The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#801
Frank Borman
#801
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Frank Frederick Borman II was an American United States Air Force colonel, aeronautical engineer, NASA astronaut, test pilot, and businessman. He was the commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to fly around the Moon, and together with crewmates Jim Lovell and William Anders, became the first of 24 humans to do so, for which he was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
Go to Profile#802
Anna Wintour
#802
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Dame Anna Wintour is a British and American media executive based in New York City who has served as editor-in-chief of Vogue since 1988. Wintour has also served as global chief content officer for Condé Nast since 2020, where she oversees Condé Nast magazines worldwide, and concurrently serves as artistic director of Condé Nast and global editorial director of Vogue. With her trademark pageboy bob haircut and dark sunglasses, Wintour is regarded as the most powerful woman in publishing and has become an important figure in the fashion world. Wintour is praised for her skill in identifying e...
Go to Profile#803
Norman Finkelstein
#803
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist and activist. His primary fields of research are the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Finkelstein was born to parents who are both Jewish Holocaust survivors in New York City in 1953. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007. In 2006, the department and ...
Go to Profile#804
Peter Geach
#804
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Peter Thomas Geach was a British philosopher who was Professor of Logic at the University of Leeds. His areas of interest were philosophical logic, ethics, history of philosophy, philosophy of religion and the theory of identity.
Go to Profile#805
Cornelius Castoriadis
#805
Overall Influence
1922 - 1997 (75 years)
Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greek-French philosopher, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group. His writings on autonomy and social institutions have been influential in both academic and activist circles.
Go to Profile#806
Bart D. Ehrman
#806
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#807
Sergei Ivanov
#807
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sergei Borisovich Ivanov is a Russian senior official and politician who has been serving as the Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation on the Issues of Environmental Activities, Ecology and Transport since 12 August 2016. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.
Go to Profile#808
John Grinder
#808
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John Thomas Grinder Jr. is an American linguist, author, management consultant, trainer and speaker. Grinder is credited with co-creating neuro-linguistic programming with Richard Bandler. He is co-director of Quantum Leap Inc., a management consulting firm founded by his partner Carmen Bostic St. Clair in 1987 . Grinder and Bostic St. Clair also run workshops and seminars on NLP internationally.
Go to Profile#809
James Q. Wilson
#809
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
James Quinn Wilson was an American political scientist and an authority on public administration. Most of his career was spent as a professor at UCLA and Harvard University. He was the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute, member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board , and the President's Council on Bioethics. He was Director of Joint Center for Urban Studies at Harvard-MIT.
Go to Profile#810
Ada Yonath
#810
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#811
Daron Acemoglu
#811
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#812
Simon Wiesenthal
#812
Overall Influence
1908 - 2005 (97 years)
Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Janowska concentration camp , the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp , the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen concentration camp .
Go to Profile#813
Larry Flick
#813
Overall Influence
Larry Flick is an American journalist, former dance music columnist, single reviewer, and Senior Talent Editor for Billboard magazine, where he worked for 14 years. Now he produces and hosts Sirius XM radio shows. Flick started in the music business at 21 as a college radio rep at a company called Gold Mountain. He went on the road as a touring assistant to the Power Station and KISS during their 1980s heyday, before starting as a part-time assistant/mail sorter at Billboard. He later became the dance music/single reviews editor of the magazine. Flick also worked as a music consultant for Prin...
Go to Profile#814
Richard Hoggart
#814
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Herbert Richard Hoggart was an English academic whose career covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with emphasis on British popular culture. Early life Hoggart was born in the Potternewton area of Leeds, one of three children in an impoverished family. His father, Tom Longfellow Hoggart , the son of a boilermaker, was a regular infantry soldier and housepainter who died of brucellosis when Hoggart was a year old, and his mother Adeline died of a chest illness when he was eight. He grew up with his grandmother in Hunslet, and was encouraged in his education by an aunt.
Go to Profile#815
Garrett Birkhoff
#815
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
Garrett Birkhoff was an American mathematician. He is best known for his work in lattice theory. The mathematician George Birkhoff was his father. Life The son of the mathematician George David Birkhoff, Garrett was born in Princeton, New Jersey. He began the Harvard University BA course in 1928 after less than seven years of prior formal education. Upon completing his Harvard BA in 1932, he went to Cambridge University to study mathematical physics but switched to studying abstract algebra under Philip Hall. While visiting the University of Munich, he met Carathéodory who pointed him toward...
Go to Profile#816
Richard Avedon
#816
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Richard Avedon was an American fashion and portrait photographer. He worked for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Elle specializing in capturing movement in still pictures of fashion, theater and dance. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century".
Go to Profile#817
Olivier Blanchard
#817
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Olivier Jean Blanchard is a French economist and professor who currently serves as the Robert M. Solow Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and as the C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund from September 1, 2008, to September 8, 2015. Blanchard was appointed to the position under the tenure of Dominique Strauss-Kahn; he was succeeded by Maurice Obstfeld. According to IDEAS/RePEc, he is one of the most cited economists in the world.
Go to Profile#818
John L. Holland
#818
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
John Lewis Holland was an American psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. He was the creator of the career development model, Holland Occupational Themes, commonly known as the Holland Codes.
Go to Profile#819
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#819
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian philosopher, theologian and Islamic scholar. He is University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University. Born in Tehran, Nasr completed his education in Iran and the United States, earning a bachelor's degree in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master's in geology and geophysics, and a doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University. He returned to his homeland in 1958, turning down teaching positions at MIT and Harvard, and was appointed a professor of philosophy and Islamic sciences at Tehran University. H...
Go to Profile#820
Kenneth G. Wilson
#820
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Kenneth Geddes "Ken" Wilson was an American theoretical physicist and a pioneer in leveraging computers for studying particle physics. He was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on phase transitions—illuminating the subtle essence of phenomena like melting ice and emerging magnetism. It was embodied in his fundamental work on the renormalization group.
Go to Profile#821
Stephen Cook
#821
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Stephen Arthur Cook is an American-Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who has made significant contributions to the fields of complexity theory and proof complexity. He is a university professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#822
Dan Ariely
#822
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Dan Ariely is an Israeli-American professor and author. He serves as a James B. Duke Professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. Ariely is the co-founder of several companies implementing insights from behavioral science. Ariely wrote an advice column called Ask Ariely in the WSJ from June 2012 until September 2022. Ariely is the author of the three New York Times best selling books Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. He co-produced the 2015 documentary Honesty: The Truth About Lies.
Go to Profile#823
Niles Eldredge
#823
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Areas of Specialization: Evolutionary Biology Niles Eldredge is a biologist and paleontologist. He studied Latin and geology as an undergraduate before earning a PhD at Columbia University. His career and research have been devoted to the exploration of paleontology and evolutionary theory. As curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Invertebrates, and later, Invertebrate Paleontology, he specialized in the study of the evolution of Phacopida trilobites, which went extinct roughly 245 million years ago. A critic of the more common, gene-centered, view of evolution, he ...
Go to Profile#824
LeBron James
#824
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
LeBron Raymone James Sr. is an American professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association . Nicknamed "King James", he is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the sport and is often compared to Michael Jordan in debates over the greatest basketball player of all time. James is the all-time leading scorer in NBA history and ranks fourth in career assists. He has won four NBA championships , and has competed in 10 NBA Finals, including eight consecutive Finals appearances from 2011 to 2018. He has also won four Most Val...
Go to Profile#825
Fred Hoyle
#825
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Sir Fred Hoyle was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and was one of the authors of the influential B2FH paper. He also held controversial stances on other scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory in favor of the "steady-state model", and his promotion of panspermia as the origin of life on Earth. He spent most of his working life at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge and served as its director for six years.
Go to Profile#826
Richard J. Evans
#826
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#827
Gregory Chaitin
#827
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gregory John Chaitin is an Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist. Beginning in the late 1960s, Chaitin made contributions to algorithmic information theory and metamathematics, in particular a computer-theoretic result equivalent to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. He is considered to be one of the founders of what is today known as algorithmic complexity together with Andrei Kolmogorov and Ray Solomonoff. Along with the works of e.g. Solomonoff, Kolmogorov, Martin-Löf, and Leonid Levin, algorithmic information theory became a foundational part of theoretical computer science, information theory, and mathematical logic.
Go to Profile#828
Frank Whittle
#828
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Air Commodore Sir Frank Whittle, was an English engineer, inventor and Royal Air Force air officer. He is credited with having invented the turbojet engine. A patent was submitted by Maxime Guillaume in 1921 for a similar invention which was technically unfeasible at the time. Whittle's jet engines were developed some years earlier than those of Germany's Hans von Ohain, who designed the first-to-fly turbojet engine.
Go to Profile#829
Wendy Doniger
#829
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include The Hindus: An Alternative History; Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978. S...
Go to Profile#830
James Clapper
#830
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
James Robert Clapper Jr. is a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force and former Director of National Intelligence. Clapper has held several key positions within the United States Intelligence Community. He served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1992 until 1995. He was the first director of defense intelligence within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and simultaneously the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. He served as the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from September 2001 until June 2006.
Go to Profile#831
Charles Murray
#831
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Charles Alan Murray is an American political scientist. He is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. Murray's work is highly controversial. His book Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 discussed the American welfare system. In the book The Bell Curve , he and co-author Richard Herrnstein argue that in 20th century American society, intelligence became a better predictor than parental socioeconomic status or education level of many individual outcomes, including income, job performance, pregnancy out of wedlock, ...
Go to Profile#832
Johan Galtung
#832
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
#833
Masatoshi Koshiba
#833
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
was a Japanese physicist and one of the founders of neutrino astronomy. His work with the neutrino detectors Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande was instrumental in detecting solar neutrinos, providing experimental evidence for the solar neutrino problem.
Go to Profile#834
William F. Sharpe
#834
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
William Forsyth Sharpe is an American economist. He is the STANCO 25 Professor of Finance, Emeritus at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Go to Profile#835
François Mitterrand
#835
Overall Influence
1916 - 1996 (80 years)
François Marie Adrien Maurice Mitterrand was a French politician and the President of France from 1981 to 1995, and the longest holder of that position in the history of France. As First Secretary of the Socialist Party, he was the first politician to assume the presidency under the Fifth Republic.
Go to Profile#836
Richard Pipes
#836
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Richard Edgar Pipes was an American academic, who specialized in Russian and Soviet history, and wrote many books on these topics, including Russia under the Old Regime , The Russian Revolution , and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime . Pipes was a frequent interviewee in the press on the matters of Soviet history and foreign affairs. His writings also appear in Commentary, The New York Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. At Harvard, he taught large courses on Imperial Russia as well as the Russian Revolution and guided over 80 graduate students to their PhDs. In 1976, he headed Team B, ...
Go to Profile#837
Storm Thorgerson
#837
Overall Influence
1944 - 2013 (69 years)
Storm Elvin Thorgerson was an English graphic designer and music video director. He is best known for closely working with the group Pink Floyd through most of their career, and also created album or other art for Led Zeppelin, Phish, Black Sabbath, Def Leppard, Al Stewart, Scorpions, UFO, Peter Gabriel, the Alan Parsons Project, Genesis, Yes, Kansas, Dream Theater, Muse, Audioslave, the Mars Volta, The Cranberries, Helloween, Ween, Shpongle and Catherine Wheel.
Go to Profile#838
Andrea Dworkin
#838
Overall Influence
1946 - 2005 (59 years)
Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.
Go to Profile#839
A. S. Byatt
#839
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy , known professionally by her former married name, A.S. Byatt , was an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Go to Profile#840
Daniel Goleman
#840
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist, author, and science journalist. For twelve years, he wrote for The New York Times, reporting on the brain and behavioral sciences. His 1995 book Emotional Intelligence was on The New York Times Best Seller list for a year and a half, a bestseller in many countries, and is in print worldwide in 40 languages. Apart from his books on emotional intelligence, Goleman has written books on topics including self-deception, creativity, transparency, meditation, social and emotional learning, ecoliteracy and the ecological crisis, and the Dalai Lama’s vision ...
Go to Profile#841
Alan Lomax
#841
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was a musician, folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax, and later alone ...
Go to Profile#842
Steven Mnuchin
#842
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Steven Terner Mnuchin is an American investment banker and film producer who served as the 77th United States secretary of the treasury as part of the Cabinet of Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021. Serving for a full presidential term, Mnuchin was one of the few high-profile members of Trump's cabinet whom the president did not dismiss.
Go to Profile#843
Yuan T. Lee
#843
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Yuan Tseh Lee is a Taiwanese chemist and a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the first Taiwanese Nobel Prize laureate who, along with the Hungarian-Canadian John C. Polanyi and American Dudley R. Herschbach, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 "for their contributions to the dynamics of chemical elementary processes".
Go to Profile#844
George Will
%20(cropped).jpg)
#844
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
George Frederick Will is an American libertarian conservative writer and political commentator, who writes regular columns for The Washington Post and provides commentary for NewsNation. In 1986, The Wall Street Journal called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America." Will won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977.
Go to Profile#845
Robert Langlands
#845
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Robert Phelan Langlands, is a Canadian mathematician. He is best known as the founder of the Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures and results connecting representation theory and automorphic forms to the study of Galois groups in number theory, for which he received the 2018 Abel Prize. He was an emeritus professor and occupied Albert Einstein's office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, until 2020 when he retired.
Go to Profile#846
Henry Jenkins
#846
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Henry Guy Jenkins III is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He also has a joint faculty appointment with the USC Rossier School of Education. Previously, Jenkins was the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities as well as co-founder and co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He has also served on the technical advisory board at ZeniMax Media, parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks.
Go to Profile#847
Robert J. Shiller
#847
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Robert James Shiller is an American economist, academic, and author. As of 2022, he served as a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University and is a fellow at the Yale School of Management's International Center for Finance. Shiller has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1980, was vice president of the American Economic Association in 2005, its president-elect for 2016, and president of the Eastern Economic Association for 2006–2007. He is also the co‑founder and chief economist of the investment management firm MacroMarkets LLC.
Go to Profile#848
Harald zur Hausen
#848
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Harald zur Hausen NAS EASA APS was a German virologist. He carried out research on cervical cancer and discovered the role of papilloma viruses in cervical cancer, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008. He was chairman of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.
Go to Profile#849
Uri Geller
#849
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Uri Geller is an Israeli-British illusionist, magician, television personality, and self-proclaimed psychic. He is known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other illusions. Geller uses conjuring tricks to simulate the effects of psychokinesis and telepathy. Geller's career as an entertainer has spanned more than four decades, with television shows and appearances in many countries. Magicians have called Geller a fraud because of his claims of possessing psychic powers.
Go to Profile#850
Andries van Dam
#850
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Andries "Andy" van Dam is a Dutch-American professor of computer science and former vice-president for research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hypertext system, Hypertext Editing System in the late 1960s. He co-authored Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice along with J.D. Foley, S.K. Feiner, and John Hughes. He also co-founded the precursor of today's ACM SIGGRAPH conference.
Go to Profile