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
#7551
Arjen Lenstra
#7561
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Arjen Klaas Lenstra is a Dutch mathematician, cryptographer and computational number theorist. He is a professor emeritus from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne where he headed of the Laboratory for Cryptologic Algorithms.
Go to Profile#7552
Martin Nowak
#7562
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Martin Andreas Nowak is an Austrian-born professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard University. He is one of the leading researchers in the field of mathematical biology. He made contributions to the theory of evolution, cooperation, virus dynamics, and cancer dynamics. Nowak held professorships at Oxford University and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, before being recruited by Harvard in 2003. He was the director of Harvard's program for evolutionary dynamics from 2003 until 2020. He is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and in the Department of Organismic and...
Go to Profile#7553
Hans Sluga
#7563
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Hans D. Sluga is a German philosopher who spent most of his career as professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Sluga teaches and writes on topics in the history of analytic philosophy, the history of continental philosophy, as well as on political theory, and ancient philosophy in Greece and China. He has been particularly influenced by the thought of Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault.
Go to Profile#7554
Richard Chorley
#7564
Overall Influence
1927 - 2002 (75 years)
Richard John Chorley was an English geographer, and Professor of Geography at Cambridge University, known as leading figure in quantitative geography in the late 20th century, who played an instrumental role in bringing in the use of systems theory to geography.
Go to Profile#7555
Jean-Marie Apostolidès
#7565
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Jean-Marie Apostolidès was a French novelist, essayist, playwright, theatre director, and university professor. Biography Apostolidès was born during World War II in the village of Saint-Bonnet-Tronçais in Auvergne. His grandfather, Evangel Apostolidès, was a Greek doctor from Asia Minor. After his studies in France, Evangel did not return home because of the rise to power of Mustafa Kemal. The childhood of Jean-Marie Apostolidès was profoundly marked by religion and its dogma; when his father Paul found out his parents had lived together without being married, he was horrified, and decided to "pay for their sins" by becoming a fervent Catholic.
Go to Profile#7556
David Matza
#7566
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
David Matza was an American sociologist who taught at University of California, Berkeley from 1961. Life and Work Born in New York, he received his PhD from Princeton University in 1959. His research fields included deviant behavior, social change, poverty and working class life. He is best known for coauthoring, with Gresham Sykes, techniques of neutralization.
Go to Profile#7557
Norman Lamm
#7567
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Norman Lamm was an American Modern Orthodox rabbi, scholar, academic administrator, author, and Jewish community leader. He was the Chancellor of Yeshiva University until he announced his retirement on July 1, 2013.
Go to Profile#7558
David Herbert Donald
#7568
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
David Herbert Donald was an American historian, best known for his 1995 biography of Abraham Lincoln. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for earlier works; he published more than 30 books on United States political and literary figures and the history of the American South.
Go to Profile#7559
Robert Fripp
#7569
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert Fripp is an English musician, songwriter, record producer, and author, best known as the guitarist, founder and longest-lasting member of the progressive rock band King Crimson. He has worked extensively as a session musician and collaborator, notably with David Bowie, Blondie, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Daryl Hall, The Roches, Talking Heads, and David Sylvian. He also composed the startup sound of Windows Vista operating system, in collaboration with Tucker Martine and Steve Ball. His discography includes contributions to over 700 official releases.
Go to Profile#7560
Ernest Callenbach
#7570
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Ernest William Callenbach was an American author, film critic, editor, and simple living adherent. He became famous due to his 1975 utopian novel Ecotopia. Life and work Born into a farming family in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Callenbach attended the University of Chicago, where he was drawn into the then 'new wave' of serious attention to film as an art form. After six months in Paris at the Sorbonne, watching four films a day, he returned to Chicago and earned a master's degree in English and Communications.
Go to Profile#7561
Ersin Kalaycıoğlu
#7571
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Mahmut Ersin Kalaycıoğlu is a Turkish political scientist, professor of political sciences at Sabancı University and former president of Işık University, Istanbul . He is also a nephew of the well-known Turkish constitution professor, Tarık Zafer Tunaya.
Go to Profile#7562
Deena Weinstein
#7572
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Deena Weinstein is a professor of sociology at DePaul University whose research focuses on popular culture. She is particularly well known for her research on heavy metal culture, on which subject she wrote a ground-breaking book, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology , later published in a revised and updated version as Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture .
Go to Profile#7563
K. C. Nicolaou
#7573
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Kyriacos Costa Nicolaou is a Cypriot-American chemist known for his research in the area of natural products total synthesis. He is currently Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Chemistry at Rice University, having previously held academic positions at The Scripps Research Institute/UC San Diego and the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#7564
Paul Bohannan
#7574
Overall Influence
1920 - 2007 (87 years)
Paul James Bohannan was an American anthropologist known for his research on the Tiv people of Nigeria, spheres of exchange and divorce in the United States. Early life and education Bohannan was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, to Hillory Bohannan and Hazel Truex Bohannan. During the Dust Bowl his family moved to Benson, Arizona. World War II interrupted his college education, and he served in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps from 1941 to 1945 reaching the rank of captain. In 1947 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with his bachelor's degree in German from the University of Arizona. He attended Queen...
Go to Profile#7565
Zvi Griliches
#7575
Overall Influence
1930 - 1999 (69 years)
Hirsh Zvi Griliches was an economist at Harvard University. The works by Zvi Griliches mostly concerned the economics of technological change, including empirical studies of diffusion of innovations and the role of R & D, patents, and education. In 2023 he had 126 publication listed in Web of Science and a Hirsch index of 49, which places him into 2% of most productive economics professors in the USA.
Go to Profile#7566
Lenny Waronker
#7576
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Lenny Waronker is an American record producer and music industry executive. As the president of Warner Bros. Records, and later, as the co-chair of DreamWorks Records, Waronker was noted for his commitment to artists and his belief that "music, not money, was still number one."
Go to Profile#7567
Jelani Nelson
#7577
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Jelani Osei Nelson is an Ethiopian-American Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the 2014 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Nelson is the creator of AddisCoder, a computer science summer program for Ethiopian high school students in Addis Ababa.
Go to Profile#7568
Kefeng Liu
#7578
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Kefeng Liu , is a Chinese-American mathematician who is known for his contributions to geometric analysis, particularly the geometry, topology and analysis of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces and Calabi–Yau manifolds. He is a professor of mathematics at University of California, Los Angeles, as well as the executive director of the Center of Mathematical Sciences at Zhejiang University. He is best known for his collaboration with Bong Lian and Shing-Tung Yau in which they establish some enumerative geometry conjectures motivated by mirror symmetry.
Go to Profile#7569
John Sessions
#7579
Overall Influence
1953 - 2020 (67 years)
John Marshall , better known by the stage name John Sessions, was a British actor and comedian. He was known for comedy improvisation in television shows such as Whose Line Is It Anyway?, as a panellist on QI, and as a character actor in numerous films, both in the UK and Hollywood.
Go to Profile#7570
Ron Howard
#7580
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Ronald William Howard is an American director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. Howard started his career as a child actor before transitioning to a career as a director of acclaimed and notable films. Over his six decade career Howard has received two Academy Awards, four Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Grammy Award. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2003 and was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 2013. Howard has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions in film and television.
Go to Profile#7571
Godfried Toussaint
#7581
Overall Influence
1944 - 2019 (75 years)
Godfried Theodore Patrick Toussaint was a Canadian computer scientist, a professor of computer science, and the head of the Computer Science Program at New York University Abu Dhabi in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He is considered to be the father of computational geometry in Canada. He did research on various aspects of computational geometry, discrete geometry, and their applications: pattern recognition , motion planning, visualization , knot theory , linkage reconfiguration, the art gallery problem, polygon triangulation, the largest empty circle problem, unimodality , and others. O...
Go to Profile#7572
Joseph Biederman
#7582
Overall Influence
1947 - 2023 (76 years)
Joseph Biederman was Chief of the Clinical and Research Programs in Pediatric Psychopharmacology and Adult ADHD at the Massachusetts General Hospital, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Biederman was Board Certified in General and Child Psychiatry.
Go to Profile#7573
Ehud Kalai
#7583
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ehud Kalai is a prominent Israeli American game theorist and mathematical economist known for his contributions to the field of game theory and its interface with economics, social choice, computer science and operations research. He was the James J. O’Connor Distinguished Professor of Decision and Game Sciences at Northwestern University, 1975-2017, and currently is a Professor Emeritus of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences.
Go to Profile#7574
Berry Gordy
#7584
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Berry Gordy III , known professionally as Berry Gordy Jr., is an American retired record executive, record producer, songwriter, film producer and television producer. He is best known as the founder of the Motown record label and its subsidiaries, which was the highest-earning African-American business for decades.
Go to Profile#7575
Boris Groys
#7585
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Boris Efimovich Groys is an art critic, media theorist, and philosopher. He is currently a global distinguished professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University and senior research fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. He has been a professor of aesthetics, art history, and media theory at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and an internationally acclaimed professor at a number of universities in the United States and Europe, including the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern ...
Go to Profile#7576
Maureen Freely
#7586
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Maureen Deidre Freely FRSL is an American journalist, novelist, professor, and translator. She has worked on the Warwick Writing Programme since 1996. Biography Born in Neptune, New Jersey, she is the daughter of author John Freely, and has a brother, Brendan. Maureen Freely grew up in Turkey. She graduated from Harvard College. She now lives in England.
Go to Profile#7577
John Ridley
#7587
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
John Ridley IV is an American screenwriter, television director, novelist, and showrunner, known for 12 Years a Slave, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is also the creator and showrunner of the anthology series American Crime. In 2017 he directed the documentary film Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982–1992.
Go to Profile#7578
Rob Grant
#7588
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Robert Grant is an English comedy writer, television producer and co-creator of Red Dwarf. Since Red Dwarf, Grant has written two television series, The Strangerers and Dark Ages, and four solo novels, his most recent being Fat. During his career Grant has been involved in two distinct writing partnerships: the first with Doug Naylor, and the second and most recent with Andrew Marshall.
Go to Profile#7579
Alicia Markova
#7589
Overall Influence
1910 - 2004 (94 years)
Dame Alicia Markova DBE was a British ballerina and a choreographer, director and teacher of classical ballet. Most noted for her career with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and touring internationally, she was widely considered to be one of the greatest classical ballet dancers of the twentieth century. She was the first British dancer to become the principal dancer of a ballet company and, with Dame Margot Fonteyn, is one of only two English dancers to be recognised as a prima ballerina assoluta. Markova was a founder dancer of the Rambert Dance Company, The Royal Ballet and American Ball...
Go to Profile#7580
Robert Altman
#7590
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He was a five-time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Director and is considered an enduring figure from the New Hollywood era. His most famous directorial achievements include M*A*S*H , McCabe & Mrs. Miller , The Long Goodbye , Nashville , 3 Women , The Player , Short Cuts , and Gosford Park .
Go to Profile#7581
Manfredo do Carmo
#7591
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Manfredo Perdigão do Carmo was a Brazilian mathematician. He spent most of his career at IMPA and is seen as the doyen of differential geometry in Brazil. Education and career Do Carmo studied civil engineering at the University of Recife from 1947 to 1951. After working a few years as engineer, he accepted a teaching position at the newly created Institute of Physics and Mathematics at Recife.
Go to Profile#7582
Joan Clarke
#7592
Overall Influence
1917 - 1996 (79 years)
Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, MBE was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist who worked as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Although she did not personally seek the spotlight, her role in the Enigma project that decrypted the German secret communications earned her awards and citations, such as appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire , in 1946.
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John D. Hawks
#7593
Overall Influence
John Hawks is a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He also maintains a paleoanthropology blog. Contrary to the common view that cultural evolution has made human biological evolution insignificant, Hawks believes that human evolution has sped up in recent history.
Go to Profile#7584
George Hardie
#7594
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
George Hardie is an English graphic designer, illustrator and educator, best known for his work producing cover art for the albums of rock musicians and bands with the British art design group Hipgnosis.
Go to Profile#7585
Alice Crary
#7595
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K. .
Go to Profile#7586
Antony Green
#7596
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Antony John Green is an Australian psephologist and commentator. He is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's chief election analyst. Early years and background Born in Warrington, Lancashire, in northern England, Green emigrated to Australia with his family in 1964. He attended James Ruse Agricultural High School in Sydney, graduating in 1977. Green graduated with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and computing, and a Bachelor of Economics with honours in politics from the University of Sydney. He worked initially as a data analyst in the computing industry and for a polling company before joining the ABC in 1989.
Go to Profile#7587
Sudhir Venkatesh
#7597
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh is an American sociologist and urban ethnographer. He is William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology & African-American Studies at Columbia University, a position he has held since 1999. In his work, Venkatesh has studied gangs and underground economies, public housing, advertising and technology. As of 2018, he is the Director of Signal: The Tech & Society Lab at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#7588
Robert Barnard
#7598
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Robert Barnard was an English crime writer, critic and lecturer. In addition to over 40 books published under his own name, he also published four books under the pseudonym Bernard Bastable. Life and work Robert Barnard was born on 23 November 1936 at Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex. He was educated at the Colchester Royal Grammar School and at Balliol College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#7589
James J. Kilpatrick
#7599
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
James Jackson Kilpatrick was an American newspaper journalist, columnist, author, writer and grammarian. During the 1950s and early 1960s he was editor of The Richmond News Leader in Richmond, Virginia and encouraged the Massive Resistance strategy to oppose the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. For three decades beginning in the mid-1960s, Kilpatrick wrote a nationally syndicated column "A Conservative View", and sparred for years with liberals Nicholas von Hoffman and later Shana Alexander on the tel...
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Axel Leijonhufvud
#7600
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Axel Leijonhufvud was a Swedish economist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles , and professor at the University of Trento, Italy. Leijonhufvud focused his studies on macroeconomic monetary theory. In his defining book On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes he focuses on a critique of the interpretation of Keynesian economic theory by Keynesian economists. He goes on to call the standard neoclassical synthesis interpretation of the Keynes' General Theory as having misunderstood and misinterpreted Keynes. In one of his papers, "Life Among the Econ" ,...
Go to Profile#7591
Kenneth Westhues
#7601
Overall Influence
Kenneth Westhues is a Canadian sociologist. He is a professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of Waterloo, where he was the chair of the department from 1975 to 1978. He is the author or editor of several books about workplace bullying in academia.
Go to Profile#7592
David Turner
#7602
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
David A. Turner was a British computer scientist. He is best known for designing and implementing three programming languages, including the first for functional programming based on lazy evaluation, combinator graph reduction, and polymorphic types: SASL , Kent Recursive Calculator , and the commercially supported Miranda . Miranda had a strong influence on the later Haskell.
Go to Profile#7593
Dale W. Jorgenson
#7603
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Dale Weldeau Jorgenson was the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University, teaching in the department of economics and John F. Kennedy School of Government. He served as chairman of the department of economics from 1994 to 1997.
Go to Profile#7594
Justine Henin
#7604
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Justine Henin is a Belgian former world No. 1 tennis player. She spent a total of 117 weeks as the world No. 1 and was the year-end No. 1 in 2003, 2006 and 2007. Henin, coming from a country with limited success in tennis, helped establish Belgium as a leading force in women's tennis alongside Kim Clijsters, and led the country to its first Fed Cup crown in 2001. She was known for her all-court style of play and for being one of the few female players to use a single-handed backhand.
Go to Profile#7595
Betsey Johnson
#7605
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Betsey Johnson , is an American fashion designer best known for her feminine and whimsical designs. Many of her designs are considered "over the top" and embellished. She also is known for doing a cartwheel ending in a split at the end of her fashion shows.
Go to Profile#7596
Gene H. Golub
#7606
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Gene Howard Golub , was an American numerical analyst who taught at Stanford University as Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and held a courtesy appointment in electrical engineering. Personal life Born in Chicago, he was educated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, receiving his B.S. , M.A. and Ph.D. all in mathematics. His M.A. degree was more specifically in Mathematical Statistics. His PhD dissertation was entitled "The Use of Chebyshev Matrix Polynomials in the Iterative Solution of Linear Equations Compared to the Method of Successive Overrelaxation" and his thesis adviser was Abraham Taub.
Go to Profile#7597
Alva Noë
#7607
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Alva Noë is an American philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. The focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. In addition to these problems in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, he is interested in analytic phenomenology, the theory of art, Ludwig Wittgenstein, enactivism, and the origins of analytic philosophy.
Go to Profile#7598
Donald Kennedy
#7608
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Donald Kennedy was an American scientist, public administrator, and academic. He served as Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration , President of Stanford University , and Editor-in-Chief of Science . Following this, he was named president emeritus of Stanford University; Bing Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, emeritus; and senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Go to Profile#7599
Marina von Neumann Whitman
#7609
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Marina von Neumann Whitman is an American economist, writer and former automobile executive. She is a professor of business administration and public policy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business as well as The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
Go to Profile#7600
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#7610
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a British and American novelist and screenwriter. She is best known for her collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of film director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant.
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