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
#8451
Pierre Manent
#8461
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Pierre Manent is a French political scientist and academic. He teaches political philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron. Every autumn, he is also a visiting teacher in Boston College at the Department of Political Science.
Go to Profile#8452
Serge Abiteboul
#8462
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Serge Joseph Abiteboul is a French computer scientist working in the areas of data management, database theory, and finite model theory. Education The son of two hardware store owners, Abiteboul attended high-school in Romorantin, and Higher School Preparatory Classes in Tours. He was admitted to the Télécom Paris engineering school and studied at the Technion in Haifa for a year.
Go to Profile#8453
Sinéad O'Connor
#8463
Overall Influence
1966 - 2023 (57 years)
Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor was an Irish singer, songwriter, and activist. Her debut studio album, The Lion and the Cobra, was released in 1987 and achieved international chart success. Her 1990 album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got, was her biggest commercial success, selling over seven million copies worldwide. Its lead single, "Nothing Compares 2 U", was honoured as the top world single of the year at the Billboard Music Awards.
Go to Profile#8454
Dale R. Corson
#8464
Overall Influence
1914 - 2012 (98 years)
Dale Raymond Corson was an American physicist and academic administrator who was the eighth president of Cornell University. Early life Born in Pittsburg, Kansas, in 1914, Corson received a B.A. degree from the College of Emporia in 1934, his M.A. degree from the University of Kansas in 1935, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1938.
Go to Profile#8455
Süleyman Demirel
#8465
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Sami Süleyman Gündoğdu Demirel was a Turkish politician, engineer, and statesman who served as the 9th President of Turkey from 1993 to 2000. He previously served as the Prime Minister of Turkey seven times between the years 1965 and 1993. He was the leader of the Justice Party from 1964 to 1980 and the leader of the True Path Party from 1987 to 1993.
Go to Profile#8456
Luis Antonio Tagle
#8466
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Luis Antonio Gokim Tagle is a Filipino prelate of the Catholic Church currently serving as the Pro-Prefect for the Section of Evangelization of Dicastery for Evangelization since June 5, 2022, and as the President of Interdicasterial Commission for Consecrated Religious since December 8, 2019. He was the 32nd Archbishop of Manila from 2011 to 2019. Tagle is the Cardinal-Bishop of San Felice da Cantalice a Centocelle and also serves as the President of the Catholic Biblical Federation, Grand Chancellor of the Pontifical Urbaniana University, and as a member of various departments and dicaste...
Go to Profile#8457
Arnold Davidson
#8467
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Arnold Ira Davidson is an American philosopher and academic, and the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in Philosophy, Comparative Literature, History of Science, and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Chicago. He is also a member of the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Chicago and a professor at the Università di Pisa in Pisa, Italy.
Go to Profile#8458
Joseph Silk
#8468
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Joseph Ivor Silk FRS is a British-American astrophysicist. He was the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1999 to September 2011. He is an Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Society . He was awarded the 2011 Balzan Prize for his works on the early Universe. Silk has given more than two hundred invited conference lectures, primarily on galaxy formation and cosmology.
Go to Profile#8459
G. Thomas Goodnight
#8469
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
G. Thomas Goodnight is an American argumentation and rhetorical scholar. Early life and education Goodnight was born in 1948 in Houston, Texas. He obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in political science from the University of Houston, in 1971 and a Master of Arts, in 1974. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas, in 1977.
Go to Profile#8460
Eric Posner
#8470
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
#8461
John Cale
#8471
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
John Davies Cale is a Welsh musician, composer, and record producer who was a founding member of the American rock band the Velvet Underground. Over his six-decade career, Cale has worked in various styles across rock, drone, classical, avant-garde and electronic music.
Go to Profile#8462
William E. Rees
#8472
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
William Rees, FRSC , is Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia and former director of the School of Community and Regional Planning at UBC. Rees taught at the University of British Columbia from 1969–70 until his retirement in 2011–12, but has since continued his writing and research. His primary interest is in public policy and planning relating to global environmental trends and the ecological conditions for sustainable socioeconomic development. He is the originator of the "ecological footprint" concept and co-developer of the method.
Go to Profile#8463
Drucilla Cornell
#8473
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
Drucilla Cornell , was an American philosopher and feminist theorist, whose work has been influential in political and legal philosophy, ethics, deconstruction, critical theory, and feminism. Cornell was an emerita Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature and Women's & Gender Studies at Rutgers University the State University of New Jersey; Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. She also taught for many years on the law faculties of the University of Pennsylvania and of Cardozo La...
Go to Profile#8464
Peter Unger
#8474
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
#8465
Lee Alvin DuBridge
#8475
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Lee Alvin DuBridge was an American educator and physicist, best known as president of the California Institute of Technology from 1946–1969. Background Lee Alvin DuBridge was born on , in Terre Haute, Indiana. His father was Fred DuBridge, a football coach at Indiana State Normal School. He graduated from Cornell College in 1922, and then began a teaching assignment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, from which he received an M.A. degree in 1924 and a Ph.D. in 1926. DuBridge continued his academic work at the California Institute of Technology, as assistant, then associate professor at Washington University in St.
Go to Profile#8466
Joshua M. Epstein
#8476
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Joshua Morris Epstein is Professor of Epidemiology at the New York University College of Global Public Health. Formerly Professor of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, with joint appointments in the departments of Applied Mathematics, Economics, Biostatistics, International Health, and Environmental Health Sciences and the Director of the JHU Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences. He is an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Identi...
Go to Profile#8467
Tom Mankiewicz
#8477
Overall Influence
1942 - 2010 (68 years)
Thomas Frank Mankiewicz was an American screenwriter, director, and producer of motion pictures and television whose credits included James Bond films and his contributions to Superman: The Movie and the television series Hart to Hart. He was the son of Joseph Mankiewicz and nephew of Herman Mankiewicz.
Go to Profile#8468
Arnoud De Meyer
#8478
Overall Influence
Arnoud De Meyer is a Belgian business academic at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business of Singapore Management University . He was previously President of SMU, Director of the Judge Business School of the University of Cambridge, and founding Dean of INSEAD's Asia Campus in Singapore.
Go to Profile#8469
Mickey Mantle
#8479
Overall Influence
1931 - 1995 (64 years)
Mickey Charles Mantle , nicknamed "the Mick" and "the Commerce Comet", was an American professional baseball player. Mantle played his entire Major League Baseball career with the New York Yankees, primarily as a center fielder. Mantle is regarded by many as being one of the best players and sluggers of all time. He was an American League Most Valuable Player three times and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974.
Go to Profile#8470
Joshua Angrist
#8480
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Joshua David Angrist is an Israeli–American economist and Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Angrist, together with Guido Imbens, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2021 "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships".
Go to Profile#8471
Peter Leeson
#8481
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Peter T. Leeson is an American economist and the Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. In 2012 Big Think listed him among "Eight of the World's Top Young Economists". He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Go to Profile#8472
Conan O'Brien
#8482
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Conan Christopher O'Brien is an American television host, comedian, writer, and producer. He is best known for having hosted late-night talk shows for almost 28 years, beginning with Late Night with Conan O'Brien and The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien on the NBC television network, and Conan on the cable channel TBS. Before his hosting career, O'Brien was a writer for the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1988 to 1991, and the Fox animated sitcom The Simpsons from 1991 to 1993. He has also been host of the podcast series Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend since 2018 and is set t...
Go to Profile#8473
Laurent Freidel
#8483
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Laurent Freidel is a French theoretical physicist and mathematical physicist known mainly for his contributions to quantum gravity, including loop quantum gravity, spin foam models, doubly special relativity, group field theory, relative locality and most recently metastring theory. He is currently a faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Go to Profile#8474
Majid Khadduri
#8484
Overall Influence
1909 - 2007 (98 years)
Majid Khadduri was an Iraqi–born academic. He was founder of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies Middle East Studies program, a division of Johns Hopkins University based in Washington, D.C. Internationally, he was recognized as a leading authority on a wide variety of Islamic subjects, modern history and the politics of the Middle East. He was the author of more than 35 books in English and Arabic and hundreds of articles.
Go to Profile#8475
Hugo de Garis
#8485
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Hugo de Garis is an Australian retired researcher in the sub-field of artificial intelligence known as evolvable hardware. He became known in the 1990s for his research on the use of genetic algorithms to evolve artificial neural networks using three-dimensional cellular automata inside field programmable gate arrays. He claimed that this approach would enable the creation of what he terms "artificial brains" which would quickly surpass human levels of intelligence.
Go to Profile#8476
William F. Miller
#8486
Overall Influence
1925 - 2017 (92 years)
William F. Miller was an American academic who was professor public and private management emeritus and a professor of computer science emeritus. He was a vice president and provost of Stanford University from 1971 to 1979, and president and CEO of SRI International from 1979 to 1990. He died in September 2017 at the age of 91.
Go to Profile#8477
Greg LeMond
#8487
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Gregory James LeMond is an American former road racing cyclist. LeMond won the Tour de France three times and the Road Race World Championship twice, becoming the only American male to win the former.
Go to Profile#8478
Beck
#8488
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Beck David Hansen , known mononymously as Beck, is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He rose to fame in the early 1990s with his experimental and lo-fi style, and became known for creating musical collages of wide-ranging genres. He has musically encompassed folk, funk, soul, hip hop, electronic, alternative rock, country, and psychedelia. He has released 14 studio albums , as well as several non-album singles and a book of sheet music.
Go to Profile#8479
Luis Suárez
#8489
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Luis Alberto Suárez Díaz is a Uruguayan professional footballer who plays for Campeonato Brasileiro Série A club Grêmio and the Uruguay national team. Nicknamed "El Pistolero" , Suárez is regarded as one of the best players of his generation and one of the greatest strikers of all time. He has won two European Golden Shoes, an Eredivisie Golden Boot, a Premier League Golden Boot and a Pichichi Trophy, and has scored over 500 career goals for club and country.
Go to Profile#8480
Jacob Needleman
#8490
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Jacob Needleman was an American philosopher, author, and religious scholar. Needleman was Jewish and was educated at Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Freiburg, Germany. He was deeply involved in the Gurdjieff Work and the Gurdjieff Foundation of San Francisco. He was a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at San Francisco State University and is said to have "popularized the term 'new religious movements'." He was a former visiting professor at the Duxx Graduate School of Business Leadership in Monterrey, Mexico, and former director of the center for the study of New Religions at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.
Go to Profile#8481
John Harry Dunning
#8491
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
John Harry Dunning was a British economist and is widely recognised as the father of the field of international business. He researched the economics of international direct investment and the multinational enterprise from the 1950s until his death. In the 1980s, he published the eclectic paradigm or OLI-Model/Framework as further development on Internalization theory. OLI remains the predominant theoretical perspective to study international business activities, notably foreign direct investment and multinational enterprises. His first book, American Investment in British Manufacturing Indu...
Go to Profile#8482
Raphael Israeli
#8492
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Raphael Israeli is an Israeli historian and writer. He is a professor emeritus of Middle Eastern, Islamic and Chinese history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as a research fellow at Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace and the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
Go to Profile#8483
Soumitra Dutta
#8493
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Soumitra Dutta is an Indian academic, author and entrepreneur. He is the dean of Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, having taken up the post from 1 June 2022. He was previously a professor of management, as well as the former Founding Dean, at the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University in New York. He was dean of SC Johnson College of Business from 2012 to 2018. Before his appointment to Cornell, he was the Roland Berger professor of business and technology at INSEAD.
Go to Profile#8484
Leo Klejn
#8494
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Lev Samuilovich Kleyn , better known in English as Leo Klejn, was a Russian archaeologist, anthropologist and philologist. Early life Klejn was born in Vitebsk, Belarus, to two Jewish physicians, Polish-born Stanislav Semenovich and Asya Moysseyevna. Both of Klejn's grandparents were wealthy: one a factory owner, the other a highly ranked merchant. Stanislav Semenovich served as a medical officer in the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army during the Russian Civil War. By the end of the war he had joined the Red Army, but was never a member of the Communist Party.
Go to Profile#8485
Graciela Chichilnisky
#8495
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Graciela Chichilnisky is an Argentine American mathematical economist. She is a professor of economics at Columbia University and has expertise in climate change. She is also co-founder and former CEO of the company Global Thermostat.
Go to Profile#8486
Derek Briggs
#8496
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Derek Ernest Gilmor Briggs is an Irish palaeontologist and taphonomist based at Yale University. Briggs is one of three palaeontologists, along with Harry Blackmore Whittington and Simon Conway Morris, who were key in the reinterpretation of the fossils of the Burgess Shale. He is the Yale University G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, and former Director of the Peabody Museum.
Go to Profile#8487
Vistasp Karbhari
#8497
Overall Influence
Vistasp Karbhari is an Indian-American civil engineer and university administrator. Karbhari was the eighth president of the University of Texas at Arlington. Prior to that, he was provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is known for his research in composite materials and structural engineering.
Go to Profile#8488
George Chryssides
#8498
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
George D. Chryssides is a British academic and researcher on new religious movements and cults, has taught at several British universities, becoming head of Religious studies at the University of Wolverhampton in 2001. He is an honorary research fellow in contemporary religion at York St John University and the University of Birmingham.
Go to Profile#8489
Hugh Casson
#8499
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Sir Hugh Maxwell Casson was a British architect. He was also active as an interior designer, as an artist, and as a writer and broadcaster on twentieth-century design. He was the director of architecture for the 1951 Festival of Britain. From 1976 to 1984, he was president of the Royal Academy.
Go to Profile#8490
Helen Quinn
#8500
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Helen Rhoda Arnold Quinn is an Australian-born particle physicist and educator who has made major contributions to both fields. Her contributions to theoretical physics include the Peccei–Quinn theory which implies a corresponding symmetry of nature and contributions to the search for a unified theory for the three types of particle interactions . As Chair of the Board on Science Education of the National Academy of Sciences, Quinn led the effort that produced A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas—the basis for the Next Generation Science Standards adopted by many states.
Go to Profile#8491
Akira Fujishima
#8501
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Akira Fujishima is a Japanese chemist and president of Tokyo University of Science. He is known for significant contributions to the discovery and research of photocatalytic and superhydrophilic properties of titanium dioxide , which is also known as the Honda-Fujishima effect.
Go to Profile#8492
Justus Dahinden
#8502
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Justus Dahinden was a Swiss architect, teacher and writer about architecture. Life Dahinden was born in Zürich. From 1945 to 1949, he studied architecture at ETH Zürich , graduating in 1956 with his PhD. In 1955 he started his own architecture office in Zürich. In 1974 Justus Dahinden became Professor of Architecture at TU Wien School of Architecture, Vienna University of Technology. He was Director of the Institute of Space and Interior Design in Vienna, from 1974 to 1995. He was appointed Life Professor at the International Academy of Architects of Sofia in 1988, helping establish its...
Go to Profile#8493
Charlotte Froese Fischer
#8503
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Charlotte Froese Fischer is a Canadian-American applied mathematician and computer scientist noted for the development and implementation of the Multi-Configurational Hartree–Fock approach to atomic-structure calculations and its application to the description of atomic structure and spectra.
Go to Profile#8494
Dimitris Liantinis
#8504
Overall Influence
1942 - 1998 (56 years)
Dimitris Liantinis was a Greek philosopher. He was associate professor at the Department of Pedagogy of the Faculty of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology of the University of Athens, teaching the course "Philosophy of Education and Teaching of Greek Language and Literature". He has written nine books. His last and most seminal work Gemma has been translated into several languages.
Go to Profile#8495
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#8505
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a Swiss art curator, critic, and historian of art. He is artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries, London. Obrist is the author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing project of interviews. He is also co-editor of the Cahiers d'Art review. He lives and works in London.
Go to Profile#8496
Jill Ker Conway
#8506
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Jill Ker Conway was an Australian-American scholar and author. Well known for her autobiographies, in particular her first memoir, The Road from Coorain, she also was Smith College's first woman president and most recently served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004 she was designated a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project. She was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal.
Go to Profile#8497
Maryna Viazovska
#8507
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska is a Ukrainian mathematician known for her work in sphere packing. She is a full professor and Chair of Number Theory at the Institute of Mathematics of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. She was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022.
Go to Profile#8498
Charles Ogletree
#8508
Overall Influence
1952 - 2023 (71 years)
Charles James Ogletree Jr. was an American legal scholar who served as the Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School, where he was the founder of the school's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. He was also the author of books on legal topics.
Go to Profile#8499
Steven Frautschi
#8509
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Steven C. Frautschi is an American theoretical physicist, currently professor of physics emeritus at the California Institute of Technology . He is known principally for his contributions to the bootstrap theory of the strong interactions and for his contribution to the resolution of the infrared divergence problem in quantum electrodynamics . He was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015 for "contributions to the introduction of Regge poles into particle physics, elucidation of the role of infrared photons in high energy scattering, and for seminal contributions to undergra...
Go to Profile#8500
Stephen M. Schwebel
#8510
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Stephen Myron Schwebel , is an American jurist and international judge, counsel and arbitrator. He previously served as judge of the World Bank Administrative Tribunal , as a member of the U.S. National Group at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, as president of the International Monetary Fund Administrative Tribunal , as president of the International Court of Justice , as vice president of the International Court of Justice , and as Judge of the International Court of Justice . Prior to his tenure on the ICJ, Schwebel served as deputy legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State and as assistant legal adviser to the U.S.
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