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
Eric Rignot
#36613
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Eric J. Rignot is the Donald Bren, Distinguished and Chancellor Professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, and a Senior Research Scientist for the Radar Science and Engineering Section at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He studies the interaction of the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica with global climate using a combination of satellite remote sensing , airborne remote sensing , understanding of physical processes controlling glacier flow and ice melt in the ocean, field methods , and climate modeling . He was elected at the National_Academy_of_Sc...
Go to Profile#852
Michael Overton
#36643
Overall Influence
Michael L. Overton is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the Silver Professor of Computer Science and former Chair of the Computer Science department at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. His research interests are in Numerical Analysis, Optimization, and Scientific Computing.
Go to Profile#853
Davut Kavranoğlu
#36750
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Davut Kavranoğlu is a Turkish scientific adviser to the President of Turkey, academic, scientist, politician, and the first deputy minister of Turkey. Kavranoğlu served as the Deputy Minister of Industry, Science and Technology of Turkey from 2011 to 2015.
Go to Profile#854
Biman Bagchi
#36784
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Biman Bagchi is an Indian scientist currently serving as a SERB-DST National Science Chair Professor and Honorary Professor at the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit of the Indian Institute of Science. He is a theoretical physical chemist and biophysicist known for his research in the area of statistical mechanics; particularly in the study of phase transition and nucleation, solvation dynamics, mode-coupling theory of electrolyte transport, dynamics of biological macromolecules , protein folding, enzyme kinetics, supercooled liquids and protein hydration layer. He is an elected fellow...
Go to Profile#855
Peter T. Poon
#36907
Overall Influence
Peter T Poon is a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology , operating for NASA. He had spent 35 plus years in science and space technology. A graduate of Hong Kong University majoring in Physics and Mathematics, in 1965, Poon completed his PhD degree at the University of Southern California. He subsequently also pursued advanced training in the Advanced Project Management Program at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#856
Colin Pask
#36952
Overall Influence
Colin Pask is a British mathematical physicist and science writer. Life He was born in Great Gonerby, on the outskirts of Grantham in Lincolnshire, where his father was a dairy farmer. He was educated at King's School, Grantham from age 11, and went to Queen Mary College, London for a degree course in theoretical physics and mathematics. He graduated B.Sc. there in 1964.
Go to Profile#857
Joanne Cohn
#37001
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Joanne Cohn is an American astrophysicist known for her work in cosmology and particle physics. She is also known for her role in the creation of the ArXiv.org e-print archive. Cohn is a Senior Space Fellow and Full Researcher in the Space Sciences Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#858
Max Birnstiel
#37047
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Max Luciano Birnstiel was a Swiss molecular biologist who held a number of positions in scientific leadership in Europe, including the chair of the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Zurich from 1972–86, and that of founding director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna from 1986 to 1996. His research focused on gene regulation in eukaryotes. His research group is sometimes cited as the first to purify single genes, the ribosomal RNA genes from Xenopus laevis, three years before the successful isolation of the lac operon. He is also recognized for one of the earliest discoveries of a gene enhancer element.
Go to Profile#859
Jonathan Dowling
#37140
Overall Influence
1955 - 2020 (65 years)
Jonathan P. Dowling was an Irish-American researcher and professor in theoretical physics, known for his work on quantum technology, particularly for exploiting quantum entanglement for applications to quantum metrology, quantum sensing, and quantum imaging.
Go to Profile#860
G. K. Surya Prakash
#37203
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
G. K. Surya Prakash is a professor of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and holder of the George A. and Judith A. Olah Nobel Laureate Chair in Hydrocarbon Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Southern California. He serves as the Director of the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute, where he maintains his prominent research lab. He also served as the Chairman of the Chemistry Department for four years between 2017 and 2021. He received a B.Sc. from Bangalore University in 1972, a M.Sc. from IIT Madras in 1974 and a Ph.D. from University of Souther...
Go to Profile#861
Peter Wright
#37233
Overall Influence
Peter Edwin Wright is a scientist, an NMR spectroscopist and a professor at the Scripps Research Institute. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Molecular Biology. Education and early life Wright is from New Zealand and studied at the University of Auckland. He graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science degree followed by a Master of Science degree in 1969. He completed his PhD in chemistry in 1972 with a thesis on the physico-chemical properties of metal ion sites in cuproproteins: an investigation of selected copper complexes.
Go to Profile#862
Mahlon Hoagland
#37248
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Mahlon Bush Hoagland was an American biochemist who discovered transfer RNA , the translator of the genetic code. Biography Early life Mahlon Bush Hoagland was born in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. in 1921 to Hudson Hoagland and Anna Hoagland. Hudson was an American physiologist who was known for co-founding the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology with Gregory Pincus. He graduated from The Hill School in 1940 and attended Williams College, and in 1948 received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School with intentions of becoming a pediatric surgeon. After a bout with tuberculosis, Hoaglan...
Go to Profile#863
Norman Davidson
#37250
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Norman Ralph Davidson was an American molecular biologist notable for advancing genome research, member of the National Academy of Sciences, received a National Medal of Science from U.S. President Bill Clinton, was a professor at Caltech. The New York Times called Davidson "major figure in advancing genome research ... whose groundbreaking work in molecular biology led to the earliest understanding of the overall structure of genomes". The Los Angeles Times called him "a groundbreaking Caltech chemical biologist". President Bill Clinton cited the scientist for "breakthroughs in chemistry a...
Go to Profile#864
John Pelesko
#37314
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
John A. Pelesko is an American mathematician. He is provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Delaware and a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences.
Go to Profile#865
Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu
#37333
Overall Influence
Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, is a Ghanaian robotics engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the chief engineer and technical group leader for the mobility and manipulation group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory He has been associated with various NASA Mars missions, notably the Mars Rover and InSight projects.
Go to Profile#866
James Freeman Gilbert
#37355
Overall Influence
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
James Freeman Gilbert was an American geophysicist, best known for his work with George E. Backus on inverting geophysical data, and also for his role in establishing an international network of long-period seismometers.
Go to Profile#867
Richard Schwartz
#37381
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (59 years)
Richard Evan Schwartz is an American mathematician notable for his contributions to geometric group theory and to an area of mathematics known as billiards. Geometric group theory is a relatively new area of mathematics beginning around the late 1980s which explores finitely generated groups, and seeks connections between their algebraic properties and the geometric spaces on which these groups act. He has worked on what mathematicians refer to as billiards, which are dynamical systems based on a convex shape in a plane. He has explored geometric iterations involving polygons, and he has been credited for developing the mathematical concept known as the pentagram map.
Go to Profile#868
Rosaly Lopes
#37411
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Rosaly M. C. Lopes is a planetary geologist, volcanologist, an author of numerous scientific papers and several books, as well as a proponent of education. Her major research interests are in planetary and terrestrial surface processes with an emphasis on volcanology.
Go to Profile#869
Jens Martin Knudsen
#37610
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Jens Martin Knudsen was a Danish astrophysicist. During his scientific career Knudsen authored or co-authored more than 100 scientific articles, and was a longtime advisor to NASA. Early years Knudsen was born in Haurum near Aarhus, Denmark. Knudsen was son of Haurum's grocers and grew up at the grocer's house together with his three brothers of whom Knudsen was the oldest. All of the brothers ended up becoming physicists.
Go to Profile#870
Louis J. Lanzerotti
#37681
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Louis John Lanzerotti is an American physicist. He is a Distinguished Research Professor of physics in the Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey.
Go to Profile#871
Christine Jones Forman
#37740
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Christine Jones Forman is a senior astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. She is a past president of the American Astronomical Society, and was the director of the Smithsonian Institution's Consortium for Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe.
Go to Profile#872
Guyford Stever
#37775
Overall Influence
1916 - 2010 (94 years)
Horton Guyford Stever was an American administrator, physicist, educator, and engineer. He was a director of the National Science Foundation . Biography Stever was raised in Corning, New York, principally by his maternal grandmother. He played football in high school. He graduated from Colgate University with an undergraduate degree in physics and then from California Institute of Technology in 1941 with a PhD in physics. He joined the staff of the radiation lab at MIT. In 1942 he began serving the military as a civilian scientific liaison officer based in London, England until the end of World War II.
Go to Profile#873
Mark M. Phillips
#37800
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Mark M. Phillips is an American astronomer who works on the observational studies of all classes of supernovae. He has worked on SN 1986G, SN 1987A, the Calán/Tololo Supernova Survey, the High-Z Supernova Search Team, and the Phillips relationship. This relationship has allowed the use of Type Ia supernovae as standard candles, leading to the precise measurements of the Hubble constant H0 and the deceleration parameter q0, the latter implying the existence of dark energy or a cosmological constant in the Universe.
Go to Profile#874
Thomas W. Parks
#37801
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
Thomas W. Parks was an American electrical engineer and Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. He is best known for his contributions to digital signal processing, especially digital filter design and computation of the fast Fourier transform. His last work before retirement was in the area of demosaicing.
Go to Profile#875
Edward J. Hoffman
#37843
Overall Influence
1942 - 2004 (62 years)
Edward Joseph Hoffman helped invent the first human PET scanner, a commonly used whole-body scanning procedure for detecting diseases like cancer. Hoffman, with Michel Ter-Pogossian and Michael E. Phelps, developed the Positron Emission Tomography scanner in 1973.
Go to Profile#876
Peter Molnar
#37950
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Peter Molnar was a professor in Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado. His research focused on aspects of how mountain ranges form and continental lithosphere deforms. Molnar was born August 25, 1943, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics from Oberlin College in 1965 and his Ph.D. in seismology from Columbia University in 1970.
Go to Profile#877
Philip Saffman
#37998
Overall Influence
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Philip Geoffrey Saffman FRS was a mathematician and the Theodore von Kármán Professor of Applied Mathematics and Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology. Education and early life Saffman was born to a Jewish family in Leeds, England, and educated at Roundhay Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge which he entered aged 15. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1953, studied for Part III of the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos in 1954 and was awarded his PhD in 1956 for research supervised by George Batchelor.
Go to Profile#878
Meinrat Andreae
#38008
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Meinrat O. Andreae, born in 1949 in Augsburg, is a German biogeochemist. Since 1987, he has worked as Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz. Biography Meinrat O. Andreae studied chemistry, mineralogy, and geochemistry at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Göttingen. In his diploma thesis, he studied the chemical composition and isotope geochemistry of highly metamorphic rocks of southern Norway. In 1977, he completed his PhD in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego. In his doctoral thesis, he examined the chemical speciation of arsenic in the ocean.
Go to Profile#879
Serge Belongie
#38009
Overall Influence
Serge Belongie is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, where he also serves as the head of the Danish Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence. Previously, he was the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech, where he also served as Associate Dean. He has also been a member of the Visiting Faculty program at Google. He is known for his contributions to the fields of computer vision and machine learning, specifically object recognition and image segmentation, with his scientific research in these areas cited over 50,000 times according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#880
Lars Hernquist
#38045
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Lars Hernquist is a theoretical astrophysicist and Mallinckrodt Professor of Astrophysics at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. He is best known for his research on dynamical processes in cosmology and galaxy formation/galaxy evolution.
Go to Profile#881
Susan Kieffer
#38129
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Susan Elizabeth Werner Kieffer is an American physical geologist and planetary scientist. Kieffer is known for her work on the fluid dynamics of volcanoes, geysers, and rivers, and for her model of the thermodynamic properties of complex minerals. She has also contributed to the scientific understanding of meteorite impacts.
Go to Profile#882
Mark M. Davis
#38189
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Mark Morris Davis is an American immunologist. He is the director of and Avery Family Professor of Immunology at the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection at Stanford University. Education Davis was educated at Johns Hopkins University and the California Institute of Technology where he was awarded a PhD in 1981 for research supervised by Leroy E. Hood.
Go to Profile#883
Donald Edward Osterbrock
#38239
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Donald Edward Osterbrock was an American astronomer, best known for his work on star formation and on the history of astronomy. Biography Osterbrock was born in Cincinnati. His father was an electrical engineer. He served with the US Army in the Second World War, making weather observations in the Pacific. He did undergraduate classes in physics at the University of Chicago as part of his weather training.
Go to Profile#884
Graham Fleming
#38349
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Graham R. Fleming is a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and member of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute based at UCB. Fleming's team is known for developing and using techniques in advanced multidimensional, ultrafast spectroscopy to study complex condensed phase dynamics in systems including natural photosynthetic complexes and nanoscale systems including single-walled carbon nanotubes and organic photovoltaic systems.
Go to Profile#885
Christof Teuscher
#38361
Overall Influence
Christof Teuscher is an author and editor who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, United States. Teuscher obtained MSc and PhD degrees from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. For his PhD, he explored Alan Turing's ideas on artificial intelligence and neural networks.
Go to Profile#886
Charlotte Erickson
#38395
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Charlotte J. Erickson was an American historian. Life Erickson was born in Oak Park, Illinois a suburb of Chicago, where her father was a Swedish Lutheran minister. She graduated from Augustana College at Rock Island, Illinois in 1945, and from Cornell University with a MA and a PhD.
Go to Profile#887
Gordon H. Sato
#38470
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Gordon Hisashi Sato was an American cell biologist who first attained prominence for his discovery that polypeptide factors required for the culture of mammalian cells outside the body are also important regulators of differentiated cell functions and of utility in culture of new types of cells for use in research and biotechnology. For this work he was elected in 1984 to the United States National Academy of Sciences. In the mid-1980s he established the Manzanar Project aimed at attacking the planet's most critical problems as poverty, hunger, environmental pollution, and global warming thro...
Go to Profile#888
Michael Creutz
#38482
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Michael John Creutz is an American theoretical physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory specializing in lattice gauge theory and computational physics. Background Creutz was born in 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico. His father, Edward Creutz, was also a physicist and was working on the Manhattan Project to help build the atomic bomb at the time of Michael's birth.
Go to Profile#889
Lada Adamic
#38498
Overall Influence
Lada Adamic is an American network scientist, who researches information dynamics in networks. She studies how network structure influences the flow of information, how information influences the evolution of networks, and crowdsourced knowledge sharing.
Go to Profile#890
Carlos E.M. Wagner
#38574
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Carlos Wagner is a particle physicist. He specializes in theoretical physics, elementary particles and supersymmetric theories. He currently works for the High Energy Physics division of the Argonne National Laboratory and is also a professor at the Physics Department of the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago. He also functions as the Head of the ANL High Energy Physics Theory Group.
Go to Profile#891
Marianne Bronner
#38598
Overall Influence
Marianne Bronner is a developmental biologist who currently serves as Edward B. Lewis Professor of Biology and an executive officer for Neurobiology at the California Institute of Technology. Her most notable work includes her research on the neural crest. Bronner's research focuses on studying the cellular events behind the migration, differentiation, and formation of neural crest cells. She currently directs her own laboratory at the California Institute of Technology called the Bronner Laboratory, and she has authored over 400 articles in her field.
Go to Profile#892
George Starbuck
#38600
Overall Influence
1931 - 1996 (65 years)
George Edwin Starbuck was an American poet of the neo-formalist school. Life Starbuck studied at Chadwick School, the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, the American Academy in Rome, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University. He also studied under Robert Lowell in the Boston University workshop with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. He taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Boston University, and the State University of New York, Buffalo. He was fired by SUNY-Buffalo for not taking a loyalty oath, but was vindicated by the Supreme Court. His student...
Go to Profile#893
Robert H. Williams
#38621
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Robert H. Williams is a senior research scientist at the Princeton Environmental Institute , Princeton University. He graduated from Yale University with a BS in physics in 1962, and from University of California, Berkeley with a PhD, in theoretical plasma physics, in 1967. He taught at University of Michigan, Physics Department, in 1970. In 1972, he became Chief Scientist with the Ford Foundation's Energy Policy Project.
Go to Profile#894
David B. Dusenbery
#38715
Overall Influence
David B. Dusenbery is a biophysicist with a central interest in how information influences the behavior of organisms. In later years, he also considered the physical constraints hydrodynamics imposes on microorganisms and gametes.
Go to Profile#895
Susan Weintraub
#38739
Overall Influence
Susan Weintraub is an American scientist. She is a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio . She received a BS in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, MS in chemistry from Trinity University in 1970 and a PhD in biochemistry from UTHSCSA in 1979. She was the president of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry for the period of 2012-2014. In 2017 she was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . She is an associate editor of the Journal of Proteome Research.
Go to Profile#896
Paul Wennberg
#38750
Overall Influence
Paul O. Wennberg is the R. Stanton Avery Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Science and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology . He is the director of the Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science. He is chair of the Total Carbon Column Observing Network and a founding member of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory project, which created NASA's first spacecraft for analysis of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He is also the principal investigator for the Mars Atmospheric Trace Molecule Occultation Spectrometer to investigate trace gases in Ma...
Go to Profile#897
Ivor Robinson
#38759
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Ivor Robinson was a British-American mathematical physicist, born and educated in England, noted for his important contributions to the theory of relativity. He was a principal organizer of the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics.
Go to Profile#898
Hatim Zaghloul
#38824
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Hatim Zaghloul Ph.D., M.Sc., B.E.E. is best known for his inventions, together with his long-time friend, Dr. Michel Fattouche of Wideband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing , and Multi-code Direct-sequence Spread Spectrum . WOFDM is the foundation for the IEEE 802.11a/g/n technologies whereas MCDSSS helped increase the data rates of code division multiple access technologies as in the CDMA2000 standard. Currently, Dr. Zaghloul is the CEO and Chairman of Innovatian Inc., Giza, Egypt, a company specializing in building wireless data networks in unconnected countries through WiFi and blockchain.
Go to Profile#899
David Chandler
#38879
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
David Chandler was a physical chemist and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and a winner of the Irving Langmuir Award. He published two books and over 300 scientific articles.
Go to Profile#900
Kane S. Yee
#39047
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Kane Shee-Gong Yee is a Chinese-American electrical engineer and mathematician. He is best known for introducing the finite-difference time-domain method in 1966. His research interests include numerical electromagnetics, fluid dynamics, continuum mechanics and numerical analysis of partial differential equations.
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