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
#7801
Alan Jones
#7811
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Alan Belford Jones AO is an Australian former radio broadcaster. He is a former coach of the Australia national rugby union team and rugby league coach and administrator. He has worked as a school teacher, a speech writer in the office of the Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, and in musical theatre. He has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Queensland, and completed a one-year teaching diploma at Worcester College, Oxford. He has received civil and industry awards.
Go to Profile#7802
Scott Adsit
#7812
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Robert Scott Adsit is an American actor, comedian, and writer. Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, Adsit joined the mainstage cast of Chicago's The Second City in 1994 after attending Columbia College Chicago. He appeared in several revues, including Paradigm Lost for which he won The Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Actor in a Comedy.
Go to Profile#7803
Andrew Cockburn
#7813
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Andrew Myles Cockburn is a British journalist and the Washington, D.C., editor of Harper's Magazine. Early life Born in the London suburb of Willesden in 1947, Cockburn grew up in County Cork, Ireland. His father was Communist author and journalist Claud Cockburn. His mother, Patricia Evangeline Anne , was the granddaughter of British colonial administrator Henry Arthur Blake and British politician George Arbuthnot. . The Cockburns are related to Sir George Cockburn, 10th Baronet, who ordered the Burning of Washington in 1814.
Go to Profile#7804
George van Driem
#7814
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
George "Sjors" van Driem is a Dutch linguist associated with the University of Bern, where he was the chair of Historical Linguistics and directed the Linguistics Institute. He became professor emeritus in 2022.
Go to Profile#7805
David Weatherall
#7815
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Sir David John Weatherall, was a British physician and researcher in molecular genetics, haematology, pathology and clinical medicine. Early life and education David Weatherall was born in Liverpool. He was educated at Calday Grange Grammar School and then attended Medical School at the University of Liverpool where he served as Treasurer of the Liverpool Medical Students Society in 1954.
Go to Profile#7806
Tomoko Ohta
#7816
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
is a Japanese scientist and Professor Emeritus of the National Institute of Genetics. Ohta works on population genetics/molecular evolution and is known for developing the nearly neutral theory of evolution.
Go to Profile#7807
Elizabeth Gilbert
#7817
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Elizabeth Gilbert is an American journalist and author. She is best known for her 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which has sold over 12 million copies and has been translated into over 30 languages. The book was also made into a film of the same name in 2010.
Go to Profile#7808
Bernadine Healy
#7818
Overall Influence
1944 - 2011 (67 years)
Bernadine Patricia Healy was an American cardiologist and the first female director of the National Institutes of Health . During her career, Healy held leadership positions at the Johns Hopkins University, the Cleveland Clinic, Ohio State University, and Harvard University. She was also president of both the American Red Cross and the American Heart Association. She was health editor and columnist for U.S. News & World Report and a well-known commentator in the news media on health issues.
Go to Profile#7809
Asa Kasher
#7819
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Asa Kasher is an Israeli philosopher and linguist working as a Professor at Tel Aviv University. Biography Asa Kasher is the grandson of talmudist Menachem Mendel Kasher. He is noted for authorship of Israel Defense Forces's Code of Conduct, as well as his co-authorship of an amended version of the controversial Hannibal Directive in the 1990s.
Go to Profile#7810
Steven Barnes
#7820
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Steven Barnes is an American science fiction, fantasy, and mystery writer. He has written novels, short fiction, screen plays for television, scripts for comic books, animation, newspaper copy, and magazine articles.
Go to Profile#7811
Dafydd Williams
#7821
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Dafydd "David" Rhys Williams is a Canadian physician, public speaker, author and retired CSA astronaut. Williams was a mission specialist on two Space Shuttle missions. His first spaceflight, STS-90 in 1998, was a 16-day mission aboard Space Shuttle Columbia dedicated to neuroscience research. His second flight, STS-118 in August 2007, was flown by Space Shuttle Endeavour to the International Space Station. During that mission he performed three spacewalks, becoming the third Canadian to perform a spacewalk and setting a Canadian record for total number of spacewalks. These spacewalks combin...
Go to Profile#7812
Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari
#7822
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari is an Iranian philosopher, theologian, hermeneutist and former professor at University of Tehran. He is noted for his idea that "religion-in-itself" is perfect, but not all-encompassing, i.e. it does not possess the answer to every question in life. Formerly a political activist and MP, he retired himself from politics in 1984.
Go to Profile#7813
Péter Frankl
#7823
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Péter Frankl is a mathematician, street performer, columnist and educator, active in Japan. Frankl studied mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and submitted his PhD thesis while still an undergraduate. He holds a PhD degree from the University Paris Diderot as well. He has lived in Japan since 1988, where he is a well-known personality and often appears in the media. He keeps travelling around Japan performing . Frankl won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1971. He has seven joint papers with Paul Erdős, and eleven joint papers with Ronald Graham. His research is in combinatorics, especially in extremal combinatorics.
Go to Profile#7814
Christopher Darden
#7824
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Christopher Allen Darden is an American lawyer, author, and lecturer. He worked for 15 years in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, where he gained national attention as a co-prosecutor in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
Go to Profile#7815
Martin Parr
#7825
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Martin Parr is a British documentary photographer, photojournalist and photobook collector. He is known for his photographic projects that take an intimate, satirical and anthropological look at aspects of modern life, in particular documenting the social classes of England, and more broadly the wealth of the Western world.
Go to Profile#7816
Hany Farid
#7826
Overall Influence
Hany Farid is an American university professor who specializes in the analysis of digital images and the detection of digitally manipulated images such as deepfakes. Farid served as Dean and Head of School for the UC Berkeley School of Information. In addition to teaching, writing, and conducting research, Farid acts as a consultant for non-profits, government agencies, and news organizations. He is the author of the book Photo Forensics .
Go to Profile#7817
Sigmar Polke
#7827
Overall Influence
1941 - 2010 (69 years)
Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer. Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products. In the last 20 years of his life, he produced paintings focused on historical events and perceptions of them.
Go to Profile#7818
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
#7828
Overall Influence
1953 - 2012 (59 years)
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke was a British historian and professor of Western esotericism at the University of Exeter, best known for his authorship of several scholarly books on the history of Germany between the World Wars and Western esotericism.
Go to Profile#7819
Bei Dao
#7829
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Bei Dao is the pen name of the Chinese-American writer Zhao Zhenkai . Among the most acclaimed Chinese-language poets of his generation, he is often regarded as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In addition to poetry, he is the author of short fiction, essays, and a memoir. Known as a dissident, he is a prominent representative of a school of poetry known variously in the West as "Misty" or "Obscure" Poetry.
Go to Profile#7820
Ben Roethlisberger
#7830
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Benjamin Todd Roethlisberger Sr. , nicknamed "Big Ben", is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 18 seasons with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He played college football for the Miami RedHawks, and was selected by the Steelers in the first round of the 2004 NFL Draft.
Go to Profile#7821
Trudy Govier
#7831
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Trudy Rose Govier is a Canadian philosopher known for her work in informal logic and argumentation. She is the author of the influential text A Practical Study of Argument. She has also been a frequent commentator in Canadian media on issues related to violence and conflict resolution.
Go to Profile#7822
Richard Scheller
#7832
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Richard H. Scheller is the former Chief Science Officer and Head of Therapeutics at 23andMe and the former Executive Vice President of Research and Early Development at Genentech. He was a professor at Stanford University from 1982 to 2001 before joining Genentech. He has been awarded the Alan T. Waterman Award in 1989, the W. Alden Spencer Award in 1993 and the NAS Award in Molecular Biology in 1997, won the 2010 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience with Thomas C. Südhof and James E. Rothman, and won the 2013 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Thomas Südhof. He was also given the Life Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award from University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#7823
Ezana of Axum
#7833
Overall Influence
Ezana , was the ruler of the Kingdom of Aksum . One of the best-documented rulers of Aksum, Ezana is important as he is the country's first king to embrace Christianity and make it the official religion. Tradition states that Ezana succeeded his father Ella Amida as king while still a child but his mother, Sofya then served as regent until he came of age.
Go to Profile#7824
Andy Gavin
#7834
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Andrew Scott Gavin is an American video game programmer, entrepreneur, and novelist. Gavin co-founded the video game company Naughty Dog with childhood friend Jason Rubin in 1986, which released games including Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter. Prior to founding Naughty Dog, Gavin worked in LISP at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Go to Profile#7825
Shriram Krishnamurthi
#7835
Overall Influence
Shriram Krishnamurthi is a computer scientist, currently a professor of computer science at Brown University and a member of the core development group for the Racket programming languages, responsible for creation of software packages including the Debugger, the FrTime package, and the networking library. Since 2006, Krishnamurthi has been a leading contributor to the Bootstrap curriculum, a project to integrate computer science education into grades 6–12.
Go to Profile#7826
Richard Long
#7836
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sir Richard Julian Long, is an English sculptor and one of the best-known British land artists. Long is the only artist to have been short-listed four times for the Turner Prize. He was nominated in 1984, 1987 and 1988, and then won the award in 1989 for White Water Line. He lives and works in Bristol, the city in which he was born.
Go to Profile#7827
Fred L. Block
#7837
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Fred L. Block is an American sociologist, and Research Professor of Sociology at UC Davis. Block is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading economic and political sociologists. His interests are wide ranging. He has been noted as an influential follower of Karl Polanyi.
Go to Profile#7828
Gregory Schopen
#7838
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Gregory Schopen is Professor of Buddhist Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. He received his B.A. majoring in American literature from Black Hills State College, M.A. in history of religions from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and Ph.D. in South Asian and Buddhist studies from the Australian National University in Canberra. His Ph.D thesis is titled "Bhaisajyaguru-sutra and the Buddhism of Gilgit."
Go to Profile#7829
John Bollinger
#7839
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John A. Bollinger is an American author, financial analyst, contributor to the field of technical analysis and the developer of Bollinger Bands. His book Bollinger on Bollinger Bands , has been translated into eleven languages. Since 1987, he has published the Capital Growth Letter, a newsletter which provides technical analysis of the financial markets.
Go to Profile#7830
Milt Gabler
#7840
Overall Influence
1911 - 2001 (90 years)
Milton Gabler was an American record producer, responsible for many innovations in the recording industry of the 20th century. These included being the first person to deal in record reissues, the first to sell records by mail order, and the first to credit all the musicians on the recordings.
Go to Profile#7831
Rolf Widerøe
#7841
Overall Influence
1902 - 1996 (94 years)
Rolf Widerøe was a Norwegian accelerator physicist who was the originator of many particle acceleration concepts, including the resonance accelerator and the betatron accelerator. Early life Widerøe was born in Kristiania in 1902 as a son of the mercantile agent Theodor Widerøe and Carla Johanne Launer . He was a brother of the aviator and entrepreneur Viggo Widerøe who became the founder of the Norwegian airline Widerøe. After his A-level exams in the summer of 1920 at the Halling School in Oslo, Widerøe left for the university of Karlsruhe, Germany, to study electrical engineering.
Go to Profile#7832
Michael J. Hopkins
#7842
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michael Jerome Hopkins is an American mathematician known for work in algebraic topology. Life He received his PhD from Northwestern University in 1984 under the direction of Mark Mahowald, with thesis Stable Decompositions of Certain Loop Spaces. Also in 1984 he also received his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Ioan James. He has been professor of mathematics at Harvard University since 2005, after fifteen years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a few years of teaching at Princeton University, a one-year position with the University of Chicago, and ...
Go to Profile#7833
Jack Kirby
#7843
Overall Influence
1917 - 1994 (77 years)
Jack Kirby was an American comic book artist, widely regarded as one of the medium's major innovators and one of its most prolific and influential creators. He grew up in New York City and learned to draw cartoon figures by tracing characters from comic strips and editorial cartoons. He entered the nascent comics industry in the 1930s, drawing various comics features under different pen names, including Jack Curtiss, before ultimately settling on Jack Kirby. In 1940, he and writer-editor Joe Simon created the highly successful superhero character Captain America for Timely Comics, predecessor of Marvel Comics.
Go to Profile#7834
Eugene Jarvis
#7844
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Eugene Peyton Jarvis is an American game designer and video game programmer, known for producing pinball machines for Atari and video games for Williams Electronics. Most notable among his works are the seminal arcade video games Defender and Robotron: 2084 in the early 1980s, and the Cruis'n series of driving games for Midway Games in the 1990s. He co-founded Vid Kidz in the early 1980s and currently leads his own development studio, Raw Thrills Inc. In 2008, Eugene Jarvis was named the first Game Designer in Residence by DePaul University's Game Development program. His family owns the Jar...
Go to Profile#7835
Alexandre Chorin
#7845
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Alexandre Joel Chorin is an American mathematician known for his contributions to computational fluid mechanics, turbulence, and computational statistical mechanics. Chorin's work involves developing methods for solving physics and fluid mechanics problems computationally. His early work introduced several widely used numerical methods for solving the Navier-Stokes equations, including the method of artificial compressibility, the projection method, and vortex methods. He has made numerous contributions to turbulence theory. In recent years he has been developing methods for prediction in the...
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Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi
#7846
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi , born Gioacchino Lanza Branciforte Ramirez, was an Italian musicologist and academic. He directed a number of cultural institutions, including the Teatro di San Carlo, the Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New York.
Go to Profile#7837
Thomas Lengauer
#7847
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Thomas Lengauer is a German computer scientist and computational biologist. Education Lengauer studied Mathematics at the Free University of Berlin, earning his Diploma in 1975 and a Dr. rer. nat. in 1976. Lengauer later gained an MSc and a PhD in computer science, both from Stanford University. He received his habilitation degree in computer science at Saarland University in 1984.
Go to Profile#7838
Gary Sick
#7848
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Gary G. Sick is an American academic and analyst of Middle East affairs, with special expertise on Iran, who served on the U.S. National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and for a couple weeks under Reagan as well. He has authored three books, and is perhaps best known to the wider public for voicing support for elements of the 1980 October Surprise theory regarding the Iran hostage crisis and that year's presidential election.
Go to Profile#7839
Jeffrey Rosen
#7849
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jeffrey Rosen is an American academic and commentator on legal affairs, who is widely published on legal issues and constitutional law. Since 2013, he has served as the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia.
Go to Profile#7840
Barbara Cartland
#7850
Overall Influence
1901 - 2000 (99 years)
Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland, was an English writer, known as the Queen of Romance, who published both contemporary and historical romance novels, the latter set primarily during the Victorian or Edwardian period. Cartland is one of the best-selling authors worldwide of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#7841
Nicolas Anelka
#7851
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Nicolas Sébastien Anelka is a French professional football manager and retired player who played as a forward. As a player, he regularly featured in his country's national team, often scoring at crucial moments. Known for his ability to both score and assist goals, he has been described as a classy and quick player, with good aerial ability, technique, shooting, and movement off the ball, and was capable of playing both as a main striker and as a second striker.
Go to Profile#7842
Robert Califf
#7852
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert McKinnon Califf is an American cardiologist who currently serves as the 25th Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. He was first nominated to be commissioner in September 2015 by President Barack Obama and he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in February 2016, serving until January 20, 2017.
Go to Profile#7843
Ernst Specker
#7853
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Ernst Paul Specker was a Swiss mathematician. Much of his most influential work was on Quine's New Foundations, a set theory with a universal set, but he is most famous for the Kochen–Specker theorem in quantum mechanics, showing that certain types of hidden variable theories are impossible. He also proved the ordinal partition relation ω2 → 2, thereby solving a problem of Erdős.
Go to Profile#7844
Julia Roberts
#7854
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Julia Fiona Roberts is an American actress. Known for her leading roles in films encompassing a variety of genres, she has received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and three Golden Globe Awards. The films in which she has starred have collectively grossed over $3.9 billion globally, making her one of Hollywood's most bankable stars.
Go to Profile#7845
John C. Butcher
#7855
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
John Charles Butcher is a New Zealand mathematician who specialises in numerical methods for the solution of ordinary differential equations. Butcher works on multistage methods for initial value problems, such as Runge-Kutta and general linear methods. The Butcher group and the Butcher tableau are named after him. More recently, he is investigating a new type of method with stability identical to that of a Runge-Kutta method.
Go to Profile#7846
Kinji Imanishi
#7856
Overall Influence
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Kinji Imanishi was a Japanese ecologist and anthropologist. He was the founder of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute and, together with Junichiro Itani, is considered one of the founders of Japanese primatology.
Go to Profile#7847
Sia
#7857
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Sia Kate Isobelle Furler is an Australian singer and songwriter. Born and raised in Adelaide, she started her career as a singer in the acid jazz band Crisp in the mid-1990s. When Crisp disbanded in 1997, she released her debut studio album, OnlySee, in Australia. She moved to London and provided vocals for the British duo Zero 7. Sia released her second studio album, Healing Is Difficult, in 2001, and her third, Colour the Small One, in 2004.
Go to Profile#7848
Mike Cowlishaw
#7858
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Mike Cowlishaw is a visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is a retired IBM Fellow, and was a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the British Computer Society. He was educated at Monkton Combe School and the University of Birmingham.
Go to Profile#7849
Patricia Bath
#7859
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Patricia Era Bath was an American ophthalmologist and humanitarian. She became the first female member of the Jules Stein Eye Institute, the first woman to lead a post-graduate training program in ophthalmology, and the first woman elected to the honorary staff of the UCLA Medical Center. Bath was the first African-American to serve as a resident in ophthalmology at New York University. She was also the first African-American woman to serve on staff as a surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center. Bath was the first African-American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical purpose. A holder of ...
Go to Profile#7850
Joan Jonas
#7860
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Joan Jonas is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, and one of the most important artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Her influences also extended to conceptual art, theatre, performance art and other visual media. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.
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