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
#7701
Bruno Mars
#7711
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Peter Gene Hernandez , known professionally as Bruno Mars, is an American singer-songwriter and record producer. He is known for his stage performances, retro showmanship, and for performing in a wide range of musical styles, including pop, R&B, funk, soul, reggae, disco, and rock. Mars is accompanied by his band, the Hooligans, who play a variety of instruments, such as electric guitar, bass, piano, keyboards, drums, and horns, and also serve as backup singers and dancers.
Go to Profile#7702
Joshua Knobe
#7712
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
#7703
Richard N. Frye
#7713
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Richard Nelson Frye was an American scholar of Iranian and Central Asian studies, and Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Harvard University. His professional areas of interest were Iranian philology and the history of Iran and Central Asia before 1000 CE.
Go to Profile#7704
Olga Ladyzhenskaya
#7714
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya was a Russian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations, fluid dynamics, and the finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations. She received the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 2002. She is the author of more than two hundred scientific works, among which are six monographs.
Go to Profile#7705
Susan N. Herman
#7715
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Susan N. Herman is an American legal scholar who served as president of the American Civil Liberties Union from October 2008 to January 2021. Herman has taught at Brooklyn Law School since 1980. Early life and education Herman was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island. Herman earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Barnard College in 1968 and a Juris Doctor from the New York University School of Law, where she was a note and comment editor for the New York University Law Review.
Go to Profile#7706
D. A. Carson
#7716
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Donald Arthur Carson is an evangelical biblical scholar. He is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and president and co-founder of the Gospel Coalition. He has written or edited about sixty books and served as president of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2022.
Go to Profile#7707
Yogi Berra
#7717
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra was an American professional baseball catcher who later took on the roles of manager and coach. He played 19 seasons in Major League Baseball , all but the last for the New York Yankees. He was an 18-time All-Star and won 10 World Series championships as a player—more than any other player in MLB history. Berra had a career batting average of .285, while hitting 358 home runs and 1,430 runs batted in. He is one of only six players to win the American League Most Valuable Player Award three times. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball h...
Go to Profile#7708
Erik S. Reinert
#7718
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Erik Steenfeldt Reinert is a Norwegian economist, with development economics, economic history and history of economic policy as his specialties. Biography Reinert was born in Oslo, attended the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland , Harvard University , and Cornell University . Already during his studies, he spent time in Latin America, working with a community development project in the Peruvian Andes, as well as in private industry. In 1972 he founded and later developed a small industrial firm, Matherson-Selig, in Bergamo, Italy. Adding production plants also in Norway and Finland, the company had become the largest of its kind in Europe when Reinert sold it in 1991.
Go to Profile#7709
Ronald Koeman
#7719
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Ronald Koeman is a Dutch professional football manager and former player who is the manager of the Netherlands national team. Koeman scored over 250 goals whilst playing in defence for the majority of his career. Koeman was capable of playing both as a defender and as a midfielder; he frequently played as a sweeper, although he was equally known for his goalscoring, long-range shooting, and accuracy from free kicks and penalties. Because of his goalscoring, he is considered one of the best attacking center backs of all time.
Go to Profile#7710
Klaus Janson
#7720
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Klaus Janson is a German-born American comics artist, working regularly for Marvel Comics and DC Comics and sporadically for independent companies. While he is best known as an inker, Janson has frequently worked as a penciller and colorist.
Go to Profile#7711
Richard Wagner
#7721
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Richard Wagner is a Canadian jurist serving as the 18th and current Chief Justice of Canada since 2017. He previously served as a puisne justice of the Quebec Court of Appeal and of the Supreme Court of Canada . For several months in 2021, following Julie Payette's resignation as Canada's governor general, Wagner was the administrator of the government of Canada as well as chief justice.
Go to Profile#7712
Jonathan Bennett
#7722
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Jonathan Francis Bennett is a philosopher of language and metaphysics, specialist of Kant's philosophy and a historian of early modern philosophy. He has New Zealand citizenship by birth and has since acquired UK and Canadian citizenship.
Go to Profile#7713
Hammond Innes
#7723
Overall Influence
1913 - 1998 (85 years)
Ralph Hammond Innes was a British novelist who wrote over 30 novels, as well as works for children and travel books. Biography Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex, and educated at Feltonfleet School, Cobham, Surrey, where he was head boy, and later at Cranbrook School in Kent. He left in 1931 to work as a journalist, initially with the Financial News. The Doppelganger, his first novel, was published in 1937. In WWII, he served in the Royal Artillery, eventually rising to the rank of Major. During the war, his first books were published, including Wreckers Must Breathe , The Trojan Horse and A...
Go to Profile#7714
Basil Hume
#7724
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
George Basil Haliburton Hume was an English Catholic bishop. He was a monk and priest of the English Benedictine monastery of Ampleforth Abbey and its abbot for 13 years until his appointment as Archbishop of Westminster in 1976. His elevation to a cardinal followed during the same year. From 1979, Hume served also as president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. He held these appointments until his death from cancer in 1999. His final resting place is at Westminster Cathedral in the Chapel of St Gregory and St Augustine.
Go to Profile#7715
Julian Savulescu
#7725
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Julian Savulescu is an Australian philosopher and bioethicist of Romanian origins. He is Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics and director of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at National University of Singapore. He was previously Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and co-director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. He is visiting professorial fellow in Biomedical Ethics at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and distinguished visiting professor in law at Melbourne University since 2017.
Go to Profile#7716
Abraham H. Taub
#7726
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Abraham Haskel Taub was a distinguished American mathematician and physicist who made important contributions to the early development of general relativity, as well as differential geometry and differential equations.
Go to Profile#7717
John Lachs
#7727
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
John Lachs was a Hungarian-born American philosopher. He was Centennial Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, where he began teaching in 1967. Lachs received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1961. His primary focus was on American philosophy and German Idealism.
Go to Profile#7718
W. G. Sebald
#7728
Overall Influence
1944 - 2001 (57 years)
Winfried Georg Sebald , known as W. G. Sebald or Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic. At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was being cited by literary critics as one of the greatest living authors.
Go to Profile#7719
Mohammad-Nabi Sarbolouki
#7729
Overall Influence
Mohammad-Nabi Sarbolouki was a distinguished Iranian biophysicist and polymer chemist and one of the most influential individuals behind modern scientific movement in Iran. He was known as the inventor of a DNA vehicle called "dendrosome". Sarbolouki was one of the main founders and pioneers of nano science, biomaterials, biotechnology and biophysics in Iran.
Go to Profile#7720
Anil Seth
#7730
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Anil Kumar Seth is a British professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. Early life and education Seth was born in England. His father, Bhola Seth, obtained a BSc from Allahabad University in 1945, before migrating from India to the United Kingdom to study engineering at Cardiff. Bhola Seth subsequently obtained a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Sheffield. His mother, Ann Delaney, came from Yorkshire. Seth's family was based in rural Oxfordshire. His father was a research scientist at the Esso Research Centre in Abingdon, and won the veterans' world doub...
Go to Profile#7721
Robert Z. Lawrence
#7731
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Robert Zachary Lawrence is a South Africa-born American economist and Albert L. Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment at John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Go to Profile#7722
Ruth Rendell
#7732
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, was an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries. Rendell is best known for creating Chief Inspector Wexford. A second string of works was a series of unrelated crime novels that explored the psychological background of criminals and their victims. This theme was developed further in a third series of novels, published under the pseudonym Barbara Vine.
Go to Profile#7723
Nnamdi Azikiwe
#7733
Overall Influence
1904 - 1996 (92 years)
Nnamdi Benjamin Azikiwe, , usually referred to as "Zik", was a Nigerian statesman and political leader who served as the 3rd governor-general of Nigeria between 1960 and 1963 and the 1st president of Nigeria during the First Nigerian Republic which existed from 1963 to 1966. Considered a driving force behind the nation's independence, he came to be known as the "father of Nigerian nationalism".
Go to Profile#7724
James Till
#7734
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
James Edgar Till is a University of Toronto biophysicist, best known for demonstrating – with Ernest McCulloch – the existence of stem cells. Early work Till was born in Lloydminster, which is located on the border between Saskatchewan and Alberta. The family farm was located north of Lloydminster, in Alberta; the eastern margin of the farm was the Alberta–Saskatchewan boundary.
Go to Profile#7725
David Oshinsky
#7735
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David M. Oshinsky is an American historian. He is the director of the Division of Medical Humanities at NYU School of Medicine and a professor in the Department of History at New York University. Background Oshinsky graduated from Cornell in 1965 and obtained his PhD from Brandeis University in 1971. He won the annual Pulitzer Prize in History for his 2005 book, Polio: An American Story. Oshinsky’s most recent book, Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital, was published in 2016. His other books include the D.B. Hardeman Prize-winning A Conspiracy S...
Go to Profile#7726
Susan Howe
#7736
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist, and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre . Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.
Go to Profile#7727
John Mighton
#7737
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
John Mighton, OC born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada on October 2, 1957, is a Canadian mathematician, playwright and best-selling author, who is known for his work supporting children's math. Mighton founded JUMP Math as a charity in 2002 and developed the JUMP Math program to address student underachievement in math. Mighton has won national and international awards for his contributions to both Canadian theatre and math education.
Go to Profile#7728
Mary Karr
#7738
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist from East Texas. She is widely noted for her 1995 bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
Go to Profile#7729
Harvey McGregor
#7739
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Harvey McGregor CBE QC was a British barrister and was Warden of New College, Oxford, from 1985 to 1996. Early life The son of William Guthrie Robertson McGregor and Agnes McGregor , McGregor was educated at Inverurie Academy, Scarborough High School, and Queen's College, Oxford, where he held the Hastings Scholarship and graduated BA in 1951, BCL in 1952, MA in 1955, and DCL in 1983.
Go to Profile#7730
Richard Gere
#7740
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Richard Tiffany Gere is an American actor. He began in films in the 1970s, playing a supporting role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and a starring role in Days of Heaven . He came to prominence with his role in the film American Gigolo , which established him as a leading man and a sex symbol. His other films include An Officer and a Gentleman , The Cotton Club , Pretty Woman , Sommersby , Primal Fear , Runaway Bride , I'm Not There , Arbitrage and Norman . For portraying Billy Flynn in the musical Chicago , he won a Golden Globe Award.
Go to Profile#7731
Kim Clijsters
#7741
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Kim Antonie Lode Clijsters is a Belgian former professional tennis player. Clijsters reached the world No. 1 ranking in both singles and doubles, having held both rankings simultaneously in 2003. She won six major titles, four in singles and two in doubles.
Go to Profile#7732
David Wood
#7742
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
David Wood was Centennial Professor of Philosophy, and Joe B. Wyatt Distinguished University Professor, at Vanderbilt University. Wood has taught philosophy in Europe and the United States for over thirty years, and is the author of 16 books. In addition to teaching at Vanderbilt University, he also co-directed a research programme in ecology and spirituality for the Centre for the Study of Religion and Culture.
Go to Profile#7734
Harlan Lane
#7744
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Harlan Lawson Lane was an American psychologist. Lane was the Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and founder of the Center for Research in Hearing, Speech, and Language . His research was focused on speech, Deaf culture, and sign language.
Go to Profile#7735
Tak Wah Mak
#7745
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Tak Wah Mak, is a Canadian medical researcher, geneticist, oncologist, and biochemist. He first became widely known for his discovery of the T-cell receptor in 1983 and pioneering work in the genetics of immunology. In 1995, Mak published a landmark paper on the discovery of the function of the immune checkpoint protein CTLA-4, thus opening the path for immunotherapy/checkpoint inhibitors as a means of cancer treatment. Mak is also the founder of Agios Pharmaceuticals, whose lead compound, IDHIFA®, was approved by the FDA for acute myeloid leukemia in August 2017, becoming the first drug specifically targeting cancer metabolism to be used for cancer treatment.
Go to Profile#7736
Donald Shell
#7746
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Donald L. Shell was an American computer scientist who designed the Shellsort sorting algorithm. He acquired his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Cincinnati in 1959, and published the Shellsort algorithm in the Communications of the ACM in July that same year.
Go to Profile#7737
Assar Lindbeck
#7747
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Carl Assar Eugén Lindbeck was a Swedish professor of economics at Stockholm University and at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics . Lindbeck was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and previously chaired the Academy's prize committee for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was the first Swede to be appointed a foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association, and one of only three Swedes ever.
Go to Profile#7738
Jerome McGann
#7748
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Jerome John McGann is an American academic and textual scholar whose work focuses on the history of literature and culture from the late eighteenth century to the present. Career Educated at Le Moyne College , Syracuse University and Yale University , McGann currently teaches at the University of Virginia , where he arrived after leaving Caltech.
Go to Profile#7739
Vincent Descombes
#7749
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Vincent Descombes is a French philosopher. His major work has been in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Philosophical work Descombes is particularly noted for a lengthy critique in two volumes of the project he calls cognitivism, and which is, roughly, the view current in philosophy of mind that mental and psychological facts can ultimately be treated as, or reduced to, physical facts about the brain.
Go to Profile#7740
Ole Ivar Lovaas
#7750
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Ole Ivar Løvaas was a Norwegian-American clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is most well known for his research on what is now called applied behavior analysis to teach autistic children through prompts, modeling, and positive reinforcement. The therapy is also noted for its use of aversives to reduce undesired behavior, however these are now used less commonly than in the past.
Go to Profile#7741
Wilfred Thesiger
#7751
Overall Influence
1910 - 2003 (93 years)
Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger , also known as Mubarak bin Landan was a British military officer, explorer, and writer. Thesiger's travel books include Arabian Sands , on his foot and camel crossing of the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula, and The Marsh Arabs , on his time living with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq.
Go to Profile#7742
Brendan Frey
#7752
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Brendan John Frey FRSC is a Canadian-born entrepreneur, engineer and scientist. He is Founder and CEO of Deep Genomics, Cofounder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Professor of Engineering and Medicine at the University of Toronto. Frey is a pioneer in the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence methods, their use in accurately determining the consequences of genetic mutations, and in designing medications that can slow, stop or reverse the progression of disease.
Go to Profile#7743
Matt Blaze
#7753
Overall Influence
Matt Blaze is an American researcher who focuses on the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management. He is currently the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, and is on the board of directors of the Tor Project.
Go to Profile#7744
F. W. de Klerk
#7754
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Frederik Willem de Klerk was a South African politician who served as state president of South Africa from 1989 to 1994 and as deputy president from 1994 to 1996. As South Africa's last head of state from the era of white-minority rule, he and his government dismantled the apartheid system and introduced universal suffrage. Ideologically a social conservative and an economic liberal, he led the National Party from 1989 to 1997.
Go to Profile#7745
Kenneth Pomeranz
#7755
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
#7746
Peter C. Gøtzsche
#7756
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Peter Christian Gøtzsche is a Danish physician, medical researcher, and former leader of the Nordic Cochrane Center at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration and has written numerous reviews for the organization. His membership in Cochrane was terminated by its Governing Board of Trustees on 25 September 2018.
Go to Profile#7747
Tomás Eloy Martínez
#7757
Overall Influence
1934 - 2010 (76 years)
Tomás Eloy Martínez was an Argentine journalist and writer. Life and work He was born on July 16, 1934 in San Miguel de Tucumán and is generally considered an influential and innovative figure in Latin America both as journalist and a novelist. Eloy Martínez obtained a degree in Spanish and Latin American literature from the University of Tucumán, and an Masters of Art at the University of Paris.
Go to Profile#7748
J. O. Urmson
#7758
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
James Opie Urmson , was a philosopher and classicist who spent most of his professional career at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was a prolific author and expert on a number of topics including British analytic/linguistic philosophy, George Berkeley, ethics, and Greek philosophy .
Go to Profile#7749
Cornelia Bargmann
#7759
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Cornelia Isabella "Cori" Bargmann is an American neurobiologist. She is known for her work on the genetic and neural circuit mechanisms of behavior using C. elegans, particularly the mechanisms of olfaction in the worm. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and had been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCSF and then Rockefeller University from 1995 to 2016. She was the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative from 2016 to 2022. In 2012 she was awarded the $1 million Kavli Prize, and in 2013 the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Go to Profile#7750
Arnold Schönhage
#7760
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Arnold Schönhage is a German mathematician and computer scientist. Schönhage was professor at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, and also in Tübingen and Konstanz. Together with Volker Strassen, he developed the Schönhage–Strassen algorithm for the multiplication of large numbers that has a runtime of O. For many years, this was the fastest way to multiply large integers, although Schönhage and Strassen predicted that an algorithm with a run-time of N should exist. In 2019, Joris van der Hoeven and David Harvey finally developed an algorithm with this runtime, proving that S...
Go to Profile