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
#8251
Linda Williams
#8261
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Linda Williams is an American professor of film studies in the departments of Film Studies and Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley. Career Williams graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a B.A in Comparative Literature in 1969, and then earned a PhD at the University of Colorado for her dissertation subsequently published as Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Her main academic areas of interest are: film history, film genre, melodrama, pornography, feminist theory and visual culture; all with an emphasis on women, gender, race, and sexualit...
Go to Profile#8252
Jack Cardiff
#8262
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Jack Cardiff, was a British cinematographer, film and television director, and photographer. His career spanned the development of cinema, from silent film, through early experiments in Technicolor, to filmmaking more than half a century later.
Go to Profile#8253
Hortense Spillers
#8263
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Hortense J. Spillers is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature, collected in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, a collection edited by Spillers published by Routledge in 1991.
Go to Profile#8254
As'ad AbuKhalil
#8264
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
As'ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus. AbuKhalil is the author of Historical Dictionary of Lebanon , Bin Laden, Islam & America's New "War on Terrorism" , and The Battle for Saudi Arabia .
Go to Profile#8255
Zac Posen
#8265
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Zachary E. Posen is an American fashion designer. Early life Posen was born and raised in a Jewish family in New York City, residing in the SoHo neighborhood of lower Manhattan. He is the son of Susan , a corporate lawyer, and Stephen Arnold Posen, an artist. He has family roots in Shklow, Belarus, and Żychlin, Poland. His interest in fashion design started early, and as a child he would steal yarmulkes from his grandparents' synagogue to make ball dresses for dolls.
Go to Profile#8256
Hiraku Nakajima
#8266
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Hiraku Nakajima is a Japanese mathematician, and a professor of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo. He is International Mathematical Union president for the 2023–2026 term.
Go to Profile#8257
Mahmood Mamdani
#8267
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Mahmood Mamdani, FBA is an Indian-born Ugandan academic, author, and political commentator. He currently serves as the Chancellor of Kampala International University, Uganda. He was the director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research from 2010 until February 2022, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University and the Professor of Anthropology, Political Science and African Studies at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#8258
Richard Gregory
#8268
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Richard Langton Gregory, was a British psychologist and Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol. Life and career Richard Gregory was born in London. He was the son of Christopher Clive Langton Gregory, the first director of the University of London Observatory, and his first wife, Helen Patricia .
Go to Profile#8259
Michio Jimbo
#8269
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michio Jimbo is a Japanese mathematician working in mathematical physics and is a professor of mathematics at Rikkyo University. He is a grandson of the linguist . Career After graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1974, he studied under Mikio Sato at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto University. He has made important contributions to mathematical physics, including the initial development of the study of quantum groups-functions for the KP integrable hierarchy, and other related integrable hierarchies , and development of the theory of isomonodromic deformation ...
Go to Profile#8260
Sarah Schulman
#8270
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Go to Profile#8261
Pat Choate
#8271
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Pat Choate is an American economist who is most known for being the 1996 Reform Party candidate for Vice President of the United States, the running-mate of Ross Perot. Following the 1996 election, the Federal Election Commission certified the Reform Party as a national political party eligible for federal campaign matching funds, a historic first.
Go to Profile#8262
C. T. Vivian
#8272
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Cordy Tindell Vivian was an American minister, author, and close friend and lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. Vivian resided in Atlanta, Georgia, and founded the C. T. Vivian Leadership Institute, Inc. He was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
Go to Profile#8263
M. David Merrill
#8273
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
M. David Merrill is an education researcher specializing in instructional design and technology. Personal life Merrill was born on March 27, 1937. After completing high school, he was involved in missionary work for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. He is married to Kathleen Merrill and together they have nine children and 39 grandchildren. He currently lives in Utah. </ref>
Go to Profile#8264
Will Ferrell
#8274
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
John William Ferrell is an American actor, comedian, writer, and producer. Ferrell is known for his leading man roles in comedy films and for his work as a television producer. He has earned four Emmy Awards and in 2011 was honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. In 2015, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was named the best comedian in British GQ.
Go to Profile#8265
Jim Yong Kim
#8275
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jim Yong Kim , also known as Kim Yong , is an American physician and anthropologist who served as the 12th president of the World Bank from 2012 to 2019. A global health leader, Kim was formerly the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a co-founder and executive director of Partners In Health before serving as the President of Dartmouth College from 2009 to 2012, becoming the first Asian American president of an Ivy League institution.
Go to Profile#8266
Michel Jouvet
#8276
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
Michel Valentin Marcel Jouvet was a French neuroscientist and medical researcher. His works, and those of his team, have brought about the discovery of paradoxical sleep and to its individualisation as the third state of functioning of the brain , to the discovery of its phylogenesis, of its ontogenesis and its main mechanisms. Jouvet was the researcher who first developed the analeptic drug Modafinil.
Go to Profile#8267
Scott S. Sheppard
#8277
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Scott Sander Sheppard is an American astronomer and a discoverer of numerous moons, comets and minor planets in the outer Solar System. He is an astronomer in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC. He attended Oberlin College as an undergraduate, and received his bachelor in physics with honors in 1998. Starting as a graduate student at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, he was credited with the discovery of many small moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. He has also discovered the first know...
Go to Profile#8268
Raja Rao
#8278
Overall Influence
1908 - 2006 (98 years)
Raja Rao was an Indian-American writer of English-language novels and short stories, whose works are deeply rooted in metaphysics. The Serpent and the Rope , a semi-autobiographical novel recounting a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India, established him as one of the finest Indian prose stylists and won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1963. For the entire body of his work, Rao was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. Rao's wide-ranging body of work, spanning a number of genres, is seen as a varied and significant contribution to Indian English literatur...
Go to Profile#8269
Susan Wise Bauer
#8279
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Susan Wise Bauer is an American author, English instructor of writing and American literature at The College of William and Mary, and founder of Well-Trained Mind Press . Early life and education Susan Wise Bauer was born on August 8, 1968, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. She grew up on a farm in Virginia, the daughter of Jessie and James Wise. Her father was a pediatrician, and her mother was an educator. She and her two siblings received a homeschool education starting in the 1970s.
Go to Profile#8270
Gerd Lüdemann
#8280
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
Gerd Lüdemann was a German biblical scholar and historian. He taught first Jewish Christianity and Gnosticism at McMaster University, Canada and then New Testament at Vanderbilt Divinity School, U.S.A. . In 1983, he was appointed to the chair in New Testament Studies in the Evangelical Theological Faculty at the University of Göttingen , Germany, and taught New Testament until 1999. In the same year, his chair in “New Testament” was renamed “History and Literature of Early Christianity” in the Institute for Special Research at the University. Thus, he was removed from the professorship to ...
Go to Profile#8271
Arthur Kopit
#8281
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
Arthur Lee Kopit was an American playwright. He was a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for Indians and Wings. He was also nominated for three Tony Awards: Best Play for Indians and Wings , as well as Best Book of a Musical for Nine . He won the Vernon Rice Award in 1962 for Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad and was nominated for another Drama Desk Award in 1979 for Wings.
Go to Profile#8272
Marilyn Hacker
#8282
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Marilyn Hacker is an American poet, translator and critic. She is Professor of English emerita at the City College of New York. Her books of poetry include Presentation Piece , which won the National Book Award, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons , and Going Back to the River . In 2003, Hacker won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. In 2009, she subsequently won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, which also garnered the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize from the National Poetry Series. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.
Go to Profile#8273
Carl Pomerance
#8283
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Carl Bernard Pomerance is an American number theorist. He attended college at Brown University and later received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1972 with a dissertation proving that any odd perfect number has at least seven distinct prime factors. He joined the faculty at the University of Georgia, becoming full professor in 1982. He subsequently worked at Lucent Technologies for a number of years, and then became a distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College.
Go to Profile#8274
Robin Fox
#8284
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Robin Fox is an Anglo-American anthropologist who has written on the topics of incest avoidance, marriage systems, human and primate kinship systems, evolutionary anthropology, sociology and the history of ideas in the social sciences. He founded the department of anthropology at Rutgers University in 1967 and had remained a professor there for the rest of his career, also being a director of research for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation from 1972 to 1984.
Go to Profile#8275
Shang-Hua Teng
#8285
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Shang-Hua Teng is a Chinese-American computer scientist. He is the Seeley G. Mudd Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Southern California. Previously, he was the chairman of the Computer Science Department at the Viterbi School of Engineering of the University of Southern California.
Go to Profile#8276
Robert Coles
#8286
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Robert Coles is an American author, child psychiatrist, and professor emeritus at Harvard University. Early life, education, and military service Born Martin Robert Coles in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 12, 1929, to Philip Coles, an immigrant from Leeds, England, United Kingdom, and Sandra Young Coles, originally from Sioux City, Iowa. Robert Coles attended Boston Latin School where he played tennis, ran track, and edited the school literary magazine. He entered Harvard College in 1946, where he studied English literature and helped to edit the undergraduate literary magazine, The Harvard Advocate.
Go to Profile#8277
Zdeněk Matějček
#8287
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Zdeněk Matějček was a Czech child psychologist, researcher, and childcare reformer, who pioneered the study of the institutional conditions of raising children in an environment of psychological deprivation. He was a significant reformer of child care, emphasising the irreplaceable role of the family. He was known for studies of the effects on children of being held in prison camps during World War II, was a co-founder and the first chairman of an association that involved animals, such as dogs and horses, in child therapy, and was the principal organizer of a meeting of the International Association for Research in Learning Disabilities, held in Prague on October 2–5, 1989.
Go to Profile#8278
Johan Håstad
#8288
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Johan Torkel Håstad is a Swedish theoretical computer scientist most known for his work on computational complexity theory. He was the recipient of the Gödel Prize in 1994 and 2011 and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1986, among other prizes. He has been a professor in theoretical computer science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden since 1988, becoming a full professor in 1992. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 2001.
Go to Profile#8279
David W. Blight
#8289
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophic...
Go to Profile#8280
Smokey Robinson
#8290
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
William "Smokey" Robinson Jr. is an American R&B and soul singer, songwriter, record producer, and former record executive. He was the founder and frontman of the pioneering Motown vocal group the Miracles, for which he was also chief songwriter and producer. He led the group from its 1955 origins, when they were called The Five Chimes, until 1972, when he retired from the group to focus on his role as Motown Records vice president. Robinson returned to the music industry as a solo artist the following year. He left Motown in 1999.
Go to Profile#8281
David M. Kennedy
#8291
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
David Michael Kennedy is an American historian specializing in American history. He is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University and the former Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic analysis and cultural analysis with social history and political history.
Go to Profile#8282
Willem Levelt
#8292
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Willem Johannes Maria Levelt is a Dutch psycholinguist. He is a researcher of human language acquisition and speech production. He developed a comprehensive theory of the cognitive processes involved in the act of speaking, including the significance of the "mental lexicon". Levelt was the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He also served as president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences between 2002 and 2005, of which he has been a member since 1978.
Go to Profile#8283
Audrey Tang
#8293
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Audrey Tang Feng is a Taiwanese free software programmer and the inaugural Minister of Digital Affairs of the Republic of China , who has been described as one of the "ten greatest Taiwanese computing personalities". In August 2016, Tang was invited to join Taiwan's Executive Yuan as a minister without portfolio, making her the first transgender person and the first non-binary official in the top executive cabinet. Tang has identified as "post-gender" and accepts "whatever pronoun people want to describe me with online." Tang is a community leader of Haskell and Perl and the core member of g0...
Go to Profile#8284
Charles Gwathmey
#8294
Overall Influence
1938 - 2009 (71 years)
Charles Gwathmey was an American architect. He was a principal at Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, as well as one of the five architects identified as The New York Five in 1969. Gwathmey was perhaps best known for the 1992 renovation of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York City.
Go to Profile#8285
James Thomson
#8295
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
James Alexander Thomson is an American developmental biologist best known for deriving the first human embryonic stem cell line in 1998 and for deriving human induced pluripotent stem cells in 2007.
Go to Profile#8286
Mary Main
#8296
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Mary Main was an American psychologist notable for her work in the field of attachment. A Professor at the University of California Berkeley, Main is particularly known for her introduction of the 'disorganized' infant attachment classification and for development of the Adult Attachment Interview and coding system for assessing states of mind regarding attachment. This work has been described as 'revolutionary' and Main has been described as having 'unprecedented resonance and influence' in the field of psychology.
Go to Profile#8287
David George Kendall
#8297
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
David George Kendall FRS was an English statistician and mathematician, known for his work on probability, statistical shape analysis, ley lines and queueing theory. He spent most of his academic life in the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge . He worked with M. S. Bartlett during World War II, and visited Princeton University after the war.
Go to Profile#8288
Toshikazu Sunada
#8298
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
is a Japanese mathematician and author of many books and essays on mathematics and mathematical sciences. He is professor emeritus of both Meiji University and Tohoku University. He is also distinguished professor of emeritus at Meiji in recognition of achievement over the course of an academic career. Before he joined Meiji University in 2003, he was professor of mathematics at Nagoya University , at the University of Tokyo , and at Tohoku University . Sunada was involved in the creation of the School of Interdisciplinary Mathematical Sciences at Meiji University and is its first dean . Sinc...
Go to Profile#8289
Axel Ockenfels
#8299
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Axel Ockenfels is a German economist. He is professor of economics at the University of Cologne. He also is Director of the Cologne Laboratory of Economic Research, Speaker of the "University of Cologne Excellence Center for Social and Economic Behavior " , and Coordinator of the DFG research unit "Design & Behavior".
Go to Profile#8290
Rick Gibson
#8300
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Rick Gibson is a Canadian sculptor and artist best known for his performance works. Early life and education Gibson was born in Montreal and studied psychology at the University of Victoria, where between 1973 and 1974 he drew weekly comics for the student newspaper. After completing his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1974 he moved to Vancouver. He lived in London, England from 1983 to 1989. He received a Master of Science degree in Interactive Art and Technology from Simon Fraser University, Surrey in 2004.
Go to Profile#8291
Hugh Bradner
#8301
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Hugh Bradner was an American physicist at the University of California who is credited with inventing the neoprene wetsuit, which helped to revolutionize scuba diving and surfing. A graduate of Ohio's Miami University, he received his doctorate from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, in 1941. He worked at the US Naval Ordnance Laboratory during World War II, where he researched naval mines. In 1943, he was recruited by Robert Oppenheimer to join the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory. There, he worked with scientists including Luis Alvarez, John von Neuman...
Go to Profile#8292
Kiyonori Kikutake
#8302
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
was a prominent Japanese architect known as one of the founders of the Japanese Metabolist group. He was also the tutor and employer of several important Japanese architects, such as Toyo Ito, Shōzō Uchii and Itsuko Hasegawa.
Go to Profile#8293
Göran Malmqvist
#8303
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Nils Göran David Malmqvist was a Swedish linguist, literary historian, sinologist and translator. He was also a member of the Swedish Academy between 1985 and 2019. Biography Göran Malmqvist was born on 6 June 1924, in Jönköping, Sweden. Following introductory studies of Chinese under Sinologist Bernhard Karlgren at Stockholm University, Malmqvist studied in China in 1948–1950. He then returned to Stockholm, taking a Licentiate of Arts degree in 1951. His international research career started shortly thereafter with a lectureship in Chinese at the University of London in 1953–1955. He was the...
Go to Profile#8294
Stuart Umpleby
#8304
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Stuart Anspach Umpleby is an American cybernetician and professor in the Department of Management and Director of the Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning in the School of Business at the George Washington University.
Go to Profile#8295
Peter Brown
#8305
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Peter Robert Lamont Brown is an Irish historian. He is the Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. Brown is credited with having brought coherence to the field of Late Antiquity, and is often regarded as the inventor of said field. His work has concerned, in particular, the religious culture of the later Roman Empire and early medieval Europe, and the relation between religion and society.
Go to Profile#8296
Gerald Hawkins
#8306
Overall Influence
1928 - 2003 (75 years)
Gerald Stanley Hawkins was a British-born American astronomer and author noted for his work in the field of archaeoastronomy. A professor and chair of the astronomy department at Boston University in the United States, he published in 1963 an analysis of Stonehenge in which he was the first to propose that it was an ancient astronomical observatory used to predict movements of the sun and moon, and that it was used as a computer. Archaeologists and other scholars have since demonstrated such sophisticated, complex planning and construction at other prehistoric earthwork sites, such as Cahok...
Go to Profile#8297
Ibn Warraq
#8307
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Ibn Warraq is the pen name of an anonymous author critical of Islam. He is the founder of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society and used to be a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry, focusing on Quranic criticism. Warraq is the vice-president of the World Encounter Institute.
Go to Profile#8298
Anita Shapira
#8308
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Anita Shapira is an Israeli historian. She is the founder of the Yitzhak Rabin Center, professor emerita of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, and former head of the Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism at Tel Aviv University. She received the Israel Prize in 2008.
Go to Profile#8299
Bradford Parkinson
#8309
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
#8300
Richard W. Conway
#8310
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Richard Walter Conway is an American industrial engineer and computer scientist who is the Emerson Electric Company Professor of Manufacturing Management, Emeritus in the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. Conway has spent his entire academic career, both as a student and a professor, at Cornell and has held faculty positions at Cornell in several different areas: industrial engineering, operations research, computer science, and management science. He is especially known for his work and publications in foundational questions about computer simulation methodology;...
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