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
#7601
David Kertzer
#7611
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David Israel Kertzer is an American anthropologist, historian, and academic, specializing in the political, demographic, and religious history of Italy. He is the Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University. His book The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. From July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2011, Kertzer served as Provost at Brown.
Go to Profile#7602
Harry B. Gray
#7612
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Harry Barkus Gray is the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology. Career Gray received his B.S. in chemistry from Western Kentucky University in 1957. He began his work in inorganic chemistry at Northwestern University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1960 working under Fred Basolo and Ralph Pearson. He was initiated into the Upsilon chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma at Northwestern University in 1958. After that, he spent a year as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, where, along with Walter A. Manch, he collaborated with Carl J. Ballhaus...
Go to Profile#7603
Shlomo Sawilowsky
#7613
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Shlomo S. Sawilowsky was a professor of educational statistics and Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he has received teaching, mentoring, and research awards.
Go to Profile#7604
Gary Taubes
#7614
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Gary Taubes is an American journalist, writer, and low-carbohydrate / high-fat diet advocate. His central claim is that carbohydrates, especially sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, overstimulate the secretion of insulin, causing the body to store fat in fat cells and the liver, and that it is primarily a high level of dietary carbohydrate consumption that accounts for obesity and other metabolic syndrome conditions. He is the author of Nobel Dreams ; Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion ; Good Calories, Bad Calories , titled The Diet Delusion in the UK and Australia; ...
Go to Profile#7605
Christopher Zeeman
#7615
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman FRS , was a British mathematician, known for his work in geometric topology and singularity theory. Overview Zeeman's main contributions to mathematics were in topology, particularly in knot theory, the piecewise linear category, and dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#7606
Michiel Hazewinkel
#7616
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Michiel Hazewinkel is a Dutch mathematician, and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science and the University of Amsterdam, particularly known for his 1978 book Formal groups and applications and as editor of the Encyclopedia of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#7607
George Schaller
#7617
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
George Beals Schaller is an American mammalogist, biologist, conservationist and author. Schaller is recognized by many as the world's preeminent field biologist, studying wildlife throughout Africa, Asia and South America. Born in Berlin, Schaller grew up in Germany, but moved to Missouri as a teen. He is vice president of Panthera Corporation and serves as chairman of their Cat Advisory Council. Schaller is also a senior conservationist at the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
Go to Profile#7608
Derald Wing Sue
#7618
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Derald Wing Sue is a professor of counseling psychology at Columbia University. He has authored several books, including Counseling the Culturally Diverse: Theory and Practice, Overcoming our Racism, and Understanding Abnormal Behavior.
Go to Profile#7609
Eric Reissner
#7619
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Max Erich Reissner was a German-American civil engineer and mathematician, and Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was recipient of the Theodore von Karman Medal in 1964, and the ASME Medal in 1988
Go to Profile#7610
Elliot Turiel
#7620
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Elliot Turiel is a psychologist and Chancellor’s Professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches courses on human development and its relation to education. He was born in Rhodes, Greece.
Go to Profile#7611
Jasper Kim
#7621
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jasper Kim is an attorney, author, media contributor, professor, and expert in international business law, negotiation strategy , and contemporary East–West issues and trends from a socio-economic and legal perspective.
Go to Profile#7612
Bruno Frey
#7622
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Bruno S. Frey is a Swiss economist and visiting professor for Political Economy at the University of Basel. Frey's research topics include Political economy and Happiness economics, with his published work including concepts derived from Psychology, Sociology, Jurisprudence, History, Arts, and Theology.
Go to Profile#7613
Robert F. Christy
#7623
Overall Influence
1916 - 2012 (96 years)
Robert Frederick Christy was a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and later astrophysicist who was one of the last surviving people to have worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He briefly served as acting president of California Institute of Technology .
Go to Profile#7614
Jacinto Convit
#7624
Overall Influence
1913 - 2014 (101 years)
Jacinto Convit García was a Venezuelan physician and scientist, known for developing a vaccine to prevent leprosy and his studies to treat cancer. He played a role in founding Venezuela's National Institute of Biomedicine and held many leprosy-related positions. Among Convit's many honors for his work on leprosy and tropical diseases was Spain's Prince of Asturias Award in the Scientific and Technical Research category and France's Legion of Honor. In 1988, Convit was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his experimental anti-leprosy vaccine.
Go to Profile#7615
Candace Owens
#7625
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Owens has been influential in the conservative movement, particularly among young people. She is a vocal critic of the left-wing and has been credited with helping to shape the conservative movement’s message.
Go to Profile#7616
Duncan Haldane
#7626
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Frederick Duncan Michael Haldane , known as F. Duncan Haldane, is a British-born physicist who is currently the Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He is a co-recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with David J. Thouless and J. Michael Kosterlitz.
Go to Profile#7617
Mircea Cărtărescu
#7627
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mircea Cărtărescu is a Romanian novelist, poet, short-story writer, literary critic, and essayist. Biography Born in Bucharest in 1956, he attended Cantemir Vodă National College during the early 1970s. During his school years, he was a member of literary groups led by Nicolae Manolescu and Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu. At that time, along with many teenagers of his generation, Cărtărescu was tremendously influenced by the legacy of the 1960s American counterculture, including artists such as Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and The Doors. He commenced writing poetry in 1978.
Go to Profile#7618
Richard Greenblatt
#7628
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Richard D. Greenblatt is an American computer programmer. Along with Bill Gosper, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds a place of distinction in the communities of the programming language Lisp and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Go to Profile#7619
Warren Montag
#7629
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Warren Montag is a professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. He is known primarily for his work on twentieth-century French theory, especially Althusser and his circle, as well as his studies of the philosophers Spinoza, Locke, and Hobbes.
Go to Profile#7620
Subrata Roy
#7630
Overall Influence
Subrata Roy is an Indian-born inventor, educator, and scientist known for his work in plasma-based flow control and plasma-based self-sterilizing technology. He is a professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida and the founding director of the Applied Physics Research Group at the University of Florida.
Go to Profile#7621
Suelette Dreyfus
#7631
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Suelette Dreyfus is a technology researcher, journalist, and lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, as well as the principal researcher on the impact of digital technologies on whistleblowing as a form of freedom of expression. Her research includes information systems, digital security, privacy, and the impact of technology on whistleblowing, health informatics and e-education.
Go to Profile#7622
Buddhadeb Dasgupta
#7632
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Buddhadeb Dasgupta was an Indian filmmaker and poet best known for his Bengali-language films like Bagh Bahadur, Tahader Katha, Charachar and Uttara. Five of his films have won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film, Bagh Bahadur , Charachar , Lal Darja , Mondo Meyer Upakhyan and Kaalpurush , while Dooratwa and Tahader Katha have won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Bengali. As a director, he has won National Film Award for Best Direction twice, for Uttara and Swapner Din . Over the years he has published several works of poetry including Govir Araley, Coffin Kimba ...
Go to Profile#7623
June Huh
#7633
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
June Huh is an American mathematician who is currently a professor at Princeton University. Previously, he was a professor at Stanford University. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022. He has been noted for the linkages that he has found between algebraic geometry and combinatorics.
Go to Profile#7624
Tony Benn
#7634
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn , known between 1960 and 1963 as The 2nd Viscount Stansgate, was a British Labour Party politician who served as a Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the Member of Parliament for Bristol South East and Chesterfield for 47 of the 51 years between 1950 and 2001. He later served as President of the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 to 2014.
Go to Profile#7625
William C. Wimsatt
#7635
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
William C. Wimsatt is professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy, the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science , and the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. He is currently a Winton Professor of the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota and Residential Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. He specializes in the philosophy of biology, where his areas of interest include reductionism, heuristics, emergence, scientific modeling, heredity, and cultural evolution.
Go to Profile#7626
Richard E. Besser
#7636
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Richard E. Besser is an American doctor and executive who has served as president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation since April 2017. Besser served as the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry from January to June 2009. He was ABC News' former chief health and medical editor. Besser is a brother-in-law to Scottish singer Annie Lennox.
Go to Profile#7627
Steven Shaviro
#7637
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Steven Shaviro is an American academic, philosopher, and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film theory, time, science fiction, panpsychism, capitalism, affect and subjectivity. He earned a B.A. in English in 1975, M.A. in English in 1978, and a Ph.D. in English in 1981, all from Yale University. From 1984 to 2004, he was a professor of English at the University of Washington, and since 2004 teaches film, culture and English at Wayne State University, where he is the DeRoy Professor of English.
Go to Profile#7628
Karim Benzema
#7638
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Karim Mostafa Benzema is a French professional footballer who plays as a striker for and captains Saudi Pro League club Al-Ittihad. Regarded as one of the best strikers of all time, he is a creative forward renowned for his goal-scoring ability, as well as his technical skills, vision, and versatility on the field. He is Real Madrid's all-time second-highest goalscorer and top assist provider. Benzema won 24 trophies with Real Madrid, including four La Liga, three Copa del Rey, and five UEFA Champions League titles.
Go to Profile#7629
Harry Shum
#7639
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Heung-Yeung "Harry" Shum is a Chinese computer scientist. He was a doctoral student of Raj Reddy. He was the Executive Vice President of Artificial Intelligence & Research at Microsoft. He is known for his research on computer vision and computer graphics, and for the development of the search engine Bing.
Go to Profile#7630
Stephen Neale
#7640
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Stephen Roy Albert Neale is a British philosopher and specialist in the philosophy of language who has written extensively about meaning, information, interpretation, and communication, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. Neale is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York .
Go to Profile#7631
Lawrence W. Sherman
#7641
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Lawrence W. Sherman is an American experimental criminologist and police educator who is the founder of evidence-based policing. Sherman's use of randomized controlled experiments to study deterrence and crime prevention has led him to examine such wide-ranging issues as domestic violence, saturation patrol, gun violence, crack houses, and reintegrative shaming. He has collaborated with over 30 police and justice agencies around the world, and been credited as a key founder of the field of experimental criminology.
Go to Profile#7632
John Ikenberry
#7642
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Gilford John Ikenberry is a theorist of international relations and United States foreign policy, and the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is known for his work on liberal International Relations theory, such as the books After Victory and Liberal Leviathan . He has been described as "the world's leading scholar of the liberal international order."
Go to Profile#7633
Annette Lareau
#7643
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Annette Patricia Lareau is a sociologist working at the University of Pennsylvania. She has completed extensive field work studying the daily lives of African-Americans and European-Americans. She is also credited with the creation of the term concerted cultivation. This concept refers to middle class child rearing practices. She says that this differs from the parents of children in working-class families, who attribute much of their child raising tactics to the accomplishment of natural growth.
Go to Profile#7634
Ann Morning
#7644
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Ann Juanita Morning is an American sociologist and demographer whose research focuses on race. In particular, she has studied racial and ethnic classification on censuses worldwide, as well as beliefs about racial difference in the United States and Western Europe. Much of her work examines how contemporary science—particularly the field of genetics—influences how we conceptualize race.
Go to Profile#7635
Michael W. Doyle
#7645
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Michael W. Doyle is an American international relations scholar who is a theorist of the liberal "democratic peace" and author of Liberalism and World Politics. He has also written on the comparative history of empires and the evaluation of UN peace-keeping. He is a University professor of International Affairs, Law and Political Science at Columbia University - School of International and Public Affairs. He is the former director of Columbia Global Policy Initiative. He co-directs the Center on Global Governance at Columbia Law School.
Go to Profile#7636
Sidney Kingsley
#7646
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Sidney Kingsley was an American dramatist. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Men in White in 1934. Life and career Kingsley was born Sidney Kirschner in New York. He studied at Cornell University, where he began his career writing plays for the college dramatic club. He joined the Group Theater for the production of his first major work. In 1933 the company performed his play Men in White. Set in a hospital, the play dealt with the issue of illegal abortion, 1930s medical and surgical practices, and the struggle of one promising physician who must choose to dedicate his life to medicine or devote himself to his fiancée.
Go to Profile#7637
Daniel Sleator
#7647
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Daniel Dominic Kaplan Sleator is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States. In 1999, he won the ACM Paris Kanellakis Award for the splay tree data structure.
Go to Profile#7638
Justin Kruger
#7648
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Justin S. Kruger is an American social psychologist and professor at New York University Stern School of Business. Education Kruger received his BS in Psychology from Santa Clara University in 1993 , and received his PhD in Social Psychology from Cornell University in 1999.
Go to Profile#7639
Jeffrey Hart
#7649
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Jeffrey Peter Hart was an American cultural critic, essayist, columnist, and Professor Emeritus of English at Dartmouth College. Life and career Hart was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. After two years as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, he transferred to Columbia University, where he joined the Philolexian Society and obtained his AB and PhD, both in English literature.
Go to Profile#7640
Ricky Martin
#7650
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Enrique Ricky Martín Morales is a Puerto Rican singer and songwriter. He is known for his musical versatility, with his discography incorporating a wide variety of many elements, such as Latin pop, dance, reggaeton, salsa, and other genres. Born in San Juan, Martin began appearing in television commercials at age nine and began his musical career at twelve, as a member of Puerto Rican boy band Menudo. He began his solo career in 1991 while in Sony Music Mexico, gaining recognition in Latin America with the release of his first two studio albums, Ricky Martin and Me Amaras , both of which wer...
Go to Profile#7641
Walter Kiechel
#7651
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Walter Kiechel III is an author and business journalist. He has served as Managing Editor of Fortune magazine and as the editorial director of Harvard Business School Publishing, producer of the Harvard Business Review. His most recent work is The Lords of Strategy, which The Wall Street Journal has described as a "clear, deft and cogent" history of the management consulting industry.
Go to Profile#7642
Douglas E. Cowan
#7652
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Douglas Edward Cowan is a Canadian academic in religious studies and the sociology of religion and currently holds a teaching position at Renison University College, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Prior to this appointment he was Assistant Professor of Sociology & Religious Studies at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
Go to Profile#7643
Franz Josef Radermacher
#7653
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Franz Josef Radermacher is a German mathematician and economist. He is Professor of Informatics at Ulm University. He is one of the co-founders of the Global Marshall Plan Initiative that suggests a socio-ecological plan to eradicate poverty, increasing global wealth while protecting natural resources.
Go to Profile#7644
Bernardine Evaristo
#7654
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Go to Profile#7645
Jeff Grubb
#7655
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Jeff Grubb is an author of novels, short stories, and comics, as well as a computer and role-playing game designer in the fantasy genre. Grubb worked on the Dragonlance campaign setting under Tracy Hickman, and the Forgotten Realms setting with Ed Greenwood. His written works include The Finder's Stone Trilogy, the Spelljammer and Jakandor campaign settings, and contributions to Dragonlance and the computer game Guild Wars Nightfall .
Go to Profile#7646
Ali Ghodsi
#7656
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ali Ghodsi is an Iranian-Swedish AI leader, computer scientist and entrepreneur specializing in distributed systems and big data. He is a co-founder and CEO of Databricks and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley. Ideas from his academic research in the area of resource management and scheduling and data caching have been applied in popular open source projects such as Apache Mesos, Apache Spark, and Apache Hadoop.
Go to Profile#7647
Fintan O'Toole
#7657
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Fintan O'Toole is an Irish polemicist, literary editor, journalist and drama critic for The Irish Times, for which he has written since 1988. O'Toole was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001 and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is also an author, literary critic, historical writer and political commentator.
Go to Profile#7648
David Hirshleifer
#7658
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David Hirshleifer is an American economist. He is a professor of finance and currently holds the Merage chair in Business Growth at the University of California at Irvine. As of 2018 he became President-Elect of the American Finance Association. In 2017, he was elected as Vice President of the American Finance Association and assigned as research associate to National Bureau of Economic Research. He was previously a professor at the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, and UCLA. His research is mostly related to behavioral finance and informational cascades. In 2007, he was on the...
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Dizzy Gillespie
#7659
Overall Influence
1917 - 1993 (76 years)
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, educator and singer. He was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuosic style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic and rhythmic complexity previously unheard in jazz. His combination of musicianship, showmanship, and wit made him a leading popularizer of the new music called bebop. His beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, scat singing, bent horn, pouched cheeks, and light-hearted personality have made him an enduring icon.
Go to Profile#7650
Börje Langefors
#7660
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
Börje Langefors was a Swedish engineer and computer scientist, Emeritus Professor of Business Information Systems at the Department of Computer and Systems Science, Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and "one of those who made systems development a science."
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