variety of work. He has been noted for his involvement with the Canadian rock band Rush. Brown produced every album by the band from Fly by Night up to Signals . He was also involved with the English pop rock band Cutting Crew, and the Canadian progressive rock band Klaatu.
Go to Profile#7254
Ray Romano
#7264
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Raymond Albert Romano is an American stand-up comedian, actor and screenwriter. He is best known for his role as Ray Barone on the CBS sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, for which he won three Primetime Emmy Awards . He is also known for being the voice of Manny in the Ice Age film series. He has received several other awards including nominations for two Grammy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.
Go to Profile#7255
Christopher Longuet-Higgins
#7265
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins was a British scholar and teacher. He was the Professor of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge for 13 years until 1967 when he moved to the University of Edinburgh to work in the developing field of cognitive science. He made many significant contributions to our understanding of molecular science. He was also a gifted amateur musician, both as performer and composer, and was keen to advance the scientific understanding of this art. He was the founding editor of the journal Molecular Physics.
Go to Profile#7256
Bill Handel
#7266
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
William Wolf Handel is a Brazilian-born American radio host and attorney. Handel currently hosts two radio programs on KFI in Los Angeles, California. First is KFI's local morning drive time show, in which he comments on current events. The program is one of the top rated morning programs in the Los Angeles radio market, with more than 1 million listeners. Additionally, he hosts a legal advice show on weekends called Handel on the Law, which launched in 1985 and is syndicated by Premiere Radio Networks, co-owned with KFI by iHeartMedia, Inc. Handel on The Law is heard on more than 150 stations in the U.S.
Go to Profile#7257
Pradeep Khosla
#7267
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Pradeep Kumar Khosla is an Indian-American computer scientist and university administrator. He is the current chancellor of the University of California, San Diego. He is also a former electrical engineering professor and dean at the Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering.
Go to Profile#7258
Carol E. Reiley
#7268
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Carol Elizabeth Reiley is an American business executive, computer scientist, and model. She is a pioneer in teleoperated and autonomous robot systems in surgery, space exploration, disaster rescue, and self-driving cars. Reiley has worked at Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric. She co-founded, invested in, and was president of Drive.ai, and is now CEO of a healthcare startup, a creative advisor for the San Francisco Symphony, and a brand ambassador for Guerlain Cosmetics. She is a published children's book author, the first female engineer on the cover of MAKE magazine,...
Go to Profile#7259
Benjamin Mazar
#7269
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Benjamin Mazar was a pioneering Israeli historian, recognized as the "dean" of biblical archaeologists. He shared the national passion for the archaeology of Israel that also attracts considerable international interest due to the region's biblical links. He is known for his excavations at the most significant biblical site in Israel: south and south west of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In 1932 he conducted the first archaeological excavation under Jewish auspices in Israel at Beit She'arim and in 1948 was the first archaeologist to receive a permit granted by the new State of Israel . M...
Go to Profile#7260
Lester Holt
#7270
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Lester Don Holt Jr. is an American journalist and news anchor for the weekday edition of NBC Nightly News, NBC Nightly News Kids Edition, and Dateline NBC. On June 18, 2015, Holt was made the permanent anchor of NBC Nightly News following the demotion of Brian Williams. Holt followed in the career footsteps of Max Robinson, an ABC News evening co-anchor, and Holt became the first black man to solo anchor a weekday network nightly newscast.
Go to Profile#7261
Brian Sewell
#7271
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Brian Alfred Christopher Bushell Sewell was an English art critic. He wrote for the Evening Standard and had an acerbic view of conceptual art and the Turner Prize. The Guardian described him as "Britain's most famous and controversial art critic", while the Standard called him the "nation’s best art critic".
Go to Profile#7262
James Stockdale
#7272
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
James Bond "Jim" Stockdale was a United States Navy vice admiral and aviator who was awarded the Medal of Honor in the Vietnam War, during which he was a prisoner of war for over seven years. Stockdale was the most senior naval officer held captive in Hanoi, North Vietnam. He led aerial attacks from the carrier during the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. On his next deployment, while commander of Carrier Air Wing Sixteen aboard the carrier , his A-4 Skyhawk jet was shot down in North Vietnam on September 9, 1965. He served as president of the Naval War College from October 1977 until he retired from the navy in 1979.
Go to Profile#7263
Robin Day
#7273
Overall Influence
1923 - 2000 (77 years)
Sir Robin Day was an English political journalist and television and radio broadcaster. Day's obituary in The Guardian by Dick Taverne stated that he was "the most outstanding television journalist of his generation. He transformed the television interview, changed the relationship between politicians and television, and strove to assert balance and rationality into the medium's treatment of current affairs".
Go to Profile#7264
Carlos Santana
#7274
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Carlos Humberto Santana Barragán is an American guitarist, best known as a founding member of the rock band Santana. Born and raised in Mexico where he developed his musical background, he rose to fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States with Santana, which pioneered a fusion of rock and roll and Latin American jazz. Its sound featured his melodic, blues-based lines set against Latin American and African rhythms played on percussion instruments not generally heard in rock, such as timbales and congas. He experienced a resurgence of popularity and critical acclaim in the late 1990s.
Go to Profile#7265
Ruth Hubbard
#7275
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Ruth Hubbard was a professor of biology at Harvard University, where she was the first woman to hold a tenuredd professorship position in biology. During her active research career from the 1940s to the 1960s, she made important contributions to the understanding of the biochemistry and photochemistry of vision in vertebrates and invertebrates. In 1967, she and George Wald shared the Paul Karrer Gold Medal for their work in this area.
Go to Profile#7266
Mike Alder
#7276
Overall Influence
Michael D. Alder is an Australian mathematician, formerly an assistant professor at the University of Western Australia. Alder is known for his popular writing, such as sardonic articles about the lack of basic arithmetic skills in young adults.
Go to Profile#7267
Robert S. Wistrich
#7277
Overall Influence
1945 - 2015 (70 years)
Robert Solomon Wistrich was the Erich Neuberger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he was also the head of the university's Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Wistrich considered antisemitism "the longest hatred" and viewed Anti-Zionism as its latest incarnation. According to Scott Ury, "More than any other scholar, Wistrich has helped integrate traditional Zionist interpretations of Jewish history, society, and fate into the study of antisemitism." Other researchers have reproduced much of his work without questi...
Go to Profile#7268
Neil Chriss
#7278
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Neil A. Chriss is a mathematician, academic, hedge fund manager, philanthropist and a founding board member of the charity organization "Math for America" which seeks to improve math education in the United States. Chriss also serves on the board of trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#7269
Charles Peters
#7279
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Charles Given Peters Jr. was an American journalist, editor, and author. He was the founder and editor-in-chief of the Washington Monthly magazine and the author of We Do Our Part: Toward A Fairer and More Equal America . Writing in The New York Times, Jonathan Martin called the book a "well timed … cri de coeur" and "a desperate plea to his country and party to resist the temptations of greed, materialism and elitism."
Go to Profile#7270
Mohsen Mostafavi
#7280
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mohsen Mostafavi is an Iranian-American architect and educator. Mostafavi is currently the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. From 2008 through 2019, Mostafavi served as the school's dean.
Go to Profile#7271
Reggie Jackson
#7281
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Reginald Martinez Jackson is an American former professional baseball right fielder who played 21 seasons in Major League Baseball for the Kansas City / Oakland Athletics, Baltimore Orioles, New York Yankees, and California Angels. Jackson was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1993.
Go to Profile#7272
Stanisław Barańczak
#7282
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Stanisław Barańczak was a Polish poet, literary critic, scholar, editor, translator and lecturer. He is perhaps most well known for his English-to-Polish translations of the dramas of William Shakespeare and of the poetry of E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Wystan Hugh Auden, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Stearns Eliot, John Keats, Robert Frost, Edward Lear and others.
Go to Profile#7273
Clive Ponting
#7283
Overall Influence
1946 - 2020 (74 years)
Clive Sheridan Ponting was a senior British civil servant and historian. In 1984, he leaked classified documents about the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano in the Falklands War in 1982, which showed that government statements about the sinking were untrue. He was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, but argued that his actions were in the public interest, and was acquitted. At the time of his resignation from the civil service in 1985, he was a Grade 5 , earning £23,000 per year .
Go to Profile#7274
Don Coppersmith
#7284
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Don Coppersmith is a cryptographer and mathematician. He was involved in the design of the Data Encryption Standard block cipher at IBM, particularly the design of the S-boxes, strengthening them against differential cryptanalysis. He also improved the quantum Fourier transform discovered by Peter Shor in the same year . He has also worked on algorithms for computing discrete logarithms, the cryptanalysis of RSA, methods for rapid matrix multiplication and IBM's MARS cipher. He is also a co-designer of the SEAL and Scream ciphers.
Go to Profile#7275
Chris Cunningham
#7285
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Chris Cunningham is a British video artist and music video director who directed music videos for electronic musicians such as Autechre, Squarepusher, and Aphex Twin on videos for "Windowlicker" and "Come to Daddy", and Björk's "All is Full of Love". All were used in Chris' chapter in Director's Label.
Go to Profile#7276
Anne McLaren
#7286
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Dame Anne Laura Dorinthea McLaren, was a British scientist who was a leading figure in developmental biology. She paved the way for women in science and her work helped lead to human in vitro fertilisation . She left an enduring legacy marked by her research and ethical contributions to the field. She received many honors for her contributions to science, including election as fellow of the Royal Society.
Go to Profile#7277
Keith DeRose
#7287
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Keith DeRose is an American philosopher teaching at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he is currently Allison Foundation Professor of Philosophy. He taught previously at New York University and Rice University. His primary interests include epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, and history of modern philosophy. He is best known for his work on contextualism in epistemology, especially as a response to the traditional problem of skepticism.
Go to Profile#7278
Roger Needham
#7288
Overall Influence
1935 - 2003 (68 years)
Roger Michael Needham was a British computer scientist. Early life and education Needham was born in Birmingham, England, the only child of Phyllis Mary, née Baker and Leonard William Needham , a university chemistry lecturer. He attended Doncaster Grammar School for Boys in Doncaster going on to St John's College, Cambridge in 1953, and graduating with a BA in 1956 in mathematics and philosophy. His PhD thesis was on applications of digital computers to the automatic classification and retrieval of documents. He worked on a variety of key computing projects in security, operating systems,...
Go to Profile#7279
Pierre Assouline
#7289
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Pierre Assouline is a French writer and journalist. He was born in Casablanca, Morocco to a Jewish family. He has published several novels and biographies, and also contributes articles for the print media and broadcasts for radio.
Go to Profile#7280
Paul Garabedian
#7290
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Paul Roesel Garabedian was a mathematician and numerical analyst. Garabedian was the Director-Division of Computational Fluid Dynamics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He is known for his contributions to the fields of computational fluid dynamics and plasma physics, which ranged from elegant existence proofs for potential theory and conformal mappings to the design and optimization of stellarators. Garabedian was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1975.
Go to Profile#7281
Susanne Baer
#7291
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Susanne Baer, FBA is a German legal scholar and one of the 16 judges of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. Baer has been the William W. Cook Global Law Professor at the University of Michigan Law School since winter 2010 and is also a professor of public law and gender studies with the law faculty at Humboldt University of Berlin and its dean of academic affairs.
Go to Profile#7282
Piet Bergveld
#7292
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Piet Bergveld is a Dutch electrical engineer. He was professor of biosensors at the University of Twente between 1983 and 2003. He is the inventor of the ion-sensitive field-effect transistor sensor. Bergveld's work has focused on electrical engineering and biomedical technology.
Go to Profile#7283
Sallie McFague
#7293
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Sallie McFague was an American feminist Christian theologian, best known for her analysis of how metaphor lies at the heart of how Christians may speak about God. She applied this approach, in particular, to ecological issues, writing extensively on care for the Earth as if it were God's "body". She was Distinguished Theologian in Residence at the Vancouver School of Theology, British Columbia, Canada.
Go to Profile#7284
Oscar Cullmann
#7294
Overall Influence
1902 - 1999 (97 years)
Oscar Cullmann was a French Lutheran theologian. He is best known for his work in the ecumenical movement and was partly responsible for the establishment of dialogue between the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions. Because of his intense ecumenical work, Cullmann's Basel colleague Karl Barth joked with him that his tombstone would bear the inscription "advisor to three popes."
Go to Profile#7285
Nan Lin
#7295
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Nan Lin is the Oscar L. Tang Family Professor of Sociology of the Trinity College, Duke University. He is most notable for his research and writing on social networks and social capital. Biography Lin received his undergraduate degree from Tunghai University, Taiwan, in 1960; his M.A. from Syracuse University in 1963; and his doctorate degree from Michigan State University in 1966. He entered the sociology department at the University at Albany, SUNY in 1971, became a full professor there in 1976 and served as department chair from 1979 to 1982. In 1979, he established contacts with sociologi...
Go to Profile#7286
David J. C. MacKay
#7296
Overall Influence
1967 - 2016 (49 years)
Sir David John Cameron MacKay was a British physicist, mathematician, and academic. He was the Regius Professor of Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and from 2009 to 2014 was Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change . MacKay wrote the book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air.
Go to Profile#7287
Ulrich Kohlenbach
#7297
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ulrich Wilhelm Kohlenbach is a German mathematician and professor of algebra and logic at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. His research interests lie in the field of proof mining. Kohlenbach was president of the German Association for Mathematical Logic and for Basic Research in the Exact Sciences from 2008 to 2012 and president of the Association for Symbolic Logic from 2016 to 2018.
Go to Profile#7288
Mike Nichols
#7298
Overall Influence
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
Mike Nichols was an American director. He worked across a range of genres and had an aptitude for getting the best out of actors regardless of their experience. He is one of 18 people to have won all four of the major American entertainment awards: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony . His other honors included three BAFTA Awards, the Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010. His films received a total of 42 Academy Award nominations, and seven wins.
Go to Profile#7289
Konstantin Feoktistov
#7299
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Konstantin Petrovich Feoktistov , was Russian engineer and a cosmonaut in the former Soviet space program. As a cosmonaut Feoktistov flew on Voskhod 1, the first spacecraft to carry three crew members. Feoktistov also wrote several books on space technology and exploration. The Feoktistov crater on the far side of the Moon is named in his honor.
Go to Profile#7290
Chris Packham
#7300
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Christopher Gary Packham CBE is an English naturalist, nature photographer, television presenter and author, best known for his television work including the CBBC children's nature series The Really Wild Show from 1986 to 1995. He has also presented the BBC nature series Springwatch, including Autumnwatch and Winterwatch, since 2009.
Go to Profile#7291
Sabino Cassese
#7301
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Sabino Cassese is an Italian jurist, former minister for the public function in the Ciampi government , and judge of the Constitutional Court of Italy . Education and career Justice Emeritus of the Italian Constitutional Court and Emeritus professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. He teaches at the Luiss University - School of Government, Rome.
Go to Profile#7292
Ives Goddard
#7302
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Robert Hale Ives Goddard III is a linguist and a curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. He is widely considered the leading expert on the Algonquian languages and the larger Algic language family.
Go to Profile#7293
Chuck Swindoll
#7303
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Charles Rozell Swindoll is an evangelical Christian pastor, author, educator, and radio preacher. He founded Insight for Living, headquartered in Frisco, Texas, which airs a radio program of the same name on more than 2,000 stations around the world in 15 languages. He is currently senior pastor at Stonebriar Community Church, in Frisco, Texas.
Go to Profile#7294
Peter H. Raven
#7304
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Peter Hamilton Raven is an American botanist and environmentalist, notable as the longtime director, now President Emeritus, of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Early life On June 13, 1936, Raven was born in Shanghai, China to American parents, Walter Francis Raven and Isabelle Marion Breen. His father's uncle Frank Jay Raven was, for a time, one of the wealthiest Americans in China, but was later jailed in a banking scandal. That incident and Japanese aggression in China led the Raven family to return to San Francisco, CA in the late 1930s.
Go to Profile#7295
Roger Establet
#7305
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Roger Establet Polity is a French scholar of the sociology of education. A student of Louis Althusser, Establet is an emeritus professor at University of Provence. A student at the lycée in Nice, and khâgne at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, in 1959 he entered the école normale supérieure, where he earned degrees in philosophy and sociology. He often collaborates with Christian Baudelot, a sociologist at the École normale supérieure. He was involved in Althusser's Reading Capital project.
Go to Profile#7296
Rosalind E. Krauss
#7306
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Rosalind Epstein Krauss is an American art critic, art theorist and a professor at Columbia University in New York City. Krauss is known for her scholarship in 20th-century painting, sculpture and photography. As a critic and theorist she has published steadily since 1965 in Artforum, Art International and Art in America. She was associate editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1974 and has been editor of October, a journal of contemporary arts criticism and theory that she co-founded in 1976.
Go to Profile#7297
Jessie Bernard
#7307
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
Jessie Shirley Bernard was an American sociologist and noted feminist scholar. She was a persistent forerunner of feminist thought in American sociology and her life's work is characterized as extraordinarily productive spanning several intellectual and political eras. Bernard studied and wrote about women's lives since the late 1930s and her contributions to social sciences and feminist theory regarding women, sex, marriage, and the interaction with the family and community are well noted. She has garnered numerous honors in her career and has several awards named after her, such as the Jessie Bernard Award.
Go to Profile#7298
John Nathan
#7308
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Weil Nathan is an American translator, writer, scholar, filmmaker, and Japanologist. His translations from Japanese into English include the works of Yukio Mishima, Kenzaburō Ōe, Kōbō Abe, and Natsume Sōseki. Nathan is also an Emmy Award-winning producer, writer and director of many films about Japanese culture and society and American business. He is Professor Emeritus of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Go to Profile#7299
John W. Huffman
#7309
Overall Influence
1932 - 2022 (90 years)
John William Huffman was a professor of organic chemistry at Clemson University who first synthesised novel cannabinoids. His research, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, was focused on making a drug to target endocannabinoid receptors in the body.
Go to Profile#7300
Jonathan Kellerman
#7310
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jonathan Seth Kellerman is an American novelist, psychologist, and Edgar- and Anthony Award–winning author best known for his popular mystery novels featuring the character Alex Delaware, a child psychologist who consults for the Los Angeles Police Department.
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