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
#7901
Ralph McQuarrie
#7911
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Ralph Angus McQuarrie was an American conceptual designer and illustrator. His career included work on the original Star Wars trilogy, the original Battlestar Galactica television series, the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the film Cocoon, for which he won an Academy Award.
Go to Profile#7902
Alun Munslow
#7912
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Alun Munslow was a British historian known for his deconstructionist and postmodernist approach to historiography. He was Professor Emeritus of History and Historical Theory at Staffordshire University. He was also Visiting Professor at the University of Chichester. His argument is that prior to engaging with the past historians need to acknowledge that the past and history do not share the same ontic and epistemic space. He suggests that the past is the time before our perpetual present and 'history' is that range of authored narratives we substitute for it. Munslow suggests that the consequ...
Go to Profile#7903
Bobbie Ann Mason
#7913
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Bobbie Ann Mason is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky. Her memoir was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Early life and education A child of Wilburn and Christianna Mason, Bobbie Ann Mason grew up on her family's dairy farm outside of Mayfield, Kentucky, with four siblings and her great niece Mya Mason. As a child she loved to read with encouragement from her parents; however, choices were limited. These books were mostly popular fiction about the Bobbsey Twins and the Nancy Drew mysteries. She would later write a book about these books s...
Go to Profile#7904
Noriko H. Arai
#7914
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Noriko H. Arai is a Japanese researcher in mathematical logic and artificial intelligence, known for her work on a project to develop robots that can pass the entrance examinations for the University of Tokyo. She is a professor in the information and society research division of the National Institute of Informatics.
Go to Profile#7905
Clive Spash
#7915
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Clive L. Spash is an ecological economist. He currently holds the Chair of Public Policy and Governance at Vienna University of Economics and Business, appointed in 2010. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Environmental Values.
Go to Profile#7906
Diane Duane
#7916
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Diane Duane is an American science fiction and fantasy author, long based in Ireland. Her works include the Young Wizards young adult fantasy series and the Rihannsu Star Trek novels. Biography Born in New York City, she grew up in Roosevelt, Long Island. After school, she studied nursing and practiced as a psychiatric nurse for two years until 1976, when she moved to California and worked as an assistant to David Gerrold. Her first novel was published by Dell Books in 1979; Gerrold wrote an "overture" to that novel, on the grounds that he'd rather be making overtures than introductions to Duane's work.
Go to Profile#7907
Nigel Shadbolt
#7917
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Tim Berners-Lee. He is also a visiting professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Shadbolt is an interdisciplinary researcher, policy expert and commentator. His research focuses on understanding how intelligent behaviour is embodied and emerges in humans, machines and, most recently, on the Web, and has made contribut...
Go to Profile#7908
Bernhard Hassenstein
#7918
Overall Influence
1922 - 2016 (94 years)
Bernhard Hassenstein was a German biologist and psychobiologist. Life and work Bernhard Hassenstein was a student of behavioral physiologist Erich von Holst and one of the leading researchers in the fields of behavioral biology and bio-cybernetics. His scientific work includes substantial contributions to the understanding of motion perception in insects and color vision in humans.
Go to Profile#7909
Charles Tomlinson
#7919
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Alfred Charles Tomlinson, CBE was an English poet, translator, academic, and illustrator. He was born in Penkhull, and grew up in Basford, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. Life After attending Longton High School, Tomlinson read English at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied with Donald Davie. After leaving university he taught for several years in Camden Town, London, followed by a brief period as secretary to Percy Lubbock in Italy, before returning to London as an M.A. student at Royal Holloway, University of London. He subsequently taught for thirty-six years in the English Department of Bristol University, where he became Emeritus Professor.
Go to Profile#7910
Donald Henderson
#7920
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Donald Ainslie Henderson was an American medical doctor, educator, and epidemiologist who directed a 10-year international effort that eradicated smallpox throughout the world and launched international childhood vaccination programs. From 1977 to 1990, he was Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Later, he played a leading role in instigating national programs for public health preparedness and response following biological attacks and national disasters. At the time of his death, he was Professor and Dean Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Pro...
Go to Profile#7911
Suze Rotolo
#7921
Overall Influence
1943 - 2011 (68 years)
Susan Elizabeth Rotolo , known as Suze Rotolo , was an American artist, and the girlfriend of Bob Dylan from 1961 to 1964. Dylan later acknowledged her strong influence on his music and art during that period. Rotolo is the woman walking with him on the cover of his 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, a photograph by the Columbia Records studio photographer Don Hunstein. In her book A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, Rotolo described her time with Dylan and other figures in the folk music and bohemian scene in Greenwich Village, New York. She discussed her upbringing as a "red diaper" baby; a child of Communist Party USA members during the McCarthy Era.
Go to Profile#7912
Ludovico Geymonat
#7922
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
Ludovico Geymonat was an Italian mathematician, philosopher and historian of science. As a philosopher, he mainly dealt with philosophy of science, epistemology and Marxist philosophy, in which he gave an original turn to dialectical materialism.
Go to Profile#7913
Maria Tallchief
#7923
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Elizabeth Marie Tallchief, "Two-Standards" was an American ballerina. She was considered America's first major prima ballerina. She was the first Native American to hold the rank, and is said to have revolutionized ballet.
Go to Profile#7914
Dean Wooldridge
#7924
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Dean Everett Wooldridge was a prominent engineer in the aerospace industry. Something of a prodigy, Wooldridge graduated from high school at the age of 14. He received his bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Oklahoma. Like his future colleague Simon Ramo, Wooldridge went on to study at the California Institute of Technology under William Smythe, from which he received his PhD in physics in 1936, studying the separation of isotopes.
Go to Profile#7915
Averil Cameron
#7925
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Dame Averil Millicent Cameron , often cited as A. M. Cameron, is a British historian. She writes on Late Antiquity, Classics, and Byzantine Studies. She was Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at the University of Oxford, and the Warden of Keble College, Oxford, between 1994 and 2010.
Go to Profile#7916
Fawaz Gerges
#7926
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Fawaz A. Gerges is a Lebanese-American academic and author with expertise on the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy, international relations, Al Qaeda, and relations between the Islamic and Western worlds.
Go to Profile#7917
Jeffrey A. Harvey
#7927
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jeffrey A. Harvey is an American string theorist at the University of Chicago. Scientific contributions Among Harvey's many contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he is one of the co-discoverers of the heterotic string, along with David Gross, Emil Martinec, and Ryan Rohm. The four physicists were colloquially known as the "Princeton string quartet".
Go to Profile#7918
Dieter Fox
#7928
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Dieter Fox is a German-American roboticist and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. He received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Bonn in 1998. He is most notable for his contributions to several fields including robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and ubiquitous computing. Together with Wolfram Burgard and Sebastian Thrun he is a co-author of the book Probabilistic Robotics.
Go to Profile#7919
Thom Hartmann
#7929
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Thomas Carl Hartmann is an American radio personality, author, businessman, and progressive political commentator. Hartmann has been hosting a nationally syndicated radio show, The Thom Hartmann Program, since 2003 and hosted a nightly television show, The Big Picture, between 2010 and 2017.
Go to Profile#7920
Christina Paxson
#7930
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Christina Hull Paxson is an American economist and public health expert serving as the 19th president of Brown University. Previously, she was the Hughes Rogers Professor of Economics & Public Affairs at Princeton University as well as the dean of Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Go to Profile#7921
Sarah Ruhl
#7931
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Sarah Ruhl is an American playwright, professor, and essayist. Among her most popular plays are Eurydice , The Clean House , and In the Next Room . She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a distinguished American playwright in mid-career. Two of her plays have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and she received a nomination for Tony Award for Best Play. In 2020, she adapted her play Eurydice into the libretto for Matthew Aucoin's opera of the same name. Eurydice was nominated for Best Opera Record...
Go to Profile#7922
Loren Mosher
#7932
Overall Influence
1933 - 2004 (71 years)
Loren Richard Mosher was an American psychiatrist, clinical professor of psychiatry, expert on schizophrenia and the chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia in the National Institute of Mental Health . Mosher spent his professional career advocating for humane and effective treatment for people diagnosed as having schizophrenia and was instrumental in developing an innovative, residential, home-like, non-hospital, non-drug treatment model for newly identified acutely psychotic persons.
Go to Profile#7923
Michael White
#7933
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Michael White is a British journalist who was until 2016 an associate editor of The Guardian. He is the paper's former political editor. Early and personal life White was raised in Wadebridge, Cornwall. He was educated at Bodmin Grammar School and then studied for a BA in history at University College London.
Go to Profile#7924
Stuart Card
#7934
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Stuart K. Card is an American researcher and retired senior research fellow at Xerox PARC. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of applying human factors in human–computer interaction. With Jock D. Mackinlay, George G. Robertson and others he invented a number of Information Visualization techniques. He holds numerous patents in user interfaces and visual analysis.
Go to Profile#7925
Segun Toyin Dawodu
#7935
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Segun Toyin Dawodu is a Nigerian Physiatrist and lawyer with the WellSpan Health, he served as an Associate Professor of Pain Medicine at Albany Medical College. Dawodu contributed to the peer-reviewed articles on the diagnosis and management of Spinal Cord Injury, Cauda Equina and Conus Medullaris Syndromes, Swallowing Disorders Traumatic Brain Injury, and chapter in Comprehensive Pain Management in the Rehabilitation Patient. In 1998, he established dawodu.com, a website on Nigeria's socio-political issues and one of the earliest blogs in 1997 on Nigeria.
Go to Profile#7926
Steve Whitmire
#7936
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Steven Lawrence Whitmire is an American puppeteer, known primarily for his work on The Muppets and Sesame Street. Beginning his involvement with the Muppets in 1978, Whitmire inherited the roles of Ernie and Kermit the Frog after Jim Henson's death in 1990; he performed the characters until 2014 and 2016, respectively. As part of the Muppet cast, he has appeared in multiple feature films and television series, performing a variety of characters on The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and Fraggle Rock and during such occupations has been employed by The Jim Henson Company, Sesame Workshop, and The ...
Go to Profile#7927
Christopher Greenwood
#7937
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Sir Christopher John Greenwood is Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and a former British judge at the International Court of Justice. Prior to his election, he was professor of international law at the London School of Economics and a barrister who regularly appeared as counsel before the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, the English courts, and other tribunals.
Go to Profile#7928
Ian La Frenais
#7938
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Ian La Frenais is an English writer best known for his creative partnership with Dick Clement. They are most famous for television series including The Likely Lads, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Porridge and its sequel Going Straight, Lovejoy and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
Go to Profile#7929
Robert A. Emmons
#7939
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Robert A. Emmons is an American psychologist and professor at UC Davis . His research is in the field of personality psychology, emotion psychology, and psychology of religion. Background Emmons completed his undergraduate psychology degree in 1980 at the University of Southern Maine, Portland. He then obtained a M.A. in 1984 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in personality psychology, and a Ph.D., in the same subject from the same university in 1986, with a thesis "Personal Strivings: An Approach to Personality and Subjective Well-Being". He was an assistant professor at Michigan State University from 1986 to 1988 and came to Davis at the same rank in 1988.
Go to Profile#7930
Frank Gaffney
#7940
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is an American anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist and the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy. In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked for the federal government in multiple posts, including seven months as Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan administration.
Go to Profile#7931
Mark Ptashne
#7941
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Mark Ptashne is a molecular biologist. He is the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Ptashne grew up in Chicago. He earned his undergraduate degree at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1961 and his PhD from Harvard in 1968, after which he joined the faculty of Harvard. He was made professor there in 1971 and became chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1980. In 1993 he was awarded an endowed chair, and in 1997 he left Harvard for MSK.
Go to Profile#7932
Werner Herzog
#7942
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Werner Herzog is a German film director, screenwriter, author, actor, and opera director, regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema. His films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature. His filmmaking process includes disregarding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing the cast and crew into similar situations to characters in his films.
Go to Profile#7933
Mohamed Morsi
#7943
Overall Influence
1951 - 2019 (68 years)
Mohamed Mohamed Morsi Eissa al-Ayyat was an Egyptian politician, engineer, and professor who served as the fifth president of Egypt, from 2012 to 2013, when General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removed him from office in a coup d'état after protests in June. An Islamist affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood organization, Morsi led the Freedom and Justice Party from 2011 to 2012.
Go to Profile#7934
Les Greenberg
#7944
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Leslie Samuel Greenberg is a Canadian psychologist born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is one of the originators and primary developers of Emotion-Focused Therapy for individuals and couples. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at York University in Toronto, and also director of the Emotion-Focused Therapy Clinic in Toronto. His research has addressed questions regarding empathy, psychotherapy process, the therapeutic alliance, and emotion in human functioning.
Go to Profile#7935
Serge Latouche
#7945
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Serge Latouche is a French emeritus professor of economics at the University of Paris-Sud. He holds a degree in political sciences, philosophy and economy. Work Latouche is a specialist in North-South economic and cultural relations, and in the epistemology of the social sciences. He has developed a critical theory towards economic orthodoxy. He denounces economism, utilitarianism in social sciences, consumer society and the notion of sustainable development. He particularly criticizes the notions of economic efficiency and economic rationalism. He is one of the thinkers and most renowned partisans of the degrowth theory.
Go to Profile#7936
John Severin
#7946
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
John Powers Severin was an American comics artist noted for his distinctive work with EC Comics, primarily on the war comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat; for Marvel Comics, especially its war and Western comics; and for his 45-year stint with the satiric magazine Cracked. He was one of the founding cartoonists of Mad in 1952.
Go to Profile#7937
John Chamberlain
#7947
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
John Rensselaer Chamberlain was an American journalist, business and economic historian, syndicated columnist, and literary critic who was dubbed "one of America's most trusted book reviewers" by the libertarian magazine The Freeman.
Go to Profile#7938
Joel David Hamkins
#7948
Overall Influence
Joel David Hamkins is an American mathematician and philosopher who is O'Hara Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. He has made contributions in mathematical and philosophical logic, set theory and philosophy of set theory , in computability theory, and in group theory.
Go to Profile#7939
Chungliang Al Huang
#7949
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Chungliang “Al” Huang is a Taiwanese philosopher, dancer, performing artist,taijiquan master and educator. He is the founder-president of the Living Tao Foundation in Oregon, US, and the International Lan Ting Institute, in China.
Go to Profile#7940
Ed Stelmach
#7950
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Edward Michael Stelmach is a Canadian politician who served as the 13th premier of Alberta, from 2006 to 2011. The grandson of Ukrainian immigrants, Stelmach was born and raised on a farm near Lamont and fluently speaks the distinctive Canadian dialect of Ukrainian. He spent his entire pre-political adult life as a farmer, except for some time spent studying at the University of Alberta. His first foray into politics was a 1986 municipal election, when he was elected to Lamont County council. A year into his term, he was appointed reeve. He continued in this position until his entry into pr...
Go to Profile#7941
Jake Nava
#7951
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jake Nava is a British director, mostly known for his work in music videos for Beyoncé, Arctic Monkeys, Adele, Britney Spears and The Rolling Stones. He also directs TV commercials, notably for Guinness and Levi Strauss & Co.
Go to Profile#7942
Theodore Lidz
#7952
Overall Influence
1910 - 2001 (91 years)
Theodore Lidz was an American psychiatrist best known for his articles and books on the causes of schizophrenia and on psychotherapy with patients with schizophrenia. An advocate of research into environmental causes of mental illness, Lidz was a notable critic of what he saw as a disproportionate focus on biological psychiatry. Lidz was a Sterling Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University. In his lifetime, he did a great amount of research on interpersonal causes of schizophrenia.
Go to Profile#7943
Muhsin Mahdi
#7953
Overall Influence
1926 - 2007 (81 years)
Muḥsin Sayyid Mahdī al-Mashhadani was an Iraqi-American Islamologist and Arabist. He was a leading authority on Arabian history, philology, and philosophy. His best-known work was the first critical edition of the One Thousand and One Nights.
Go to Profile#7944
Günther Jakobs
#7954
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Günther Jakobs , is a German jurist, specializing in criminal law, criminal procedural law and philosophy of law. Jakobs studied legal sciences in Cologne, Kiel and Bonn, and in 1967 he graduated from the University of Bonn with a thesis on criminal law and competition doctrine.
Go to Profile#7945
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann
#7955
Overall Influence
1916 - 2010 (94 years)
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann was a German political scientist. Her most famous contribution is the model of the spiral of silence, detailed in The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our Social Skin. The model is an explanation of how perceived public opinion can influence individual opinions or actions.
Go to Profile#7946
Lee Giles
#7956
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Clyde Lee Giles is an American computer scientist and the David Reese Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. He is also Graduate Faculty Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Courtesy Professor of Supply Chain and Information Systems, and Director of the Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory. He was Interim Associate Dean of Research in the College of IST. His graduate degrees are from the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona and his undergraduate degrees are from Rhodes College and the University of Tennessee.
Go to Profile#7947
Pat Morin
#7957
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Patrick Ryan Morin is a Canadian computer scientist specializing in computational geometry and data structures. He is a professor in the School of Computer Science at Carleton University. Education and career Morin was educated at Carleton University, earning a bachelor's degree with highest honours in 1996, a master's degree in 1998, and a Ph.D. in 2001. His dissertation, Online Routing in Geometric Graphs, was jointly supervised by Jit Bose and Jörg-Rüdiger Sack. After postdoctoral research at McGill University, he returned to Carleton University as a faculty member in 2002.
Go to Profile#7948
James M. Bardeen
#7958
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
James Maxwell Bardeen was an American physicist, well known for his work in general relativity, particularly his role in formulating the laws of black hole mechanics. He also discovered the Bardeen vacuum, an exact solution of the Einstein field equation.
Go to Profile#7949
Françoise Sagan
#7959
Overall Influence
1935 - 2004 (69 years)
Françoise Sagan was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Sagan was known for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois characters. Her best-known novel was her first – Bonjour Tristesse – which was written when she was a teenager.
Go to Profile#7950
Philip Nel
#7960
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Philip W. Nel is an American scholar of children's literature and University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University. He is best known for his work on Dr. Seuss and Harry Potter, which has led to him being a guest on such media programs as CBS Sunday Morning, NPR's Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, and CNN's Don Lemon Tonight.
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