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
#7451
Robert S. Barton
#7461
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Robert Stanley "Bob" Barton was the chief architect of the Burroughs B5000 and other computers such as the B1700, a co-inventor of dataflow architecture, and an influential professor at the University of Utah.
Go to Profile#7452
Jonathan Turley
#7462
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
#7453
George Stroumboulopoulos
#7463
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
George Mark Paul Stroumboulopoulos is a Canadian media personality. He is one of Canada's most popular broadcasters and best known as formerly being a VJ for the Canadian music television channel MuchMusic. He was also the host and co-executive producer of the CBC Television talk show George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight from 2005 to 2014. From 2014 to 2016, Stroumboulopoulos worked for Rogers Media, anchoring Hockey Night in Canada and the NHL on Rogers. , he is a radio host on CBC Music. Most recently, he joined Apple Music Radio as host of a Monday to Thursday live show.
Go to Profile#7454
Dana Angluin
#7464
Overall Influence
Dana Angluin is a professor emeritus of computer science at Yale University. She is known for foundational work in computational learning theory and distributed computing. Education Angluin received her B.A. and Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley. Her thesis, entitled "An application of the theory of computational complexity to the study of inductive inference" was one of the first works to apply complexity theory to the field of inductive inference. Angluin joined the faculty at Yale in 1979.
Go to Profile#7455
Mary Catherine Bateson
#7465
Overall Influence
1939 - 2021 (82 years)
Mary Catherine Bateson was an American writer and cultural anthropologist. The daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, Bateson was a noted author in her field with many published monographs. Among her books was With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, a recounting of her upbringing by two famous parents. She taught at Harvard, Amherst, and George Mason University, among others. Bateson was a fellow of the International Leadership Forum and was president of the Institute for Intercultural Studies in New York until 2010.
Go to Profile#7456
Jean Blondel
#7466
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
#7457
Rick Moody
#7467
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Hiram Frederick Moody III is an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought him widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into the film The Ice Storm. Many of his works have been praised by fellow writers and critics alike.
Go to Profile#7458
Robert Ellickson
#7468
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Robert C. Ellickson is an American property law scholar. He is the Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law at Yale Law School, and was formerly on the faculty at the USC Gould School of Law and Stanford Law School. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president of the American Law and Economics Association. Ellickson is the author of numerous books and articles on land use, property, and social norms, and is best known for his 1991 book Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes. In that book, a study of ranchers and farmers in Shasta County...
Go to Profile#7459
Thom Yorke
#7469
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Thomas Edward Yorke is an English musician who is the main vocalist and songwriter of the rock band Radiohead. A multi-instrumentalist, he mainly plays guitar and keyboards and is noted for his falsetto. He has been described by Rolling Stone as one of the greatest and most influential singers of his generation.
Go to Profile#7460
Franklin Stahl
#7470
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Franklin William Stahl is an American molecular biologist and geneticist. With Matthew Meselson, Stahl conducted the famous Meselson-Stahl experiment showing that DNA is replicated by a semiconservative mechanism, meaning that each strand of the DNA serves as a template for production of a new strand.
Go to Profile#7461
Karlheinz Stockhausen
#7471
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.
Go to Profile#7462
Victoria Azarenka
#7472
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Victoria Fiodaraŭna Azarenka is a Belarusian professional tennis player. Azarenka is a former world No. 1 in singles, having claimed the top ranking for the first time on 30 January 2012. She was the year-end No. 1 in 2012 and has held the top ranking for a combined total of 51 weeks.
Go to Profile#7463
Ian Goldberg
#7473
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Ian Avrum Goldberg is a cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is best known for breaking Netscape's implementation of SSL , and for his role as chief scientist of Radialpoint , a Canadian software company. Goldberg is currently a professor at the Faculty of Mathematics of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science within the University of Waterloo, and the Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. He was formerly Tor Project board of directors chairman, and is one of the designers of off the record messaging.
Go to Profile#7464
Kathy Pham
#7474
Overall Influence
Kathy Pham is a Vietnamese American computer scientist and product management executive. She has held roles in leadership, engineering, product management, and data science at Google, IBM, the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Harris Healthcare, and served as a founding product and engineering member of the United States Digital Service in the Executive Office of the President of the United States at The White House. Pham was the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Product and Engineering at the Federal Trade Commission, and the inaugural Executive Director of the National AI Advisory Committe...
Go to Profile#7465
Hari Balakrishnan
#7475
Overall Influence
Hari Balakrishnan is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and the Co-founder and CTO at Cambridge Mobile Telematics.
Go to Profile#7466
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#7476
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Siddhartha Mukherjee is an Indian-American physician, biologist, and author. He is best known for his 2010 book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, that won notable literary prizes including the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and Guardian First Book Award, among others. The book was listed in the "All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books" by Time magazine in 2011. His 2016 book The Gene: An Intimate History made it to #1 on The New York Times Best Seller list, and was among The New York Times 100 best books of 2016, and a finalist for the Wellcome Trust Prize and the Roya...
Go to Profile#7467
Dov Gabbay
#7477
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Dov M. Gabbay is an Israeli logician. He is Augustus De Morgan Professor Emeritus of Logic at the Group of Logic, Language and Computation, Department of Computer Science, King's College London. Work Gabbay has authored over four hundred and fifty research papers and over thirty research monographs. He is editor of several international journals, and of many reference works and handbooks of logic, including the Handbook of Philosophical Logic , the Handbook of Logic in Computer Science] , and the Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming .
Go to Profile#7468
Eldar Shafir
#7478
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Eldar Shafir is an American behavioral scientist, and the co-author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much . He is the Class of 1987 Professor in Behavioral Science and Public Policy; Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University Department of Psychology and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and Inaugural Director of Princeton’s Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy,.
Go to Profile#7469
Spiro Agnew
#7479
Overall Influence
1918 - 1996 (78 years)
Spiro Theodore Agnew was the 39th vice president of the United States, serving from 1969 until his resignation in 1973. He is the second of two vice presidents to resign the position, the first being John C. Calhoun in 1832.
Go to Profile#7470
Erna Schneider Hoover
#7480
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Erna Schneider Hoover is an American mathematician notable for inventing a computerized telephone switching method which "revolutionized modern communication". It prevented system overloads by monitoring call center traffic and prioritizing tasks on phone switching systems to enable more robust service during peak calling times. At Bell Laboratories where she worked for over 32 years, Hoover was described as an important pioneer for women in the field of computer technology.
Go to Profile#7471
Didier Anzieu
#7481
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Didier Anzieu was a distinguished French psychoanalyst. Life Anzieu studied philosophy and was a pupil of Daniel Lagache, before undertaking his first psychoanalysis with Jacques Lacan. Then, after discovering that Lacan had also treated his mother , he began a second analysis with Georges Favez. He retained a deep grudge against Lacan's lack of candor and later also condemned the excesses and arbitrary practices of the Lacanians — highlighting the latter's 'unending dependence on an idol, a logic, or a language', as well as the pervasively tantalizing element in Lacan's approach, with 'funda...
Go to Profile#7472
Orkut Büyükkökten
#7482
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Orkut Büyükkökten is a Turkish software engineer who developed the social networking services Club Nexus, inCircle and Orkut. Orkut Büyükkökten is a former product manager at Google. Career Originally from Konya, Turkey, Büyükkökten obtained a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering and Information Science from Bilkent University in Ankara. He received both a M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research at Stanford focused on Web search and efficient PDA usage.
Go to Profile#7473
Anthony Mason
#7483
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (101 years)
Sir Anthony Frank Mason HonFAIB DistFRSN is an Australian judge who served as the ninth Chief Justice of Australia, in office from 1987 to 1995. He was first appointed to the High Court in 1972, having previously served on the Supreme Court of New South Wales.
Go to Profile#7474
Nets Katz
#7484
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Nets Hawk Katz is the W.L. Moody Professor of Mathematics at Rice University. He was a professor of Mathematics at Indiana University Bloomington until March 2013 and the IBM Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology until 2023.
Go to Profile#7475
Sue Perkins
#7485
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Susan Elizabeth Perkins is an English actress, broadcaster, comedian, presenter and writer. Originally coming to prominence through her comedy partnership with Mel Giedroyc in Mel and Sue, she has since become best known as a radio broadcaster and television presenter, notably of The Great British Bake Off , Insert Name Here and Just a Minute on BBC Radio 4.
Go to Profile#7476
Matthew Warchus
#7486
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Matthew Warchus is an English theatre director, filmmaker and dramaturg. He has been the Artistic Director of London's The Old Vic since September 2015. Career Warchus attended Selby High School. He studied music and drama at Bristol University and has directed for the National Youth Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Donmar Warehouse, Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, Opera North, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Welsh National Opera, English National Opera in the West End and on Broadway. He won the Globe's Most Promising Newcomer Award for Much Ado About Nothing in the West End, the Evening S...
Go to Profile#7477
Les Murray
#7487
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Leslie Allan Murray was an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spanned over 40 years and he published nearly 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings.
Go to Profile#7478
Eugene Galanter
#7488
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Eugene Galanter was one of the modern founders of cognitive psychology. He was an academic in the field of experimental psychology and an author. Dr. Galanter was Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Quondam Director of the Psychophysics Laboratory at Columbia University. He was also the co-founder, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Scientific Officer of Children’s Progress, an award-winning New York City-based company that specializes in the use of computer technology in early education. The company's assessments and reports have been used in 40 states and 9 countries.
Go to Profile#7479
Guy von Dardel
#7489
Overall Influence
1919 - 2009 (90 years)
Guy Fredrik von Dardel was a Swedish physicist who researched particle physics and participated in the establishment of CERN. Biography Dardel was the son of Fredrik Elias August von Dardel by his marriage to Maria Sofia "Maj" Wising. His half-brother, from his mother's previous marriage, was Raoul Wallenberg. His sister was Nina Lagergren . His niece Nane Lagergren, Nina's eldest daughter, was married to Kofi Annan.
Go to Profile#7480
Howard Jerome Keisler
#7490
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Howard Jerome Keisler is an American mathematician, currently professor emeritus at University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research has included model theory and non-standard analysis. His Ph.D. advisor was Alfred Tarski at Berkeley; his dissertation is Ultraproducts and Elementary Classes .
Go to Profile#7481
Barbara Forrest
#7491
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Barbara Carroll Forrest is a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. She is a critic of intelligent design and the Discovery Institute. Biography Forrest is a graduate of Hammond High School. She received her B.A. in English in 1974 from Southeastern Louisiana University, her M.A. in Philosophy in 1978 from Louisiana State University, and her PhD in philosophy from Tulane University in 1988. She has taught philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University since 1988 and presently is a professor of philosophy in the Department of History and Political S...
Go to Profile#7482
Adam Grant
#7492
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Adam M. Grant is an American popular science author, and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania specializing in organizational psychology. Early life and education Grant was born in the township of West Bloomfield, Michigan, on August 13, 1981, to a lawyer father and a teacher mother. He grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. Grant participated in springboard diving and aspired to be a professional basketball player growing up. During high school, he was named an All-American in 1999 in diving.
Go to Profile#7483
Njabulo Ndebele
#7493
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele is an academic and writer of fiction who is the former vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Cape Town . On November 16, 2012, he was inaugurated as the chancellor of the University of Johannesburg. He is currently the chairman of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.
Go to Profile#7484
Lene Hau
#7494
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Lene Vestergaard Hau is a Danish physicist and educator. She is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at Harvard University. In 1999, she led a Harvard University team who, by use of a Bose–Einstein condensate, succeeded in slowing a beam of light to about 17 metres per second, and, in 2001, was able to stop a beam completely. Later work based on these experiments led to the transfer of light to matter, then from matter back into light, a process with important implications for quantum encryption and quantum computing. More recent work has involved research into novel interactions between ultracold atoms and nanoscopic-scale systems.
Go to Profile#7485
Brian Swimme
#7495
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Brian Thomas Swimme is a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, in San Francisco, where he teaches evolutionary cosmology to graduate students in the philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness program. He received his Ph.D. from the department of mathematics at the University of Oregon for work with Richard Barrar on singularity theory, with a dissertation titled Singularities in the N-Body Problem.
Go to Profile#7486
John Stillwell
#7496
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
#7487
Tom Joyner
#7497
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Thomas Joyner is an American radio personality, host, philanthropist and former musician. Joyner is the former host of the nationally syndicated The Tom Joyner Morning Show, and also founder of Reach Media Inc., the Tom Joyner Foundation, and BlackAmericaWeb.com.
Go to Profile#7488
Jack Higgins
#7498
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Henry "Harry" Patterson , commonly known by his pen name Jack Higgins, was a British author. He was a best-selling author of popular thrillers and espionage novels. His novel The Eagle Has Landed sold more than 50 million copies and was adapted into a successful 1976 movie of the same title.
Go to Profile#7489
Mike Crossey
#7499
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Mike Crossey is a Northern Irish record producer, songwriter, and mixing engineer. He produced the debut single by Arctic Monkeys, collaborating with them over two albums. He is known for his ongoing relationship with The 1975 in addition to productions with Jeremy Zucker, Twenty One Pilots, Walk the Moon, LANY, LAUV, Foals, Keane, Jake Bugg, The Gaslight Anthem, MUNA, Wolf Alice, Yungblud.
Go to Profile#7490
James Mellaart
#7500
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
James Mellaart FBA was an English archaeologist and author who is noted for his discovery of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He was expelled from Turkey when he was suspected of involvement with the antiquities black market. He was also involved in a string of controversies, including the so-called mother goddess controversy in Anatolia, which eventually led to his being banned from excavations in Turkey in the 1960s. After his death it was discovered that he had forged many of his "finds", including murals and inscriptions used to discover the Çatalhöyük site.
Go to Profile#7491
Steve McClaren
#7501
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Stephen McClaren is an English former professional footballer and coach who currently serves as an assistant coach for Premier League club Manchester United, in his second spell at the club. McClaren began his coaching career with Oxford United, before joining Derby County in 1995. In 1999, McClaren was hired by Manchester United as Brian Kidd's replacement as Alex Ferguson's assistant manager. He held that position for two years, until he was hired as manager of Middlesbrough. During his tenure, Middlesbrough won their first major trophy, the League Cup in 2004. They were also UEFA Cup runners-up in 2006.
Go to Profile#7492
Lana Del Rey
#7502
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Elizabeth Woolridge Grant , known professionally as Lana Del Rey, is an American singer-songwriter. Her music is noted for its cinematic quality and exploration of tragic romance, glamour, and melancholia, with frequent references to contemporary pop culture and 1950s–70s Americana. Her vintage Hollywood glamour aesthetic is presented not only in her music, but also in her music videos. She is the recipient of various accolades, including two Brit Awards, two Billboard Women in Music, two MTV Europe Music Awards, and a Satellite Award, in addition to nominations for eleven Grammy Awards and a Golden Globe Award.
Go to Profile#7493
Gérard La Forest
#7503
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Gérard Vincent La Forest is a former puisne justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. He served there from January 16, 1985 to September 30, 1997. He is currently counsel at law firm Stewart McKelvey in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
Go to Profile#7494
Gareth Morgan
#7504
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Gareth Morgan is a British/Canadian organizational theorist, management consultant and Distinguished Research Professor at York University in Toronto. He is known as creator of the "organisational metaphor" concept and writer of the 1979 book Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis with Gibson Burrell and the 1986 best-seller Images of Organization.
Go to Profile#7495
Cornelia B. Wilbur
#7505
Overall Influence
1908 - 1992 (84 years)
Cornelia Burwell Wilbur was an American psychiatrist. She is best known for a book, written by Flora Rheta Schreiber, and a television film, both titled Sybil, which were presented as non-fiction accounts of the psychiatric treatment she rendered to a person diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.
Go to Profile#7496
Edward Seidensticker
#7506
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Edward George Seidensticker was an American noted post-World War II scholar, historian, and preeminent translator of classical and contemporary Japanese literature. His English translation of the epic The Tale of Genji, published in 1976, was especially well received critically and is counted among the preferred modern translations.
Go to Profile#7497
Astro Teller
#7507
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Eric "Astro" Teller is an American entrepreneur, computer scientist, and author, with expertise in the field of intelligent technology. Early life and education Teller was born in Cambridge, England, and raised in Evanston, Illinois, US. He is the son of Paul Teller, who was an instructor in the philosophy of science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Chantal DeSoto, a buyer and clothing designer for Sears who later became a teacher of gifted children. His grandparents include both French economist and mathematician Gérard Debreu and Hungarian-born American theoretical physicist Edward Teller.
Go to Profile#7498
Sharon Street
#7508
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Sharon Street is a professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at New York University. She specializes in metaethics, focusing in particular on how to reconcile our understanding of normativityativity with a scientific conception of the world.
Go to Profile#7499
Joram Lindenstrauss
#7509
Overall Influence
1936 - 2012 (76 years)
Joram Lindenstrauss was an Israeli mathematician working in functional analysis. He was a professor of mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics. Biography Joram Lindenstrauss was born in Tel Aviv. He was the only child of a pair of lawyers who immigrated to Israel from Berlin. He began to study mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1954 while serving in the army. He became a full-time student in 1956 and received his master's degree in 1959. In 1962 Lindenstrauss earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University . He worked as a postdoc at Yale University and the University of Washington in Seattle from 1962 - 1965.
Go to Profile#7500
Hans Hollein
#7510
Overall Influence
1934 - 2014 (80 years)
Hans Hollein was an Austrian architect and designer and key figure of postmodern architecture. Some of his most notable works are the Haas House and the Albertina extension in the inner city of Vienna.
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