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
#751
Severo Ochoa
#751
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Severo Ochoa de Albornoz was a Spanish physician and biochemist, and winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Arthur Kornberg for their discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid ".
Go to Profile#752
Tadao Ando
#752
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Tadao Ando is a Japanese autodidact architect whose approach to architecture and landscape was categorized by architectural historian Francesco Dal Co as "critical regionalism". He is the winner of the 1995 Pritzker Prize.
Go to Profile#753
Michael Lewis
#753
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Michael Monroe Lewis is an American author and financial journalist. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. He is known for his nonfiction work, particularly his coverage of financial crises and behavioral finance.
Go to Profile#754
David Malet Armstrong
#754
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
David Malet Armstrong , often D. M. Armstrong, was an Australian philosopher. He is well known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the laws of nature. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.
Go to Profile#755
James E. Webb
#755
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
James Edwin Webb was an American government official who served as Undersecretary of State from 1949 to 1952. He was the second Administrator of NASA from February 14, 1961, to October 7, 1968. Webb led NASA from the beginning of the Kennedy administration through the end of the Johnson administration, thus overseeing each of the critical first crewed missions throughout the Mercury and Gemini programs until days before the launch of the first Apollo mission. He also dealt with the Apollo 1 fire.
Go to Profile#756
Carl Djerassi
#756
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Carl Djerassi was an Austrian-born Bulgarian-American pharmaceutical chemist, novelist, playwright and co-founder of Djerassi Resident Artists Program with Diane Wood Middlebrook. He is best known for his contribution to the development of oral contraceptive pillss, nicknamed the "father of the pill".
Go to Profile#757
Ivan Illich
#757
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Ivan Dominic Illich was an Austrian Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, and social critic. His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. His 1975 book Medical Nemesis, importing to the sociology of medicine the concept of medical harm, argues that industrialised society widely impairs quality of life by overmedicalising life, pathologizing normal conditions, creating false dependency, and limiting other more healthful solutions.
Go to Profile#758
John McWhorter
#758
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
John Hamilton McWhorter V is an American linguist with a specialty in creole languages, sociolects, and Black English. He is currently an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches American studies and music history. He has authored a number of books on race relations and African-American culture, acting as political commentator especially in his New York Times newsletter.
Go to Profile#759
Eric Foner
#759
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Eric Foner is an American historian. He writes extensively on American political history, the history of freedom, the early history of the Republican Party, African American biography, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and historiography, and has been a member of the faculty at the Columbia University Department of History since 1982. He is the author of several popular textbooks. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Foner is the most frequently cited author on college syllabi for history courses.
Go to Profile#760
Ronald Graham
#760
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
#761
Goro Shimura
#761
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Gorō Shimura was a Japanese mathematician and Michael Henry Strater Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University who worked in number theory, automorphic forms, and arithmetic geometry. He was known for developing the theory of complex multiplication of abelian varieties and Shimura varieties, as well as posing the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture which ultimately led to the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
Go to Profile#762
Sid Meier
#762
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Sidney K. Meier is a Canadian-born Swiss-American programmer, designer, and producer of several strategy video games and simulation video games, including the Civilization series. Meier co-founded MicroProse in 1982 with Bill Stealey and is the Director of Creative Development of Firaxis Games, which he co-founded with Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds in 1996. For his contributions to the video game industry, Meier was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#763
Karl-Otto Apel
#763
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Karl-Otto Apel was a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Frankfurt am Main. He specialized on the philosophy of language and was thus considered a communication theorist. He developed a distinctive philosophical approach which he called "transcendental pragmatics."
Go to Profile#764
David McCullough
#764
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
David Gaub McCullough was an American popular historian. He was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 2006, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award.
Go to Profile#765
Erwin Chargaff
#765
Overall Influence
1905 - 2002 (97 years)
Erwin Chargaff was an Austro-Hungarian-born American biochemist, writer, Bucovinian Jew who emigrated to the United States during the Nazi era, and professor of biochemistry at Columbia University medical school. He wrote a well-reviewed autobiography, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature.
Go to Profile#766
Tommy Flowers
#766
Overall Influence
1905 - 1998 (93 years)
Thomas Harold Flowers MBE was an English engineer with the British General Post Office. During World War II, Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help decipher encrypted German messages.
Go to Profile#767
Jacques Chirac
#767
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Jacques René Chirac was a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. Chirac was previously Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988, as well as Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.
Go to Profile#768
Leslie Valiant
#768
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Leslie Gabriel Valiant is a British American computer scientist and computational theorist. He was born to a chemical engineer father and a translator mother. He is currently the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Valiant was awarded the Turing Award in 2010, having been described by the A.C.M. as a heroic figure in theoretical computer science and a role model for his courage and creativity in addressing some of the deepest unsolved problems in science; in particular for his "striking combination of depth and breadth".
Go to Profile#769
Chinua Achebe
#769
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic who is regarded as a central figure of modern African literature. His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart , occupies a pivotal place in African literature and remains the most widely studied, translated, and read African novel. Along with Things Fall Apart, his No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God complete the "African Trilogy". Later novels include A Man of the People and Anthills of the Savannah . In the West, Achebe is often referred to as the "father of African literature", although he vigorously rejected the characteriza...
Go to Profile#770
James L. Brooks
#770
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
James Lawrence Brooks is an American director, producer, screenwriter and co-founder of Gracie Films. His television and film work includes The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, The Simpsons, Broadcast News, As Good as It Gets, and Terms of Endearment.
Go to Profile#771
Stokely Carmichael
#771
Overall Influence
1941 - 1998 (57 years)
Kwame Ture was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while attending the Bronx High School of Science. He was a key leader in the development of the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , then as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party , and last as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party .
Go to Profile#772
Antony Hewish
#772
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Antony Hewish was a British radio astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 for his role in the discovery of pulsars. He was also awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969.
Go to Profile#773
Gerald Guralnik
#773
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
Gerald Stanford "Gerry" Guralnik was the Chancellor’s Professor of Physics at Brown University. In 1964 he co-discovered the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble . As part of Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognized this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history. While widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Go to Profile#774
Gary Marcus
#774
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Gary Fred Marcus is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence . Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. In 2014 Marcus founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber.
Go to Profile#775
C. R. Hagen
#775
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Carl Richard Hagen is a professor of particle physics at the University of Rochester. He is most noted for his contributions to the Standard Model and Symmetry breaking as well as the 1964 co-discovery of the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with Gerald Guralnik and Tom Kibble . As part of Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognized this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history. While widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Phys...
Go to Profile#776
Griselda Pollock
#776
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#777
Antonio Damasio
#777
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He was previously the chair of neurology at the University of Iowa for 20 years. Damasio heads the Brain and Creativity Institute, and has authored several books: his work, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain , explores the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Damasio's research in neu...
Go to Profile#778
Malala Yousafzai
#778
Overall Influence
1997 - Present (27 years)
Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani female education activist and the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the age of 17. She is the world's youngest Nobel Prize laureate, the second Pakistani and the first Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize. Yousafzai is a human rights advocate for the education of women and children in her native homeland, Swat, where the Pakistani Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Her advocacy has grown into an international movement, and according to former Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, she has become Pakistan's "most prominent citizen."
Go to Profile#779
Ed Diener
#779
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
#780
Bernardo Provenzano
#780
Overall Influence
1933 - 2016 (83 years)
Bernardo Provenzano was an Italian mobster and chief of the Sicilian Mafia clan known as the Corleonesi, a Mafia faction that originated in the town of Corleone, and de facto the boss of bosses . His nickname was Binnu u tratturi because, in the words of one informant, "he mows people down". Another nickname was il ragioniere , due to his apparently subtle and low-key approach to running his crime empire, at least in contrast to some of his more violent predecessors.
Go to Profile#781
Talal Asad
#781
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Talal Asad is emeritus distinguished professor of anthropology for the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He earned his B.Litt from the University of Edinburgh, and a Bachelor of Letters and Ph.D from the University of Oxford. He is noted for his contributions to theoretical secularism. His work in secularism challenges the actual impacts of separation of church and state, or the secular and the religious, suggesting that in so doing, the government becomes too distant from the cultural norms and expectations of conduct held by their citizenry. He felt Europe, in particular, ...
Go to Profile#782
Vitaly Ginzburg
#782
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, ForMemRS was a Russian physicist who was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003, together with Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett for their "pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids."
Go to Profile#783
Tyler Cowen
#783
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Tyler Cowen is an American economist, columnist and blogger. He is a professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert L. Harris chair in the economics department. He hosts the economics blog Marginal Revolution, together with co-author Alex Tabarrok. Cowen and Tabarrok also maintain the website Marginal Revolution University, a venture in online education.
Go to Profile#784
Marcian Hoff
#784
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Marcian Edward "Ted" Hoff Jr. is one of the inventors of the microprocessor. Education and work history Hoff received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1958. He applied for his first two patents based on work done for the General Railway Signal Corp. of Rochester, New York during the summers of his undergraduate study. He received a National Science Foundation Fellowship to enroll in Stanford University, where he received his master's degree in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1962. As part of his Ph.D. dissertation, Hoff co-invented the least m...
Go to Profile#785
Vladimir Arnold
#785
Overall Influence
1937 - 2010 (73 years)
Vladimir Igorevich Arnold was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. While he is known for the Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theorem regarding the stability of integrable systems, he contributed to several areas, including geometrical theory of dynamical systems theory, algebra, catastrophe theory, topology, algebraic geometry, symplectic geometry, symplectic topology, differential equations, classical mechanics, differential geometric approach to hydrodynamics, geometric analysis and singularity theory, including posing the ADE classification problem, since his first main result—the solution of Hilbert's thirteenth problem in 1957 at the age of 19.
Go to Profile#786
John Milnor
#786
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
John Willard Milnor is an American mathematician known for his work in differential topology, algebraic K-theory and low-dimensional holomorphic dynamical systems. Milnor is a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University and the only mathematician to have won the Fields Medal, the Wolf Prize, the Abel Prize and all three Steele prizes.
Go to Profile#787
Steven Levy
#787
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Steven Levy is an American journalist and Editor at Large for Wired who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which chronicles the early days of the computer underground. Levy published eight books covering computer hacker culture, artificial intelligence, cryptography, and multi-year exposés of Apple, Google, and Facebook. His most recent book, Facebook: The Inside Story, recounts the history and rise of Facebook from three years o...
Go to Profile#788
Richard Helms
#788
Overall Influence
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Richard McGarrah Helms was an American government official and diplomat who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973. Helms began intelligence work with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Following the 1947 creation of the Central Intelligence Agency , he rose in its ranks during the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Helms then was DCI under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, yielding to James R. Schlesinger in early 1973.
Go to Profile#789
Cornel West
#789
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#790
Anselm Strauss
#790
Overall Influence
1916 - 1996 (80 years)
Anselm Leonard Strauss was an American sociologist professor at the University of California, San Francisco internationally known as a medical sociologist and as the developer of grounded theory, an innovative method of qualitative analysis widely used in sociology, nursing, education, social work, and organizational studies. He also wrote extensively on Chicago sociology/symbolic interactionism, sociology of work, social worlds/arenas theory, social psychology and urban imagery. He published over 30 books, chapters in over 30 other books, and over 70 journal articles.
Go to Profile#791
Ben Brantley
#791
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Benjamin D. Brantley is an American theater critic, journalist, editor, publisher, and writer. He served as the chief theater critic for The New York Times from 1996 to 2017, and as co-chief theater critic from 2017 to 2020.
Go to Profile#792
Fareed Zakaria
#792
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Fareed Rafiq Zakaria is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author. He is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post. He has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time.
Go to Profile#793
Edmund Gettier
#793
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Edmund Lee Gettier III was an American philosopher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is best known for his article written in 1963: "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", which has generated an extensive philosophical literature trying to respond to what became known as the Gettier problem.
Go to Profile#794
Patricia Hill Collins
#794
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#795
Brian Greene
#795
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#796
John Pilger
#796
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John Richard Pilger is an Australian journalist, writer, scholar, and documentary filmmaker. He has mainly been based in Britain since 1962. He has also been a visiting professor at Cornell University in New York.
Go to Profile#797
Stanley Cavell
#797
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Stanley Louis Cavell was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.
Go to Profile#798
Jack Goody
#798
Overall Influence
1919 - 2015 (96 years)
Sir John Rankine Goody was an English social anthropologist. He was a prominent lecturer at Cambridge University, and was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 to 1984. Among his main publications were Death, property and the ancestors , Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa , The myth of the Bagre and The domestication of the savage mind .
Go to Profile#799
Joseph Bonanno
#799
Overall Influence
1905 - 2002 (97 years)
Joseph Charles Bonanno , sometimes referred to as Joe Bananas, was an Italian-American crime boss of the Bonanno crime family, which he ran from 1931 to 1968. Bonanno was born in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, where his father was also involved in organized crime. At the age of three, Bonanno immigrated to New York City with his family, where he lived for about 10 years before he moved back to Italy. He later slipped back into the United States in 1924, by stowing away on a Cuban fishing boat bound for Tampa, Florida. After the Castellammarese War, Salvatore Maranzano was murdered in 1931, Bonanno reorganized most of the crime family as the Bonanno family.
Go to Profile#800
Stuart Kauffman
#800
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Areas of Specialization: Biochemistry Stuart Kauffman is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, an affiliate faculty member for the Institute of Systems Biology, a medical doctor, theoretical biologist, and researcher of complex systems. He earned his BA at University of Oxford and an MD at the University of California, San Francisco. Among his best-known work has been his exploration of the complexity of biological systems and the origins of the Earth. He built the N-K fitness landscapes model, which expanded upon the spin glass physics models. His N-K fitness landscapes have since been used by biologists and economists to understand systems behaviors.
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