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
#8001
Edward Vajda
#8011
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Edward J. Vajda is a historical linguist at Western Washington University, Washington State, United States. He is known for his work on the proposed Dené–Yeniseian language family, seeking to establish that the Ket language of Siberia has a common linguistic ancestor with the Na-Dené languages of North America. He began to study the Ket language in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union; he interviewed Ket speakers in Germany and later traveled to Tomsk in southwestern Siberia to perform fieldwork. In August 2008 he became the first North American to visit the Ket homeland in no...
Go to Profile#8002
Frederik Kortlandt
#8012
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Frederik Herman Henri Kortlandt is a Dutch former professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He writes on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in other language families. He has also studied ways to associate language families into super-groups such as controversial Indo-Uralic.
Go to Profile#8003
Alistair Sinclair
#8013
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Alistair Sinclair is a British computer scientist and computational theorist. Sinclair received his B.A. in mathematics from St. John’s College, Cambridge in 1979, and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh in 1988 under the supervision of Mark Jerrum. He is professor at the Computer Science division at the University of California, Berkeley and has held faculty positions at University of Edinburgh and visiting positions at DIMACS and the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley.
Go to Profile#8004
Manning Clark
#8014
Overall Influence
1915 - 1991 (76 years)
Charles Manning Hope Clark, was an Australian historian and the author of the best-known general history of Australia, his six-volume A History of Australia, published between 1962 and 1987. He has been described as "Australia's most famous historian", but his work has been the target of much criticism, particularly from conservative and classical liberal academics and philosophers.
Go to Profile#8005
David Spergel
#8015
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
David Nathaniel Spergel is an American theoretical astrophysicist and the Emeritus Charles A. Young Professor of Astronomy on the Class of 1897 Foundation at Princeton University. Since 2021, he has been the President of the Simons Foundation. He is known for his work on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe project. In 2022, Spergel accepted the chair of NASA's UAP independent study team.
Go to Profile#8006
Lawrence Rabiner
#8016
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Lawrence R. Rabiner is an electrical engineer working in the fields of digital signal processing and speech processing; in particular in digital signal processing for automatic speech recognition. He has worked on systems for AT&T Corporation for speech recognition.
Go to Profile#8007
Albert Allen Bartlett
#8017
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Albert Allen Bartlett was an American professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Professor Bartlett had lectured over 1,742 times since September, 1969 on Arithmetic, Population, and Energy. Bartlett regarded the word combination "sustainable growth" as an oxymoron, and argued that modest annual percentage population increases could lead to exponential growth. He therefore regarded human overpopulation as "The Greatest Challenge" facing humanity.
Go to Profile#8008
Dan Olweus
#8018
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Dan Olweus was a Swedish-Norwegian psychologist. He was a research professor of psychology at the University of Bergen, Norway. Olweus has been widely recognized as a pioneer of research on bullying.
Go to Profile#8009
Calvin C. Moore
#8019
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Calvin C. Moore was an American mathematician who worked in the theory of operator algebras and topological groups. Moore graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in 1958 and with a Ph.D. in 1960 under the supervision of George Mackey . In 1961 he became assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley and professor in 1966. From 1977 to 1980, he was director of the Center for Pure and Applied mathematics.
Go to Profile#8010
Ralph W. Hood
#8020
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ralph Wilbur Hood Jr. is an American psychologist. He serves as Leroy A. Martin Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he specializes in the psychology of religion.
Go to Profile#8011
Hannah Fry
#8021
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Hannah Fry is a British mathematician, author, and radio and television presenter. She is Professor in the Mathematics of Cities at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. She studies the patterns of human behaviour, such as interpersonal relationships and dating, and how mathematics can apply to them. Fry delivered the 2019 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures.
Go to Profile#8012
Steven Wright
#8022
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Steven Alexander Wright is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and film producer. He is known for his distinctive lethargic voice and slow, deadpan delivery of ironic, philosophical and sometimes nonsensical jokes, paraprosdokians, non sequiturs, anti-humor, and one-liners with contrived situations.
Go to Profile#8013
Samuel L. Jackson
#8023
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Samuel Leroy Jackson is an American actor. One of the most widely recognized actors of his generation, the films in which he has appeared have collectively grossed over $27 billion worldwide, making him the second-highest-grossing actor of all time. According to a more recent rating, he is the highest-grossing actor of all time. In 2022, he received the Academy Honorary Award as "a cultural icon whose dynamic work has resonated across genres and generations and audiences worldwide".
Go to Profile#8014
Ouriel Zohar
#8024
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ouriel Zohar , is an Israeli and French theater director, playwright, poet and translator from French to Hebrew. Professor at the Department of Humanities & Arts at the Technion University, created the Technion theater in 1986. Has been full professor at the University of Paris VIII since 1997 and at HEC Paris since 1995.
Go to Profile#8015
Duncan K. Foley
#8025
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Duncan K. Foley is an American economist. He is the Leo Model Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Economics at MIT and Stanford, and Professor of Economics at Columbia University . He has held visiting professorships at Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, UC Berkeley, and Dartmouth College, as well as the New School for Social Research .
Go to Profile#8016
Rankin
#8026
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
John Rankin Waddell , known as Rankin, is a British photographer and director who has photographed, amongst other subjects, Björk, Kate Moss, Madonna, David Bowie and Queen Elizabeth II. The London Evening Standard described Rankin's fashion and portrait photography style as "high-gloss, highly sexed and hyper-perfect".
Go to Profile#8017
Susan Owicki
#8027
Overall Influence
Susan Owicki is a computer scientist, Association for Computing Machinery Fellow, and one of the founding members of the Systers mailing list for women in computing. She changed careers in the early 2000s and became a licensed marriage and family therapist.
Go to Profile#8018
Alistair McGowan
#8028
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Alistair Charles McGowan is an English impressionist, comic, actor, singer and writer best known to British audiences for The Big Impression , which was, for four years, one of BBC1's top-rating comedy programmes – winning numerous awards, including a BAFTA in 2003. He has also worked extensively in theatre and appeared in the West End in Art, Cabaret, The Mikado and Little Shop of Horrors . As a television actor, he played the lead role in BBC1's Mayo. He wrote the play Timing and the book A Matter of Life and Death or How to Wean Your Man off Football with former comedy partner Ronni Ancona.
Go to Profile#8019
Vincent Ostrom
#8029
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Vincent Alfred Ostrom was an American political economist and the Founding Director of the Ostrom Workshop based at Indiana University and the Arthur F. Bentley Professor Emeritus of Political Science. He and his wife, the political economist Elinor Ostrom, made numerous contributions to the field of political science, political economy, and public choice.
Go to Profile#8020
Stephen Wolff
#8030
Overall Influence
Stephen South Wolff is one of the many fathers of the Internet. He is mainly credited with turning the Internet from a government project into something that proved to have scholarly and commercial interest for the rest of the world. Dr. Wolff realized before most the potential in the Internet and began selling the idea that the Internet could have a profound effect on both the commercial and academic world.
Go to Profile#8021
Garry Moore
#8031
Overall Influence
1915 - 1993 (78 years)
Garry Moore was an American entertainer, comedic personality, game show host, and humorist best known for his work in television. He began a long career with the CBS network starting in radio in 1937. Beginning in 1949 and through the mid-1970s, Moore was a television host on several variety and game shows.
Go to Profile#8022
Michelle Bachelet
#8032
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria is a Chilean politician who served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2018 to 2022. She previously served as President of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and from 2014 to 2018 for the Socialist Party of Chile. She is the first woman to hold the Chilean presidency. After leaving the presidency in 2010 and before becoming eligible for re-election, she was appointed as the first executive director of the newly established United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. In December 2013, Bachelet was re-elected with over 62% of the vote, surpassing the 54% she received in 2006.
Go to Profile#8023
Rodolfo Stavenhagen
#8033
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Rodolfo Stavenhagen was a German-born Mexican sociologist and anthropologist who specialized in the study of human rights and the political relations between indigenous peoples and states. He was a professor-researcher at El Colegio de México. In 2001 he was appointed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people through Resolution 2001/57. His mandate expired 30 April 2008. He was succeeded by Prof S. James Anaya of the University of Arizona.
Go to Profile#8024
Nicholas Kemmer
#8034
Overall Influence
1911 - 1998 (87 years)
Nicholas Kemmer was a Russian-born nuclear physicist working in Britain, who played an integral and leading edge role in United Kingdom's nuclear programme, and was known as a mentor of Abdus Salam – a Nobel laureate in physics.
Go to Profile#8025
Robert Trent Jones
#8035
Overall Influence
1906 - 2000 (94 years)
Robert Trent Jones Sr. was a British–American golf course architect who designed or re-designed more than 500 golf courses in 45 U.S. states and 35 countries. In reference to this, Jones took pride in saying, "The sun never sets on a Robert Trent Jones golf course." He is often confused with the famous amateur golfer Bobby Jones with whom he worked from time to time. Jones received the 1987 Old Tom Morris Award from the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, GCSAA's highest honor. Also in 1987, he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#8026
Bruce Lincoln
#8036
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Bruce Lincoln is Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he also holds positions in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, Committee on the History of Culture, and in the departments of Anthropology and Classics . Before his arrival at the University of Chicago, Lincoln taught at the University of Minnesota , where he co-founded the Program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society.
Go to Profile#8027
Eunice Kennedy Shriver
#8037
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Eunice Mary Kennedy Shriver was an American philanthropist and a member of the Kennedy family. She was the founder of the Special Olympics, a sports organization for persons with intellectual disabilities. For her efforts on behalf of disabled people, Shriver was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984.
Go to Profile#8028
Richard Foreman
#8038
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Richard Foreman is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Achievements and awards Foreman has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own plays, both in New York City and abroad. He has received three Obie Awards for Best Play of the Year, and received four other Obies for directing and for sustained achievement. Foreman has received the annual Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a "Lifetime Achievement in the Theater" award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN American Center Mast...
Go to Profile#8029
Kōbō Abe
#8039
Overall Influence
1924 - 1993 (69 years)
Kōbō Abe, pen name of Kimifusa Abe, was a Japanese writer, playwright, musician, photographer, and inventor. He is best known for his 1962 novel The Woman in the Dunes that was made into an award-winning film by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1964. Abe has often been compared to Franz Kafka for his modernist sensibilities and his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society.
Go to Profile#8030
Elizabeth Gershoff
#8040
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff is Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. She is known for her research on the impact of corporal punishment in the home and at school on children and their mental health.
Go to Profile#8031
Jean-Bertrand Aristide
#8041
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jean-Bertrand Aristide is a Haitian former Salesian priest and politician who became Haiti's first democratically elected president. A proponent of liberation theology, Aristide was appointed to a parish in Port-au-Prince in 1982 after completing his studies to become a priest. He became a focal point for the pro-democracy movement first under Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and then under the military transition regime which followed. He won the 1990–91 Haitian general election, with 67% of the vote. As a priest, he taught liberation theology and, as a president, he attempted to normalize Af...
Go to Profile#8032
Edward Goldsmith
#8042
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Edward René David Goldsmith , widely known as Teddy Goldsmith, was an Anglo-French environmentalist, writer and philosopher. He was a member the prominent Goldsmith family. The eldest son of Major Frank Goldsmith, and elder brother of the financier James Goldsmith. Edward Goldsmith was the founding editor and publisher of The Ecologist. Known for his outspoken views opposing industrial society and economic development, he expressed a strong sympathy for the ways and values of traditional peoples.
Go to Profile#8033
W. Cleon Skousen
#8043
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Willard Cleon Skousen was an American conservative author with the John Birch Society and a faith-based conspiracy theorist. A notable anti-communist and supporter of the John Birch Society, Skousen's works involved a wide range of subjects including the Six-Day War, Mormon eschatology, New World Order conspiracies, and parenting. His most popular works are The Five Thousand Year Leap and The Naked Communist.
Go to Profile#8034
Arkady Vainshtein
#8044
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Arkady Vainshtein is a Russian and American Professor Emeritus of Theoretical physics who was awarded Pomeranchuk Prize and Sakurai Prize for theoretical physics. Biography Vainshtein was born on 24 February 1942 in Novokuznetsk, Russia. He got his Ph.D. from Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk, Russia and master's degree from Novosibirsk University where he became a Professor. He was the director of William I Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota where he currently serves as the Gloria Becker Lubkin chair and also holds a position as Professor since 1990.
Go to Profile#8035
Hideo Baba
#8045
Overall Influence
Hideo Baba is a Japanese video game producer and president of the game development company, Studio Istolia. He formerly worked at Namco Bandai Studios where he was hired by them before their merge to be primarily involved with the production of the Tales of video games. He joined Namco in 2001. From Tales of Innocence , he was the brand manager and the producer of the Tales of video game series.
Go to Profile#8036
Đàm Thanh Sơn
#8046
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Đàm Thanh Sơn is a Vietnamese theoretical physicist working in quantum chromodynamics, applications of string theory and many-body physics. Early life and education Born in North Vietnam, Bac Ninh. Sơn attended HUS High School for Gifted Students, where he won gold medal in the International Mathematics Olympiad with an absolute score, and received his Ph.D. at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Moscow in 1995.
Go to Profile#8037
Ann Hibner Koblitz
#8047
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ann Hibner Koblitz is a Professor Emerita of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University known for her studies of the history of women in science. She is the Director of the Kovalevskaia Fund, which supports women in science in developing countries.
Go to Profile#8038
Victor A. McKusick
#8048
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Victor Almon McKusick was an American internist and medical geneticist, and Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. He was a proponent of the mapping of the human genome due to its use for studying congenital diseases. He is well known for his studies of the Amish. He was the original author and, until his death, remained chief editor of Mendelian Inheritance in Man and its online counterpart Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man . He is widely known as the "father of medical genetics".
Go to Profile#8039
Eli Manning
#8049
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Elisha Nelson Manning is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 16 seasons with the New York Giants. A member of the Manning family, he is the youngest son of quarterback Archie Manning and younger brother of quarterback Peyton Manning. Manning played college football at Ole Miss, where he won the Maxwell and Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Awards as a senior. He was selected first overall in the 2004 NFL Draft by the San Diego Chargers and traded to the Giants during the draft.
Go to Profile#8040
David Korn
#8050
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
David G. Korn is an American UNIX programmer and the author of the Korn shell , a command line interface/programming language. Education and work David Korn received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1965 and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1969. After working on computer simulations of transsonic airfoils and developing the Korn airfoil, he switched fields to computer science and became a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories in 1976. He developed Korn shell in response to probl...
Go to Profile#8041
Hunter Lovins
#8051
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
L. Hunter Lovins is an American environmentalist, author, sustainable development proponent, co-founder of Rocky Mountain Institute, and president of the nonprofit organization Natural Capitalism Solutions.
Go to Profile#8042
Howard Ashman
#8052
Overall Influence
1950 - 1991 (41 years)
Howard Elliott Ashman was an American playwright, lyricist and stage director. He is most widely known for his work on feature films for Walt Disney Animation Studios, for which Ashman wrote the lyrics and Alan Menken composed the music. Ashman has been credited as being a main driving force behind the Disney Renaissance. His work included songs for Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. Tim Rice took over to write the rest of the songs for the latter film after Ashman's death in 1991.
Go to Profile#8043
Kanan Makiya
#8053
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Kanan Makiya is an Iraqi-American academic and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. He gained international attention with Republic of Fear , which became a best-selling book after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and with Cruelty and Silence , a critique of the Arab intelligentsia. In 2003, Makiya lobbied the U.S. government to invade Iraq and oust Hussein.
Go to Profile#8044
James Pustejovsky
#8054
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
James Pustejovsky is an American computer scientist. He is the TJX Feldberg professor of computer science at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States. His expertise includes theoretical and computational modeling of language, specifically: Computational linguistics, Lexical semantics, Knowledge representation, temporal and spatial reasoning and Extraction. His main topics of research are Natural language processing generally, and in particular, the computational analysis of linguistic meaning. He holds a B.S. from MIT as well as a PhD from the University of Massachusetts, ...
Go to Profile#8045
Madhu Sudan
#8055
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Madhu Sudan is an Indian-American computer scientist. He has been a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences since 2015. Career He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from IIT Delhi in 1987 and his doctoral degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. He was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York from 1992 to 1997 and moved to MIT after that. From 2009 to 2015 he was a permanent researcher at Microsoft Research ...
Go to Profile#8046
Ilan Stavans
#8056
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Ilan Stavans is an American writer and academic. He writes and speaks on American, Hispanic, and Jewish cultures. He is the author of Quixote and a contributor to the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature . He was the host of the syndicated PBS show Conversations with Ilan Stavans, which ran from 2001 to 2006.
Go to Profile#8047
Gordie Howe
#8057
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Gordon Howe was a Canadian professional ice hockey player. From 1946 to 1980, he played 26 seasons in the National Hockey League and six seasons in the World Hockey Association ; his first 25 seasons were spent with the Detroit Red Wings. Nicknamed "Mr. Hockey", Howe is often considered the most complete player to ever play the game and one of the greatest of all time. At his retirement, his 801 goals, 1,049 assists, and 1,850 total points were all NHL records that stood until they were broken by Wayne Gretzky, who himself has been a major champion of Howe's legacy. A 23-time NHL All-Star, ...
Go to Profile#8048
Zohar Manna
#8058
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Zohar Manna was an Israeli-American computer scientist who was a professor of computer science at Stanford University. Biography He was born in Haifa, Israel. He earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#8049
William Bechtel
#8059
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
William Bechtel is a professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. He was a professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis from 1994 until 2002 . Bechtel was also the chair of the Philosophy Department from 1999 until 2002 and was heavily involved with the Philosophy-Psychology-Neuroscience program, serving at different times as Assistant Director and Director. Before that, he was at Georgia State. Bechtel earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and his BA from Kenyon College.
Go to Profile#8050
Janet Frame
#8060
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
Janet Paterson Frame was a New Zealand author. She is internationally renowned for her work, which includes novels, short stories, poetry, juvenile fiction, and an autobiography, and received numerous awards including being appointed to the Order of New Zealand, New Zealand's highest civil honour.
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