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
#7401
Herb Trimpe
#7411
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Herbert William Trimpe was an American comics artist and occasional writer, best known as the seminal 1970s artist on The Incredible Hulk and as the first artist to draw for publication the character Wolverine, who later became a breakout star of the X-Men.
Go to Profile#7402
Wojciech Jaruzelski
#7412
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski was a Polish military general, politician and de facto leader of the Polish People's Republic from 1981 until 1989. He was the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party between 1981 and 1989, making him the last leader of the Polish People's Republic. Jaruzelski served as Prime Minister from 1981 to 1985, the Chairman of the Council of State from 1985 to 1989 and briefly as President of Poland from 1989 to 1990, when the office of President was restored after 37 years. He was also the last commander-in-chief of the Polish People's Army, which in 1990 becam...
Go to Profile#7403
Lewis A. Coser
#7413
Overall Influence
1913 - 2003 (90 years)
Lewis Alfred Coser was a German-American sociologist, serving as the 66th president of the American Sociological Association in 1975. Biography Born in Berlin as Ludwig Cohen, his father was a successful Jewish industrialist. In 1933 he emigrated to Paris and in 1941 he left war-torn Paris for the United States where he married Rose Laub. In the Fifties, he enrolled as a graduate student in sociology at Columbia University, taking his PhD at the age of forty-one. Coser first taught at the University of Chicago and the University of California. He then founded the sociology department at Bran...
Go to Profile#7404
Raoul Berger
#7414
Overall Influence
1901 - 2000 (99 years)
Raoul Berger was an American attorney and professor at The University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School. While at Harvard, he was the Charles Warren Senior Fellow in American Legal History. He is known for his role in the development of originalism.
Go to Profile#7405
Victor Chang
#7415
Overall Influence
1936 - 1991 (55 years)
Victor Peter Chang was a Chinese-born Australian cardiac surgeon and a pioneer of modern heart transplantation in Australia. His murder in 1991 stunned Australia and is considered one of the most notorious in the country's history. Chang was given a state funeral, and in 1999, he was voted Australian of the Century at the People's Choice Awards.
Go to Profile#7406
John Boswell
#7416
Overall Influence
1947 - 1994 (47 years)
John Eastburn Boswell was an American historian and a full professor at Yale University. Many of Boswell's studies focused on the issue of religion and homosexuality, specifically Christianity and homosexuality. All of his work focused on the history of those at the margins of society.
Go to Profile#7407
Walter Röhrl
#7417
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Walter Röhrl is a German rally and auto racing driver, with victories for Fiat, Opel, Lancia and Audi as well as Porsche, Ford and BMW. Röhrl has scored 14 victories over his career, with his notable achievements including winning the World Rally Championship twice: in 1980 in a Fiat Abarth and in 1982 while driving for Opel. He has also competed in other forms of motorsport, such as endurance racing, winning in the GTP +3.0 class in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1981 with the Porsche System team. Röhrl also set the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb record in 1987 driving an Audi Sport Quattro S1 E2.
Go to Profile#7408
Erwin Griswold
#7418
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Erwin Nathaniel Griswold was an American appellate attorney and legal scholar who argued many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Griswold served as Solicitor General of the United States under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. He also served as the dean of Harvard Law School for 21 years. Several times he was considered for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. During a career that spanned more than six decades, he served as member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and as president of the American Bar Foundation.
Go to Profile#7409
Paul R. McHugh
#7419
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Paul Rodney McHugh is an American psychiatrist, researcher, and educator. He is currently the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the author, co-author, or editor of seven books in his field.
Go to Profile#7410
Mathis Wackernagel
#7420
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Mathis Wackernagel is a Swiss-born sustainability advocate. He is President of Global Footprint Network, an international sustainability think tank with offices in Oakland, California, and Geneva, Switzerland. The think-tank is a non-profit that focuses on developing and promoting metrics for sustainability.
Go to Profile#7411
Giorgio Moroder
#7421
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Giovanni Giorgio Moroder is an Italian composer and music producer. Dubbed the "Father of Disco", Moroder is credited with pioneering euro disco and electronic dance music. His work with synthesizers had a large influence on several music genres such as Hi-NRG, Italo disco, synth-pop, new wave, house and techno music.
Go to Profile#7412
Howard Dean
#7422
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Howard Brush Dean III is an American physician, author, consultant, and retired politician who served as the 79th governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003 and chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009. Dean was an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2004 presidential election. Later, his implementation of the fifty-state strategy as head of the DNC is credited with the Democratic victories in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Afterward, he became a political commentator and consultant to McKenna Long & Aldridge, a law and lobbying firm.
Go to Profile#7413
William Wulf
#7423
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
William Allan Wulf was an American computer scientist notable for his work in programming languages and compilers. Early life and education Born in Chicago, Wulf attended the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, receiving a Bachelor of Science in engineering physics in 1961 and an Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1963. He then achieved the first Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from the University of Virginia in 1968.
Go to Profile#7414
Frédéric Lordon
#7424
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Frédéric Lordon is a French economist and philosopher, CNRS Director of Research at the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique in Paris. He is an influential figure in France's Nuit debout movement and has regularly contributed to French broadcast and print media on French and European politics, and also writes a regular opinion column for Le Monde diplomatique. He has argued in favour of Communism as an alternative to Capitalism in books, articles and media appearances, and has been engaged in a project of re-grounding the social sciences in a Spinoza-inspired materialism. He ...
Go to Profile#7415
Raymond Carr
#7425
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
Sir Albert Raymond Maillard Carr was an English historian specialising in the history of Spain, Latin America, and Sweden. From 1968 to 1987, he was Warden of St Antony's College, Oxford. Early life Carr was born on 11 April 1919 in Bath, Somerset, to Reginald Henry Maillard Carr and his wife Marion . He was educated at Brockenhurst School, then a state secondary school in the New Forest, Hampshire. He then studied at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was elected Gladstone Research Exhibitioner in 1941.
Go to Profile#7416
Sandra Bem
#7426
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
Sandra Ruth Lipsitz Bem was an American psychologist known for her works in androgyny and gender studies. Her pioneering work on gender roles, gender polarization and gender stereotypes led directly to more equal employment opportunities for women in the United States.
Go to Profile#7417
Bel Kaufman
#7427
Overall Influence
1911 - 2014 (103 years)
Bella Kaufman was an American teacher and author, well known for writing the bestselling 1964 novel Up the Down Staircase. Early life Bella's father, Michael Kaufman and her mother, Lala Kaufman were both from Russia and married in 1909. Bella Kaufman was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1911, where her father was studying medicine. The family subsequently returned to Russia where her father completed his studies. Her father eventually became a physician, and her mother, the second-oldest daughter of famed Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, later established herself as a writer under the name Lala...
Go to Profile#7418
Dale Russell
#7428
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Dale Alan Russell was an American-Canadian geologist and palaeontologist. Throughout his career Russell worked as the Curator of Fossil Vertebrates at the Canadian Museum of Nature, Research Professor at the Department of Marine Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at North Carolina State University, and Senior Paleontologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Dinosaurs he has described include Daspletosaurus and Dromiceiomimus, and he was amongst the first paleontologists to consider an extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. Russell also helped lead ...
Go to Profile#7419
Terry Tempest Williams
#7429
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Terry Tempest Williams , is an American writer, educator, conservationist, and activist. Williams' writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of Utah. Her work focuses on social and environmental justice ranging from issues of ecology and the protection of public lands and wildness, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature. She writes in the genre of creative nonfiction and the lyrical essay.
Go to Profile#7420
Sheng-yen
#7430
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
Sheng Yen , born Zhang Baokang , was a Taiwanese Buddhist monk, religious scholar, and writer. He was one of the mainstream teachers of Chan Buddhism. He was a 57th generational dharma heir of Linji Yixuan in the Linji school and a third-generation dharma heir of Hsu Yun. In the Caodong lineage, Sheng Yen was a 52nd-generation Dharma heir of Dongshan Liangjie , and a direct Dharma heir of Dongchu .
Go to Profile#7421
Hal Willner
#7431
Overall Influence
1957 - 2020 (63 years)
Hal Willner was an American music producer working in recording, films, television, and live events. He was best known for assembling tribute albums and events featuring a wide variety of artists and musical styles . Willner died during the COVID-19 pandemic from complications brought on by the virus.
Go to Profile#7422
Mark Adler
#7432
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mark Adler is an American software engineer. He is best known for his work in the field of data compression as the author of the Adler-32 checksum function, and a co-author together with Jean-loup Gailly of the zlib compression library and gzip. He has contributed to Info-ZIP, and has participated in developing the Portable Network Graphics image format. Adler was also the Spirit Cruise Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission.
Go to Profile#7423
Susan Sarandon
#7433
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Susan Abigail Sarandon is an American actress. She is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award, in addition to nominations for a Daytime Emmy Award, six Primetime Emmy Awards, and nine Golden Globe Awards. In 2002, she was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Go to Profile#7424
Jean-Raymond Abrial
#7434
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Jean-Raymond Abrial is a French computer scientist and inventor of the Z and B formal methods. Abrial was a student at the École Polytechnique . Abrial's 1974 paper Data Semantics laid the foundation for a formal approach to Data Models; although not adopted directly by practitioners, it directly influenced all subsequent models from the Entity-Relationship Model through to RDF.
Go to Profile#7425
Robert Indiana
#7435
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Robert Indiana was an American artist associated with the pop art movement. His iconic image LOVE was first created in 1964 in the form of a card which he sent to several friends and acquaintances in the art world. In 1965, Robert Indiana was invited to propose an artwork to be featured on the Museum of Modern Art's annual Christmas card. Indiana submitted several 12” square oil on canvas variations based on his LOVE image. The museum selected the most intense color combination in red, blue, and green. It became one of the most popular cards the museum has ever offered. Indiana continued to develop his LOVE series, and in 1966, worked with Marian Goodman of Multiples, Inc.
Go to Profile#7426
Gered Mankowitz
#7436
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Gered Mankowitz is an English photographer who focused his career in the music industry. He has worked with a range of artists from The Rolling Stones to Jimi Hendrix, and in other divisions of the photography industry, including fashion, music, advertising, news, and private photography. He works from his own gallery in North London.
Go to Profile#7427
Dirk Nowitzki
#7437
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Dirk Werner Nowitzki is a German former professional basketball player who is a special advisor for the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association . Listed at , he is widely regarded as one of the greatest power forwards of all time and is considered by many to be the greatest European player of all time. In 2021, he was selected to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team. In 2023, Nowitzki was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#7428
Horace Barlow
#7438
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Horace Basil Barlow FRS was a British vision scientist. Early life Barlow was the son of the civil servant Sir Alan Barlow and his wife Lady Nora. Barlow was the great-grandson of Charles Darwin and thus part of the Darwin — Wedgwood family.
Go to Profile#7429
Bruce M. Metzger
#7439
Overall Influence
1914 - 2007 (93 years)
Bruce Manning Metzger was an American biblical scholar, Bible translator and textual critic who was a longtime professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and Bible editor who served on the board of the American Bible Society and United Bible Societies. He was a scholar of Greek, New Testament, and New Testament textual criticism, and wrote prolifically on these subjects. Metzger was an influential New Testament scholar of the 20th century. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1986.
Go to Profile#7430
Tillie Olsen
#7440
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Tillie Lerner Olsen was an American writer who was associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists. Biography Olsen was born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents Samuel and Ida Lerner in Wahoo, Nebraska; the family moved to Omaha while she was a young child. There she attended Lake School in the Near North Side through the eighth grade, living among the city's Jewish community. At age 15, she dropped out of Omaha High School to enter the work force. Over the years Olsen worked as a waitress, domestic worker, and meat trimmer. She was also a union organizer and political activist in the Socialist community.
Go to Profile#7431
U. S. R. Murty
#7441
Overall Influence
Uppaluri Siva Ramachandra Murty, or U. S. R. Murty , is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization, University of Waterloo. U. S. R. Murty received his Ph.D. in 1967 from the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, with a thesis on extremal graph theory; his advisor was C. R. Rao. Murty is well known for his work in matroid theory and graph theory, and mainly for being a co-author with J. A. Bondy of a textbook on graph theory. Murty has served as a managing editor and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B.
Go to Profile#7432
Diederik Stapel
#7442
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Diederik Alexander Stapel is a Dutch former professor of social psychology at Tilburg University. In 2011 Tilburg University suspended Stapel for fabricating and manipulating data for his research publications. This scientific misconduct took place over a number of years and affected dozens of his publications. By 2015, fifty-eight of Stapel's publications had been retracted. He has been described in coverage by the New York Times as "the biggest con man in academic science".
Go to Profile#7433
David Mitchell
#7443
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
David Stephen Mitchell is an English novelist, television writer, and screenwriter. He has written nine novels, two of which, number9dream and Cloud Atlas , were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written articles for several newspapers, most notably for The Guardian, and translated books about autism from Japanese to English.
Go to Profile#7434
Oleg Viro
#7444
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Oleg Yanovich Viro is a Russian mathematician in the fields of topology and algebraic geometry, most notably real algebraic geometry, tropical geometry and knot theory. Contributions Viro developed a "patchworking" technique in algebraic geometry, which allows real algebraic varieties to be constructed by a "cut and paste" method. Using this technique, Viro completed the isotopy classification of non-singular plane projective curves of degree 7. The patchworking technique was one of the fundamental ideas which motivated the development of tropical geometry. In topology, Viro is most known f...
Go to Profile#7435
Keiji Inafune
#7445
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Keiji Inafune is a Japanese video game producer, illustrator and businessman. In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time. Starting his career at Capcom in the late 1980s, his job was as an artist and illustrator. The first two games he worked on were the original Street Fighter and Mega Man in 1987. He was then an illustrator and artist of the Mega Man series during the NES and Super NES era. For Mega Man X, he created and designed the character Zero.
Go to Profile#7436
Mirza Tahir Ahmad
#7446
Overall Influence
1928 - 2003 (75 years)
Mirza Tahir Ahmad was the fourth caliph and the head of the worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. He was elected as the fourth successor of the founder of the community, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. He was elected on 10 June 1982, the day after the death of his predecessor, Mirza Nasir Ahmad.
Go to Profile#7437
Nicholas A. Peppas
#7447
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
#7438
Queen Letizia of Spain
#7448
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano is Queen of Spain as the wife of King Felipe VI. Letizia came from a middle-class family. She worked as a journalist for ABC and EFE before becoming a news anchor at CNN+ and Televisión Española. In 1998, she married Alonso Guerrero Pérez, whom she divorced the following year. In 2004, Letizia married Felipe, then Prince of Asturias as the son and heir apparent of King Juan Carlos I. The couple has two daughters, Leonor and Sofía. As Princess of Asturias, Letizia represented her father-in-law in Spain and abroad. On Juan Carlos's abdication in June 2014, Felipe became...
Go to Profile#7439
Jeanine Basinger
#7449
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Jeanine Basinger is an American film historian who retired in 2020 as the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, and Founder and Curator of The Cinema Archives at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.
Go to Profile#7440
Steve Osborne
#7450
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Stephen John "Steve" Osborne is a British record producer, living in Bath, England. He has worked with a wide variety of musicians, including Suede, the B-52s, A-ha, New Order, Elbow, U2, Happy Mondays, Placebo, Gregory Porter, Doves, KT Tunstall, Vanessa Carlton, and Simple Minds.
Go to Profile#7441
Craig Calhoun
#7451
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Craig Jackson Calhoun is an American sociologist who currently serves as the University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He is a strong advocate for applying social science to address issues of public concerns. Calhoun served as the Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science from September 2012 until September 2016 and continues to hold the title of Centennial Professor of Sociology at LSE.
Go to Profile#7442
Jo Coenen
#7452
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jo Coenen is a Dutch architect and urban planner. He studied architecture at the Eindhoven University of Technology , and later held professorships at TU Karlsruhe, Eindhoven University of Technology and Delft University of Technology.
Go to Profile#7443
Tamaki Saitō
#7453
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Tamaki Saitō is a Japanese psychologist and critic. He specializes in the psychiatry of puberty and adolescence. Saitō is Director of Medical Service at Sofukai Sasaki Hospital in Funabashi, Chiba.
Go to Profile#7444
Robert Gates
#7454
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert Michael Gates is an American intelligence analyst and university president who served as the 22nd United States secretary of defense from 2006 to 2011. He was appointed by President George W. Bush and was retained by President Barack Obama. Gates began his career serving as an officer in the United States Air Force but was quickly recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency . Gates served for twenty-six years in the CIA and at the National Security Council, and was director of central intelligence under President George H. W. Bush from 1991 to 1993. After leaving the CIA, Gates became president of Texas A&M University and was a member of several corporate boards.
Go to Profile#7445
Julius Wess
#7455
Overall Influence
1934 - 2007 (73 years)
Julius Erich Wess was an Austrian theoretical physicist noted as the co-inventor of the Wess–Zumino model and Wess–Zumino–Witten model in the field of supersymmetry and conformal field theory. He was also a recipient of the Max Planck medal, the Wigner medal, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the Heineman Prize, and of several honorary doctorates.
Go to Profile#7446
Amit Chaudhuri
#7456
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, singer, and music composer from India. He was Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia from 2006 to 2021, Since 2020, he has been at Ashoka University, India, as Professor of Creative Writing and, since 2021, is also Director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical, Ashoka University.
Go to Profile#7447
Angelique Kerber
#7457
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Angelique Kerber is a German inactive professional tennis player. She has been ranked as high as world No. 1, for a total of 34 weeks, and won three Major titles at the 2016 Australian Open, the 2016 US Open, and the 2018 Wimbledon Championships. She is also an Olympic silver medalist and was the year-end world number one in 2016.
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Alex Tabarrok
#7458
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Alexander Taghi Tabarrok is a Canadian-American economist. Tabarrok is a professor at Virginia's George Mason University and Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the school's Mercatus Center. With Tyler Cowen, he co-authors the economics blog Marginal Revolution. Tabarrok and Cowen have also ventured into online education with Marginal Revolution University.
Go to Profile#7449
Harold J. Morowitz
#7459
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Harold Joseph Morowitz was an American biophysicist who studied the application of thermodynamics to living systems. Author of numerous books and articles, his work includes technical monographs as well as essays. The origin of life was his primary research interest for more than fifty years. He was the Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy at George Mason University after a long career at Yale.
Go to Profile#7450
Deborah Meier
#7460
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Deborah Meier is an American educator often considered the founder of the modern small schools movement. After spending several years as a kindergarten teacher in Chicago, Philadelphia and then New York City, in 1974, Meier became the founder and director of the alternative Central Park East school, which embraced progressive ideals in the tradition of John Dewey in an effort to provide better education for children in East Harlem, within the New York City public school system.
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