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
#851
Martin Davis
#851
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Martin David Davis was an American mathematician and computer scientist who contributed to the fields of computability theory and mathematical logic. His work on Hilbert's tenth problem led to the MRDP theorem. He also advanced the Post–Turing model and co-developed the Davis–Putnam–Logemann–Loveland algorithm, which is foundational for Boolean satisfiability solvers.
Go to Profile#852
Hannes Alfvén
#852
Overall Influence
1908 - 1995 (87 years)
Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics . He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves. He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics and electrical engineering. Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the behavior of auroraee, the Van Allen radiation belts, the effect of magnetic storms on the Earth's magnetic field, the terrestrial...
Go to Profile#853
Oscar de la Renta
#853
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Óscar Arístides Renta Fiallo , known professionally as Oscar de la Renta, was a Dominican fashion designer. Born in Santo Domingo, he was trained by Cristóbal Balenciaga and Antonio del Castillo. De la Renta became internationally known in the 1960s as one of the couturiers who dressed Jacqueline Kennedy. He worked for Lanvin and Balmain. His eponymous fashion house has boutiques around the world including in Harrods of London and Madison Avenue in New York.
Go to Profile#854
John Galliano
#854
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
John Charles Galliano is a British fashion designer born in Gibraltar. He was the creative director of his eponymous label John Galliano and French fashion houses Givenchy and Dior. Since 2014, Galliano has been the creative director of Paris-based fashion house Maison Margiela. Galliano has been named British Designer of the Year four times. In a 2004 poll for the BBC, he was named the fifth most influential person in British culture.
Go to Profile#855
Claudia Goldin
#855
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Claudia Dale Goldin is an American economic historian and labor economist. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In October 2023, she was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes,” as well as the root causes of the gender pay gap. She was the third woman to win the award, and the first woman to win the award solo.
Go to Profile#856
Günter Grass
#856
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Günter Wilhelm Grass was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in the Free City of Danzig . As a teenager, he was drafted into the military and served from late 1944 in the Waffen-SS. He was taken as a prisoner of war by US forces at the end of the war in May 1945. He was released in April 1946. Trained as a stonemason and sculptor, Grass began writing in the 1950s. In his fiction, he frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood.
Go to Profile#857
Pope Benedict XVI
#857
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Pope BenedictXVI was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 19 April 2005 until his resignation on 28 February 2013. Benedict's election as pope occurred in the 2005 papal conclave that followed the death of Pope John Paul II. Benedict chose to be known as "Pope emeritus" upon his resignation, and he retained this title until his death in December 2022.
Go to Profile#858
John Pople
#858
Overall Influence
1925 - 2004 (79 years)
Sir John Anthony Pople was a British theoretical chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Walter Kohn in 1998 for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry. Early life and education Pople was born in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, and attended the Bristol Grammar School. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1943. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1946. Between 1945 and 1947 he worked at the Bristol Aeroplane Company. He then returned to the University of Cambridge and was awarded his PhD in mathematics in 1951 on lone pair electrons.
Go to Profile#859
Neil Gorsuch
#859
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Neil McGill Gorsuch is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President Donald Trump on January 31, 2017, and has served since April 10, 2017.
Go to Profile#860
Igor Shafarevich
#860
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich was a Soviet and Russian mathematician who contributed to algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry. Outside mathematics, he wrote books and articles that criticised socialism and other books which were described as anti-semitic.
Go to Profile#861
Michael Moorcock
#861
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Michael John Moorcock is an English–American writer, particularly of science fiction and fantasy, who has published a number of well-received literary novels as well as comic thrillers, graphic novels and non-fiction. He has worked as an editor and is also a successful musician. He is best known for his novels about the character Elric of Melniboné, which were a seminal influence on the field of fantasy in the 1960s and 1970s.
Go to Profile#862
Robert Mundell
#862
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Robert Alexander Mundell was a Canadian economist. He was a professor of economics at Columbia University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1999 for his pioneering work in monetary dynamics and optimum currency areas. Mundell is known as the "father" of the euro, as he laid the groundwork for its introduction through this work and helped to start the movement known as supply-side economics. Mundell was also known for the Mundell–Fleming model and Mundell–Tobin effect.
Go to Profile#863
Abhijit Banerjee
#863
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
#864
Jacques Barzun
#864
Overall Influence
1907 - 2012 (105 years)
Jacques Martin Barzun was a French-born American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music, and was also known as a philosopher of education. In the book Teacher in America , Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States.
Go to Profile#865
John McCain
#865
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
John Sidney McCain III was an American politician and United States Navy officer who served as a United States senator from Arizona from 1987 until his death in 2018. He previously served two terms in the United States House of Representatives and was the Republican nominee for president of the United States in the 2008 election, which he lost to Barack Obama.
Go to Profile#866
Clement Greenberg
#866
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Clement Greenberg , occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock.
Go to Profile#867
James Meredith
#867
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
James Howard Meredith is an American civil rights activist, writer, political adviser, and United States Air Force veteran who became, in 1962, the first African-American student admitted to the racially segregated University of Mississippi after the intervention of the federal government . Inspired by President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, Meredith decided to exercise his constitutional rights and apply to the University of Mississippi. His goal was to put pressure on the Kennedy administration to enforce civil rights for African Americans. The admission of Meredith ignited the Ole M...
Go to Profile#868
Paul Farmer
#868
Overall Influence
1959 - 2022 (63 years)
Paul Edward Farmer was an American medical anthropologist and physician. Farmer held an MD and PhD from Harvard University, where he was a University Professor and the chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was the co-founder and chief strategist of Partners In Health , an international non-profit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He was professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Global Health Equ...
Go to Profile#869
Antony Flew
#869
Overall Influence
1923 - 2010 (87 years)
Antony Garrard Newton Flew was an English philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, Flew worked on the philosophy of religion. During the course of his career he taught philosophy at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading in the United Kingdom, and at York University in Toronto, Canada.
Go to Profile#870
Moshe Safdie
#870
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Moshe Safdie is an Israeli architect, urban planner, educator, theorist, and author. He is known for incorporating principles of socially responsible design throughout the course of his six-decade career. His projects include cultural, educational, and civic institutions; neighborhoods and public parks; housing; mixed-use urban centers; airports; and master plans for existing communities and entirely new cities in the Americas, the Middle East, and Asia. Safdie is most identified with designing Marina Bay Sands and Jewel Changi Airport, as well as his debut project Habitat 67, which was originally conceived as his thesis at McGill University.
Go to Profile#871
Stella McCartney
#871
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Stella Nina McCartney is an English fashion designer. She is a daughter of British singer-songwriter Paul McCartney and the late American photographer and animals rights activist Linda McCartney. Like her parents, McCartney is a firm supporter of animal rights and environmentalism, and is particularly known for her use of vegetarian and animal-free alternatives in her work. Since 2005, she has designed an activewear collection for Adidas.
Go to Profile#872
Victor Weisskopf
#872
Overall Influence
1908 - 2002 (94 years)
Victor Frederick "Viki" Weisskopf was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. He did postdoctoral work with Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Niels Bohr. During World War II he was Group Leader of the Theoretical Division of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, and he later campaigned against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Go to Profile#873
Arthur Kornberg
#873
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Arthur Kornberg was an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for the discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic acid" together with Spanish biochemist and physician Severo Ochoa of New York University. He was also awarded the Paul-Lewis Award in Enzyme Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 1951, an L.H.D. degree from Yeshiva University in 1962, and the National Medal of Science in 1979. In 1991, Kornberg received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and the Gairdner F...
Go to Profile#874
Saharon Shelah
#874
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Saharon Shelah is an Israeli mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University in New Jersey. Biography Shelah was born in Jerusalem on July 3, 1945. He is the son of the Israeli poet and political activist Yonatan Ratosh. He received his PhD for his work on stable theories in 1969 from the Hebrew University.
Go to Profile#875
Christos Papadimitriou
#875
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Christos Charilaos Papadimitriou is a Greek theoretical computer scientist and the Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Education Papadimitriou studied at the National Technical University of Athens, where in 1972 he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in electrical engineering. He then pursued graduate studies at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1976 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "The complexity of combinatorial optimization problems."
Go to Profile#876
Raymond Smullyan
#876
Overall Influence
1919 - 2017 (98 years)
Raymond Merrill Smullyan was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, his first career was stage magic. He earned a BSc from the University of Chicago in 1955 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1959. He is one of many logicians to have studied with Alonzo Church.
Go to Profile#877
Michael Levitt
#877
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#878
Hayden White
#878
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Hayden V. White was an American historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe . Career White received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Wayne State University and his Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Michigan. While an undergraduate at Wayne State, White studied history under William J. Bossenbrook alongside then-classmate Arthur Danto.
Go to Profile#879
Ivar Giaever
#879
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Ivar Giaever is a Norwegian-American engineer and physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson "for their discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids". Giaever's share of the prize was specifically for his "experimental discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in superconductors".
Go to Profile#880
Alec Jeffreys
#880
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sir Alec John Jeffreys, is a British geneticist known for developing techniques for genetic fingerprinting and DNA profiling which are now used worldwide in forensic science to assist police detective work and to resolve paternity and immigration disputes. He is Professor of Genetics at the University of Leicester, and became an honorary freeman of the City of Leicester on 26 November 1992. In 1994, he was knighted for services to genetics.
Go to Profile#881
Raj Reddy
#881
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
#882
Cristiano Ronaldo
#882
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro is a Portuguese professional footballer who plays as a forward for and captains both Saudi Pro League club Al Nassr and the Portugal national team. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, Ronaldo has won five Ballon d'Or awards, a record three UEFA Best Player in Europe, and four European Golden Shoes, the most by a European player. He has won 34 trophies in his career, including seven league titles, five UEFA Champions Leagues, the UEFA European Championship and the UEFA Nations League. Ronaldo holds the records for most appearances , ...
Go to Profile#883
Lynn Margulis
#883
Overall Influence
1938 - 2011 (73 years)
Lynn Margulis was an American evolutionary biologist, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. Historian Jan Sapp has said that "Lynn Margulis's name is as synonymous with symbiosis as Charles Darwin's is with evolution." In particular, Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria.
Go to Profile#884
Tariq Ali
#884
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Tariq Ali is a Pakistani-British political activist, writer, journalist, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso, and contributes to The Guardian, CounterPunch, and the London Review of Books. He studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#885
Steven Best
#885
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Steven Best is an American philosopher, writer, speaker and activist. His concerns include animal rights, species extinction, human overpopulation, ecological crisis, biotechnology, liberation politics, terrorism, mass media and culture, globalization, and capitalist domination. He is Associate Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has published 13 books and over 200 articles and reviews.
Go to Profile#886
Peter Shor
#886
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Peter Williston Shor is an American professor of applied mathematics at MIT. He is known for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than the best currently-known algorithm running on a classical computer.
Go to Profile#887
Susan Blackmore
#887
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#888
Renato Dulbecco
#888
Overall Influence
1914 - 2012 (98 years)
Renato Dulbecco was an Italian–American virologist who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oncoviruses, which are viruses that can cause cancer when they infect animal cells. He studied at the University of Turin under Giuseppe Levi, along with fellow students Salvador Luria and Rita Levi-Montalcini, who also moved to the U.S. with him and won Nobel prizes. He was drafted into the Italian army in World War II, but later joined the resistance.
Go to Profile#889
John Ehrlichman
#889
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
John Daniel Ehrlichman was an American political aide who served as White House Counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon. Ehrlichman was an important influence on Nixon's domestic policy, coaching him on issues and enlisting his support for environmental initiatives.
Go to Profile#890
James Gleick
#890
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
James Gleick is an American author and historian of science whose work has chronicled the cultural impact of modern technology. Recognized for his writing about complex subjects through the techniques of narrative nonfiction, he has been called "one of the great science writers of all time". He is part of the inspiration for Jurassic Park character Ian Malcolm.
Go to Profile#891
Jørn Utzon
#891
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Jørn Oberg Utzon was a Danish architect. In 1957, he won an international design competition for his design of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. Utzon's revised design, which he completed in 1961, was the basis for the landmark, although it was not completed until 1973.
Go to Profile#892
Alfred Hershey
#892
Overall Influence
1908 - 1997 (89 years)
Alfred Day Hershey was an American Nobel Prize–winning bacteriologist and geneticist. Early Years Hershey was born in Owosso, Michigan to Robert Day and Alma Wilbur Hershey. He earned a B.S. in chemistry in 1930, and Ph.D. in bacteriology in 1934 from Michigan State University. Shortly after, Hershey accepted a faculty position at Washington University in St. Louis, serving as an instructor of bacteriology and immunology from 1934-1950.
Go to Profile#893
Michael I of Romania
#893
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Michael I was the last king of Romania, reigning from 20 July 1927 to 8 June 1930 and again from 6 September 1940 until his forced abdication on 30 December 1947. Shortly after Michael's birth, his father, Crown Prince Carol, had become involved in a controversial relationship with Magda Lupescu. In 1925, Carol was pressured to renounce his rights to the throne and moved to Paris in exile with Lupescu. In 1927, following the death of his grandfather Ferdinand I, Michael ascended the throne at age five, the youngest crowned head in Europe. As Michael was still a minor, a regency council was in...
Go to Profile#894
Emil Cioran
#894
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Emil Cioran was a Romanian philosopher, aphorist and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, style, and aphorisms. His works frequently engaged with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. In 1937, Cioran moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris, which became his permanent residence, wherein he lived in seclusion with his partner, Simone Boué, until his death in 1995.
Go to Profile#895
Shafi Goldwasser
#895
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
#896
Marvin Harris
#896
Overall Influence
1927 - 2001 (74 years)
Marvin Harris was an American anthropologist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York City. A prolific writer, he was highly influential in the development of cultural materialism and environmental determinism. In his work, he combined Karl Marx's emphasis on the forces of production with Thomas Malthus's insights on the impact of demographic factors on other parts of the sociocultural system.
Go to Profile#897
Robert Moog
#897
Overall Influence
1934 - 2005 (71 years)
Robert Arthur Moog was an American engineer and electronic music pioneer. He was the founder of the synthesizer manufacturer Moog Music and the inventor of the first commercial synthesizer, the Moog synthesizer, which debuted in 1964. In 1970, Moog released a more portable model, the Minimoog, described as the most famous and influential synthesizer in history. Among Moog's honors are a Technical Grammy Award, received in 2002, and an induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#898
Roger Federer
#898
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Roger Federer is a Swiss former professional tennis player. Federer was ranked world No. 1 in singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals for 310 weeks, including a record 237 consecutive weeks, and finished as the year-end No. 1 five times. He won 103 singles titles on the ATP Tour, the second most of all time, including 20 major men's singles titles and six year-end championships.
Go to Profile#899
Stanisław Lem
#899
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Stanisław Herman Lem was a Polish writer of science fiction and essays on various subjects, including philosophy, futurology, and literary criticism. Many of his science fiction stories are of satirical and humorous character. Lem's books have been translated into more than 50 languages and have sold more than 45 million copies. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world.
Go to Profile#900
Mark Oliphant
#900
Overall Influence
1901 - 2000 (99 years)
Sir Marcus Laurence Elwin Oliphant, was an Australian physicist and humanitarian who played an important role in the first experimental demonstration of nuclear fusion and in the development of nuclear weaponss.
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