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
#8301
Keith Jackson
#8311
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Keith Max Jackson was an American sports commentator, journalist, author, and radio personality, known for his career with ABC Sports . While he covered a variety of sports over his career, he is best known for his coverage of college football from 1952 until 2006, and his distinctive voice, "a throwback voice, deep and operatic. A voice that was to college football what Edward R. Murrow's was to war. It was the voice of ultimate authority in his profession."
Go to Profile#8302
Travis Scott
#8312
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Jacques Bermon Webster II , known professionally as Travis Scott , is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Throughout his career, Scott has achieved four number-one hits on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart, along with a total of over a hundred charted songs. Scott has been nominated for eight Grammy Awards and won a Billboard Music Award, Latin Grammy Award, MTV Video Music Award, and multiple BET Hip Hop Awards. As of 2020, Scott has sold over 45 million certified records in the US alone. Scott's musical style has been described as a "blend between traditional hip-hop an...
Go to Profile#8303
Hans Singer
#8313
Overall Influence
1910 - 2006 (96 years)
Sir Hans Wolfgang Singer was a German-born British development economist best known for the Prebisch-Singer thesis, which states that the terms of trade move against producers of primary products. He is one of the primary figures of heterodox economics.
Go to Profile#8304
André Joyal
#8314
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
André Joyal is a professor of mathematics at the Université du Québec à Montréal who works on category theory. He was a member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2013, where he was invited to join the Special Year on Univalent Foundations of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#8305
Benjamin Stora
#8315
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Benjamin Stora is a French historian, expert on North Africa, who is widely considered one of the world's leading authorities on Algerian history. He was born in a Jewish family that left the country following its War of Independence in 1962. Stora holds two PhDs and a Doctorate of the State . His books and articles have been translated into several languages, including English, Arabic, Spanish, German, Russian, and Vietnamese.
Go to Profile#8306
Sidney Poitier
#8316
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Sidney Poitier was a Bahamian and American actor, film director, and diplomat. In 1964, he was the first Black actor and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He received two competitive Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, and a Grammy Award as well as nominations for two Emmy Awards and a Tony Award. In 1999, he ranked among one of the "American Film Institute's 100 Stars". Poitier was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.
Go to Profile#8307
John N. Bahcall
#8317
Overall Influence
1934 - 2005 (71 years)
John Norris Bahcall was an American astrophysicist and the Richard Black Professor for Astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was known for a wide range of contributions to solar, galactic and extragalactic astrophysics, including the solar neutrino problem, the development of the Hubble Space Telescope and for his leadership and development of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Go to Profile#8308
Marta Harnecker
#8318
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Marta Harnecker was a Chilean journalist, author, psychologist, sociologist, and Marxist intellectual. She studied the analysis of labor movements and acted as an advisor to the government of Cuba, and worked with left-wing political movements within Latin America. She was active in the government of Salvador Allende between 1970 and 1973, and provided advice to Hugo Chávez between 2004 and 2011.
Go to Profile#8309
Frank Iacobucci
#8319
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Frank Iacobucci is a former Puisne Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada from 1991 until his retirement from the bench in 2004. He was the first Italian-Canadian, allophone judge on the court. Iacobucci was also the first judge on the Supreme Court to have been born, raised and educated in British Columbia. Iacobucci has had a distinguished career in private practice, academia, the civil service and the judiciary.
Go to Profile#8310
Alan Knight
#8320
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Alan Knight is a professor and researcher of Latin American history and former professor at the University of Oxford in England. His work has been recognized with several awards, including the Order of the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government.
Go to Profile#8311
Victoria Fromkin
#8321
Overall Influence
1923 - 2000 (77 years)
Victoria Alexandra Fromkin was an American linguist who taught at UCLA. She studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors, which she applied to phonology, the study of how the sounds of a language are organized in the mind.
Go to Profile#8312
Leonard Baskin
#8322
Overall Influence
1922 - 2000 (78 years)
Leonard Baskin was an American sculptor, draughtsman and graphic artist, as well as founder of the Gehenna Press . One of America's first fine arts presses, it went on to become "one of the most important and comprehensive art presses of the world", often featuring the work of celebrated poets, such as Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Anthony Hecht, and James Baldwin side by side with Baskin's bold, stark, energetic and often dramatic black-and-white prints. Called a "Sculptor of Stark Memorials" by the New York Times, Baskin is also known for his wood, limestone, bronze, and large-scale woodblock ...
Go to Profile#8313
Joseph Sung
#8323
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Joseph Sung Jao-yiu is a Hong Kong physician and gastroenterologist, and the current Dean of Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine at the Nanyang Technological University , also serving as the Senior Vice President of NTU. Previously, he was the Vice-Chancellor and President of the Chinese University of Hong Kong .
Go to Profile#8314
Christos Yannaras
#8324
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Christos Yannaras is a Greek philosopher, Eastern Orthodox theologian and author of more than 50 books which have been translated into many languages. He is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens.
Go to Profile#8315
Paul Beatty
#8325
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Paul Beatty is an American author and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. In 2016, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout. It was the first time a writer from the United States was honored with the Man Booker.
Go to Profile#8316
Malcolm Bowie
#8326
Overall Influence
1943 - 2007 (64 years)
Malcolm McNaughtan Bowie FBA was a British academic, and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge from 2002 to 2006. An acclaimed scholar of French literature, Bowie wrote several books on Marcel Proust, as well as books on Mallarmé, Lacan, and psychoanalysis.
Go to Profile#8317
Tom of Finland
#8327
Overall Influence
1920 - 1991 (71 years)
Touko Valio Laaksonen , known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and influenced late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
Go to Profile#8318
David J. Griffiths
#8328
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David Jeffrey Griffiths is an American physicist and educator. He was on the faculty of Reed College from 1978 through 2009, becoming the Howard Vollum Professor of Science before his retirement. He wrote three highly regarded textbooks for undergraduate physics students.
Go to Profile#8319
Rick Wakeman
#8329
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Richard Christopher Wakeman is an English keyboardist and composer best known as a former member of the progressive rock band Yes across five tenures between 1971 and 2004, and for his solo albums released in the 1970s. AllMusic describes Wakeman as a "classically trained keyboardist extraordinaire who plied his trade with Yes and developed his own brand of live spectacular in a solo act."
Go to Profile#8320
Terry Flew
#8330
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Terry Flew is an Australian media and communications scholar, and Professor of Digital Communication and Culture in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Sydney, Australia. He was formerly the Professor and Assistant Dean in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. He has produced award-winning research in creative industries, media and communications, and online journalism. He is primarily known for his publication, New Media: An Introduction, which is currently in its fourth edition . His research interests include digital media,...
Go to Profile#8321
Luc Bovens
#8331
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Luc Bovens is a Belgian professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bovens is a former editor of Economics and Philosophy. His main areas of research are moral and political philosophy, philosophy of economics, philosophy of public policy, Bayesian epistemology, rational choice theory, and voting theory. He has also published work, of some controversy to the anti-abortion movement, on issues regarding abortion and natural family planning methods of contraception.
Go to Profile#8322
Jonathan Kvanvig
#8332
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jonathan Lee Kvanvig is Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. Kvanvig has published extensively in areas such as epistemology, philosophy of religion, logic, and philosophy of language. Some of his books include Rationality and Reflection, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding, and The Problem of Hell , which debates Hell in a modern theological and philosophical way.
Go to Profile#8323
William Bunge
#8333
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
William Wheeler Bunge Jr. was an American geographer active mainly as a quantitative geographer and spatial theorist. He also became a radical geographer and anti-war activist in the US and Canada. Personal life Bunge served in the American Fifth Army during the height of the Korean War, November 1950 to November 1952. He completed a master's degree at the University of Wisconsin in 1955. He studied under Richard Hartshorne, the first professional geographer he had ever met. He gained a PhD in quantitative geography from the Department of Geography, University of Washington in 1960.
Go to Profile#8324
Jeffery Deaver
#8334
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jeffery Deaver is an American mystery and crime writer. He has a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a J.D. degree from Fordham University and originally started working as a journalist. He later practiced law before embarking on a career as a novelist. He has been awarded the Steel Dagger and Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association and the Nero Wolfe Award, and he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader's Award for Best Short Story of the Year and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. His novels have appeared on be...
Go to Profile#8325
Alexander Schrijver
#8335
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Alexander Schrijver is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, a professor of discrete mathematics and optimization at the University of Amsterdam and a fellow at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. Since 1993 he has been co-editor in chief of the journal Combinatorica.
Go to Profile#8326
Simon J. Ortiz
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#8336
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Simon J. Ortiz (born May 27, 1941) is a Native American writer, poet, and enrolled member of the Pueblo of Acoma. Ortiz is one of the key figures in the second wave of what has been called the Native American Renaissance. He attended Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, as a chemistry major with the help of a BIA educational grant. While enthralled with language and literature, the young Ortiz never considered pursuing writing seriously; at the time, it was not a career that seemed viable for Native people; it was “a profession only whites did.” Since 1968, Ortiz has taught creative writin...
Go to Profile#8327
Victor Guillemin
#8337
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Victor William Guillemin is an American mathematician. He works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the field of symplectic geometry, and he has also made contributions to the fields of microlocal analysis, spectral theory, and mathematical physics.
Go to Profile#8328
Mark Kelman
#8338
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Mark Kelman is jurist and vice dean of Stanford Law School. As a prominent legal scholar, he has applied social science methodologies, including economics and psychology, to the study of law. He is one of the most cited law professors. He is regarded as one of the co-founders of the critical legal studies movement and authored "A Guide to Critical Legal Studies." He is widely known for his influential 1978 critique of the Coase theorem, a core part of law and economics.
Go to Profile#8329
Timothy Tyson
#8339
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Timothy B. Tyson is an American writer and historian who specializes in the issues of culture, religion, and race associated with the Civil Rights Movement. He is a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and an adjunct professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina.
Go to Profile#8330
Julio Palmaz
#8340
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Julio Palmaz is a doctor of vascular radiology at University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He studied at the National University of La Plata in Argentina, earning his medical degree in 1971. He then practiced vascular radiology at the San Martin University Hospital in La Plata before moving to the University of Texas Health and Science Center at San Antonio. He is known for inventing the balloon-expandable stent, for which he received a patent filed in 1985. It was recognized in Intellectual Property International Magazine as one of "Ten Patents that Changed the World" in the last century.
Go to Profile#8331
Arthur P. Dempster
#8341
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Arthur Pentland Dempster is a Professor Emeritus in the Harvard University Department of Statistics. He was one of four faculty when the department was founded in 1957. Biography Dempster received his B.A. in mathematics and physics and M.A. in mathematics , both from the University of Toronto. He obtained his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Princeton University in 1956. His thesis, titled The two-sample multivariate problem in the degenerate case, was written under the supervision of John Tukey.
Go to Profile#8332
Julian Castro
#8342
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Julián Castro is an American lawyer and politician from San Antonio. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the youngest member of President Obama's cabinet, serving as the 16th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2014 to 2017. Castro served as the mayor of his native San Antonio, Texas from 2009 until he joined Barack Obama's cabinet in 2014.
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Gerrit Blaauw
#8343
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Gerrit Anne "Gerry" Blaauw was a Dutch computer scientist, known as one of the principal designers of the IBM System/360 line of computers, together with Fred Brooks, Gene Amdahl, and others. Biography Born in The Hague, Netherlands, Blaauw received his BA from the Delft University of Technology in 1946. In 1947, Blaauw won an exclusive scholarship funded by IBM Chief Executive Officer Thomas J. Watson. After an initial year at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, Blaauw studied at Harvard University. He received his MA in 1949 and his PhD in 1952 under supervision of Howard Aiken, inventor of the early Mark I computer.
Go to Profile#8334
Janice Long
#8344
Overall Influence
1955 - 2021 (66 years)
Janice Berry , known professionally by her first married name Janice Long, was an English broadcaster who was best known for her work in British music radio. In a career that spanned five decades, she became the first woman to have her own daily music show on BBC Radio 1. She also appeared on other BBC Radio stations, such as BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio London, BBC Radio WM, and BBC Radio 6 Music, and was a regular presenter on the television chart show Top of the Pops.
Go to Profile#8335
Winston Graham
#8345
Overall Influence
1908 - 2003 (95 years)
Winston Mawdsley Graham OBE, born Winston Grime , was an English novelist best known for the Poldark series of historical novels set in Cornwall, though he also wrote numerous other works, including contemporary thrillers, period novels, short stories, non-fiction and plays. Winston Graham was the author's pseudonym until he changed his name by deed poll from Grime to Graham on 7 May 1947.
Go to Profile#8336
Jorge Rafael Videla
#8346
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Jorge Rafael Videla was an Argentine military officer and dictator, Commander in Chief of the Army, member of the Military Junta, and de facto President of Argentina from 29 March 1976 to 29 March 1981. His reign, which was during the time of Operation Condor, was among the most infamous in Latin America during the Cold War due to its high level of human rights abuses and severe economic mismanagement.
Go to Profile#8337
Gérard Houllier
#8347
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
Gérard Paul Francis Houllier was a French professional football manager and player. Clubs he managed include Paris Saint-Germain, Lens and Liverpool, where he won the FA Cup, League Cup, FA Charity Shield, UEFA Cup and UEFA Super Cup in 2001. He then guided Lyon to two French titles, before announcing his resignation on 25 May 2007. He became manager of Aston Villa in September 2010. He also coached the France national team between 1992 and 1993. He assisted Aimé Jacquet in the 1998 FIFA World Cup, was part of UEFA's and FIFA's Technical Committee in the 2002 and 2006 FIFA World Cup finals, and technical director for the French Football Federation during the 2010 finals.
Go to Profile#8338
Francis Deng
#8348
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Francis Mading Deng is a politician and diplomat from South Sudan who served as the newly independent country's first ambassador to the United Nations from 2012 to July 2016. Life and career Deng was educated at University of Khartoum and Master of Laws and earned a Doctor of Juridical Science from Yale University. He also took graduate courses at King's College London.
Go to Profile#8339
J. Laurie Snell
#8349
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
James Laurie Snell was an American mathematician and educator. Biography J. Laurie Snell was the son of Roy Snell, an adventure author, and Lucille, a concert pianist. Lucille taught the three sons to play piano, cello, and violin. The family had a life-lease on a cabin in Isle Royale National Park where they would go for summer holidays.
Go to Profile#8340
Kerry James Marshall
#8350
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kerry James Marshall is an American artist and professor, known for his paintings of Black figures. He previously taught painting at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2017, Marshall was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. He was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved in childhood to South Central Los Angeles. He has spent much of his career in Chicago, Illinois.
Go to Profile#8341
Matthew Goodwin
#8351
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Matthew James Goodwin is a British academic who is professor of politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent. His publications include National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy and Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics.
Go to Profile#8342
Steve Wright
#8352
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Stephen Richard Wright is an English radio personality, occasional television presenter and disc jockey, credited with introducing the zoo format on British radio, known for its zany, multi-personality approach. He presented Steve Wright in the Afternoon for 12 years on BBC Radio 1 and 23 years on BBC Radio 2, two of the BBC's national radio stations, the latter being the most popular station in the United Kingdom, ending on 30 September 2022. He continues to present his Sunday Love Songs weekend mid-morning show on Radio 2, and in October 2023, he took over as the host of Pick of the Pops from Paul Gambaccini.
Go to Profile#8343
Timothy Wilson
#8353
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Timothy DeCamp Wilson is an American social psychologist and writer. He is the Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and teaches public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He is known for his research on self-knowledge and the influence of the unconscious mind on decision-making, preferences and behavior. He is the author of two popular books on psychology, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious and Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change.
Go to Profile#8344
Alex Inkeles
#8354
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Alex Inkeles was an American sociologist and social psychologist. One of his main areas of research was the culture and society of the Soviet Union. His career was mostly spent at Harvard University and Stanford University. In addition to being the founding editor of the Annual Review of Sociology, some of his recognitions included membership in the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#8345
Kevin Spacey
#8355
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Kevin Spacey Fowler is an American actor. Known for his work on stage and screen, he has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Tony Award, and two Laurence Olivier Awards. Spacey was named an honorary Commander and Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2010 and 2015, respectively.
Go to Profile#8346
Philip H. Dybvig
#8356
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Philip Hallen Dybvig is an American economist. He is the Boatmen's Bancshares Professor of Banking and Finance at the Olin Business School of Washington University in St. Louis. Career Dybvig attended Indiana University and received in 1976 a BA in mathematics and physics. He then attended the economics PhD program at University of Pennsylvania for one year before transferring to Yale University, where he received the MA , MPhil , and PhD degrees in economics. His thesis, titled "Recovering additive utility functions", was supervised by Stephen A. Ross.
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Kurt Warner
#8357
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Kurtis Eugene Warner is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 12 seasons, primarily with the St. Louis Rams and Arizona Cardinals. His career, which saw him ascend from an undrafted free agent to a two-time Most Valuable Player and Super Bowl MVP, is regarded as one of the greatest Cinderella stories in NFL history.
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J. R. McNeill
#8358
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
John Robert McNeill is an American environmental historian, author, and professor at Georgetown University. He is best known for "pioneering the study of environmental history". In 2000 he published Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, which argues that human activity during the 20th century led to environmental changes on an unprecedented scale, primarily due to the energy system built around fossil fuels.
Go to Profile#8349
Ian Jarvie
#8359
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Ian Charles Jarvie was a British-born philosopher. Trained in England, he was a long-time resident in Canada. Jarvie was educated at Dover Grammar School for Boys from 1948 to 1955. He studied at the London School of Economics under Karl Popper where he gained his B.Sc. and Ph.D. . Between 1960 and 1962 he was a Philosophy tutor at the London School of Economics, before accepting lectureships in Hong Kong and at the University of York, Ontario. Jarvie was a member of the Royal Society of Canada and managing editor of the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
Go to Profile#8350
Catherine Coleman
#8360
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Catherine Grace "Cady" Coleman is an American chemist, engineer, former United States Air Force colonel, and retired NASA astronaut. She is a veteran of two Space Shuttle missions, and departed the International Space Station on May 23, 2011, as a crew member of Expedition 27 after logging 159 days in space.
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