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
#8651
Steven Soderbergh
#8661
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Steven Andrew Soderbergh is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor. A pioneer of modern independent cinema, Soderbergh later drew acclaim for formally inventive films made within the studio system.
Go to Profile#8652
Walter Veith
#8662
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Walter Julius Veith is a South African zoologist and a Seventh-day Adventist author and speaker known for his work in nutrition, creationism and Biblical exegesis. Veith was professor of the zoology department at the University of Cape Town and taught in the medical bioscience department. During this time, the department was awarded a Royal Society London grant for zoological research.
Go to Profile#8653
Ruth Arnon
#8663
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Ruth Arnon is an Israeli biochemist and codeveloper of the multiple sclerosis drug Copaxone. She is currently the Paul Ehrlich Professor of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where she is researching anti-cancer and influenza vaccinations.
Go to Profile#8654
Zhong Lin Wang
#8664
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
#8655
Gary Ruvkun
#8665
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Gary Bruce Ruvkun is an American molecular biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Ruvkun discovered the mechanism by which lin-4, the first microRNA discovered by Victor Ambros, regulates the translation of target messenger RNAs via imperfect base-pairing to those targets, and discovered the second miRNA, let-7, and that it is conserved across animal phylogeny, including in humans. These miRNA discoveries revealed a new world of RNA regulation at an unprecedented small size scale, and the mechanism of that regulation. Ruv...
Go to Profile#8656
Maurice Edmond Müller
#8666
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Maurice Edmond Müller was a Swiss orthopedic surgeon who was instrumental in the development of internal fixation techniques to treat bone fractures and who also significantly advanced the development of the hip prostheses. For his work in these areas he has been honored with numerous awards. On 24 August 2002, the International Society of Orthopaedic Surgery and Traumatology named him the "Orthopedic Surgeon of the Century" at a congress in San Diego.
Go to Profile#8657
Gerhard A. Ritter
#8667
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Gerhard Albert Ritter was a German historian. Biography Ritter was born in and grew up in Berlin and studied from 1947 at the University of Tübingen and at the Free University of Berlin. He died in Berlin in 2015.
Go to Profile#8658
Roger Apéry
#8668
Overall Influence
1916 - 1994 (78 years)
Roger Apéry was a French mathematician most remembered for Apéry's theorem, which states that is an irrational number. Here, denotes the Riemann zeta function. Biography Apéry was born in Rouen in 1916 to a French mother and Greek father. His childhood was spent in Lille until 1926, when the family moved to Paris, where he studied at the Lycée Ledru-Rollin and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He was admitted at the École normale supérieure in 1935. His studies were interrupted at the start of World War II; he was mobilized in September 1939, taken prisoner of war in June 1940, repatriated with pleurisy in June 1941, and hospitalized until August 1941.
Go to Profile#8659
Kenneth Bowles
#8669
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Kenneth L. "Ken" Bowles was an American computer scientist best known for his work in initiating and directing the UCSD Pascal project, when he was a professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego .
Go to Profile#8660
Ashfaq Ahmed
#8670
Overall Influence
1925 - 2004 (79 years)
Ashfaq Ahmed was a Pakistani writer, playwright and broadcaster. His works in Urdu included novels, short stories and plays for television and radio of Pakistan. He received the President's Pride of Performance and Sitara-i-Imtiaz awards for his everlasting services in the field of broadcasting and literary heritage of Pakistan.
Go to Profile#8661
Sergei Gukov
#8671
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Sergei Gukov is a professor of mathematics and theoretical physicist. Gukov graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in Moscow, Russia before obtaining a doctorate in physics from Princeton University under the supervision of Edward Witten.
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Masaru Tomita
#8672
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Masaru Tomita is a Japanese scientist in the fields of systems biology and computer science, best known as the founder of the E-Cell simulation system and/or the inventor of GLR parser algorithm. He served a professor of Keio University, Director of the Institute for Advanced Biosciences, and the founder and board member of various spinout companies, including Human Metabolome Technologies, Inc. and Spiber Inc. He is also the co-founder and on the board of directors of The Metabolomics Society. His father was the renowned composer and synthesiser pioneer Isao Tomita.
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Renato Treves
#8673
Overall Influence
1907 - 1992 (85 years)
Renato Treves was an Italian sociologist. Biography Treves was born in Turin, Italy of a Jewish family. According to Vincenzo Ferrari, Treves "devoted his first academic study to the diffusion of Claude Henri de Saint-Simon's doctrines in Italy" before turning his attention to the neo-Kantian movement and Hans Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law.
Go to Profile#8664
Thomas A. Drake
#8674
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Thomas Andrews Drake is a former senior executive of the National Security Agency , a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, and a whistleblower. In 2010, the government alleged that Drake mishandled documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. Drake's defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project. He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award.
Go to Profile#8665
Richard Swedberg
#8675
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
#8666
Pierre Rosanvallon
#8676
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Pierre Rosanvallon is a French historian and sociologist. He was named a professor at the Collège de France in 2001, holding the chair in modern and contemporary political history. His works are dedicated to the history of democracy, French political history, the role of the state and the question of social justice in contemporary societies.
Go to Profile#8667
Thomas Berger
#8677
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Thomas Louis Berger was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure.
Go to Profile#8668
Leon Litwack
#8678
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Leon Frank Litwack was an American historian whose scholarship focused on slavery, the Reconstruction Era of the United States, and its aftermath into the 20th century. He won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for History, and the Francis Parkman Prize for his 1979 book Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Dianne Feinstein
#8679
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Dianne Emiel Feinstein was an American politician who served as a United States senator from California from 1992 until her death in 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, she served as mayor of San Francisco from 1978 to 1988.
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Lipman Bers
#8680
Overall Influence
1914 - 1993 (79 years)
Lipman Bers was a Latvian-American mathematician, born in Riga, who created the theory of pseudoanalytic functions and worked on Riemann surfaces and Kleinian groups. He was also known for his work in human rights activism.
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Frederic Pryor
#8681
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Frederic LeRoy Pryor was an American economist. While studying in Berlin during the partition of the city in 1961, he was imprisoned in East Germany for six months, then released in a Cold War "spy swap" that also involved downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. He spent the bulk of his career as a member of the Swarthmore College faculty, as a professor of economics.
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Charles V. Hamilton
#8682
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Charles Vernon Hamilton is a political scientist, civil rights leader, and the W. S. Sayre Professor Emeritus of Government and Political Science at Columbia University. Biography Hamilton was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma. His family moved to the southside of Chicago, Illinois in 1935, which is where he was raised. He had aspirations to be a journalist growing up, but he was dissuaded as, in his words, “there [weren’t] many jobs for black people who want to be journalists.” He went to Roosevelt University to study political science and graduated in 1951, and went on to earn a master's degree in 1957 from the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#8673
Clare Balding
#8683
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Clare Victoria Balding is an English broadcast journalist and author. She currently presents for BBC Sport, Channel 4 and BT Sport and formerly presented the religious programme Good Morning Sunday on BBC Radio 2. Balding was appointed as the 30th president of the Rugby Football League, serving a two-year term until December 2022.
Go to Profile#8674
E. J. Dionne
#8684
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Eugene Joseph Dionne Jr. is an American journalist, political commentator, and long-time op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. He is also a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a professor in the Foundations of Democracy and Culture at the McCourt School of Public Policy of Georgetown University, and an NPR, MSNBC, and PBS commentator.
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Ridwan Kamil
#8685
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Mochamad Ridwan Kamil , alternatively Kang Emil is an Indonesian architect and politician who was the 15th Governor of West Java, the largest province of Indonesia. He was also the mayor of Bandung from 2013 to 2018. As an architect, he designed iconic structures in Indonesia and other countries in Asia with his Urbane architectural firm and lectured at the Department of Architecture, Bandung Institute of Technology.
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Julius Anatolyevich Schrader
#8686
Overall Influence
1927 - 1998 (71 years)
Julius Anatolyevich Schreider, OP [Yu. A. Schreider] was a mathematician, cyberneticist, philosopher, and a convert to Roman Catholicism. Education and research work Schrader was born in Dnepropetrovsk, Soviet Union. In 1946, he graduated from the renowned Mechanics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University. He completed his doctoral work in 1949 and in 1950 completed his postdoctoral dissertation on functional analysis.
Go to Profile#8677
Chaka Khan
#8687
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Yvette Marie Stevens , better known by her stage name Chaka Khan , is an American singer. Known as the "Queen of Funk", her career has spanned more than five decades beginning in the early 1970s as the lead vocalist of the funk band Rufus. With the band she recorded the notable hits, "Tell Me Something Good", "Sweet Thing", "Do You Love What You Feel" and the platinum certified "Ain't Nobody". Her debut solo album featured the number-one R&B hit, "I'm Every Woman" . Khan scored another R&B charts hit with "What Cha' Gonna Do for Me" before becoming the first R&B artist to have a crossover hit featuring a rapper, with her 1984 cover of Prince's "I Feel for You".
Go to Profile#8678
Engin Arık
#8688
Overall Influence
1948 - 2007 (59 years)
Engin Arık was a Turkish particle physicist and professor at Boğaziçi University. She led the Turkish participation in a number of experiments at CERN. Arık was a prominent supporter of Turkey's membership to CERN and the founding of a national particle accelerator center as a means to utilize thorium as an energy source. She has also represented Turkey at the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization for a number of years. She died in the Atlasjet Flight 4203 crash on November 30, 2007.
Go to Profile#8679
Thurgood Marshall
#8689
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
Thoroughgood "Thurgood" Marshall was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall was a prominent figure in the movement to end racial segregation in American public schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v.
Go to Profile#8680
Mark Turner
#8690
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mark Turner is a cognitive scientist, linguist, and author. He is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. He has won an Anneliese Maier Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a Grand Prix from the French Academy for his work in these fields. Turner and Gilles Fauconnier founded the theory of conceptual blending, presented in textbooks and encyclopedias. Turner is also the director of the Cognitive Science Network and co-director of the Distributed Little Red Hen Lab.
Go to Profile#8681
Inder Verma
#8691
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Inder Mohan Verma is an Indian American molecular biologist, the former Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology in the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, San Diego. He is recognized for seminal discoveries in the fields of cancer, immunology, and gene therapy.
Go to Profile#8682
Roddy Doyle
#8692
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Roddy Doyle is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. He is the author of eleven novels for adults, eight books for children, seven plays and screenplays, and dozens of short stories. Several of his books have been made into films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. Doyle's work is set primarily in Ireland, especially working-class Dublin, and is notable for its heavy use of dialogue written in slang and Irish English dialect. Doyle was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
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Pascal Salin
#8693
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Pascal Salin is a French economist, professor emeritus at the Université Paris-Dauphine and a specialist in public finance and monetary economics. He is a former president of the Mont Pelerin Society .
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Christopher Golden
#8694
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Christopher Golden is an American author of horror, fantasy, and suspense novels for adults and teens. Early life Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. He graduated from Tufts University.
Go to Profile#8685
Enrique Peña Nieto
#8695
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Enrique Peña Nieto , commonly referred to by his initials EPN, is a Mexican politician who served as the 64th president of Mexico from 1 December 2012 to 30 November 2018. A member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party , he previously served as Governor of the State of Mexico from 2005 to 2011, local deputy from 2003 to 2004, and Secretary of Administration from 2000 to 2002.
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Michelle Rhee
#8696
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Michelle Ann Rhee is an American educator and advocate for education reform. She was Chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools from 2007 to 2010. In late 2010, she founded StudentsFirst, a non-profit organization that works on education reform.
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Vladimir Gribov
#8697
Overall Influence
1930 - 1997 (67 years)
Vladimir Naumovich Gribov was a prominent Russian theoretical physicist, who worked on high-energy physics, quantum field theory and the Regge theory of the strong interactions. His best known contributions are the pomeron, the DGLAP equations, and the Gribov copies.
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Leo Harrington
#8698
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Leo Anthony Harrington is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who works in recursion theory, model theory, and set theory. Having retired from being a Mathematician, Professor Leo Harrington is now a Philosopher.
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Vincent O'Brien
#8699
Overall Influence
1917 - 2009 (92 years)
Michael Vincent O'Brien was an Irish race horse trainer from Churchtown, County Cork, Ireland. In 2003 he was voted the greatest influence in horse racing history in a worldwide poll hosted by the Racing Post. In earlier Racing Post polls he was voted the best ever trainer of national hunt and of flat racehorses. He trained six horses to win the Epsom Derby, won three Grand Nationals in succession and trained the only British Triple Crown winner, Nijinsky, since the Second World War. He was twice British champion trainer in flat racing and also twice in national hunt racing; the only trainer in history to have been champion under both rules.
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Dominique de Villepin
#8700
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France from 31 May 2005 to 17 May 2007 under President Jacques Chirac. In his career working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, De Villepin rose through the ranks of the French right as one of Chirac's protégés. He came into the international spotlight as Minister of Foreign Affairs with his opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, one year after his appointment to the office, which culminated with a speech to the United Nations. Before his tenure as prime minister, he also served as Mi...
Go to Profile#8691
Gerhard Huisken
#8701
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Gerhard Huisken is a German mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry and partial differential equations. He is known for foundational contributions to the theory of the mean curvature flow, including Huisken's monotonicity formula, which is named after him. With Tom Ilmanen, he proved a version of the Riemannian Penrose inequality, which is a special case of the more general Penrose conjecture in general relativity.
Go to Profile#8692
Diana Gabaldon
#8702
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Diana J. Gabaldon is an American author, known for the Outlander series of novels. Her books merge multiple genres, featuring elements of historical fiction, romance, mystery, adventure and science fiction/fantasy. A television adaptation of the Outlander novels premiered on Starz in 2014.
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Georges Poulet
#8703
Overall Influence
1902 - 1991 (89 years)
Georges Poulet was a Belgian literary critic associated with the Geneva School. Best known for his four-volume work Studies in Human Time, Poulet rejected formalist approaches to literary criticism and advanced the theory that criticism requires the reader to open his or her mind to the consciousness of the author. His work has had a lasting influence on critics such as J. Hillis Miller.
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Scott Shannon
#8704
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Michael Scott Shannon is an American radio disc jockey currently best known as the announcer of The Sean Hannity Show. He also hosted the morning show for WCBS-FM in New York City from 2014 to 2022 as well as Scott Shannon Presents America's Greatest Hits which is syndicated nationally with United Stations Radio Networks and Audacy. He previously worked for WHTZ, WPLJ, and The True Oldies Channel.
Go to Profile#8695
Taras Kuzio
#8705
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Taras Kuzio is a Professor of Political Science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy . His area of study is Russian and Ukrainian political, economic and security affairs. Education Taras Kuzio is of Ukrainian descent.
Go to Profile#8696
Léopold Sédar Senghor
#8706
Overall Influence
1906 - 2001 (95 years)
Léopold Sédar Senghor was a Senegalese poet, politician and cultural theorist who was the first president of Senegal . Ideologically an African socialist, he was one of the major theoreticians of Négritude. Senghor was a proponent of African culture, black identity and African empowerment within the framework of French-African ties. He advocated for the extension of full civil and political rights for France's African territories while arguing that French Africans would be better off within a federal French structure than as independent nation-states.
Go to Profile#8697
Xavi
#8707
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Xavier Hernández Creus , also known as Xavi Hernández or simply Xavi , is a Spanish professional football manager and former player who is currently the manager of La Liga club Barcelona. Widely considered one of the greatest midfielders of all time, Xavi was renowned for his passing, vision, ball retention, and positioning. He won 32 trophies in his career, making him the second-most decorated Spanish player in history, behind former teammate Andrés Iniesta.
Go to Profile#8698
Moslem Bahadori
#8708
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Moslem Bahadori was an Iranian medical scientist, pathologist, and a university lecturer. In 1973, Bahadori along with Averill Abraham Liebow, reported the first case of plasma cell granuloma, a benign tumor of the lung.
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Farley Mowat
#8709
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Farley McGill Mowat, was a Canadian writer and environmentalist. His works were translated into 52 languages, and he sold more than 17 million books. He achieved fame with the publication of his books on the Canadian north, such as People of the Deer and Never Cry Wolf . The latter, an account of his experiences with wolves in the Arctic, was made into a film of the same name released in 1983. For his body of work as a writer he won the annual Vicky Metcalf Award for Children's Literature in 1970.
Go to Profile#8700
Sergei Adian
#8710
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Sergei Ivanovich Adian, also Adyan , was a Soviet and Armenian mathematician. He was a professor at the Moscow State University and was known for his work in group theory, especially on the Burnside problem.
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