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
#8051
Winfred P. Lehmann
#8061
Overall Influence
1916 - 2007 (91 years)
Winfred Philip Lehmann was an American linguist who specialized in historical, Germanic, and Indo-European linguistics. He was for many years a professor and head of departments for linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and served as president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association. Lehmann was also a pioneer in machine translation. He lectured a large number of future scholars at Austin, and was the author of several influential works on linguistics.
Go to Profile#8052
Phillip Tobias
#8062
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Phillip Vallentine Tobias was a South African palaeoanthropologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He was best known for his work at South Africa's hominid fossil sites. He was also an activist for the eradication of apartheid and gave numerous anti-apartheid speeches at protest rallies and also to academic audiences.
Go to Profile#8053
Ronen Bergman
#8063
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Ronen Bergman is an Israeli investigative journalist and author. He is a senior political and military analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest-circulation daily. Bergman has written for The New York Times, where he is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Newsweek in the United States, and for The Times, The Guardian, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Europe. He is also interviewed frequently by the media in the United States and Europe, and his work is often quoted in Middle Eastern newspapers in...
Go to Profile#8054
Anthony D. Smith
#8064
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Anthony David Stephen Smith was a British historical sociologist who, at the time of his death, was Professor Emeritus of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics. He is considered one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of nationalism studies.
Go to Profile#8055
Larry Klayman
#8065
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Larry Elliot Klayman is an American attorney, right-wing activist, and former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor. He founded both Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch. In addition to his numerous lawsuits against the Clinton administration, which led him to be called a "Clinton nemesis," Klayman has filed a number of lawsuits against political figures and governmental agencies. Klayman's goal in initiating the lawsuits is often to obtain information through the discovery process, rather than to win the lawsuit. Most cases brought by either Judicial Watch or Klayman himself have failed.
Go to Profile#8056
Marin Čilić
#8066
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Marin Čilić is a Croatian professional tennis player. Čilić has won 20 ATP Tour singles titles, including a major at the 2014 US Open. He was also runner-up at the 2017 Wimbledon Championships and the 2018 Australian Open, and won a silver medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in the men's doubles tournament partnering Ivan Dodig. His career-high singles ranking is world No. 3, achieved on 28 January 2018. Čilić has reached the semifinal stage or better at all four majors, and the quarterfinal stage or better at all nine ATP Masters 1000 tournaments. He is one of six active players with at least 2...
Go to Profile#8057
Eric Laithwaite
#8067
Overall Influence
1921 - 1997 (76 years)
Eric Roberts Laithwaite was a British electrical engineer, known as the "Father of Maglev" for his development of the linear induction motor and maglev rail system. Biography Eric Roberts Laithwaite was born in Atherton, Lancashire, on 14 June 1921, raised in the Fylde, Lancashire and educated at Kirkham Grammar School. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1941. Through his service in World War II, he rose to the rank of Flying Officer, becoming a test engineer for autopilot technology at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough.
Go to Profile#8058
Charles S. Maier
#8068
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Charles S. Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. He teaches European and international history at Harvard. Biography Maier served as the director of the Center for European Studies at Harvard, 1994-2001, and currently co-directs the Weatherhead Initiative in Global History. He taught at Duke University 1976-81 and has also held various visiting professorships in Europe. He was married from 1961 to 2013 to the late Pauline Maier, Professor at MIT and noted American historian. In 2017 he married Marjorie Anne Sa'adah, professor emerita of government at Dartmouth College.
Go to Profile#8059
Michael J. S. Dewar
#8069
Overall Influence
1918 - 1997 (79 years)
Michael James Steuart Dewar was an American theoretical chemist. Education and early life Dewar was the son of Scottish parents, Annie Balfour and Francis Dewar. He received the degrees of Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and DPhil from Balliol College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#8060
Leonid Khachiyan
#8070
Overall Influence
1952 - 2005 (53 years)
Leonid Genrikhovich Khachiyan was a Soviet and American mathematician and computer scientist. He was most famous for his ellipsoid algorithm for linear programming, which was the first such algorithm known to have a polynomial running time. Even though this algorithm was shown to be impractical, it has inspired other randomized algorithms for convex programming and is considered a significant theoretical breakthrough.
Go to Profile#8061
Tomoko Masuzawa
#8071
Overall Influence
Tomoko Masuzawa is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and History at the University of Michigan. In 1979, she received her MA in religious studies at Yale University. Masuzawa received her PhD in Religious Studies from University of California Santa Barbara in 1985. European intellectual history , discourses on religion, history of religion, and psychoanalysis are Masuzawa’s fields of study.
Go to Profile#8062
Laurence Kotlikoff
#8072
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Laurence Jacob Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University, a William Warren Fairfield Professor at Boston University, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and a former Senior Economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers.
Go to Profile#8063
Lleyton Hewitt
#8073
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Lleyton Glynn Hewitt is an Australian former world No. 1 tennis player. He is the most recent Australian man to win a major singles title, with two at the 2001 US Open and 2002 Wimbledon Championships. In November 2001, Hewitt became, at the time, the youngest man to be singles world No. 1 in the ATP rankings, at the age of . He won 30 singles titles and 3 doubles titles, with highlights being the 2001 US Open and 2002 Wimbledon singles titles, the 2000 US Open men's doubles title, back-to-back Tour Finals titles in 2001 and 2002, and the Davis Cup with Australia in 1999 and 2003. Between 19...
Go to Profile#8064
Bruce Bawer
#8074
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Theodore Bruce Bawer is an American writer who has been a resident of Norway since 1999. He is a literary, film, and cultural critic and a novelist and poet, who has also written about gay rights, Christianity, and Islam.
Go to Profile#8065
Jon Culshaw
#8075
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Jonathan Peter Culshaw is an English actor, comedian and impressionist. He is best known for his work on the radio comedy Dead Ringers since 2000. Culshaw has voiced a number of characters for ITV shows including 2DTV , Spitting Image and Newzoids , as well as appearing in The Impressions Show alongside Debra Stephenson from 2009 until 2011.
Go to Profile#8066
Dalibor Vesely
#8076
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Dalibor Vesely was a Czech-born architectural historian and theorist who was influential through his teaching and writing in promoting the role of hermeneutics and phenomenology as part of the discourse of architecture and of architectural design.
Go to Profile#8067
George Plimpton
#8077
Overall Influence
1927 - 2003 (76 years)
George Ames Plimpton was an American writer. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review, as well as his patrician demeanor and accent. He was also known for "participatory journalism," including accounts of his active involvement in professional sporting events, acting in a Western, performing a comedy act at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and then recording the experience from the point of view of an amateur.
Go to Profile#8068
George S. Hammond
#8078
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
George Simms Hammond was an American scientist and theoretical chemist who developed "Hammond's postulate", and fathered organic photochemistry,–the general theory of the geometric structure of the transition state in an organic chemical reaction. Hammond's research is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. His research garnered him the Norris Award in 1968, the Priestley Medal in 1976, the National Medal of Science in 1994, and the Othmer Gold Medal in 2003. He served as the executive chairman of the Allied Chemical Corporation from 1979 to 1989.
Go to Profile#8069
Jerzy Kosiński
#8079
Overall Influence
1933 - 1991 (58 years)
Jerzy Kosiński was a Polish-American novelist and two-time president of the American Chapter of P.E.N., who wrote primarily in English. Born in Poland, he survived World War II and, as a young man, emigrated to the U.S., where he became a citizen.
Go to Profile#8070
Ehud Hrushovski
#8080
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ehud Hrushovski is a mathematical logician. He is a Merton Professor of Mathematical Logic at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He was also Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#8071
Todd Rundgren
#8081
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Todd Harry Rundgren is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer who has performed a diverse range of styles as a solo artist and as a member of the band Utopia. He is known for his sophisticated and often unorthodox music, his occasionally lavish stage shows, and his later experiments with interactive art. He also produced music videos and was an early adopter and promoter of various computer technologies, such as using the Internet as a means of music distribution in the late 1990s.
Go to Profile#8072
Manfred R. Schroeder
#8082
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Manfred Robert Schroeder was a German physicist, most known for his contributions to acoustics and computer graphics. He wrote three books and published over 150 articles in his field. Born in Ahlen, he studied at the University of Göttingen , earning a vordiplom in mathematics and Dr. rer. nat. in physics. His thesis showed how small regular cavities in concert halls cause unfortunate resonances.
Go to Profile#8073
Urs Schreiber
#8083
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Urs Schreiber is a mathematician specializing in the connection between mathematics and theoretical physics and currently working as a researcher at New York University Abu Dhabi. He was previously a researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Mathematics, Department for Algebra, Geometry and Mathematical Physics.
Go to Profile#8074
James Fenton
#8084
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
James Martin Fenton is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry. Life and career Born in Lincoln, Fenton grew up in Lincolnshire and Staffordshire, the son of Canon John Fenton, a biblical scholar. He was educated at the Durham Choristers School, Repton and Magdalen College, Oxford. He graduated with a B.A. in 1970.
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Bertrand Serlet
#8085
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Bertrand Serlet is a French software engineer and businessman; he worked first at the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique before leaving France for the United States in 1985. He was the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple Inc.
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Ben Bagdikian
#8086
Overall Influence
1920 - 2016 (96 years)
Ben-hur Haig Bagdikian was an Armenian-American journalist, news media critic and commentator, and university professor. An Armenian genocide survivor, Bagdikian moved to the United States as an infant and began a journalism career after serving in World War II. He worked as a local reporter, investigative journalist and foreign correspondent for The Providence Journal. During his time there, he won a Peabody Award and a Pulitzer Prize. In 1971, he received parts of the Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg and successfully persuaded The Washington Post to publish them despite objections and threats from the Richard Nixon administration.
Go to Profile#8077
Yvonne Rainer
#8087
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Yvonne Rainer is an American dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, whose work in these disciplines is regarded as challenging and experimental. Her work is sometimes classified as minimalist art. Rainer currently lives and works in New York.
Go to Profile#8078
Larry McCaffery
#8088
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Lawrence F. McCaffery Jr. is an American literary critic, editor, and retired professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. His work and teaching focuses on postmodern literature, contemporary fiction, and Bruce Springsteen. He also played a role in helping to establish science fiction as a major literary genre.
Go to Profile#8079
Jeff Rulifson
#8089
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Johns Frederick Rulifson is an American computer scientist. Early life and education Johns Frederick Rulifson was born August 20, 1941, in Bellefontaine, Ohio. His father was Erwin Charles Rulifson and mother was Virginia Helen Johns. Rulifson married Janet Irving on June 8, 1963, and had two children. He received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Washington in 1966. Rulifson earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1973.
Go to Profile#8080
Chang-Lin Tien
#8090
Overall Influence
1935 - 2002 (67 years)
Chang-lin Tien was a Chinese-American professor of mechanical engineering and university administrator. He was the seventh chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley , and in that capacity was the first person of Asian descent to head a major research university in the United States.
Go to Profile#8081
Michael Riffaterre
#8091
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
Michel Riffaterre , known as Michael Riffaterre, was an influential French literary critic and theorist. He pursued a generally structuralist approach. He is well known in particular for his book Semiotics of Poetry, and his conceptions of hypogram and syllepsis. Kvas observes three phases in Riffaterre's work: stylistic, semiotic, and the intertextual phase. The most important is his intertextual phase in which he develops his understanding of intertextuality. For Riffaterre, "intertextuality is not a felicitous surplus, the privilege of a good memory or a classical education. The term inde...
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Rein Raud
#8092
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Rein Raud is an Estonian scholar and author. Early life He was born in 1961 in the family of Eno Raud and Aino Pervik, both children's authors. He is the eldest of three children. His younger brother Mihkel Raud is a playwright, television personality, singer, guitarist, journalist and member of the Estonian Parliament; his sister Piret Raud is an artist and translator. He is the grandson of playwright, poet and writer Mart Raud.
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Joshua Jortner
#8093
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Joshua Jortner is an Israeli physical chemist. He is a professor emeritus at the School of Chemistry, The Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. Birth and education Jortner was born on March 14, 1933, in Tarnów, Poland, to a Jewish family. He migrated with his parents to Palestine under the British Mandate during the Second World War in 1940. He received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1960.
Go to Profile#8084
Ron Charles
#8094
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ron Charles is a book critic at The Washington Post. His awards include the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award Nona Balakian Citation for book reviews, and 1st Place for A&E Coverage from the Society for Features Journalism in 2011. He was one of three jurors for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
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Daniel W. Smith
#8095
Overall Influence
Daniel W. Smith is an American philosopher, academic, researcher, and translator. He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, where his work is focused on 19th and 20th century continental philosophy.
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Douglas A. Melton
#8096
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Douglas A. Melton is an American medical researcher who is the Xander University Professor at Harvard University, and was an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute until 2022. Melton serves as the co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and was the first co-chairman of the Harvard University Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. Melton is the founder of several biotech companies including Gilead Sciences, Ontogeny , iPierian , and Semma Therapeutics. Melton holds membership in the National Academy of the Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and ...
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Nicholas Crafts
#8097
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Nicholas Francis Robert Crafts CBE was a British economist who was known for his contributions to economic history, in particular on the Industrial Revolution. He was Professor of Economic History at the University of Sussex Business School from 2019 until his death, Professor of Economics and Economic History at the University of Warwick from 2005 to 2019, and Professor of Economic History at London School of Economics and Political Science between 1995 and 2005.
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Jim Bambra
#8098
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jim Bambra is a British designer and reviewer of fantasy roleplaying games , and a former company director. He is particularly known for his contributions to Dungeons & Dragons, Fighting Fantasy, Warhammer, and Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game which was based on the Star Wars films. Later he became head of design at MicroProse, then managing director of Pivotal Games, a publisher of video games including Conflict: Desert Storm.
Go to Profile#8089
Benjamin Bolger
#8099
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Benjamin Bradley Bolger was born in 1975 in Flint, Michigan. He and his family were in a severe car crash when he was a toddler, and the experience led him to try to accomplish as much as possible in his life. He has achieved this dream by becoming the second-most credentialed person in modern history: obtaining 14 degrees. Despite being diagnosed with dyslexia and relying on his mother to read assignments to him, Bolger is an enormously successful student. He began taking college classes at Muskegon Community College when he was only 12 years old, and he had completed his first degree (an Associate of Arts) by age 17.
Go to Profile#8090
Gary Neville
#8100
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Gary Alexander Neville is an English football pundit and former player. He is also a co-owner of English Football League club Salford City. After retiring from football in 2011, Neville went into punditry and was a commentator for Sky Sports, until he took over the head coach position at Valencia in 2015. After being sacked by the club in 2016, he returned to his position as a pundit for Sky Sports later that year. He was also assistant manager for the England national team from 2012 to 2016.
Go to Profile#8091
Alger Hiss
#8101
Overall Influence
1904 - 1996 (92 years)
Alger Hiss was an American government official accused in 1948 of having spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The statute of limitations had expired for espionage, but he was convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950. Before the trial Hiss was involved in the establishment of the United Nations, both as a US State Department official and as a UN official. In later life, he worked as a lecturer and author.
Go to Profile#8092
Ben Grosse
#8102
Overall Influence
Ben Grosse is an American record producer and mixer, known for his signature sound involving metal and hard rock music. Grosse has mixed and produced numerous albums for popular artists such as Dream Theater, Marilyn Manson, Sevendust, Disturbed, Breaking Benjamin, Filter, Fuel, Depeche Mode, Richard Barone, Alter Bridge, Red, Vertical Horizon, Love and Death, Starset, Hollywood Undead, Ben Folds, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Underoath, Vattica and many others. As the mixer for many well-known songs from artists like Red Hot Chili Peppers , Republica , Third Eye Blind , and The Flaming Lips , he cu...
Go to Profile#8093
Hadley Arkes
#8103
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Hadley P. Arkes is an American political scientist and the Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions emeritus at Amherst College, where he has taught since 1966. He is currently the founder and director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#8094
Georgy Adelson-Velsky
#8104
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Georgy Maximovich Adelson-Velsky was a Soviet and Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. Born in Samara, Adelson-Velsky was originally educated as a pure mathematician. His first paper, with his fellow student and eventual long-term collaborator Alexander Kronrod in 1945, won a prize from the Moscow Mathematical Society. He and Kronrod were the last students of Nikolai Luzin, and he earned his doctorate in 1949 under the supervision of Israel Gelfand.
Go to Profile#8095
Andrey Zubov
#8105
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Andrey Borisovich Zubov is a Russian historian, religion scholar and political scientist, Doctor of History, prominent public person, church figure, political activist and commentator. He was also the Vice-president of the former People's Freedom Party.
Go to Profile#8096
Bernard Haykel
#8106
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Bernard Haykel is professor of Near Eastern Studies and the director of the Institute for Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia at Princeton University. He has been described as "the foremost secular authority on the Islamic State’s ideology" by journalist Graeme C.A. Wood.
Go to Profile#8097
Hanna Segal
#8107
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
Hanna Segal was a British psychoanalyst of Polish descent and a follower of Melanie Klein. She was president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and was appointed to the Freud Memorial Chair at University College, London in 1987. The American psychoanalyst James Grotstein considered that "received wisdom suggests that she is the doyen of "classical" Kleinian thinking and technique." The BBC broadcaster Sue Lawley introduced her as "one of the most distinguished psychological theorists of our time,"
Go to Profile#8098
Mark Weisbrot
#8108
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mark Alan Weisbrot is an American economist and columnist. He is co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. Weisbrot is President of Just Foreign Policy, a non-governmental organization dedicated to reforming United States foreign policy.
Go to Profile#8099
Eugene Genovese
#8109
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He was noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the left and Marxism and embraced traditionalist conservatism. He wrote during the Cold War and his political beliefs were viewed by some as highly controversial at the time.
Go to Profile#8100
Peter Matthiessen
#8110
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Peter Matthiessen was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher and onetime CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction and fiction . He was also a prominent environmental activist.
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