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
#801
Cosmas Zachos
#34498
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Cosmas K. Zachos is a theoretical physicist. He was educated in physics at Princeton University, and did graduate work in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of John Henry Schwarz.
Go to Profile#802
Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
#34539
Overall Influence
1953 - 1994 (41 years)
Johannes Lambertus Adriana van de Snepscheut was a computer scientist and educator. He was a student of Martin Rem and Edsger Dijkstra. At the time of his death he was the executive officer of the computer science department at the California Institute of Technology. He was also developing an editor for proving theorems called "Proxac".
Go to Profile#803
Laurel L. Wilkening
#34545
Overall Influence
1944 - 2019 (75 years)
Laurel L. Wilkening was an American planetary scientist and college professor. She was chancellor of the University of California, Irvine from 1993 to 1998. Early life Wilkening was born in Richland, Washington, and raised in Socorro, New Mexico. Her mother, Ruby Alma Barks Wilkening, was a teacher; her father, Marvin H. Wilkening, was an atomic scientist during World War II, and a physics professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. She earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Reed College in 1966. She completed doctoral studies in chemistry at the University of California, San Diego in 1970, under advisor Hans Suess.
Go to Profile#804
Philip J. Hanlon
#34614
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Philip James Hanlon is an American mathematician, computer scientist, and academic administrator, who served as the 18th president of Dartmouth College, his alma mater, from June 2013 until June 2023. Previously, he served as the 13th provost and executive vice president for academic affairs of the University of Michigan from 2010 to 2013.
Go to Profile#805
Sossina M. Haile
#34699
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Sossina M. Haile is an American chemist, known for developing the first solid acid fuel cells. She is a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, Illinois, US. Haile received the National Science Foundation National Young Investigator Award , Humboldt Fellowship , Fulbright Fellowship , and AT&T Cooperative Research Fellowship . The Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships supported her research at the Max Planck Institut für Festkörperforschung [Institute for Solid State Research], Stuttgart, Germany . She earned the 2001 J.B. Wagner Award of the High Temperature ...
Go to Profile#806
Demetri Psaltis
#34704
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Demetri Psaltis is a Greek-American electrical engineer who was the Dean of the School of Engineering at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne from 2007 to 2017. He is a professor in Bioengineering and Director of the Optics Laboratory of the EPFL. He is one of the founders of the term and the field of optofluidics. He is also well known for his past work in holography, especially with regards to optical computing, holographic data storage, and neural networks. He is an author of over 1100 publications, contributed more than 20 book chapters, invented more than 50 patents, and currently ha...
Go to Profile#807
Giuseppe Attardi
#34726
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Giuseppe Attardi was an American molecular biologist of Italian origin, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He made pioneering studies on the human mitochondrial structure and function.
Go to Profile#808
Lawrence C. Washington
#34816
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Lawrence Clinton Washington is an American mathematician at the University of Maryland who specializes in number theory. Biography Washington studied at Johns Hopkins University, where in 1971 he received his B.A. and master's degree. In 1974 he earned his PhD at Princeton University under Kenkichi Iwasawa with thesis extensions. He then became an assistant professor at Stanford University and from 1977 at the University of Maryland, where he became in 1981 an associate professor and in 1986 a professor. He held visiting positions at several institutions, including IHES , Max-Planck-Institut...
Go to Profile#809
Thomas Wolff
#34859
Overall Influence
1954 - 2000 (46 years)
Thomas Hartwig Wolff was an American mathematician, working primarily in the fields of harmonic analysis, complex analysis, and partial differential equations. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, he regularly played poker with his classmate Bill Gates. While a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley from 1976 to 1979, under the direction of Donald Sarason, he obtained a new proof of the corona theorem, a famously difficult theorem in complex analysis. He was made Professor of Mathematics at Caltech in 1986, and was there from 1988–1992 and from 1995 to his death in a car accident in 2000.
Go to Profile#810
Richard F. Lyon
#34890
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Richard "Dick" Francis Lyon is an American inventor, scientist, and engineer. He is one of the two people who independently invented the first optical mouse devices in 1980. He has worked in signal processing and was a co-founder of Foveon, Inc., a digital camera and image sensor company.
Go to Profile#811
Zvi Bern
#34959
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Zvi Bern is an American theoretical particle physicist. He is a professor at University of California, Los Angeles . Bern studied physics and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his doctorate in 1986 in theoretical physics from the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Martin Halpern. Bern's dissertation manuscript can currently be found in Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's archives, examining "possible nonperturbative continuum regularization schemes for quantum field theory which are based upon the Langevin equation of Parisi and Wu."
Go to Profile#812
Manfred Morari
#34992
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Manfred Morari is a world-leading control theorist who has made pioneering contributions to the theory and applications of Model Predictive Control, Internal Model Control and Hybrid Systems. His book on Robust Process Control is considered to be definitive text on the subject. He is currently Peter and Susanne Armstrong Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1977. Dr. Morari held positions at the University of Wisconsin, Madison , the California Institute of Technology , and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich ETH Zurich.
Go to Profile#813
David R. Smith
#35008
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
David R. Smith is an American physicist and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University in North Carolina. Smith's research focuses on electromagnetic metamaterials, or materials with a negative index of refraction.
Go to Profile#814
Eric Jacobsen
#35033
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Eric N. Jacobsen is the Sheldon Emery Professor of Chemistry and former chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. He is a prominent figure in the field of organic chemistry and is best known for the development of the Jacobsen epoxidation and other work in selective catalysis.
Go to Profile#815
Kenneth Kwong
#35058
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Kenneth Kin Man Kwong is a Hong Kong-born American nuclear physicist. He is a pioneer in human brain imaging. He received his bachelor's degree in Political Science in 1972 from the University of California, Berkeley. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Riverside studying photon-photon collision interactions.
Go to Profile#816
Lucy Jones
#35117
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Lucile M. Jones is a seismologist and public voice for earthquake science and earthquake safety in California. One of the foremost and trusted public authorities on earthquakes, Jones is viewed by many in Southern California as "the Beyoncé of earthquakes" who is frequently called up on to provide information on recent earthquakes.
Go to Profile#817
William McGinnis
#35128
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
William McGinnis, Ph.D. is a molecular biologist and professor of biology at the University of California San Diego. At UC San Diego he has also served as the Chairman of the Department of Biology from July 1998 - June 1999, as Associate Dean of the Division of Natural Sciences from July 1, 1999 - June 2000, and as Interim Dean of the newly established Division of Biological Sciences from July 1, 2000 - February 1, 2001. Dr. McGinnis was appointed Dean of the Divisional Biological Sciences on July 1, 2013.
Go to Profile#818
Gerald Fuller
#35206
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Gerald Gendall Fuller is a Canadian/American chemical engineer and Fletcher Jones II Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. Fuller received his B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Calgary in 1975 and his PhD in chemical engineering from Caltech in 1980.
Go to Profile#819
Ralph Lorenz
#35257
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Ralph D. Lorenz is a planetary scientist and engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. whose research focuses on understanding surfaces, atmospheres, and their interactions on planetary bodies, especially Titan, Venus, Mars, and Earth. He currently serves as Mission Architect of Dragonfly, NASA's fourth selected New Frontiers mission, and as participating scientist on Akatsuki and InSight. He is a Co-Investigator on the SuperCam instrument on the Perseverance rover, responsible for interpreting data from its microphone. He leads the Venus Atmospheric Structure Investigation on the DAVINCI Discovery mission to Venus.
Go to Profile#820
Herschel K. Mitchell
#35269
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Herschel Kenworthy Mitchell was an American professor of biochemistry who spent most of his career on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology. He was one of many researchers interested in vitamin B6 in the early 1940s and is credited as one of the discoverers of folic acid. He later focused his research on Drosophila , in particular the genetics and biochemistry of the heat shock response.
Go to Profile#821
Petr Pravec
#35311
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Petr Pravec is a Czech astronomer and a discoverer of minor planets, born in Třinec, Czech Republic. Pravec is a prolific discoverer of binary asteroids, expert in photometric observations and rotational lightcurves at Ondřejov Observatory. He is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery and co-discovery of 350 numbered minor planets, and is leading the effort of a large consortium of stations called "BinAst" to look for multiplicity in the near-Earth objects and inner main-belt populations.
Go to Profile#822
Colwyn Trevarthen
#35408
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Colwyn Trevarthen is Emeritus Professor of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh. Background After training as a biologist in New Zealand at Auckland University College and Otago University, Trevarthen researched infancy at Harvard in 1967.
Go to Profile#823
David L. Dill
#35430
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
David Lansing Dill is a computer scientist and academic noted for contributions to formal verification, electronic voting security, and computational systems biology. In 2013, Dill was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for the development of techniques to verify hardware, software, and electronic voting systems.
Go to Profile#824
Don Showalter
#35454
Overall Influence
Donald L. Showalter is a professor emeritus and former chairman of the department of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he attended Saint Xavier High School. Afterwards, he received his bachelor's degree from Eastern Kentucky University in 1964 and his Ph.D. in 1970 from the University of Kentucky. He spent one year as a research fellow at Oregon State University's Radiation Center before moving to UWSP in 1971. For a brief time he taught at Iowa Western Community College before returning to UWSP, where he would receive many teaching awards, such as the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents Excellence in Teaching Award in 1994.
Go to Profile#825
Bette Korber
#35529
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Bette Korber is an American computational biologist focusing on the molecular biology and population genetics of the HIV virus that causes infection and eventually AIDS. She has contributed heavily to efforts to obtain an effective HIV vaccine. She created a database at Los Alamos National Laboratory that has enabled her to design novel mosaic HIV vaccines, one of which is currently in human testing in Africa. The database contains thousands of HIV genome sequences and related data.
Go to Profile#826
Raphael Tsu
#35601
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (100 years)
Raphael Tsu is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is Professor Emeritus of electrical engineering at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC. Early life and education Tsu was born to a Catholic family in Shanghai, China, in 1931. As a child he was inspired by his great uncle who in 1926 was amongst the first six Chinese bishops ever to be consecrated at the Vatican in Rome and as a teenager by his US-educated father, Adrian, and French-educated uncle, Louis. His paternal grandfather and great uncle were pioneers in power plant and modern shipyard in Shanghai. W...
Go to Profile#827
Rangaswamy Narasimhan
#35631
Overall Influence
1926 - 2007 (81 years)
Rangaswamy Narasimhan was an Indian computer and cognitive scientist, regarded by many as the father of computer science research in India. He led the team which developed the TIFRAC, the first Indian indigenous computer and was instrumental in the establishment of CMC Limited in 1975, a Government of India company, later bought by Tata Consultancy Services. He was a recipient of the fourth highest Indian civilian award of Padma Shri from the Government of India in 1977.
Go to Profile#828
Kerry Vahala
#35736
Overall Influence
Kerry J. Vahala is an American professor of Applied Physics at the California Institute of Technology . He holds the Ted and Ginger Jenkins chair of Information Science and Technology and also serves as the Executive Officer of the Department of Applied Physics and Materials Science. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Physics and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering, all from Caltech.
Go to Profile#829
Wei-Kan Chu
#35840
Overall Influence
Wei-Kan Chu is an American physicist, an expert in ion beam interaction with solid, currently the Cullen University Professor and distinguished university professor at the University of Houston and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Go to Profile#830
Shuguang Zhang
#35865
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Shuguang Zhang is an American biochemist. He is at the MIT Media Lab's Laboratory for Molecular Architecture. Shuguang Zhang's research focuses on designs of biological molecules, particularly proteins and peptides. He has published over 170 scientific papers, which have cumulatively been cited over 35,000 times with an h-index of 88. On the “Updated science-wide author databases of standardizes citation indicators”, he is ranked 18th worldwide in the field of Biomedical Engineering. Zhang is also a co-founder and board member of Molecular Frontiers Foundation, which organizes annual Molecular Frontiers Symposia in Sweden and around the world.
Go to Profile#831
Arthur David Hall III
#35888
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Arthur David Hall III was an American electrical engineer and a pioneer in the field of systems engineering. He was the author of a widely used engineering textbook A Methodology for Systems Engineering from 1962.
Go to Profile#832
Lance J. Dixon
#35950
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Lance Jenkins Dixon is an American theoretical particle physicist. He is a professor in the SLAC Theory Group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University. Dixon received in 1982 his B.S. in physics and applied mathematics from Caltech and received in 1986 his doctorate from Princeton University. As a postdoc he was at SLAC. From 1987 he was assistant professor at Princeton University, from 1989 he was a Panofsky Fellow at the SLAC and in 1992 he became an associate professor and in 1998 a full professor at SLAC.
Go to Profile#833
Ernst Peter Fischer
#36074
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Ernst Peter Fischer is a German Historian of Science and Publicist. Life and work Ernst Peter Fischer studied mathematics, physics, and biology and graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1977. In 1987, he qualified as a university lecturer in the history of science, and taught as a professor at the University of Konstanz. Between 1989 and 1999 he was the publisher of the Mannheimer Forum. This position was previously held by Hoimar von Ditfurth.
Go to Profile#834
Ned Wingreen
#36125
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Ned S. Wingreen is a theoretical physicist and the Howard A. Prior Professor of the Life Sciences at Princeton University. He is a member of the Department of Molecular Biology and of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, where he is currently director of graduate studies. He is the associate director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, and is also associated faculty in the department of physics. Working with Yigal Meir, Wingreen formulated the Meir-Wingreen Formula which describes the electric current through an arbitrary mesoscopic system.
Go to Profile#835
Melanie Sanford
#36200
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Melanie Sarah Sanford is an American chemist, currently the Moses Gomberg Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Chemistry at the University of Michigan. She is a Fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. She has served as an executive editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society since 2021, having been an associate editor of the since 2014.
Go to Profile#836
Susan Hough
#36216
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Susan Elizabeth Hough is a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, and scientist in charge of the office. She has served as an editor and contributor for many journals and is a contributing editor to Geotimes Magazine. She is the author of five books, including Earthshaking Science .
Go to Profile#837
Larry Abbott
#36246
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Laurence Frederick Abbott is an American theoretical neuroscientist, who is currently the William Bloor Professor of Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University, where he helped create the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. He is widely regarded as one of the leaders of theoretical neuroscience, and is coauthor, along with Peter Dayan, on the first comprehensive textbook on theoretical neuroscience, which is considered to be the standard text for students and researchers entering theoretical neuroscience. He helped invent the dynamic clamp method alongside Eve Marder.
Go to Profile#838
Claire F. Gmachl
#36273
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Claire F. Gmachl is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. She is best known for her work in the development of quantum cascade lasers. Education and honors Gmachl earned her M.Sc. in physics from the University of Innsbruck in 1991. She went on to receive her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Vienna in 1995, graduating sub auspiciis Praesidentis . Her studies focused on integrated optical modulators and tunable surface-emitting lasers in the near infrared. From 1996 to 1998, she was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories.
Go to Profile#839
David J. Anderson
#36312
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
David J. Anderson is an American neurobiologist. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. His lab is located at the California Institute of Technology, where he currently holds the position of Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology, TianQiao and Chrissy Chen Leadership Chair and Director, TianQiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience. Anderson is a founding adviser of the Allen Institute for Brain Research, a non-profit research institute funded by the late Paul G. Allen, and spearheaded the Institute's early effort to generate a comprehensive map of gene expression in the m...
Go to Profile#840
Hollis B. Chenery
#36348
Overall Influence
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
Hollis Burnley Chenery was an American economist well known for his pioneering contribution in the field of development economics. Early life Chenery was born in Richmond, son of Christopher Chenery, a businessman and horseman. He was educated in Virginia, Pelham Manor, New York and at the University of Arizona , the University of Oklahoma , and California Institute of Technology . He served in the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. After the war he earned degrees from the University of Virginia and Harvard University . His doctoral dissertation, entitled Engineering Bases of Eco...
Go to Profile#841
John Gatenby Bolton
#36375
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
John Gatenby Bolton was a British-Australian astronomer who was fundamental to the development of radio astronomy. In particular, Bolton was integral in establishing that discrete radio sources were either galaxies or the remnants of supernovae, rather than stars. He also played a significant role in the discovery of quasars and the centre of the Milky Way. Bolton served as the inaugural director of the Parkes radio telescope in Australia and established the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in California. Bolton's students held directorships at most of the radio observatories in the world and one was a Nobel Prize winner.
Go to Profile#842
Micah Altman
#36410
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Micah Altman is an American social scientist who conducts research in social science informatics. Since 2012, he has worked as the head research scientist in the MIT Libraries, first as director of the Program on Information Science and subsequently as director of research for the libraries' Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship. Altman previously worked at Harvard University. He is known for his work on redistricting, scholarly communication, privacy and open science. Altman is a co-founder of Public Mapping Project, which develops DistrictBuilder, an open-source software.
Go to Profile#843
Anderson Sunda-Meya
#36431
Overall Influence
Anderson Sunda-Meya is a Congolese–American physicist and the Norwood Endowed Professor of Physics at Xavier University in New Orleans. He also holds the position of Associate Dean. Sunda-Meya was awarded the 2021 American Physical Society Excellence in Physics Education Award.
Go to Profile#844
Ian Crawford
#36444
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Ian Andrew Crawford is a British professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck, University of London in the United Kingdom. Education and early life Born in Warrington, Cheshire, Crawford was educated at North Cestrian Grammar School in Greater Manchester from 1972 to 1979. Crawford studied Astronomy at University College London followed by Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Newcastle University . He was awarded a PhD in Astrophysics from University College London in 1988 for research on the interstellar medium.
Go to Profile#845
Farid F. Abraham
#36466
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Farid F. Abraham is an American scientist. He has pioneered new methods of using computer modeling in the fields of fracture mechanics, membrane dynamics and phase transformation behavior of matter. He has written two textbooks and over 200 papers published in international journals. He won the Aneesur Rahman Prize in Computational Physics, which is the highest prize given by the American Physical Society.
Go to Profile#846
Alfred W. Hales
#36473
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Alfred Washington Hales is an American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the namesakes of the Hales–Jewett theorem. He was born in Pasadena, California, and is the older brother of R. Stanton Hales.
Go to Profile#847
William Newsome
#36475
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
William Thomas Newsome is a neuroscientist at Stanford University who works to "understand the neuronal processes that mediate visual perception and visually guided behavior." He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#848
Dan Graur
#36501
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Dan Graur \ˈɡra.ur\ is a Romanian-American scientist working in the field of molecular evolution. He is a Moores Professor at the University of Houston and Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is coauthor along with Wen-Hsiung Li of Fundamentals of Molecular Evolution. His Molecular and Genome Evolution was published in 2016.
Go to Profile#849
Maria Spiropulu
#36516
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Maria Spiropulu is a Greek particle physicist. She is the Shang-Yi Ch'en Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Biography Maria Spiropulu received her bachelor's degree in physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1993, and obtained her PhD with the CDF experiment from Harvard University in 2000. For her doctoral thesis, she applied for the first time in hadron colliders a novel double blind analysis method to search for evidence of supersymmetry. She excluded a large part of the parameter space where SUSY particles were expected to emerge.
Go to Profile#850
Michael D. Swords
#36538
Overall Influence
Michael D. Swords is a retired professor of Natural Science at Western Michigan University, who writes about general sciences and anomalous phenomena, particularly parapsychology, cryptozoology, and ufology, editing the academic publication The Journal of UFO Studies. He is a board member of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies.
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