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
#8551
Joseph F. Traub
#8561
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Joseph Frederick Traub was an American computer scientist. He was the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He held positions at Bell Laboratories, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and Columbia, as well as sabbatical positions at Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, California Institute of Technology, and Technical University, Munich.
Go to Profile#8552
Harvey J. Alter
#8562
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Harvey James Alter is an American medical researcher, virologist, physician and Nobel Prize laureate, who is best known for his work that led to the discovery of the hepatitis C virus. Alter is the former chief of the infectious disease section and the associate director for research of the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center in the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In the mid-1970s, Alter and his research team demonstrated that most post-transfusion hepatitis cases were not due to hepatitis A or hepatitis B viruses. Working independently, Alter and Edward Tabor, a scientist at the U.S.
Go to Profile#8553
W. Jason Morgan
#8563
Overall Influence
1935 - 2023 (88 years)
William Jason Morgan was an American geophysicist who made seminal contributions to the theory of plate tectonics and geodynamics. He retired as the Knox Taylor Professor emeritus of geology and professor of geosciences at Princeton University. He served as a visiting scholar in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University until his death.
Go to Profile#8554
Gregory J. Feist
#8564
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Gregory John Feist is an American psychologist and Professor of Psychology at San Jose State University. He has published in the psychology of creativity, personality, psychology of science, motivated reasoning, the psychology of science, and the development of scientific talent.
Go to Profile#8555
David Keene
#8565
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David Arthur Keene is an American political consultant, former presidential advisor, and newspaper editor, formerly the Opinion Editor of The Washington Times. Keene was the president of the National Rifle Association for the traditional two one-year terms from 2011 to 2013. From 1984 to 2011, he was the chairman of the American Conservative Union.
Go to Profile#8556
Terri Windling
#8566
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Terri Windling is an American editor, artist, essayist, and the author of books for both children and adults. She has won nine World Fantasy Awards, the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, and her collection The Armless Maiden appeared on the short-list for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.
Go to Profile#8557
Joe Feagin
#8567
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
#8558
Greg Grandin
#8568
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Greg Grandin is an American historian and author. He is a professor of history at Yale University. He previously taught at New York University. He is author of a number of books, including Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History, as well as for the National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Go to Profile#8559
Juan Luis Segundo
#8569
Overall Influence
1925 - 1996 (71 years)
Juan Luis Segundo was a Jesuit priest and Uruguayan theologian who was an important figure in the movement known as Latin American liberation theology. He wrote numerous books on theology, ideology, faith, hermeneutics, and social justice, and was an outspoken critic of what he perceived as Church callousness toward oppression and suffering. He was a physician by training.
Go to Profile#8560
Melba Phillips
#8570
Overall Influence
1907 - 2004 (97 years)
Melba Newell Phillips was an American physicist and a pioneer science educator. One of the first doctoral students of J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, Phillips completed her PhD. in 1933, a time when few women could pursue careers in science. In 1935 Oppenheimer and Phillips published their description of the Oppenheimer–Phillips process, an early contribution to nuclear physics that explained the behavior of accelerated nuclei of radioactive hydrogen atoms. Phillips was also known for refusing to cooperate with a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee's investigat...
Go to Profile#8561
Fred W. Glover
#8571
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Fred Glover is Chief Scientific Officer of Entanglement, Inc., USA, in charge of algorithmic design and strategic planning for applications of combinatorial optimization in quantum computing. He also holds the title of Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, associated with the College of Engineering and Applied Science and the Leeds School of Business. He is known for his innovations in the area of metaheuristics including the computer-based optimization methodology of Tabu search an adaptive memory programming algorithm for mathematical optimiza...
Go to Profile#8562
Asad Abidi
#8572
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Asad Ali Abidi is a Pakistani-American electrical engineer. He serves as a tenured professor at University of California, Los Angeles, and is the inaugural holder of the Abdus Salam Chair at the Lahore University of Management Sciences . He is best known for pioneering RF CMOS technology during the late 1980s to early 1990s. As of 2008, the radio transceivers in all wireless networking devices and modern mobile phones are mass-produced as RF CMOS devices.
Go to Profile#8563
Edwin Hewitt
#8573
Overall Influence
1920 - 1999 (79 years)
Edwin Hewitt was an American mathematician known for his work in abstract harmonic analysis and for his discovery, in collaboration with Leonard Jimmie Savage, of the Hewitt–Savage zero–one law.
Go to Profile#8564
Barbara Partee
#8574
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst . Biography Born in Englewood, New Jersey, Partee grew up in the Baltimore area. She is the younger sister of professional baseball player Dick Hall. She attended Swarthmore College, where she majored in mathematics with minors in Russian and philosophy. She did her graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Noam Chomsky. Her 1965 PhD dissertation from MIT was entitled Subject and Object in Modern English.
Go to Profile#8565
David Waltz
#8575
Overall Influence
1943 - 2012 (69 years)
David Leigh Waltz was a computer scientist who made significant contributions in several areas of artificial intelligence, including constraint satisfaction, case-based reasoning and the application of massively parallel computation to AI problems. He held positions in academia and industry and at the time of his death, was a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University where he directed the Center for Computational Learning Systems.
Go to Profile#8566
Walter LaFeber
#8576
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Walter Fredrick LaFeber was an American academic who served as the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History at Cornell University. Previous to that he served as the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell.
Go to Profile#8567
Kathryn Bolkovac
#8577
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Kathryn Bolkovac is a human rights advocate, consultant, former police investigator with the Lincoln Police Department, and former monitor with United Nations International Police Task Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She came to prominence when she sued her employers for unfair dismissal after she lost her job following her attempts to expose sex trafficking in Bosnia. Her story was shown in the film The Whistleblower and told in the nonfiction book, The Whistleblower.
Go to Profile#8568
Robert Geroch
#8578
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Robert Geroch is an American theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. He has worked prominently on general relativity and mathematical physics and has promoted the use of category theory in mathematics and physics. He was the Ph.D. supervisor for Abhay Ashtekar, Basilis Xanthopoulos and Gary Horowitz. He also proved an important theorem in spin geometry.
Go to Profile#8569
Sumit Sarkar
#8579
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Sumit Sarkar is an Indian historian of modern India. He is the author of Swadeshi Movement. Early life, education and career He was born to Susobhan Sarkar. His maternal uncle was Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.
Go to Profile#8570
Clark Howard
#8580
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Clark Brian Howard is a consumer expert and podcast host of The Clark Howard Show. Life and career Howard grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. His parents, Bernard and Joy Garson Howard, were prominent members of Atlanta's Jewish community. Howard has three children, born in 1988, 1999 and 2005.
Go to Profile#8571
Benjamin Weiss
#8581
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Benjamin Weiss is an American-Israeli mathematician known for his contributions to ergodic theory, topological dynamics, probability theory, game theory, and descriptive set theory. Biography Benjamin Weiss was born in New York City. In 1962 he received B.A. from Yeshiva University and M.A. from the Graduate School of Science, Yeshiva University. In 1965, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton under the supervision of William Feller.
Go to Profile#8572
Leslie Martin
#8582
Overall Influence
1908 - 2000 (92 years)
Sir John Leslie Martin was an English architect, and a leading advocate of the International Style. Martin's most famous building is the Royal Festival Hall. His work was especially influenced by Alvar Aalto.
Go to Profile#8573
David Berliner
#8583
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
David C. Berliner is an educational psychologist. He was a professor and dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education. Biography After a B.A. in psychology from U.C.L.A. and an M.A. in psychology from California State University at Los Angeles, Berliner received a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He also was awarded Doctorates of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Manhattanville College. He is the father to a son and a daughter.
Go to Profile#8574
Kenji Yoshino
#8584
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar and the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. Formerly, he was the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School. His work involves constitutional law, anti-discrimination law, civil and human rights, as well as law and literature, and Japanese law and society.
Go to Profile#8575
Alexander Kellner
#8585
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Alexander Wilhelm Armin Kellner is a Brazilian geologist and paleontologist who is a leading expert in the field of studying pterosaurs. His research has focused mainly on fossil reptiles from the Cretaceous Period, including extinct dinosaurs and crocodylomorphs.
Go to Profile#8576
Wolfgang Brezinka
#8586
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Wolfgang Brezinka was a German-Austrian educational scientist. He served as Professor of Pedagogy at the School of education of the University of Würzburg, as well as at the Universities of Innsbruck and Konstanz.
Go to Profile#8577
Philip Hensher
#8587
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Philip Michael Hensher FRSL is an English novelist, critic and journalist. Biography Son of Raymond J. and Miriam Hensher, his father a bank manager and composer and his mother a university librarian, Hensher was born in South London,, although he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Sheffield, attending Tapton School. He did his undergraduate degree at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, before attending Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in 1992 for work on 18th-century painting and satire.
Go to Profile#8578
Sanduk Ruit
#8588
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Sanduk Ruit is an ophthalmologist from Nepal who has restored the sight of over 180,000 people across Africa and Asia using small-incision cataract surgery. Ruit is the founder and the executive director of the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology, which manufactures high-quality intraocular lenses for surgery at a fraction of the price of the previous manufacturing cost. The low cost has made cataract surgeries affordable to the world's poorest people.
Go to Profile#8579
Marcus Samuelsson
#8589
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Marcus Samuelsson is an Ethiopian-born Swedish-American celebrity chef, restaurateur and television personality. He is the head chef of Red Rooster in Harlem, New York. Early life and education Kassahun Joar Tsegie was born in Ethiopia. His father, Tsegie, is an Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church priest. His mother died in a tuberculosis epidemic when he was three years old. As detailed in Samuelsson's appearance on Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown he and his elder sister, Fantaye, were separated from their family during the turmoil of the Ethiopian Civil War which began in 1974. Subsequently,...
Go to Profile#8580
Lou Montulli
#8590
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Louis J. Montulli II is a computer programmer who is well known for his work in producing web browsers. In 1991 and 1992, he co-authored a text web browser called Lynx, with Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac, while he was at the University of Kansas. This web browser was one of the first available and is still in use today.
Go to Profile#8581
Peter Carruthers
#8591
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Peter Carruthers is a British-American philosopher and cognitive scientist working primarily in the area of philosophy of mind, though he has also made contributions to philosophy of language and ethics. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, an associate member of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, and a member of the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences.
Go to Profile#8582
Richard Boyd
#8592
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Richard Newell Boyd was an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University where he was Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters Emeritus. He specialized in epistemology, the philosophy of science, language, and mind.
Go to Profile#8583
Dmitry Likhachev
#8593
Overall Influence
1906 - 1999 (93 years)
Dmitry Sergeyevich Likhachev was a Russian medievalist, linguist, and a former inmate of Gulag. During his lifetime, Likhachev was considered the world's foremost scholar of the Old Russian language and its literature.
Go to Profile#8584
Wubbo Ockels
#8594
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Wubbo Johannes Ockels was a Dutch physicist and astronaut with the European Space Agency who, in 1985, became the first Dutch citizen in space when he flew on STS-61-A as a payload specialist. He later became professor of aerospace engineering at Delft University of Technology.
Go to Profile#8585
Ángel González Muñiz
#8595
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Ángel González Muñiz was a major Spanish poet of the twentieth century. Biography González was born in Oviedo. He took a law degree at the University of Oviedo and, in 1950, moved to Madrid to work in Civil Administration. It was in Madrid that he first began to write and publish his poetry, becoming friends with many of the leading Spanish writers who encouraged his work. His first book of poems, Áspero mundo , was an immediate critical success. His second book, Grado elemental , was published in Paris and won the prestigious Antonio Machado Prize for Poetry. He published eight more books of...
Go to Profile#8586
Frederick Sontag
#8596
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
Frederick Earl Sontag was a professor of philosophy and author. He taught at Pomona College in Claremont, California from 1952 to 2009, retiring shortly before his death. Biography Sontag served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, becoming a sergeant. He graduated from Stanford University in 1949 with a B.A. , then attended Yale University where he earned an M.A. in 1951 and a Ph.D. in 1952.
Go to Profile#8587
Vijay S. Pande
#8597
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Vijay Satyanand Pande is a Trinidadian–American scientist and venture capitalist. Pande is the former director of the biophysics program and is best known for orchestrating the distributed computing disease research project known as Folding@home. His research is focused on distributed computing and computer-modelling of microbiology and on improving computer simulations regarding drug-binding, protein design, and synthetic bio-mimetic polymers. Pande became the ninth general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz in November 2015. He is the founding investor of their Bio + Health ...
Go to Profile#8588
Pranab K. Sen
#8598
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Pranab Kumar Sen is a statistician, a professor of statistics and the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Academic biography Sen was the second of seven siblings; his father, a railway officer, died of leukemia when Sen was ten, and he was raised by his mother, the daughter of a physician. He began his undergraduate studies at Presidency College, Kolkata, initially intending to study medicine but shifting to statistics when it was discovered that he was too young for medical college. He received a B.S. from the University of Calcutta in 1955, an M.Sc.
Go to Profile#8589
Liam Gillick
#8599
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Liam Gillick is a British artist who lives and works in New York City. Gillick deploys multiple forms to make visible the aesthetics of the constructed world and examine the ideological control systems that have emerged along with globalization and neoliberalism. He utilizes materials that resemble everyday built environments, transforming them into minimalist abstractions that deliver commentaries on social constructs, while also exploring notions of modernism.
Go to Profile#8590
Ravi Jagannathan
#8600
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ravi Jagannathan is an American economist. He is a chaired professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. With the exception of the period 1989–1997 when he was a professor at the University of Minnesota, Jagannathan has been at Kellogg since graduate school.
Go to Profile#8591
Mark Danner
#8601
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mark David Danner is an American writer, journalist, and educator. He is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Danner specializes in U.S. foreign affairs, war and politics, and has written books and articles on Haiti, Central America, the former Yugoslavia, and the Middle East, as well as on American politics, covering every presidential election since 2000. In 1999, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#8592
Simon A. Levin
#8602
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Simon Asher Levin is an American ecologist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the director of the Center for BioComplexity at Princeton University. He specializes in using mathematical modeling and empirical studies in the understanding of macroscopic patterns of ecosystems and biological diversities.
Go to Profile#8593
Elke U. Weber
#8603
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Elke U. Weber is a Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University where she holds the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professorship in Energy & the Environment. Prior to moving to Princeton in 2016, she spent 19 years at Columbia University, where she founded and co-directed the Earth Institute's Center for Research on Environmental Decisions and the Columbia Business School's Center for Decision Sciences.
Go to Profile#8594
Antonino Zichichi
#8604
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Antonino Zichichi is an Italian physicist who has worked in the field of nuclear physics. He has served as President of the World Federation of Scientists and as a professor at the University of Bologna.
Go to Profile#8595
Dan Gurney
#8605
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Daniel Sexton Gurney was an American racing driver, race car constructor, and team owner who reached racing's highest levels starting in 1958. Gurney won races in the Formula One, Indy Car, NASCAR, Can-Am, and Trans-Am Series. Gurney is the first of three drivers to have won races in sports cars , Formula One , NASCAR , and Indy cars , the other two being Mario Andretti and Juan Pablo Montoya.
Go to Profile#8596
Bhikkhu Analayo
#8606
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Bhikkhu Anālayo is a bhikkhu , scholar, and meditation teacher. He was born in Germany in 1962, and went forth in 1995 in the Theravāda monastic tradition Sri Lanka. He is best known for his comparative studies of Early Buddhist Texts as preserved by the various early Buddhist traditions.
Go to Profile#8597
Sandy Douglas
#8607
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Alexander Shafto "Sandy" Douglas CBE was a British professor of computer science, credited with creating the first graphical computer game, OXO, a version of noughts and crosses, in 1952 on the EDSAC computer at University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#8598
Yoav Freund
#8608
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Yoav Freund is an Israeli professor of computer science at the University of California San Diego who mainly works on machine learning, probability theory and related fields and applications. He is best known for his work on the AdaBoost algorithm, an ensemble learning algorithm which is used to combine many "weak" learning machines to create a more robust one. He and Robert Schapire received the Gödel prize in 2003 for their joint work on AdaBoost.
Go to Profile#8599
Neeli Bendapudi
#8609
Overall Influence
Neeli Bendapudi is an American academic administrator who is the 19th president of Pennsylvania State University. From 2018 until 2021, she served as the 18th president of the University of Louisville. In December 2021, Penn State announced Bendapudi as the university's president; she succeeded Eric J. Barron following his retirement. She assumed office in May 2022 and is the first woman and the first non-white person to serve as Penn State's president.
Go to Profile#8600
Jack Davis
#8610
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
John Burton Davis Jr. was an American cartoonist and illustrator, known for his advertising art, magazine covers, film posters, record album art, and numerous comic book stories. He was one of the founding cartoonists for Mad in 1952. His cartoon characters are characterized by extremely distorted anatomy, including big heads, skinny legs, and large feet.
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