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
#8201
Denis Napthine
#8211
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Denis Vincent Napthine is a former Australian politician and veterinarian who served as the 47th premier of Victoria from 2013 to 2014. He held office as the leader of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party of Australia and was a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly for the district of Portland from 1988 to 2002, before transferring to that of South-West Coast from 2002 to 2015.
Go to Profile#8202
Patrick Modiano
#8212
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jean Patrick Modiano , generally known as Patrick Modiano, is a French novelist and recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is a noted writer of autofiction, the blend of autobiography and historical fiction.
Go to Profile#8203
Freda Adler
#8213
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Freda Adler is a criminologist and educator, currently serving as professor emeritus at Rutgers University and a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was President of the American Society of Criminology in 1994-1995. She has acted as a consultant to the United Nations on criminal justice matters since 1975, holding various roles within United Nations organizations. A prolific writer, Adler has published in a variety of criminological areas, including female criminality, international issues in crime, piracy, drug abuse, and social control theories.
Go to Profile#8204
Raúl Castro
#8214
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz is a Cuban retired politician and general who served as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, the most senior position in the one-party communist state, from 2011 to 2021, and President of Cuba between 2008 and 2018, succeeding his brother Fidel Castro.
Go to Profile#8205
Paul Vitz
#8215
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Paul Clayton Vitz is an American psychologist who is a Senior Scholar at Divine Mercy University in Sterling, Virginia. He is emeritus professor of psychology at New York University. His work focuses primarily on the relationship between psychology and Christianity.
Go to Profile#8206
John J. DeGioia
#8216
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
John Joseph DeGioia is an American academic administrator and philosopher who has been the president of Georgetown University since 2001. He is the first lay president of the school and is currently its longest-serving president. Upon his appointment, he also became the first lay president of any Jesuit university in the United States. Having spent his entire career at Georgetown, where he received his undergraduate and graduate degrees, DeGioia was the dean of student affairs and held various vice presidential positions before becoming president.
Go to Profile#8207
Stuart Newman
#8217
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Stuart Alan Newman is a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla, NY, United States. His research centers around three program areas: cellular and molecular mechanisms of vertebrate limb development, physical mechanisms of morphogenesis, and mechanisms of morphological evolution. He also writes about social and cultural aspects of biological research and technology.
Go to Profile#8208
Eric Xing
#8218
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Eric Poe Xing is an American computer scientist whose research spans machine learning, computational biology, and statistical methodology. Xing is founding President of the world’s first artificial intelligence university, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence .
Go to Profile#8209
Morton O. Schapiro
#8219
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Morton Owen Schapiro is an American economist who served as the 16th president of Northwestern University from 2009 to 2022. Schapiro previously served as president of Williams College in Massachusetts from 2000 to 2009, vice president for planning of the University of Southern California from 1998 to 2000, and dean of the University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts and Sciences from 1994 to 2000.
Go to Profile#8210
Bohdan Hawrylyshyn
#8220
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Bohdan Dmytrovych Hawrylyshyn was a Canadian, Swiss and Ukrainian economist, thinker, benefactor and advisor to governments and large companies worldwide. He was a full member of the Club of Rome, a long-time director of Switzerland's International Management Institute , a founder of the European Management Forum in Davos , a fellow and member of the Board of the World Academy of Art and Science. Hawrylyshyn also was a consultant of General Electric, IBM, Unilever, Philips and advisor to several countries. After Ukraine declared independence in 1991, he was an advisor to several Ukrainian pri...
Go to Profile#8211
Lael Brainard
#8221
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Lael Brainard is an American economist serving as the 14th director of the National Economic Council since February 21, 2023. She previously served as the 22nd vice chair of the Federal Reserve between May 2022 and February 2023. Prior to her term as vice chair, Brainard served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, taking office in 2014. Before her appointment to the Federal Reserve, she served as the under secretary of the treasury for international affairs from 2010 to 2013.
Go to Profile#8212
Paul Scholes
#8222
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Paul Scholes is an English football coach, pundit, former player, and co-owner of Salford City. He spent his entire professional playing career with Manchester United, for whom he scored over 150 goals in more than 700 appearances between 1993 and 2013. He is widely regarded as one of the best midfielders of his generation and one of the greatest Manchester United players of all time.
Go to Profile#8213
Sam Moskowitz
#8223
Overall Influence
1920 - 1997 (77 years)
Sam Moskowitz was an American writer, critic, and historian of science fiction. Biography As a child, Moskowitz greatly enjoyed reading science fiction pulp magazines. As a teenager, he organized a branch of the Science Fiction League. While still in his teens, Moskowitz became chairman of the first World Science Fiction Convention held in New York City in 1939. He barred several members of the rival Futurians club from the convention because they threatened to disrupt it. This event is referred to by historians of fandom as the "Great Exclusion Act".
Go to Profile#8214
Jeffrey Shaw
#8224
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jeffrey Shaw is a visual artist known for being a leading figure in new media art. In a prolific career of widely exhibited and critically acclaimed work, he has pioneered the creative use of digital media technologies in the fields of expanded cinema, interactive art, virtual, augmented and mixed reality, immersive visualization environments, navigable cinematic systems and interactive narrative. Shaw was co-designer of Algie the inflatable pig, which was photographed above Battersea Power Station for the 1977 Pink Floyd album, Animals.
Go to Profile#8215
Christina Koch
#8225
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Christina Hammock Koch is an American engineer and NASA astronaut of the class of 2013. She received Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and physics and a Master of Science in electrical engineering at North Carolina State University. She also did advanced study while working at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Just before becoming an astronaut, she served at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as station chief for American Samoa.
Go to Profile#8216
Henri Cohen
#8226
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Henri Cohen is a number theorist, and an emeritus professor at the University of Bordeaux. He is best known for leading the team that created the PARI/GP computer algebra system. He also introduced the Rankin–Cohen bracket, co-proposed the Cohen-Lenstra heuristics and has written several textbooks in computational and algebraic number theory.
Go to Profile#8217
Michael R. Taylor
#8227
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Michael R. Taylor is an American lawyer who has played leadership roles in the US Food and Drug Administration, agrochemical company Monsanto, and law firm King & Spalding. He currently co-chairs the board of STOP Foodborne Illness, a non-profit that supports victims of serious illness and their families in efforts to strengthen food safety culture and practices in government and industry.
Go to Profile#8218
Oded Schramm
#8228
Overall Influence
1961 - 2008 (47 years)
Oded Schramm was an Israeli-American mathematician known for the invention of the Schramm–Loewner evolution and for working at the intersection of conformal field theory and probability theory. Biography Schramm was born in Jerusalem. His father, Michael Schramm, was a biochemistry professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#8219
Anat Ninio
#8229
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Anat Ninio is a professor emeritus of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She specializes in the interactive context of language acquisition, the communicative functions of speech, pragmatic development, and syntactic development.
Go to Profile#8220
Lewis Gordon
#8230
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Lewis Ricardo Gordon is an American philosopher at the University of Connecticut who works in the areas of Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political theory, postcolonial thought, theories of race and racism, philosophies of liberation, aesthetics, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. He has written particularly extensively on Africana and black existentialism, postcolonial phenomenology, race and racism, and on the works and thought of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. His most recent book is titled: Fear of Black Consciousness.
Go to Profile#8221
Samuel Scheffler
#8231
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Samuel Ira Scheffler is a moral and political philosopher, who is University Professor of Philosophy and Law in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Law at New York University. Education and career Before moving to NYU in 2008, Scheffler taught for 31 years at the University of California, Berkeley. Scheffler received his PhD from Princeton University, where he was a student of the philosopher Thomas Nagel. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
Go to Profile#8222
Emile Zuckerkandl
#8232
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
Émile Zuckerkandl was an Austrian-born French biologist considered one of the founders of the field of molecular evolution. He introduced, with Linus Pauling, the concept of the "molecular clock", which enabled the neutral theory of molecular evolution.
Go to Profile#8223
Andreas Huyssen
#8233
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he taught beginning in 1986. He is the founding director of the university's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and one of the founding editors of the New German Critique.
Go to Profile#8224
Hugh Huxley
#8234
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Hugh Esmor Huxley MBE FRS was a British molecular biologist who made important discoveries in the physiology of muscle. He was a graduate in physics from Christ's College, Cambridge. However, his education was interrupted for five years by the Second World War, during which he served in the Royal Air Force. His contribution to development of radar earned him an MBE.
Go to Profile#8225
Alexander Varshavsky
#8235
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Alexander J. Varshavsky is a Russian-American biochemist and geneticist. He works at the California Institute of Technology as the Morgan Professor of Biology. Varshavsky left Russia in 1977, emigrating to United States.
Go to Profile#8226
Ronald N. Bracewell
#8236
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Ronald Newbold Bracewell AO was the Lewis M. Terman Professor of Electrical Engineering of the Space, Telecommunications, and Radioscience Laboratory at Stanford University. Education Bracewell was born in Sydney, in 1921, and educated at Sydney Boys High School. He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1941 with the BSc degree in mathematics and physics, later receiving the degrees of B.E. , and M.E. with first class honours, and while working in the Engineering Department became the President of the Oxometrical society. During World War II he designed and developed microwave radar eq...
Go to Profile#8227
Damon Albarn
#8237
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Damon Albarn ; born 23 March 1968 Raised in Leytonstone, East London, and around Colchester, Essex, Albarn attended the Stanway School, where he met the guitarist Graham Coxon and formed Blur. They released their debut album Leisure in 1991. After spending long periods touring the US, Albarn's songwriting became increasingly influenced by Philippa Dineen and British bands from the 1960s. The result was the Blur albums Modern Life Is Rubbish , Parklife and The Great Escape . All three received critical acclaim, while Blur gained mass popularity in the UK, aided by a Britpop chart rivalry with Oasis.
Go to Profile#8228
T. Marshall Hahn
#8238
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Thomas Marshall Hahn Jr. was an American educator. He served as President of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University from 1962 to 1974 and CEO of Georgia-Pacific Corporation from 1983 to 1993.
Go to Profile#8229
Dirk van Dalen
#8239
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Dirk van Dalen is a Dutch mathematician and historian of science. Van Dalen studied mathematics and physics and astronomy at the University of Amsterdam. Inspired by the work of Brouwer and Heyting, he received his Ph.D. in 1963 from the University of Amsterdam for the thesis Extension problems in intuitionistic plane Projective geometry. From 1964 to 1966 Van Dalen taught logic and mathematics at MIT, and later Oxford. From 1967 he was professor at the University of Utrecht. In 2003 Dirk van Dalen was awarded the Academy Medal 2003 of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences for bringing the work...
Go to Profile#8230
Wanda Orlikowski
#8240
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Wanda J. Orlikowski is a US-based organizational theorist and Information Systems researcher, and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Information Technologies and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#8231
Jerry M. Linenger
#8241
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Jerry Michael Linenger is a retired Captain in the United States Navy Medical Corps, and a former NASA astronaut who flew on the Space Shuttle and Space Station Mir. Background Born January 16, 1955, and raised in East Detroit, Michigan, he is married to the former Kathryn M. Bartmann of Arlington Heights, Illinois; they have four children. Linenger graduated from East Detroit High School 1973. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in bioscience from the United States Naval Academy in 1977, a doctorate in medicine from Wayne State University School of Medicine in 1981, a Master of Science ...
Go to Profile#8232
Kiki Smith
#8242
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Kiki Smith is a German-born American artist whose work has addressed the themes of sex, birth and regeneration. Her figurative work of the late 1980s and early 1990s confronted subjects such as AIDS, feminism, and gender, while recent works have depicted the human condition in relationship to nature. Smith lives and works in the Lower East Side, New York City, and the Hudson Valley, New York State.
Go to Profile#8233
Tommi Mäkinen
#8243
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Tommi Antero Mäkinen is a Finnish racing executive and former driver. Mäkinen is one of the most successful WRC drivers of all time, ranking fifth in rally wins and third in championships , tied with Juha Kankkunen behind Sébastien Ogier and Sébastien Loeb . In 2018, as a head of Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT, he became the first person in the history of rally driving to win a Championship both as a driver and as a team principal.
Go to Profile#8234
Leonid Kuchma
#8244
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Leonid Danylovych Kuchma is a Ukrainian politician who was the second president of Ukraine from 19 July 1994 to 23 January 2005. After a successful career in the machine-building industry of the Soviet Union, Kuchma began his political career in 1990, when he was elected to the Verkhovna Rada ; he was re-elected in 1994. He served as Prime Minister of Ukraine between October 1992 and September 1993.
Go to Profile#8235
Hassan Rouhani
#8245
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Hassan Rouhani is an Iranian Islamist politician who served as the seventh president of Iran from 2013 to 2021. He is also a sharia lawyer , academic, former diplomat and Islamic cleric. He has been a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts since 1999. He was a member of the Expediency Council from 1991 to 2021, and also was a member of the Supreme National Security Council from 1989 to 2021. Rouhani was deputy speaker of the fourth and fifth terms of the Parliament of Iran and Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council from 1989 to 2005. In the latter capacity, he was the country's top...
Go to Profile#8236
Mary Kaldor
#8246
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Mary Henrietta Kaldor is a British academic, currently Professor of Global Governance at the London School of Economics, where she is also the Director of the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit. She also teaches at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals . She has been a key figure in the development of cosmopolitan democracy. She writes on globalisation, international relations and humanitarian intervention, global civil society and global governance, as well as what she calls New Wars.
Go to Profile#8237
Edward H. Shortliffe
#8247
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Edward Hance Shortliffe is a Canadian-born American biomedical informatician, physician, and computer scientist. Shortliffe is a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in medicine. He was the principal developer of the clinical expert system MYCIN, one of the first rule-based artificial intelligence expert systems, which obtained clinical data interactively from a physician user and was used to diagnose and recommend treatment for severe infections. While never used in practice , its performance was shown to be comparable to and sometimes more accurate than that of Stanford infectious disease faculty.
Go to Profile#8238
Julian Simon
#8248
Overall Influence
1932 - 1998 (66 years)
Julian Lincoln Simon was an American professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute at the time of his death, after previously serving as a longtime economics and business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Go to Profile#8239
Joy Buolamwini
#8249
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Joy Adowaa Buolamwini is a Ghanaian-American-Canadian computer scientist and digital activist based at the MIT Media Lab. Buolamwini introduces herself as a poet of code, daughter of art and science. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League , an organization that works to challenge bias in decision-making software, using art, advocacy, and research to highlight the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence .
Go to Profile#8240
Bruce Trigger
#8250
Overall Influence
1937 - 2006 (69 years)
Bruce Graham Trigger was a Canadian archaeologist, anthropologist, and ethnohistorian. He was appointed the James McGill Professor at McGill University in 2001. Life Born in Preston, Ontario , Trigger obtained his undergraduate education at the University of Toronto earning a B.A. in anthropology in 1959. Trigger received a doctorate in archaeology from Yale University in 1964. He was taught by George Peter Murdock and Benjamin Irving Rouse. He was co-supervised by William Kelly Simpson and Michael D. Coe. He became friends with K. C. Chang, a Chinese archaeologist, who joined the department during his final year of his PhD.
Go to Profile#8241
Arthur L. Herman
#8251
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Arthur L. Herman is an American popular historian. He currently serves as a senior fellow at Hudson Institute. Biography Herman's father Arthur L. Herman, a scholar of Sanskrit, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
Go to Profile#8242
Bernd Schmitt
#8252
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Bernd Herbert Schmitt is a professor of international business in the marketing department at Columbia Business School, Columbia University in New York. He is known for his research, books, speaking and consulting on customer experience, customer happiness, branding, innovation and for his work in Asia on Asian markets and consumers. He wrote several influential books in these areas like Experiential Marketing, Customer Experience Management, Big Think Strategy and Happy Customers Everywhere.
Go to Profile#8243
Paul Frampton
#8253
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Paul Howard Frampton is an English theoretical physicist who works in particle theory and cosmology. From 1996 until 2014, he was the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is affiliated with the Department of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Salento, in Italy.
Go to Profile#8244
Peter Haggett
#8254
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Peter Haggett is a British geographer and academic, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow in Urban and Regional Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. Education and career Haggett was born in the rural Somerset village of Pawlett, and he was educated at Dr Morgan's Grammar School in Bridgwater. He would later credit the time spent in his childhood walking and cycling around the district for the development of his keen interest in geography.
Go to Profile#8245
Lev Vaidman
#8255
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Lev Vaidman is a Russian-Israeli physicist and Professor at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He is noted for his theoretical work in the area of fundamentals of quantum mechanics, which includes quantum teleportation, the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester, and the weak values. He was a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The American Journal of Physics from 2007 to 2009. In 2010, the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester was chosen as one of the "Seven Wonders of the Quantum World" by New Scientist Magazine.
Go to Profile#8246
Damodar N. Gujarati
#8256
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Damodar N. Gujarati is a professor of economics at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and author/co-author of the Basic Econometrics textbook, among others. The textbook has been published in 5 editions over the last 21 years, and translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Turkish, and Persian.
Go to Profile#8247
Murray Bookchin
#8257
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Murray Bookchin was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. A pioneer in the environmental movement, Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment , Post-Scarcity Anarchism , The Ecology of Freedom , and Urbanization Without Cities . In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted w...
Go to Profile#8248
James L. Flanagan
#8258
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
James Loton Flanagan was an American electrical engineer. He was Rutgers University's vice president for research until 2004. He was also director of Rutgers' Center for Advanced Information Processing and the Board of Governors Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is known for co-developing adaptive differential pulse-code modulation with P. Cummiskey and Nikil Jayant at Bell Labs.
Go to Profile#8249
Byron White
#8259
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Byron Raymond "Whizzer" White was an American lawyer, jurist, and professional football player who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1962 until 1993. By his retirement, he was its only sitting Democrat and the last surviving member of the progressive Warren Court.
Go to Profile#8250
Kenneth Branagh
#8260
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh is a British actor and filmmaker. Born in Belfast and raised primarily in Reading, Berkshire, Branagh trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and has served as its president since 2015. His accolades include an Academy Award, four BAFTAss, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Olivier Award. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2012 Birthday Honours, and was given Freedom of the City in his native Belfast in 2018. In 2020, he was ranked in 20th place on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors.
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