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
#8151
Patrik Schumacher
#8161
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Patrik Schumacher is a London based architect and architectural theorist. He is the principal architect of Zaha Hadid Architects. Education and early career Schumacher studied Philosophy and Mathematics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn in the early 1980s. In the mid-eighties he studied architecture in Stuttgart and in 1987 continued his architecture study at London Southbank University. In 1988, Schumacher worked in the design studio of Zaha Hadid, on the Vitra Firestation. In 1990, he returned to University of Stuttgart to complete his Diploma in Architecture and then re-joined Hadid.
Go to Profile#8152
Robert W. Fuller
#8162
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Robert Works Fuller is an American physicist, author, social reformer, and former president of Oberlin College. Biography Robert Fuller attended Oberlin College, leaving without graduating in order to earn his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University in 1961. He taught at Columbia University, where he co-authored the book Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics.
Go to Profile#8153
Mark Ronson
#8163
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Mark Daniel Ronson is a British musician, DJ, record producer, songwriter, and remixer. He is best known for his collaborations with artists such as Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Adele, Lily Allen, Duran Duran, Miley Cyrus, Queens of the Stone Age, and Bruno Mars. He has received seven Grammy Awards, including Producer of the Year for Winehouse's album Back to Black and two for Record of the Year singles "Rehab" and "Uptown Funk". He received an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Grammy Award for "Shallow" for the film A Star Is Born .
Go to Profile#8154
Bruce Vilanch
#8164
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Bruce Gerald Vilanch is an American comedy writer, songwriter and actor. He is a two-time Emmy Award-winner. Vilanch is best known to the public for his four-year stint on Hollywood Squares, as a celebrity participant; behind the scenes he was head writer for the show. In 2000, he performed off-Broadway in his self-penned one-man show, Bruce Vilanch: Almost Famous.
Go to Profile#8155
Don Bradman
#8165
Overall Influence
1908 - 2001 (93 years)
Sir Donald George Bradman , nicknamed "The Don", was an Australian international cricketer, widely acknowledged as the greatest batsman of all time. His cricketing successes have been claimed by Shane Warne, among others, to make Bradman the "greatest sportsperson" in history. Bradman's career Test batting average of 99.94 is considered by some to be the greatest achievement by any sportsman in any major sport.
Go to Profile#8156
Jimmy Douglass
#8166
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jimmy Douglass, also known as "The Senator", is an American recording engineer and record producer. His career has spanned more than four decades. Career In the early 1970s at Atlantic Records studios in New York City, he started his studio career as a part-time tape duplicator while still attending high school. There he learned how to operate the studio's custom made 16-channel console and observed, was trained by, as well as worked with some of the greatest engineers, producers and record moguls including Tom Dowd, Arif Mardin, Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun. For his first time behind the faders, he was encouraged by Wexler to engineer the session recording for a demo of a new band.
Go to Profile#8157
Keith Yandell
#8167
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Keith Edward Yandell was a philosopher of religion who became notable by his teaching and his writings. Teaching Yandell began teaching in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1966. He had become the Julius R. Weinberg Professor of Philosophy when he retired in 2011.
Go to Profile#8158
Nell Irvin Painter
#8168
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Nell Irvin Painter is an American historian notable for her works on United States Southern history of the nineteenth century. She is retired from Princeton University as the Edwards Professor of American History Emerita. She has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and as president of the Southern Historical Association, and was appointed as chair of MacDowell's board of directors in 2020.
Go to Profile#8159
Sun-Yung Alice Chang
#8169
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sun-Yung Alice Chang is a Taiwanese American mathematician specializing in aspects of mathematical analysis ranging from harmonic analysis and partial differential equations to differential geometry. She is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#8160
James Alan Fox
#8170
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
James Alan Fox is the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy and former dean at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. Fox holds a bachelor's degree in sociology , a master's degree in criminology , a master's degree in statistics , and a Ph.D. in sociology , all from the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#8161
Oren Patashnik
#8171
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Oren Patashnik is an American computer scientist. He is notable for co-creating BibTeX, and co-writing Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science. He is a researcher at the Center for Communications Research, La Jolla, and lives nearby in San Diego. Oren and his wife Amy have three children, Josh, Ariel, and Jeremy.
Go to Profile#8162
William Boyd
#8172
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
William Andrew Murray Boyd is a Scottish novelist, short story writer and screenwriter. Biography Boyd was born in Accra, Gold Coast , to Scottish parents, both from Fife, and has two younger sisters. His father Alexander, a doctor specialising in tropical medicine, and Boyd's mother, who was a teacher, moved to the Gold Coast in 1950 to run the health clinic at the University College of the Gold Coast, Legon . In the early 1960s the family moved to western Nigeria, where Boyd's father held a similar position at the University of Ibadan. Boyd spent his early life in Ghana and Nigeria and, at...
Go to Profile#8163
Azar Nafisi
#8173
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008. Nafisi has held several academic leadership roles, including director of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies Dialogue Project and Cultural Conversations, a Georgetown Walsh School of Foreign Service, Centennial Fellow, and a fellow at Oxford University.
Go to Profile#8164
Teun A. van Dijk
#8174
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Teun Adrianus van Dijk is a scholar in the fields of text linguistics, discourse analysis and Critical Discourse Analysis . With Walter Kintsch he contributed to the development of the psychology of text processing. Since the 1980s his work in CDA focused especially on the study of the discursive reproduction of racism by what he calls the 'symbolic elites' , the study of news in the press, and on the theories of ideology, context and knowledge.
Go to Profile#8165
Vik Muniz
#8175
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Vik Muniz is a Brazilian artist and photographer. Initially a sculptor, Muniz grew interested with the photographic representations of his work, eventually focusing completely on photography. Primarily working with unconventional materials such as tomato sauce, diamonds, magazine clippings, chocolate syrup, dust, dirt, etc., Muniz creates works of art, referencing old master's paintings and celebrity portraits, among other things, and then photographs them. His work has been met with both commercial success and critical acclaim, and has been exhibited worldwide. He is currently represented by...
Go to Profile#8166
Sally Davies
#8176
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Dame Sally Claire Davies is a British physician. She was the Chief Medical Officer from 2010 to 2019 and Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Health from 2004 to 2016. She worked as a clinician specialising in the treatment of diseases of the blood and bone marrow. She is now Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, appointed on 8 February 2019, with effect from 8 October 2019. She is one of the founders of the National Institute for Health and Care Research.
Go to Profile#8167
Gunther Schmidt
#8177
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
#8168
Paul Mason
#8178
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Paul Mason is a British journalist. He was Business Editor of the BBC Two television programme Newsnight from 2001, and Culture and Digital Editor of Channel 4 News from 2013, becoming the programme's Economics Editor in 2014.
Go to Profile#8169
Arkadi Nemirovski
#8179
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Arkadi Nemirovski is a professor at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been a leader in continuous optimization and is best known for his work on the ellipsoid method, modern interior-point methods and robust optimization.
Go to Profile#8170
Arun Sundararajan
#8180
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Arun Sundararajan is the NEC Faculty Fellow, Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics and a Doctoral Coordinator at the Stern School of Business, New York University. For 2010–12, he is the Distinguished Academic Fellow at the Center for IT and the Networked Economy, Indian School of Business. Sundararajan is an expert on the economics of digital goods and network effects. He also conducts research about network science and the socioeconomic transformation of India.
Go to Profile#8171
Bonnie Berger
#8181
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Bonnie Anne Berger is an American mathematician and computer scientist, who works as the Simons professor of mathematics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in algorithms, bioinformatics and computational molecular biology.
Go to Profile#8172
Susan L. Graham
#8182
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Susan Lois Graham is an American computer scientist. Graham is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Computer Science Division of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#8173
Gerald Teschl
#8183
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Gerald Teschl is an Austrian mathematical physicist and professor of mathematics. He works in the area of mathematical physics; in particular direct and inverse spectral theory with application to completely integrable partial differential equations .
Go to Profile#8174
Jean Erdman
#8184
Overall Influence
1916 - 2020 (104 years)
Jean Erdman was an American dancer and choreographer of modern dance as well as an avant-garde theater director. Biography Early years and background Erdman was born in Honolulu. Erdman's father, John Piney Erdman, a doctor of divinity and missionary from New England, settled in Honolulu as a minister at the non-denominational Protestant Church of the Crossroads where he preached, in both English and Japanese, to a multi-ethnic congregation. Her mother, Marion Dillingham Erdman, was a member of one of the founding industrialist families of Hawaii.
Go to Profile#8175
Jean-Jacques Nattiez
#8185
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jean-Jacques Nattiez is a musical semiologist or semiotician and professor of musicology at the Université de Montréal. He studied semiology with Georges Mounin and Jean Molino and music semiology with Nicolas Ruwet.
Go to Profile#8176
Robert Schapire
#8186
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Robert Elias Schapire is an American computer scientist, former David M. Siegel '83 Professor in the computer science department at Princeton University, and has recently moved to Microsoft Research. His primary specialty is theoretical and applied machine learning.
Go to Profile#8177
Karin Knorr Cetina
#8187
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Karin Knorr Cetina is an Austrian sociologist well known for her work on epistemology and social constructionism, summarized in the books The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science and Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge . Currently, she focuses on the study of global microstructures and Social studies of finance. Knorr Cetina is the Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#8178
Jonathan Alter
#8188
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Jonathan H. Alter is a liberal American journalist, best-selling author, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker and television producer who was a columnist and senior editor for Newsweek magazine from 1983 until 2011. Alter has written several books about American presidents, most recently His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life, published in 2020, the first independent biography of Carter. Alter is a contributing correspondent to NBC News, where since 1996 he has appeared on NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC. In 2021, Alter launched a newsletter called "Old Goats: Ruminating With Friends", where he has conversations with accomplished people who share their wisdom and experience.
Go to Profile#8179
Diane Martel
#8189
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Diane Martel is an American music video director and choreographer. Awards Martel was nominated for Video of the Year for her work in "Blurred Lines" – Robin Thicke feat. Pharrell & T.I. in 2013. Filmography
Go to Profile#8180
Conor McPherson
#8190
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Conor McPherson is an Irish playwright, screenwriter and director of stage and film. In recognition of his contribution to world theatre, McPherson was awarded a doctorate of Literature, Honoris Causa, in June 2013 by the University College Dublin.
Go to Profile#8181
Gaël Monfils
#8191
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Gaël Sébastien Monfils is a French professional tennis player. He has been ranked as high as world No. 6 in singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals , which he achieved in November 2016. His career highlights include reaching two major semifinals at the 2008 French Open and 2016 US Open, and three ATP Masters 1000 finals – two at the Paris Masters in 2009 and 2010, and the other at the 2016 Monte-Carlo Masters. Monfils was named the ATP Newcomer of the Year in 2005. He has won twelve ATP Tour singles titles and has been runner-up twenty-two times. He has reached at least one ATP Tou...
Go to Profile#8182
Etel Adnan
#8192
Overall Influence
1925 - 2021 (96 years)
Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
Go to Profile#8183
M. Cherif Bassiouni
#8193
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni was an Egyptian-American emeritus professor of law at DePaul University, where he taught from 1964 to 2012. He served in numerous United Nations positions and served as the consultant to the US Department of State and Justice on many projects. He was a founding member of the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University which was established in 1990. He served as president from 1990 to 1997 and then as president emeritus. Bassiouni is often referred to by the media as "the Godfather of International Criminal Law" and a "war crimes expert". As such, he ...
Go to Profile#8184
Frederick Alt
#8194
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Frederick W. Alt is an American geneticist. He is a member of the Immunology section of the National Academy of Sciences and a Charles A. Janeway Professor of Pediatrics, and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He is the Director of the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Boston Children's Hospital. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, since 1987.
Go to Profile#8185
Arianne Chernock
#8195
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Arianne Jessica Chernock is an American historian specialized in modern Britain and the history of Europe. She has written two books on women's rights and the history of women in the United Kingdom. Chernock is a professor at Boston University.
Go to Profile#8186
Hans Zeisel
#8196
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
Hans Zeisel was an Austrian-American sociologist and legal scholar who taught at the University of Chicago Law School from 1953 to 1974. He was best known for using quantitative social science techniques to study the law.
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Thomas Marshburn
#8197
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Thomas Henry Marshburn is an American physician and a former NASA astronaut. He is a veteran of three spaceflights to the International Space Station and holds the record for the oldest person to perform a spacewalk at 61 years old.
Go to Profile#8188
Gloria Ladson-Billings
#8198
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Gloria Jean Ladson-Billings is an American pedagogical theorist and teacher educator known for her work in the fields of culturally relevant pedagogy and critical race theory, and the pernicious effects of systemic racism and economic inequality on educational opportunities. Her book The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African-American Children is a significant text in the field of education. Ladson-Billings is Professor Emerita and formerly the Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison...
Go to Profile#8189
Eldon C. Hall
#8199
Overall Influence
Eldon Hall was the leader of hardware design efforts for the Apollo Guidance Computer at MIT, and advocated the use of integrated circuits for this task. He wrote extensively of the development of the AGC, culminating in his 1996 book, Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer
Go to Profile#8190
Philip Rubin
#8200
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Philip E. Rubin is an American cognitive scientist, technologist, and science administrator known for raising the visibility of behavioral and cognitive science, neuroscience, and ethical issues related to science, technology, and medicine, at a national level. His research career is noted for his theoretical contributions and pioneering technological developments, starting in the 1970s, related to speech synthesis and speech production, including articulatory synthesis and sinewave synthesis, and their use in studying complex temporal events, particularly understanding the biological bas...
Go to Profile#8191
Roger Moore
#8201
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Sir Roger George Moore was an English actor. He was the third actor to portray fictional secret agent James Bond in the Eon Productions/MGM Studios film series, playing the character in seven feature films between 1973 and 1985. Moore's seven appearances as Bond, from Live and Let Die to A View to a Kill, are the most of any actor in the Eon-produced entries.
Go to Profile#8192
Brahma Chellaney
#8202
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Brahma Chellaney is an Indian geostrategist, public intellectual, columnist and author on geostrategic affairs. He is a professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He was a member of India's National Security Advisory Board and an author of its draft nuclear doctrine. He is a regular columnist for Project Syndicate, and writes for numerous other international publications. He is the author of nine books on geostrategic affairs, of which Asian Juggernaut was a best-seller and Water: Asia's New Battleground received the $20,000 Bernard Schwartz Award.
Go to Profile#8193
Paula Vogel
#8203
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Paula Vogel is an American playwright who received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play How I Learned to Drive. A longtime teacher, Vogel spent the bulk of her academic career – from 1984 to 2008 – at Brown University, where she served as Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor in Creative Writing, oversaw its playwriting program, and helped found the Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium. From 2008 to 2012, Vogel was Eugene O'Neill Professor of Playwriting and department chair at the Yale School of Drama, as well as playwright in residence at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
Go to Profile#8194
Wanda Austin
#8204
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Wanda M. Austin is a former president and CEO of The Aerospace Corporation. She was both the first woman, and the first African-American, to hold this position. Austin also served as interim president for the University of Southern California, following the resignation of C. L. Max Nikias. She was both the first woman, and the first African-American, to hold this position.
Go to Profile#8195
Sadegh Zibakalam
#8205
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sadegh Zibakalam Mofrad is an Iranian academic, author and pundit described as reformist and neo-liberal. Zibakalam is a professor at University of Tehran and appears frequently on international news outlets including the BBC News and Al Jazeera. His books "How Did We Become What We Are? " and "An Introduction to Islamic Revolution" are among bestsellers and prominent books on Iranian contemporary politics.
Go to Profile#8196
Stephanie Wilson
#8206
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Stephanie Diana Wilson is an American engineer and a NASA astronaut. She flew to space onboard three Space Shuttle missions, and is the second African American woman to go into space, after Mae Jemison. her 42 days in space are the second most of any female African American astronaut, having been surpassed by Jessica Watkins in 2022.
Go to Profile#8197
Richard Lipsey
#8207
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Richard George Lipsey, is a Canadian academic and economist. He is best known for his work on the economics of the second-best, a theory that demonstrated that piecemeal establishing of individual first best conditions would not necessarily raise welfare in a situation in which all first best conditions could not be satisfied, an article that he co-authored with Kelvin Lancaster. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Economics at Simon Fraser University.
Go to Profile#8198
Juhani Pallasmaa
#8208
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Juhani Uolevi Pallasmaa is a Finnish architect and former professor of architecture and dean at the Helsinki University of Technology. Among the many academic and civic positions he has held are those of Director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture 1978–1983, and head of the Institute of Industrial Arts, Helsinki. He established his own architect's office – Arkkitehtitoimisto Juhani Pallasmaa KY – in 1983 in Helsinki. From 2001 to 2003, he was Raymond E. Maritz Visiting Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2013 he received an honorary doctorate from that university.
Go to Profile#8199
Stephen Baxter
#8209
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Stephen Baxter is an English hard science fiction author. He has degrees in mathematics and engineering. Writing style Strongly influenced by SF pioneer H. G. Wells, Baxter has been vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society since 2006. His fiction falls into three main categories of original work plus a fourth category, extending other authors' writing; each has a different basis, style, and tone.
Go to Profile#8200
Stephen P. Boyd
#8210
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Stephen P. Boyd is an American professor and control theorist. He is the Samsung Professor of Engineering, Professor in Electrical Engineering, and professor by courtesy in Computer Science and Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University. He is also affiliated with Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering .
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