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
#8701
Isaak Khalatnikov
#8711
Overall Influence
1919 - 2021 (102 years)
Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov was a leading Soviet theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to many areas of theoretical physics, including general relativity, quantum field theory, as well as the theory of quantum liquids. He is well known for his role in developing the Landau-Khalatnikov theory of superfluidity and the so-called BKL conjecture in the general theory of relativity.
Go to Profile#8702
Joe Rosenthal
#8712
Overall Influence
1911 - 2006 (95 years)
Joseph John Rosenthal was an American photographer who received the Pulitzer Prize for his iconic World War II photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, taken during the 1945 Battle of Iwo Jima. His picture became one of the best-known photographs of the war, and was replicated as the United States Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.
Go to Profile#8703
Mike Duggan
#8713
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michael Edward Duggan is an American lawyer, businessman, and politician serving as the 75th mayor of Detroit, Michigan since 2014. A member of the Democratic Party, Duggan previously served as the Wayne County Prosecutor from 2001 to 2004, and as the deputy county executive of Wayne County from 1987 to 2001.
Go to Profile#8704
James Foley
#8714
Overall Influence
1973 - 2014 (41 years)
James Wright Foley was an American journalist and video reporter. While working as a freelance war correspondent during the Syrian Civil War, he was abducted on November 22, 2012, in northwestern Syria. He was murdered by decapitation in August 2014 purportedly as a response to American airstrikes in Iraq, thus becoming the first American citizen killed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria .
Go to Profile#8705
Ann Charters
#8715
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Ann Charters is Professor Emerita of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. She is a Jack Kerouac and Beat Generation scholar. Early life and career Charters was born on November 10, 1936, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She is a professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and has been interested in Beat writers since 1956, when as an undergraduate English major at the University of California, Berkeley she attended the repeat performance of the Six Gallery Poetry reading in San Francisco where Allen Ginsberg gave his second public reading...
Go to Profile#8706
Roger Daltrey
#8716
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Roger Harry Daltrey is an English singer, musician and actor. He is a co-founder and the lead singer of the rock band the Who. Daltrey's hit songs with the Who include "My Generation", "Pinball Wizard", "Won't Get Fooled Again", "Baba O'Riley" and "You Better You Bet". He began his solo career in 1973, while still a member of the Who. Since then he has released ten solo studio albums, five compilation albums, and one live album. His solo hits include "Giving It All Away", "Walking the Dog", "Written on the Wind", "Free Me", "Without Your Love" and "Under a Raging Moon".
Go to Profile#8707
Edward C. Banfield
#8717
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Edward Christie Banfield was an American political scientist, best known as the author of The Moral Basis of a Backward Society , and The Unheavenly City . His work was foundational to the advent of the policing tactic of broken windows theory, which was first advocated by his mentee James Q. Wilson in an Atlantic Monthly article entitled "Broken Windows".
Go to Profile#8708
Peter Englund
#8718
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Peter Mikael Englund is a Swedish author and historian born on April 4, 1957. He focuses on writing non-fiction books and essays, mostly about the Swedish Empire and other historical events. Englund is known for his accessible writing style, which includes narrative details that are often left out in traditional history books. His works have been translated into multiple languages, including German and Czech. From 2009 to 2015, Englund served as the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, before being succeeded by Sara Danius. In January 2019, he and fellow academy member Kjell Espmark ann...
Go to Profile#8709
Jon Halliday
#8719
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Jon Halliday is an Irish historian specialising in modern Asia. He was formerly a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London. He was educated at University of Oxford and has been married to Jung Chang since 1991. Halliday is the older brother of the late Irish International relations academic and writer Fred Halliday.
Go to Profile#8710
Justin Clemens
#8720
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Justin Clemens is an Australian academic known for his work on Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. He is also a published poet. Background Clemens studied at the University of Melbourne, gaining his PhD on "Institution, aesthetics, nihilism : the Romanticism of contemporary theory" in 1999.
Go to Profile#8711
Charles L. Evans
#8721
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Charles L. Evans was the ninth president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago from 2007 to 2023. In that capacity, he served on the Federal Open Market Committee , the Federal Reserve System's monetary policy-making body.
Go to Profile#8712
Kate Pickett
#8722
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Kate Elizabeth Pickett is a British epidemiologist and political activist who is Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, and was a National Institute for Health and Care Research Career Scientist from 2007 to 2012. She co-authored The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better and is a co-founder of The Equality Trust. Pickett was awarded a 2013 Silver Rose Award from Solidar for championing equality and the 2014 Charles Cully Memorial Medal by the Irish Cancer Society.
Go to Profile#8713
Richard E. Caves
#8723
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Richard Earl Caves was an American economist, and Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He is known for his work on multinational corporations, industrial organization and the creative industries. He is known within the film economics field as the author of a definitive book on the organization of creative industries.
Go to Profile#8714
Ana Lydia Vega
#8724
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Ana Lydia Vega is a Puerto Rican writer. Biography Her parents were Virgilio Vega, an "oral poet" from Coamo, Puerto Rico, and Doña María Santana, a teacher from the town of Arroyo. She went to school at the Academia del Sagrado Corazón in Santurce, and studied at the University of Puerto Rico, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1968. She went on to study at the University of Provence, France, receiving a master's degree in French literature in 1971, and a doctorate in French literature in 1978. She has received the Premio Casa de las Américas and the Premio Juan Rulfo . In 1985 she was selected as the "Author of the Year" by the Puerto Rico Society of Authors.
Go to Profile#8715
Ron Atkinson
#8725
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Ronald Frederick Atkinson is an English former football player and manager. Nicknamed "Big Ron", he was regarded as one of Britain's best-known football pundits in the 1990s and early 2000s. Nicknamed "The Tank" during his playing career, he represented Oxford United for twelve years, and still holds the club record for appearances. As a manager, he won the FA Cup with Manchester United in 1983 and 1985 and the Football League Cup with Sheffield Wednesday in 1991 and Aston Villa in 1994.
Go to Profile#8716
Uma Narayan
#8726
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Uma Narayan is an American feminist scholar and a current professor of philosophy at Vassar College on the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of Humanities. Narayan's work focuses on the epistemology of the inequities involving postcolonial feminism.
Go to Profile#8717
Robert Castel
#8727
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Robert Castel was a French sociologist and researcher at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Academic career Castel was born in Saint-Pierre-Quilbignon, now part of Brest. He initially studied philosophy in the late 1950s. In the late 1960s, he met Pierre Bourdieu and began working with him in sociology. His initial work dealt with psychology and psychiatry, establishing a critical sociology of these issues and linking this work to Michel Foucault, particularly to his 'genealogical approach'. He further dealt with exclusion, or rather what he called the 'disaffiliation', which...
Go to Profile#8718
Craig Blomberg
#8728
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Craig L. Blomberg is an American New Testament scholar. He is currently the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the New Testament at Denver Seminary in Colorado where he has been since 1986. His area of academic expertise is the New Testament. This includes parables, miracles, historical Jesus, Luke-Acts, John, 1 Corinthians, James, the historical trustworthiness of Scripture, financial stewardship, gender roles, Latter Day Saint movement, hermeneutics, New Testament theology, and exegetical method. Blomberg has written and edited multiple books.
Go to Profile#8719
Marci Bowers
#8729
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Marci Lee Bowers is an American gynecologist and surgeon who specializes in gender-affirming surgeries. Bowers is viewed as an innovator in gender confirmation/affirmation surgery, and is the first transgender woman to perform such surgeries.
Go to Profile#8720
Ronald Gillespie
#8730
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Ronald James Gillespie, was a British chemist specializing in the field of molecular geometry, who arrived in Canada after accepting an offer that included his own laboratory with new equipment, which post-World War II Britain could not provide. He was responsible for establishing inorganic chemistry education in Canada.
Go to Profile#8721
Andy Haldane
#8731
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Andrew George Haldane is a British economist who worked at the Bank of England between 1989 and 2021 as the chief economist and executive director of monetary analysis and statistics. He resigned from the Bank of England in June 2021 to become chief executive of the Royal Society for Arts. He sits on the UK's government's Economic Advisory Council.
Go to Profile#8722
Roger T. Ames
#8732
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Roger T. Ames is a Canadian-born philosopher, translator, and author. He is Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University in Beijing, China, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and a Berggruen Fellow. He has made significant contributions to the study of Chinese and comparative philosophy, in which he emphasizes the importance of understanding Chinese philosophy on its own terms rather than through the lens of Western philosophy.
Go to Profile#8723
Paavo Pylkkänen
#8733
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Paavo Pylkkänen is a Finnish philosopher of mind. He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Skövde and a university lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. He is known for his work on mind-body studies, building on David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics, in particular Bohm's view of the cosmos as an enfolding and unfolding whole including mind and matter.
Go to Profile#8724
Robert Coldwell Wood
#8734
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Robert Coldwell Wood was an American political scientist, academic and government administrator, and professor of political science at MIT. From 1965 to 1969, Wood served as the Under Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and for two weeks as the Secretary at the end of the Johnson Administration.
Go to Profile#8725
Larisa Bogoraz
#8735
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
Larisa Iosifovna Bogoraz was a dissident in the Soviet Union. Biography Born in Kharkiv, at the time capital of the Ukrainian SSR, to a family of Communist Party bureaucrats, she graduated as a linguist from the University of Kharkiv and in 1950, married her first husband, Yuli Daniel, a writer. Together, they moved to Moscow.
Go to Profile#8726
Abdulrazak Gurnah
#8736
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and moved to the United Kingdom in the 1960s as a refugee during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise , which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; By the Sea , which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Desertion , shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Go to Profile#8727
Roger Shattuck
#8737
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Roger Whitney Shattuck was an American writer best known for his books on French literature, art, and music of the twentieth century. Background and education Born in New York City to parents Howard Francis Shattuck, a physician, and Elizabeth Shattuck, he studied at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire before entering Yale College.
Go to Profile#8728
Virginijus Šikšnys
#8738
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Virginijus Šikšnys is a Lithuanian biochemist and a professor at Vilnius University. He is a chief scientist at the Vilnius University Institute of Biotechnology. Biography Šikšnys studied organic chemistry at Vilnius University, receiving his Masters in 1978, then moved to Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he studied enzyme kinetics and received Candidate of Sciences degree in 1983. From 1982 till 1993 he worked at the Institute of Applied Enzymology in Vilnius. In 1993 he was a visiting scientist in Robert Huber’s laboratory at the Max-Planck-Institut für Biochemie, Martinsried, Germany.
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Ramesh Raskar
#8739
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Ramesh Raskar is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology associate professor and head of the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture research group. Previously he worked as a senior research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories during 2002 to 2008. He holds 132 patents in computer vision, computational health, sensors and imaging. He received the $500K Lemelson–MIT Prize in 2016. The prize money will be used for launching REDX.io, a group platform for co-innovation in Artificial Intelligence. He is well known for inventing EyeNetra , EyeCatra and EyeSelfie , Femto-photography and h...
Go to Profile#8730
Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty
#8740
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty , PhD was an Indian American microbiologist, scientist, and researcher, most notable for his work in directed evolution and his role in developing a genetically engineered organism using plasmid transfer while working at GE, the patent for which led to landmark Supreme Court case, Diamond v. Chakrabarty.
Go to Profile#8731
Brian Higgins
#8741
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Brian Thomas Higgins is a British record producer and songwriter, who has written and produced albums and tracks for several successful pop music singers and groups, including Girls Aloud, S Club 7, Sugababes, and the Saturdays through his Xenomania production team. Miranda Cooper is a key collaborator who shares co-writing credits in nearly all Xenomania-written tracks.
Go to Profile#8732
Graham Higman
#8742
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Graham Higman FRS was a prominent English mathematician known for his contributions to group theory. Biography Higman was born in Louth, Lincolnshire, and attended Sutton High School, Plymouth, winning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1939 he co-founded The Invariant Society, the student mathematics society, and earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1941. His thesis, The units of group-rings, was written under the direction of J. H. C. Whitehead. From 1960 to 1984 he was the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#8733
Martha E. Pollack
#8743
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Martha Elizabeth Pollack is an American computer scientist who has served as the 14th president of Cornell University since April 2017. Previously, she served as the 14th provost and executive vice president for academic affairs of the University of Michigan from 2013 to 2017.
Go to Profile#8734
Michelangelo Pistoletto
#8744
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Michelangelo Pistoletto is an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist. Pistoletto is acknowledged as one of the main representatives of the Italian Arte Povera. His work mainly deals with the subject matter of reflection and the unification of art and everyday life in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Go to Profile#8735
Piers Sellers
#8745
Overall Influence
1955 - 2016 (61 years)
Piers John Sellers was a British-American meteorologist, NASA astronaut and Director of the Earth Science Division at NASA/GSFC. He was a veteran of three Space Shuttle missions. Sellers attended Cranbrook School, Cranbrook, Kent, United Kingdom, until 1973, and achieved a bachelor's degree in ecological science from the University of Edinburgh in 1976. In 1981 he gained a doctorate in biometeorology from the University of Leeds. In 2011, Sellers retired from the NASA Astronaut Corps.
Go to Profile#8736
Rachid Yazami
#8746
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Rachid Yazami is a Moroccan scientist, engineer, and inventor. He is best known for his critical role in the development of the graphite anode for lithium-ion batteries and his research on fluoride ion batteries.
Go to Profile#8737
Lawrence M. Breed
#8747
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Lawrence Moser "Larry" Breed was a computer scientist, artist and inventor, best known for his involvement in the programming language APL. Career As an undergraduate at Stanford University in 1961, he created the first computer animation language and system and used it at Stanford football half-times to coordinate images produced by a 100 ft-by-100 ft array of rooters holding up colored cards.
Go to Profile#8738
Sarvajna
#8748
Overall Influence
Sarvajña was a Kannada poet, pragmatist and philosopher of the 16th century. The word "Sarvajna" in Sanskrit literally means "the all knowing". His father was Kumbara Malla and his mother was Mallaladevi. His birth anniversary is celebrated on February 20 every year. He belongs to the caste of Kumbara. He is famous for his pithy three-lined poems called tripadi . He is also referred as Sarvagna in modern translation.
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Virginia Vassilevska Williams
#8749
Overall Influence
Virginia Vassilevska Williams is a theoretical computer scientist and mathematician known for her research in computational complexity theory and algorithms. She is currently the Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is notable for her breakthrough results in fast matrix multiplication, for her work on dynamic algorithms, and for helping to develop the field of fine-grained complexity.
Go to Profile#8740
Mehryar Mohri
#8750
Overall Influence
Mehryar Mohri is a Professor and theoretical computer scientist at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He is also a Research Director at Google Research where he heads the Learning Theory team.
Go to Profile#8741
Richard Elmore
#8751
Overall Influence
Richard Frazier Elmore was the Gregory R. Anrig Research Professor of Educational Leadership in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he taught for 24 years commencing in 1990. Professor Elmore was known for his modes of learning framework, and instructional rounds.
Go to Profile#8742
Guus Hiddink
#8752
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Guus Hiddink is a Dutch former football manager and professional player. He enjoyed a long career playing as a midfielder in his native Netherlands. Retired as player in 1982, Hiddink went into management, leading both clubs and countries from across the globe to achieve various titles and feats. With PSV Eindhoven he won the European Champions Cup, the predecessor of the UEFA Champions League.
Go to Profile#8743
Diosdado Macapagal
#8753
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Diosdado Pangan Macapagal Sr. was a Filipino lawyer, poet and politician who served as the ninth president of the Philippines, serving from 1961 to 1965, and the sixth vice president, serving from 1957 to 1961. He also served as a member of the House of Representatives, and headed the Constitutional Convention of 1970. He was the father of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who followed his path as president of the Philippines from 2001 to 2010.
Go to Profile#8744
Ewan Birney
#8754
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
John Frederick William Birney is joint director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute , in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire and deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory . He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge. Birney has made significant contributions to genomics, through his development of innovative bioinformatics and computational biology tools. He previously served as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Tru...
Go to Profile#8745
Majid Samii
#8755
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Majid Samii is an Iranian neurosurgeon and medical scientist. Biography Samii was born in Tehran, Iran on 19 June 1937. After having completed his high school education in Iran, he moved to Germany, where he started his medical studies at the University of Mainz.
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Norman E. Rosenthal
#8756
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Norman E. Rosenthal is an American author, psychiatrist and scientist who first described seasonal affective disorder , and developed light therapy as a treatment. Rosenthal was born and educated in South Africa but moved to the United States to complete his medical training. He established a private practice and conducted research at the National Institute of Mental Health as a researcher and senior researcher for more than twenty years. It was here that he studied disorders of mood, sleep, and biological rhythms and was the first psychiatrist to describe and diagnose seasonal affective diso...
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Helmut Koester
#8757
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Helmut Heinrich Koester was an American scholar who specialized in the New Testament and early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. His research was primarily in the areas of New Testament interpretation, history of early Christianity, and archaeology of the early Christian period.
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Curt Swan
#8758
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
Douglas Curtis Swan was an American comics artist. The artist most associated with Superman during the period fans call the Bronze Age of Comic Books, Swan produced hundreds of covers and stories from the 1950s through the 1980s.
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John Kay
#8759
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sir John Anderson Kay, is a British economist. He was the first dean of Oxford’s Said Business School and has held chairs at the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, and London Business School. He has been a fellow of St John's College, Oxford, since 1970.
Go to Profile#8750
Charles Guthrie, Baron Guthrie of Craigiebank
#8760
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Field Marshal Charles Ronald Llewelyn Guthrie, Baron Guthrie of Craigiebank, is a retired senior officer of the British Army who served as Chief of the General Staff from 1994 to 1997 and Chief of the Defence Staff from 1997 until his retirement in 2001.
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