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
#7851
Jonathan Gruber
#7861
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Jonathan Holmes Gruber is an American professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992. He is also the director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a research associate. An associate editor of both the Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Health Economics, Gruber has been heavily involved in crafting public health policy.
Go to Profile#7852
Boris Feigin
#7862
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Boris Lvovich Feigin is a Russian mathematician. His research has spanned representation theory, mathematical physics, algebraic geometry, Lie groups and Lie algebras, conformal field theory, homological and homotopical algebra.
Go to Profile#7853
Kati Marton
#7863
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Kati Marton is a Hungarian-American author and journalist. Her career has included reporting for ABC News as a foreign correspondent and National Public Radio, where she started as a production assistant in 1971, as well as print journalism and writing a number of books.
Go to Profile#7854
James McGaugh
#7864
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
James L. McGaugh is an American neurobiologist and author working in the field of learning and memory. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine and a fellow and founding director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.
Go to Profile#7855
Mark S. Cohen
#7865
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mark Steven Cohen is an American neuroscientist and early pioneer of functional brain imaging using magnetic resonance imaging. He currently is a Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, Radiology, Psychology, Biomedical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the Staglin Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He is also a performing musician.
Go to Profile#7856
Thomas P. Moran
#7866
Overall Influence
Thomas P. Moran is a Distinguished Engineer at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. He has been active in the field of human computer interaction for a very long time. In 1983 the book he wrote along with Stuart Card and Allen Newell The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction was published. It became a very influential book in the field, partly for introducing the Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection rules model.
Go to Profile#7857
Pico Iyer
#7867
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Siddharth Pico Raghavan Iyer , known as Pico Iyer, is a British-born essayist and novelist known chiefly for his travel writing. He is the author of numerous books on crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. He has been a contributor to Time, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times.
Go to Profile#7858
Ciprian Foias
#7868
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Ciprian Ilie Foiaș was a Romanian-American mathematician. He was awarded the Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics in 1995, for his contributions in operator theory. Education and career Born in Reșița, Romania, Foias studied mathematics at the University of Bucharest. He completed his dissertation in 1957, but was not allowed to defend his thesis by the Communist government until 1962. He received his doctorate in 1962 under supervision of Miron Nicolescu.
Go to Profile#7859
Milan Kangrga
#7869
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Milan Kangrga was a Croatian and Yugoslav philosopher who was one of the leading thinkers in the Praxis School of thought which originated in the 1960s in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Go to Profile#7860
Tung-Yen Lin
#7870
Overall Influence
1912 - 2003 (91 years)
Tung-Yen Lin was a Chinese-American structural engineer who was the pioneer of standardizing the use of prestressed concrete. Biography Born in Fuzhou, Republic of China , as the fourth of eleven children, he was raised in Beijing where his father was a justice of the ROC's Supreme Court. He did not begin formal schooling until age 11, and only so because his parents forged his birth year to be 1911 so that he would qualify. At only 14, entered Jiaotong University's Tangshan Engineering College , having earned the top score in math and the second best score overall in the college entrance exams for his entering class.
Go to Profile#7861
Joe Clark
#7871
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Charles Joseph Clark is a Canadian businessman, writer, and politician who served as the 16th prime minister of Canada from 1979 to 1980. Despite his relative inexperience, Clark rose quickly in federal politics, entering the House of Commons in the 1972 election and winning the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1976. He won a minority government in the 1979 election, defeating the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau and ending sixteen years of continuous Liberal rule. Taking office the day before his 40th birthday, Clark is the youngest person to become Prime Minister.
Go to Profile#7862
Larry Crabb
#7872
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Lawrence J. Crabb, Jr. was an American Christian counselor, author, Bible teacher, spiritual director, and seminar speaker. Crabb wrote several best-selling books and was the founder and director of New Way Ministries and co-founder of his legacy ministry, Larger Story. He served as a Spiritual Director for the American Association of Christian Counselors and taught at several different Christian colleges, including Colorado Christian University.
Go to Profile#7863
Naum Ya. Vilenkin
#7873
Overall Influence
1920 - 1991 (71 years)
Naum Yakovlevich Vilenkin was a Soviet mathematician, an expert in representation theory, the theory of special functions, functional analysis, and combinatorics. He is best known as the author of many books in recreational mathematics aimed at middle and high school students.
Go to Profile#7864
Cynthia Solomon
#7874
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Cynthia Solomon is an American computer scientist known for her work in popularizing computer science for students. She is a pioneer in the fields of computer science, and educational computing. While working as a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Solomon took it upon herself to understand and program in the programming language Lisp. As she began learning this language, she realized the need for a programming language that was more accessible and understandable for children. Throughout her research studies in education, Solomon worked full-time as a computer teacher in elementary and secondary schools.
Go to Profile#7865
Roberto Mancini
#7875
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Roberto Mancini is an Italian football manager and former player. He is the head coach of the Saudi Arabia national team. As a player, Mancini operated as a deep-lying forward, and was best known for his time at Sampdoria, where he played more than 550 matches, and helped the team win the Serie A league title, four Coppa Italia titles, and the European Cup Winners' Cup. He was capped 36 times for Italy, taking part at UEFA Euro 1988 and the 1990 FIFA World Cup, achieving semi-final finishes in both tournaments, although he was never put onto the pitch during the 1990 tournament. In 1997, aft...
Go to Profile#7866
Satyajit Ray
#7876
Overall Influence
1921 - 1992 (71 years)
Satyajit Ray was an Indian director, screenwriter, documentary filmmaker, author, essayist, lyricist, magazine editor, illustrator, calligrapher, and composer. Ray is not only widely considered one of the greatest and most influential Indian directors of all time but has been often described as "one of the world's greatest directors". He is celebrated for works including The Apu Trilogy , The Music Room , The Big City and Charulata and the Goopy–Bagha trilogy.
Go to Profile#7867
Michele Parrinello
#7877
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Michele Parrinello is an Italian physicist particularly known for his work in molecular dynamics . Parrinello and Roberto Car were awarded the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics and the Sidney Fernbach Award in 2009 for their continuing development of the Car–Parrinello method, first proposed in their seminal 1985 paper, "Unified Approach for Molecular Dynamics and Density-Functional Theory". They have continued to receive awards for this breakthrough, most recently the Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences and the 2020 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry.
Go to Profile#7868
Jacob Cohen
#7878
Overall Influence
1923 - 1998 (75 years)
Jacob Cohen was an American psychologist and statistician best known for his work on statistical power and effect size, which helped to lay foundations for current statistical meta-analysis and the methods of estimation statistics. He gave his name to such measures as Cohen's kappa, Cohen's d, and Cohen's h.
Go to Profile#7869
Gary Westfahl
#7879
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gary Wesley Westfahl is an American scholar of science fiction. He has written reviews for the Los Angeles Times, The Internet Review of Science Fiction and Locus Online. He worked at the University of California, Riverside until 2011 and is now an adjunct professor at the University of La Verne.
Go to Profile#7870
Richard Saul Wurman
#7880
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Richard Saul Wurman is an American architect and graphic designer. Wurman has written, designed, and published 90 books and created the TED conferences, the EG Conference, and TEDMED. Education and honors Wurman received both his B.Arch. and M.Arch. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, completing his graduate degree with honors in 1959.
Go to Profile#7871
Burne Hogarth
#7881
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
Burne Hogarth was an American artist and educator, best known for his work on the Tarzan newspaper comic strip and his series of anatomy books for artists. Early life Hogarth was born in Chicago in 1911, the younger son of Pauline and carpenter Max He displayed an early talent for drawing. His father saved these efforts and some years later presented them and the young Hogarth to the registrar at the Art Institute of Chicago. At age 12, Hogarth was admitted, embarking on a formal education that took him through such institutions as Chicago's Crane College and Northwestern University, and New...
Go to Profile#7872
Saidiya Hartman
#7882
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Saidiya Hartman is an American writer and academic focusing on African-American studies. She is currently a University Professor at Columbia University in their English department. Her work focuses on African-American literature, cultural history, photography and ethics, and the intersections of law and literature.
Go to Profile#7873
Hubert Curien
#7883
Overall Influence
1924 - 2005 (81 years)
Hubert Curien was a French physicist and a key figure in European science politics, as the President of CERN Council , the first chairman of the European Space Agency , and second President of the Academia Europæa and a President of Fondation de France.
Go to Profile#7874
Rolf Huisgen
#7884
Overall Influence
1920 - 2020 (100 years)
Rolf Huisgen was a German chemist. His importance in synthetic organic chemistry extends to the enormous influence he had in post-war chemistry departments in Germany and Austria, due to a large number of his habilitants becoming professors. His major achievement was the development of the 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reaction, also called the Huisgen cycloaddition.
Go to Profile#7875
Hiroki Azuma
#7885
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Hiroki Azuma is a Japanese cultural critic, novelist, and philosopher. He is the co-founder and former director of Genron, an independent institute in Tokyo, Japan. Biography Azuma was born in Mitaka, Tokyo. Azuma received his PhD in Culture and Representation from the University of Tokyo in 1999 and became a professor at the International University of Japan in 2003. He was an Executive Research Fellow and Professor at the Center for Global Communications and a Research Fellow at Stanford University's Japan Center. Since 2006, he has been working at the Center for Study of World Civilizatio...
Go to Profile#7876
Richard Lewis
#7886
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Richard Philip Lewis is an American actor, writer, and retired stand-up comedian. He came to prominence in the 1980s and became known for his dark, neurotic and self-deprecating humor. As an actor he is known for co-starring with Jamie Lee Curtis in the sitcom Anything but Love, for playing the role of Prince John in the film Robin Hood: Men in Tights and for his recurring role as a semi-fictionalized version of himself in HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Go to Profile#7877
Raphael Bousso
#7887
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Raphael Bousso is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He is a professor at the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics in the Department of Physics, UC Berkeley. He is known for the Bousso bound on the information content of the universe. With Joseph Polchinski, Bousso proposed the string theory landscape as a solution to the cosmological constant problem.
Go to Profile#7878
Adam Maida
#7888
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Adam Joseph Maida is an American cardinal prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. Maida served as the archbishop of the Archdiocese of Detroit in Michigan from 1990 to 2009, and was elevated to cardinal in 1994. Maida previously served as bishop of the Diocese of Green Bay in Wisconsin from 1984 to 1990.
Go to Profile#7879
Henry T. Yang
#7889
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Henry Tzu-Yow Yang is a Chinese American mechanical engineer, university administrator, and the fifth and current chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, a post he has held since 1994.
Go to Profile#7880
David Hemenway
#7890
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David Hemenway is a Professor of Health Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in economics. He is the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center. He is also currently a James Marsh Visiting Professor-at-Large at the University of Vermont. Hemenway has written over 130 articles and five books in the fields of economics and public health.
Go to Profile#7881
Nathaniel C. Comfort
#7891
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Nathaniel Charles Comfort is an American historian specializing in the history of biology. He is an associate professor in the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. In 2015, he was appointed the third Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center. He also serves on the advisory council of METI .
Go to Profile#7882
William A. Tiller
#7892
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
William A. Tiller was a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University. He wrote Science and Human Transformation, a book about concepts such as subtle energies beyond the four fundamental forces, which he believes act in concert with human consciousness. Tiller appeared in the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!?.
Go to Profile#7883
Xavier Leroy
#7893
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Xavier Leroy is a French computer scientist and programmer. He is best known for his role as a primary developer of the OCaml system. He is Professor of software science at Collège de France. Before his appointment at Collège de France in 2018, he was senior scientist at the French government research institution Inria.
Go to Profile#7884
Andrew J. Nathan
#7894
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Andrew J. Nathan is a professor of political science at Columbia University. He specializes in Chinese politics, foreign policy, human rights and political culture. Nathan attended Harvard University, where he earned a B.A. in history, an M.A. in East Asian studies, and a Ph.D. in political science. He has taught at Columbia University since 1971, and currently serves as the chair of the steering committee for the Center for the Study of Human Rights. His previous appointments include as the chair of the Department of Political Science , and chair of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute .
Go to Profile#7885
Moni Naor
#7895
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Moni Naor is an Israeli computer scientist, currently a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Naor received his Ph.D. in 1989 at the University of California, Berkeley. His advisor was Manuel Blum.
Go to Profile#7886
T. K. Seung
#7896
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
T. K. Seung was a Korean American philosopher and literary critic. His academic interests cut across diverse philosophical and literary subjects, including ethics, political philosophy, Continental philosophy, cultural hermeneutics, and literary criticism.
Go to Profile#7887
Paul Foot
#7897
Overall Influence
1937 - 2004 (67 years)
Paul Mackintosh Foot was a British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party . Early life and education Foot was born in Haifa during the British mandate.
Go to Profile#7888
Douglas Murray
#7898
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Douglas Murray is a British author and political commentator. He founded the Centre for Social Cohesion in 2007, which became part of the Henry Jackson Society, where he was associate director from 2011 to 2018. He is currently an associate editor of the conservative British political and cultural magazine The Spectator.
Go to Profile#7889
Noam Nisan
#7899
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Noam Nisan is an Israeli computer scientist, a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is known for his research in computational complexity theory and algorithmic game theory.
Go to Profile#7890
Nicholas Humphrey
#7900
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Nicholas Keynes Humphrey is an English neuropsychologist based in Cambridge, known for his work on evolution of primate intelligence and consciousness. He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda; he was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" after brain damage in monkeys; he proposed the theory of the "social function of intellect". He is the only scientist to have edited the literary journal Granta.
Go to Profile#7891
Daniel Thalmann
#7901
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Prof. Daniel Thalmann is a Swiss and Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer in Virtual humans. He is currently Honorary Professor at EPFL, Switzerland and Director of Research Development at MIRALab Sarl in Geneva, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#7892
Ziauddin Yousafzai
#7902
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Ziauddin Yousafzai is a Pakistani education activist best known as the father of Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, who protested against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan opposition to the education rights of girls, especially for Pakistani girls.
Go to Profile#7893
Harry Reid
#7903
Overall Influence
1939 - 2021 (82 years)
Harry Mason Reid Jr. was an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States senator from Nevada from 1987 to 2017. He led the Senate Democratic Caucus from 2005 to 2017 and was the Senate Majority Leader from 2007 to 2015.
Go to Profile#7894
Jim Gettys
#7904
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jim Gettys is an American computer programmer. He was involved in multiple computer related projects. Activity Gettys worked at DEC's Cambridge Research Laboratory. Until January 2009, he was the Vice President of Software at the One Laptop per Child project, working on the software for the OLPC XO-1.
Go to Profile#7895
Julian Rappaport
#7905
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Julian Rappaport is an American psychologist who introduced the concept of empowerment into social work and social psychiatry. He is a recipient of the American Psychological Association's Division of Community Psychology Distinguished Career Award and of the Seymour B. Sarason Award for "novel and critical rethinking of basic assumptions and approaches to human services, education, and other areas of community research and action."
Go to Profile#7896
Jackie Kay
#7906
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jacqueline Margaret Kay, , is a Scottish poet, playwright, and novelist, known for her works Other Lovers , Trumpet and Red Dust Road . Kay has won many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1994, the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998 and the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011.
Go to Profile#7897
Philip E. Tetlock
#7907
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Philip E. Tetlock is a Canadian-American political science writer, and is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Go to Profile#7898
Stuart R. Schram
#7908
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Stuart Reynolds Schram was an American physicist, political scientist and sinologist who specialised in the study of modern Chinese politics. He was particularly well known for his works on the life and thought of Mao Zedong.
Go to Profile#7899
Gillian Clarke
#7909
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet and playwright, who also edits, broadcasts, lectures and translates from Welsh into English. She co-founded Tŷ Newydd, a writers' centre in North Wales. Life Gillian Clarke was born on 8 June 1937 in Cardiff.
Go to Profile#7900
Charles C. Ragin
#7910
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Charles C. Ragin is Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Biography Born , Ragin graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin in May 1972. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at age 22 in 1975.
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