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
#7951
Victor Klee
#7961
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Victor LaRue Klee, Jr. was a mathematician specialising in convex sets, functional analysis, analysis of algorithms, optimization, and combinatorics. He spent almost his entire career at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Go to Profile#7952
Juan Martín del Potro
#7962
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Juan Martín del Potro is an Argentinian professional tennis player. Del Potro's biggest achievement is winning the 2009 US Open singles title, where he defeated Rafael Nadal in the semifinals and the five-time defending champion Roger Federer in the final. He was the only man outside the Big Three to win a major between the 2005 Australian Open and the 2012 US Open, a span of 30 tournaments. Del Potro's other career highlights include reaching the 2018 US Open final, winning an Olympic bronze medal in singles at the 2012 London Olympics and the silver medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics, winning Indian Wells in 2018, and leading Argentina to the 2016 Davis Cup title.
Go to Profile#7953
Alan Brinkley
#7963
Overall Influence
1949 - 2019 (70 years)
Alan Brinkley was an American political historian who taught for over 20 years at Columbia University. He was the Allan Nevins Professor of History until his death. From 2003 to 2009, he was University Provost.
Go to Profile#7954
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi
#7964
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Haifa, Israel. In 1970 Beit-Hallahmi received a PhD in clinical psychology from Michigan State University. Bibliography
Go to Profile#7955
Steven M. Greer
#7965
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Steven Macon Greer is an American ufologist and retired physician who founded the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Disclosure Project, which seeks the disclosure of alleged classified UFO information.
Go to Profile#7956
Don Pardo
#7966
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Dominick George "Don" Pardo Jr. was an American radio and television announcer whose career spanned more than seven decades. A member of the Television Hall of Fame, Pardo was noted for his 70-year tenure with NBC, working as the announcer for early incarnations of such notable shows as The Price Is Right, Jackpot, Jeopardy!, Three on a Match, Winning Streak and NBC Nightly News. His longest, and best-known, announcing job was for NBC's Saturday Night Live, a job he held for 38 seasons, from the show's debut in 1975 until his death in 2014.
Go to Profile#7957
Phil Hendrie
#7967
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Philip Stephen Hendrie is an American radio personality and actor. He is widely known for his voiceover talent throughout the radio and film industry. He came to prominence in the 1990s hosting The Phil Hendrie Show, a radio talk show where he portrayed both himself as a calm, rational host while simultaneously portraying any of several outrageous and offensive characters who would engage in debates with Hendrie and callers to the show.
Go to Profile#7958
Ruqaiya Hasan
#7968
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Ruqaiya Hasan was a professor of linguistics who held visiting positions and taught at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University in Sydney, from which she retired as emeritus professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation. The latter involved the devising of extensive semantic system networks for the analysis of meaning in naturally occurring dialogues.
Go to Profile#7959
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga
#7969
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga is a French former professional tennis player. He was ranked as high as world No. 5 by the Association of Tennis Professionals , which he achieved in February 2012. Tsonga won 18 singles titles on the ATP Tour, including two Masters 1000 titles.In his early career, Tsonga won the 2003 US Open junior singles title and was the ATP Newcomer of the Year for 2007. He rose to fame by reaching the 2008 Australian Open final as an unseeded player, defeating four seeded players en route. He followed by winning his first Masters title at the 2008 Paris Masters, and reached the final of the 2011 ATP Finals.
Go to Profile#7960
Adrian Vermeule
#7970
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule is an American legal scholar who is currently the Ralph S. Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. He is an expert on constitutional and administrative law, and, since 2016, has voiced support for Catholic integralism. He has articulated this into his theory of common-good constitutionalism.
Go to Profile#7961
Jay Leno
#7971
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
James Douglas Muir Leno is an American television host, writer and comedian. After doing stand-up comedy for years, he became the host of NBC's The Tonight Show from 1992 until 2009 when Conan O'Brien took over as host. Beginning in September 2009, Leno started a primetime talk show, The Jay Leno Show, which aired weeknights at 10:00p.m. ET, also on NBC. When O'Brien turned down NBC's offer to have Leno host a half hour monologue show before The Tonight Show to boost ratings amid reported viewership diminishing, it led to the 2010 Tonight Show conflict which resulted in Leno returning to hosting the show on March 1, 2010.
Go to Profile#7962
Henry Baker
#7972
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Henry Givens Baker Jr. is an American computer scientist who has made contributions in garbage collection, functional programming languages, and linear logic. He was one of the founders of Symbolics, a company that designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines. In 2006 he was recognized as a Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Go to Profile#7963
Jia Tolentino
#7973
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Jia Angeli Carla Tolentino is an American writer and editor. A staff writer for The New Yorker, she previously worked as deputy editor of Jezebel and a contributing editor at The Hairpin. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Pitchfork. In 2019, her collected essays were published as Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.
Go to Profile#7964
Michael Schumacher
#7974
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Michael Schumacher is a German former racing driver who competed in Formula One for Jordan, Benetton, Ferrari, and Mercedes. Schumacher has a joint-record seven World Drivers' Championship titles and, at the time of his retirement from the sport in 2012, he held the records for the most wins , pole positions , and podium finishes —which have since been broken by Hamilton—while he maintains the record for the number of total fastest laps , among others.
Go to Profile#7965
David Quantick
#7975
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
David Quantick is an English novelist, comedy writer and critic, who has worked as a journalist and screenwriter. A former freelance writer for the music magazine NME, his writing credits have included On the Hour, Blue Jam and TV Burp. He won an Emmy Award for Veep in 2015.
Go to Profile#7966
Emmet G. Sullivan
#7976
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Emmet Gael Sullivan is an American attorney and jurist serving as a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Howard University. He worked in private practice for more than a decade at Houston & Gardner, becoming a name partner in 1980. He was appointed to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan, to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals as an Associate Judge in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush, and to the federal bench in 1994 by Preside...
Go to Profile#7967
Peter J. Bowler
#7977
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Peter J. Bowler is a historian of biology who has written extensively on the history of evolutionary thought, the history of the environmental sciences, and on the history of genetics. His 1984 book, Evolution: The History of an Idea is a standard textbook on the history of evolution; a 25th anniversary edition came in 2009. His 1983 book The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 describes the scientific predominance of other evolutionary theories which led many to minimise the significance of natural selection, in the first part of the twentieth...
Go to Profile#7968
Don Daglow
#7978
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Don Daglow is an American video game designer, programmer, and producer. He is best known for being the creator of early games from several different genres, including pioneering simulation game Utopia for Intellivision in 1981, role-playing game Dungeon in 1975, sports games including the first interactive computer baseball game Baseball in 1971, and the first graphical MMORPG, Neverwinter Nights in 1991. He founded long-standing game developer Stormfront Studios in 1988.
Go to Profile#7969
Enrique Iglesias
#7979
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Enrique Miguel Iglesias Preysler is a Spanish singer and songwriter. He started his recording career in the mid-1990s on the Mexican label Fonovisa and became the bestselling Spanish-language act of the decade. By the turn of the millennium, he made a successful crossover into the mainstream English-language market. He signed a multi-album deal with Universal Music Group for US$68 million with Universal Music Latino to release his Spanish albums and Interscope Records to release English albums.
Go to Profile#7970
Nan Laird
#7980
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Nan McKenzie Laird is the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of Public Health, Emerita in Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She served as Chair of the Department from 1990 to 1999. She was the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Biostatistics from 1991 to 1999. Laird is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, as well as the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is a member of the International Statistical Institute.
Go to Profile#7971
Apostolos Doxiadis
#7981
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Apostolos K. Doxiadis is a Greek writer. He is best known for his international bestsellers Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture and Logicomix . Early life Doxiadis was born in Australia, where his father, the architect Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis was working. Soon after his birth, the family returned to Athens, where Doxiadis grew up. Though his earliest interests were in poetry, fiction and the theatre, an intense interest in mathematics led Doxiadis to leave school at age fifteen, to attend Columbia University, in New York, from which he obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics. ...
Go to Profile#7972
John Saville
#7982
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
John Saville was a Greek-British Marxist historian, long associated with University of Hull. He was an influential writer on British labour history in the second half of the twentieth century, and also known for his multi-volume work, the Dictionary of Labour Biography, edited in collaboration with others.
Go to Profile#7973
Joseph Francis Shea
#7983
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Joseph Francis Shea was an American aerospace engineer and NASA manager. Born in the New York City borough of the Bronx, he was educated at the University of Michigan, receiving a Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics in 1955. After working for Bell Labs on the radio inertial guidance system of the Titan I intercontinental ballistic missile, he was hired by NASA in 1961. As Deputy Director of NASA's Office of Manned Space Flight, and later as head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, Shea played a key role in shaping the course of the Apollo program, helping to lead NASA to the decision in favor of lunar orbit rendezvous and supporting "all up" testing of the Saturn V rocket.
Go to Profile#7974
Erich Bagge
#7984
Overall Influence
1912 - 1996 (84 years)
Erich Rudolf Bagge was a German scientist. Bagge, a student of Werner Heisenberg for his doctorate and Habilitation, was engaged in German Atomic Energy research and the German nuclear energy project during the Second World War. He worked as an Assistant at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik in Berlin. Bagge, who became associated professor at the University of Hamburg in 1948, was in particular involved in the usage of nuclear power for trading vessels, and he was one of the founders of the Society for the Usage of Nuclear Energy in Ship-Building and Seafare. The first German nuclear vessel, the "NS Otto Hahn", was launched in 1962.
Go to Profile#7975
Dante Giacosa
#7985
Overall Influence
1905 - 1996 (91 years)
Dante Giacosa was an Italian automobile designer and engineer responsible for a range of Italian automobile designs — and for refining the front-wheel drive layout to an industry-standard configuration.
Go to Profile#7976
Eli Biham
#7986
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Eli Biham is an Israeli cryptographer and cryptanalyst who is a professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Computer Science department. From 2008 to 2013, Biham was the dean of the Technion Computer Science department, after serving for two years as chief of CS graduate school. Biham invented differential cryptanalysis, for which he received his Ph.D., while working under Adi Shamir. It had been invented before by a team at IBM during their Data Encryption Standard work; the National Security Agency told IBM to keep the discovery secret.
Go to Profile#7977
Lynda Barry
#7987
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Linda Jean Barry , known professionally as Lynda Barry, is an American cartoonist. Barry is best known for her weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek. She garnered attention with her 1988 illustrated novel The Good Times are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls, which was adapted into a play. Her second illustrated novel, Cruddy, first appeared in 1999. Three years later she published One! Hundred! Demons!, a graphic novel she terms "autobifictionalography". What It Is is a graphic novel that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook, in which Barry instruc...
Go to Profile#7978
Susan Moller Okin
#7988
Overall Influence
1946 - 2004 (58 years)
Susan Moller Okin was a liberal feminist political philosopher and author. Life Okin was born in 1946 in Auckland, New Zealand. She attended Remuera Primary School and Remuera Intermediate and Epsom Girls' Grammar School, where she was Dux in 1963.
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Jun-ichi Nishizawa
#7989
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Jun-ichi Nishizawa was a Japanese engineer and inventor. He is known for his electronic inventions since the 1950s, including the PIN diode, static induction transistor, static induction thyristor, SIT/SITh. His inventions contributed to the development of internet technology and the information age.
Go to Profile#7980
Fidel V. Ramos
#7990
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Fidel Valdez Ramos , popularly known as FVR and Eddie Ramos, was a Filipino general and politician who served as the 12th president of the Philippines from 1992 to 1998. He was the only career military officer who reached the rank of five-star general/admiral de jure. Rising from second lieutenant to commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Ramos is credited for revitalizing and renewing international confidence in the Philippine economy during his six years in office.
Go to Profile#7981
Viola Spolin
#7991
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
Viola Spolin was an American theatre academic, educator and acting coach. She is considered an important innovator in 20th century American theater for creating directorial techniques to help actors to be focused in the present moment and to find choices improvisationally, as if in real life. These acting exercises she later called Theater Games and formed the first body of work that enabled other directors and actors to create improvisational theater. Her book Improvisation for the Theater, which published these techniques, includes her philosophy and her teaching and coaching methods, and is considered the "bible of improvisational theater".
Go to Profile#7982
Israel Halperin
#7992
Overall Influence
1911 - 2007 (96 years)
Israel Halperin, was a Canadian mathematician and social activist. Early life and education Israel Halperin was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants Solomon Halperin and Fanny Lundy. Halperin attended Malvern Collegiate Institute, Victoria University in the University of Toronto, graduated from the University of Toronto in 1932, and later was a graduate student of John von Neumann at Princeton University, where he received his doctorate in mathematics.
Go to Profile#7983
Staughton Lynd
#7993
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Staughton Craig Lynd was an American political activist, author, and lawyer. His involvement in social justice causes brought him into contact with some of the nation's most influential activists, including Howard Zinn, Tom Hayden, A. J. Muste, and David Dellinger.
Go to Profile#7984
Marcus Raskin
#7994
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Marcus Goodman Raskin was an American progressive social critic, political activist, author, and philosopher. He was the co-founder, with Richard Barnet, of the progressive think tank the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He was also a professor of public policy at The George Washington University’s School of Public Policy and Public Administration.
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Stefan Karpinski
#7995
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Stefan Karpinski is an American computer scientist known for being a co-creator of the Julia programming language. He is an alumnus of Harvard and works at Julia Computing, which he co-founded with Julia co-creators, Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Viral B. Shah as well as Keno Fischer and Deepak Vinchhi.
Go to Profile#7986
Douglas P. Fry
#7996
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Douglas P. Fry is an American anthropologist. He has written extensively on aggression, conflict, and conflict resolution in his own books and in journals such as "Science" and "American Anthropologist." His work frequently engages the debate surrounding the origins of war, arguing against claims that war or lethal aggression is rooted in human evolution.
Go to Profile#7987
Otto Haxel
#7997
Overall Influence
1909 - 1998 (89 years)
Otto Haxel was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project. After the war, he was on the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen. From 1950 to 1974, he was an ordinarius professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg, where he fostered the use of nuclear physics in environmental physics; this led to the founding of the Institute of Environmental Physics in 1975. During 1956 and 1957, he was a member of the Nuclear Physics Working Group of the German Atomic Energy Commission. From 1970 to 1975, he was the Scientific a...
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Robert J. Birgeneau
#7998
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Robert Joseph Birgeneau is a Canadian-American physicist and university administrator. He was the ninth chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley from 2004-13, and the fourteenth president of the University of Toronto from 2000-04.
Go to Profile#7989
Jacques Rogge
#7999
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Jacques Jean Marie Rogge, Count Rogge was a Belgian sports administrator and physician who served as the eighth President of the International Olympic Committee from 2001 to 2013. In 2013, Rogge became the IOC's Honorary President, a lifetime position, which he held until his death in 2021.
Go to Profile#7990
Otmar Issing
#8000
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Otmar Issing is a German economist who served as a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank from 1998 to 2006 and concurrently as ECB chief economist. He developed the 'two-pillar' approach to monetary policy decision-making that the ECB has adopted. After leaving the executive board, Issing been serving as president of the Center for Financial Studies since 2006.
Go to Profile#7991
Martin Walser
#8001
Overall Influence
1927 - 2023 (96 years)
Martin Johannes Walser was a German writer, especially known as a novelist. He began his career as journalist for Süddeutscher Rundfunk, where he wrote and directed audio plays. He was part of Group 47 from 1953.
Go to Profile#7992
Jorma Rissanen
#8002
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Jorma Johannes Rissanen was an information theorist, known for originating the minimum description length principle and practical approaches to arithmetic coding for lossless data compression. His work inspired the development of the theory of stochastic chains with memory of variable length.
Go to Profile#7993
Gary Drescher
#8003
Overall Influence
Gary L. Drescher is a scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , and author of multiple books on AI, including Made-Up Minds: A Constructivist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. His book describes a theory of how a computer program might be implemented to learn and use new concepts that have not been programmed into it. It introduces the Schema Mechanism, a general learning and concept-building mechanism inspired by Jean Piaget's account of human cognitive development.
Go to Profile#7994
Roberto Esposito
#8004
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Roberto Esposito is an Italian political philosopher, critical theorist, and professor, notable for his academic research and works on biopolitics. He currently serves as professor of theoretical philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.
Go to Profile#7995
Michael Palin
#8005
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Sir Michael Edward Palin is an English actor, comedian, writer, and television presenter. He was a member of the Monty Python comedy group. He received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2013 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2019.
Go to Profile#7996
Malcolm Garrett
#8006
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Malcolm Leslie Garrett is a British graphic designer, and Creative Director of Images&Co, a communications design consultancy based in London, UK. He is Ambassador for Manchester School of Art and co-founder of the annual Design Manchester festival, which has run since 2013.
Go to Profile#7997
Dennis C. Blair
#8007
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Dennis Cutler Blair is the former United States Director of National Intelligence and a retired United States Navy admiral who was the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific region. Blair was a career officer in the U.S. Navy and served in the White House during the presidencies of both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Blair retired from the Navy in 2002 as an Admiral. In 2009, Blair was selected as President Barack Obama’s first Director of National Intelligence, but after a series of bureaucratic battles, he resigned on May 20, 2010.
Go to Profile#7998
Ronald W. Davis
#8008
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Ronald Wayne "Ron" Davis is professor of biochemistry and genetics, and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center at Stanford University. Davis is a researcher in biotechnology and molecular genetics, particularly active in human and yeast genomics and the development of new technologies in genomics, with over 30 biotechnology patents. In 2013, it was said of Davis that "A substantial number of the major genetic advances of the past 20 years can be traced back to Davis in some way."
Go to Profile#7999
Stanley Zdonik
#8009
Overall Influence
Stanley Zdonik is a computer scientist specializing in database management systems. He is a tenured professor of computer science at Brown University. Zdonik has lived in the Boston area his entire life. After completing two bachelor’s and two master's degrees at MIT, he then earned a PhD in database management under Michael Hammer.
Go to Profile#8000
Michael Harner
#8010
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Michael James Harner was an anthropologist, educator and author. His 1980 book, The Way of the Shaman: a Guide to Power and Healing, has been foundational in the development and popularization of Core shamanism as a new age path of personal development for adherents of neoshamanism. He also founded the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.
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