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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#7501
Sam Peltzman
#7511
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sam Peltzman is professor emeritus at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago. He is an editor of The Journal of Law and Economics and was editor of the Journal of Political Economy from 1974 till 1989. Peltzman’s research has focused on issues related to the interface between the public sector and the private economy. His published work includes numerous articles in academic journals.
Go to Profile#7502
Daniel Mendelsohn
#7512
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Daniel Adam Mendelsohn is an American author, essayist, critic, columnist, and translator. Best known for his internationally best-selling and award-winning Holocaust family memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, he is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, the Editor at Large of the New York Review of Books, and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to supporting writers of nonfiction.
Go to Profile#7503
Herbert Kelman
#7513
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Herbert Chanoch Kelman was an Austrian-born American psychologist who was the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. He is known for his work on conflict resolution in the Middle East.
Go to Profile#7504
Holly Black
#7514
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Holly Black is an American writer and editor best known for her children's and young adult fiction. Her most recent work is the New York Times bestselling young adult Folk of the Air series. She is also well known for The Spiderwick Chronicles, a series of children's fantasy books she created with writer and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi, and her debut trilogy of young adult novels officially called the Modern Faerie Tales. Black has won an Eisner Award, a Lodestar Award, a Nebula Award, and a Newbery Honor.
Go to Profile#7505
Adam B. Jaffe
#7515
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Adam B. Jaffe is a freelance economist working in Boston, Massachusetts. He was previously Director of Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, in Wellington, New Zealand and a professor of economics at Brandeis University. His areas of expertise include industrial organization, technological change and innovation, law and economics, and environmental economics. The overarching theme of his work is focused on the process of technological change and innovation.
Go to Profile#7506
Richard Fortey
#7516
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Richard Alan Fortey is a British palaeontologist, natural historian, writer and television presenter, who served as president of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007. Early life and education Fortey was educated at Ealing Grammar School for Boys and King's College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences specialising in geology. He received a PhD and DSc from the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#7507
Michael L. Scott
#7517
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Michael Lee Scott is a professor of computer science at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. Education and teaching Scott received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985. He joined the faculty at Rochester the same year as an assistant professor of computer science. Scott was chair of the computer science department from 1996 until 1999, when he was succeeded by Mitsunori Ogihara. He served again as interim chair from July to December 2007 and from July to December 2017.
Go to Profile#7508
David A. Cox
#7518
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David Archibald Cox is a retired American mathematician, working in algebraic geometry. Cox graduated from Rice University with a bachelor's degree in 1970 and his Ph.D. in 1975 at Princeton University, under the supervision of Eric Friedlander . From 1974 to 1975, he was assistant professor at Haverford College and at Rutgers University from 1975 to 1979. In 1979, he became assistant professor and in 1988 professor at Amherst College.
Go to Profile#7509
Douglas J. Futuyma
#7519
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Douglas Joel Futuyma is an American evolutionary biologist. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York and a Research Associate on staff at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. His research focuses on speciation and population biology. Futuyma is the author of a widely used undergraduate textbook on evolution and is also known for his work in public outreach, particularly in advocating against creationism.
Go to Profile#7510
Dionne Warwick
#7520
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Marie Dionne Warwick is an American singer, actress, and television host. Warwick ranks among the 40 biggest U.S. hit makers between 1955 and 1999, based on her chart history on Billboard's Hot 100 pop singles chart. She is the second-most charted female vocalist during the rock era . She is also one of the most-charted vocalists of all time, with 56 of her singles making the Hot 100 between 1962 and 1998 , and 80 singles in total – either solo or collaboratively – making the Hot 100, R&B, or adult contemporary charts. Warwick ranks number 74 on the Billboard Hot 100's "Greatest Artists of al...
Go to Profile#7511
Felipe Calderón
#7521
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa is a Mexican politician who served as the 63rd president of Mexico from 1 December 2006 to 30 November 2012 and Secretary of Energy during the presidency of Vicente Fox between 2003 and 2004. He was a member of the National Action Party for 30 years before quitting the party in November 2018.
Go to Profile#7512
Arne Duncan
#7522
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Arne Starkey Duncan is an American educator who served as United States Secretary of Education from 2009 to 2015 and as Chief Executive Officer of Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2008. A lifelong resident of Chicago, Duncan is the founder of Create Real Economic Destiny , a non-profit aimed at reducing gun violence.
Go to Profile#7513
Stephen Rollnick
#7523
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Stephen Rollnick is Honorary Distinguished Professor in the School of Medicine, Cardiff University, Wales, UK. Alongside William R Miller, he developed many of the founding principles of motivational interviewing.
Go to Profile#7514
Andrew Cuomo
#7524
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Andrew Mark Cuomo is an American politician, lawyer, and former government official who served as the 56th governor of New York from 2011 to 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected to the same position that his father, Mario Cuomo, held for three terms .
Go to Profile#7515
Mike Shipley
#7525
Overall Influence
1956 - 2013 (57 years)
Michael Shipley was an Australian mixing engineer, audio engineer, and record producer. Shipley's music career spanned more than 30 years – mostly working in Los Angeles. At the Grammy Awards of 2012 he won the Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical category for his joint work on Paper Airplane , by Alison Krauss and Union Station. Shipley died in July 2013, aged 56, of an apparent suicide.
Go to Profile#7516
Michael Grandage
#7526
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Michael Grandage CBE is a British theatre director and producer. He is currently Artistic Director of the Michael Grandage Company. From 2002 to 2012 he was Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse in London and from 2000 to 2005 he was Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres.
Go to Profile#7517
Jan Kregel
#7527
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jan A. Kregel is an American post-Keynesian economist. Kregel has served since 2006 as Professor of Finance and Development at Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia. He is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS , whose Bologna Center he co-directed in the late 1980s, and a visiting professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He is also one of the Senior Scholars at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Until 2007, he was Chief of the Policy Analysis and Development Branch of the Financing for Development Office of United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
Go to Profile#7518
Leo Postman
#7528
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Leo Joseph Postman was a Russian-born American psychologist known for his research on human memory. Career He taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1950 to his retirement in 1987. In 1961, he founded Berkeley's Institute of Human Learning, which later became the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological Association, as well as the president of the Western Psychological Association in 1968.
Go to Profile#7519
Aviva Chomsky
#7529
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Aviva Chomsky is an American professor, historian, author, and activist. She is a professor of history and the Coordinator of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. She previously taught at Bates College in Maine and was a research associate at Harvard University, where she specialized in Caribbean and Latin American history.
Go to Profile#7520
Ian Hancock
#7530
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ian Francis Hancock is a linguist, Romani scholar and political advocate. He was born and raised in England and is one of the main contributors in the field of Romani studies. He is director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has been a professor of English, linguistics and Asian studies since 1972. He has represented the Romani people at the United Nations and served as a member of the US Holocaust Memorial Council under President Bill Clinton, who, Hancock claims, has Romani ancestry. He also repr...
Go to Profile#7521
Saul Rosenzweig
#7531
Overall Influence
1907 - 2004 (97 years)
Saul Rosenzweig was an American psychologist and therapist who studied subjects such as repression, psychotherapy, and aggression. Rosenzweig, who, with a co-author, has been credited with being the first to attempt to "elicit repression" in a laboratory setting, became well known after publishing a paper discussing "common factors" underlying competing approaches to psychotherapy.
Go to Profile#7522
Mary Oliver
#7532
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. It is characterized by a sincere wonderment at the impact of natural imagery, conveyed in unadorned language. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.
Go to Profile#7523
Richard Helm
#7533
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Richard Helm is one of the "Gang of Four" who wrote the influential Design Patterns book. In 2006 he was awarded the Dahl–Nygaard Prize for his contributions to the state of the art embodied in that book.
Go to Profile#7524
Steve Lawrence
#7534
Overall Influence
Steve Lawrence is an Australian computer scientist. He was among the group at NEC Research which was responsible for the creation of the Search Engine/Digital Library CiteSeer. He was an employee at Google. He is currently a co-founder & CTO at Xoo.
Go to Profile#7525
Maryse Condé
#7535
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Maryse Condé is a French novelist, critic, and playwright from the French Overseas department and region of Guadeloupe. Condé is best known for her novel Ségou . Her novels explore the African diaspora that resulted from slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean. Her novels, written in French, have been translated into English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. She has won various awards, such as the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme , Prix de l’Académie française , Prix Carbet de la Carraibe and the New Academy Prize in Literature for her works. She is considered a ...
Go to Profile#7526
Bob Geldof
#7536
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof is an Irish singer-songwriter and political activist. He rose to prominence in the late 1970s as lead singer of the Irish rock band the Boomtown Rats, who achieved popularity as part of the punk rock movement. The band had UK number one hits with his co-compositions "Rat Trap" and "I Don't Like Mondays". Geldof starred as Pink in Pink Floyd's 1982 film Pink Floyd – The Wall. As a fundraiser, Geldof organised the charity supergroup Band Aid and the concerts Live Aid and Live 8, and co-wrote "Do They Know It's Christmas?", one of the best-selling singles to date.
Go to Profile#7527
Bruce Tuckman
#7537
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
Bruce Wayne Tuckman was an American psychological researcher who carried out research into the theory of group dynamics. In 1965, he published a theory generally known as "Tuckman's stages of group development".
Go to Profile#7528
Roshdi Rashed
#7538
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Roshdi Rashed , born in Cairo in 1936, is a mathematician, philosopher and historian of science, whose work focuses largely on mathematics and physics of the medieval Arab world. His work explores and illuminates the unrecognized Arab scientific tradition, being one of the first historians to study in detail the ancient and medieval texts, their journey through the Eastern schools and courses, their immense contributions to Western science, particularly in regarding the development of algebra and the first formalization of physics.
Go to Profile#7529
Richard Peto
#7539
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Sir Richard Peto is an English statistician and epidemiologist who is Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, England. Education He attended Taunton's School in Southampton and subsequently studied the Natural Sciences Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge followed by a Master of Science degree in Statistics at Imperial College London.
Go to Profile#7530
Henry Abramson
#7540
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Henry Abramson is an American historian who is the dean of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences in Flatbush, New York. Before that, he served as the Dean for Academic Affairs and Student Services at Touro College's Miami branch . He is notable for his teachings on Jewish history and Judaism as a religion.
Go to Profile#7531
Jean-Lou Chameau
#7541
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jean-Lou Chameau is a French civil engineer who served as the president of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology from 2013 to 2017, and California Institute of Technology from 2006 to 2013. In addition, he previously served as a Dean of Engineering and provost of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#7532
Martin Weitzman
#7542
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Martin Lawrence Weitzman was an economist and a professor of economics at Harvard University. He was among the most influential economists in the world according to Research Papers in Economics . His latest research was largely focused on environmental economics, specifically climate change and the economics of catastrophes.
Go to Profile#7533
John Williams
#7543
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
John Towner Williams is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career that has spanned seven decades, he has composed some of the most popular, recognizable and critically acclaimed film scores in cinema history. Williams has won 25 Grammy Awards, five Academy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. With 53 Academy Award nominations, he is the second-most nominated person, after Walt Disney. His compositions are often considered the epitome of orchestral film music and he is considered among the greatest composers in the history of cinema. Williams...
Go to Profile#7534
Jonathan Strahan
#7544
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jonathan Strahan is an editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His family moved to Perth, Western Australia in 1968, and he graduated from the University of Western Australia with a Bachelor of Arts in 1986.
Go to Profile#7535
Chris Ofili
#7545
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Christopher Ofili, is a British painter who is best known for his paintings incorporating elephant dung. He was Turner Prize-winner and one of the Young British Artists. Since 2005, Ofili has been living and working in Trinidad and Tobago, where he currently resides in the city of Port of Spain. He also has lived and worked in London and Brooklyn.
Go to Profile#7536
Paola Cavalieri
#7546
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Paola Cavalieri is an Italian philosopher, most known for her work arguing for extension of human rights to the other great apes and more broadly, "to mammals and birds, and probably vertebrates in general". In addition to her books, she was the editor of Etica & Animali, a quarterly international philosophy journal that published nine volumes from 1988 to 1998.
Go to Profile#7537
Neil MacGregor
#7547
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert Neil MacGregor is a British art historian and former museum director. He was editor of the Burlington Magazine from 1981 to 1987, then Director of the National Gallery, London, from 1987 to 2002, Director of the British Museum from 2003 to 2009, and founding director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin until 2018.
Go to Profile#7538
Rick Doblin
#7548
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Richard Elliot Doblin is an American drug activist and executive who is the founder and former executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies . Life and career Born in 1953, Doblin grew up in a Conservative Jewish family in suburban Chicago. He is the first of four children to pediatrician Morton Doblin and schoolteacher Arline Doblin. He has three younger siblings, Bruce, Sharon, and Stuart Doblin.
Go to Profile#7539
Ekaterina Schulmann
#7549
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Ekaterina Mikhailovna Schulmann is a Russian political scientist specializing in legislative processes. Schulmann is an associate professor of the RANEPA, an associate professor of the Moscow School for the Social and Economic Sciences, and an associate fellow of Chatham House.
Go to Profile#7540
Alfred Stepan
#7550
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Alfred C. Stepan was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics and Latin American politics. He was the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government at Columbia University, where he was also director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration and Religion. He is known for his comparative politics research on the military, state institutions, democratization, and democracy.
Go to Profile#7541
Jamshed Bharucha
#7551
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jamshed Bharucha is an Indian-American cognitive neuroscientist who has served in leadership roles in higher education. He is the founding vice chancellor of Sai University, Chennai, and is a member of the board of advisors of India's International Movement to Unite Nations .
Go to Profile#7542
Walter Thirring
#7552
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Walter Eduard Thirring was an Austrian physicist after whom the Thirring model in quantum field theory is named. He was the son of the physicist Hans Thirring. Life and career Walter Thirring was born in Vienna, Austria, where he earned his Doctor of Physics degree in 1949 at the age of 22. In 1959 he became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Vienna, and from 1968 to 1971 he was head of the Theory Division and director at CERN.
Go to Profile#7543
Alex Ross
#7553
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Alex Ross is an American music critic and author who specializes in classical music. Ross has been a staff member of The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His extensive writings include performance and record reviews, industry updates, cultural commentary, and historical narratives in the realm of classical music. He has written three well-received books: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century , Listen to This , and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music .
Go to Profile#7544
Wassily Hoeffding
#7554
Overall Influence
1914 - 1991 (77 years)
Wassily Hoeffding was a Finnish statistician and probabilist. Hoeffding was one of the founders of nonparametric statistics, in which Hoeffding contributed the idea and basic results on U-statistics.
Go to Profile#7545
Fritz Stern
#7555
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Fritz Richard Stern was a German-born American historian of German history, Jewish history and historiography. He was a University Professor and a provost at New York's Columbia University. His work focused on the complex relationships between Germans and Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries and on the rise of National Socialism in Germany during the first half of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#7546
Monica Seles
#7556
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Monica Seles is a former world No. 1 tennis player who represented Yugoslavia and the United States. She won nine major singles titles, eight of them as a teenager while representing Yugoslavia, and the final one while representing the United States. In 1990, Seles became the youngest-ever French Open champion at the age of 16. She went on to win eight major singles titles before her 20th birthday and was the year-end No. 1 in 1991 and 1992. However, on April 30, 1993, while playing a match, she was the victim of an on-court attack when an obsessed fan of Seles' rival Steffi Graf stabbed Seles in the back with a knife as she was sitting down between games.
Go to Profile#7547
Keith Waterhouse
#7557
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Keith Spencer Waterhouse was a British novelist and newspaper columnist and the writer of many television series. Biography Keith Waterhouse was born in Hunslet, Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, England. He performed two years of national service in the Royal Air Force.
Go to Profile#7548
Henry B. Eyring
#7558
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Henry Bennion Eyring is an American educational administrator, author, and religious leader. Eyring has been the second counselor to Russell M. Nelson in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since January 14, 2018. Previously, Eyring was the first counselor to Thomas S. Monson in the First Presidency from 2008 until Monson's death on January 2, 2018. Eyring was the second counselor to Gordon B. Hinckley in the First Presidency from October 6, 2007, until Hinckley's death on January 27, 2008.
Go to Profile#7549
Joseph Dan
#7559
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Joseph Dan was an Israeli scholar of Jewish mysticism. He taught for over 40 years in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was the first incumbent of the Gershom Scholem Chair in Jewish Mysticism at The Hebrew University.
Go to Profile#7550
Cosma Shalizi
#7560
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Cosma Rohilla Shalizi is an associate professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Life Cosma Rohilla Shalizi is of Indian Tamil, Afghan and Italian heritage and was born in Boston, where he lived for the first two years of his life. He grew up in Bethesda, Maryland.
Go to Profile