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
#8951
Arnold Kling
#8961
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Arnold Kling is an American economist, scholar, and blogger known for his writings on EconLog, an economics blog, along with Bryan Caplan and David R. Henderson. Kling also has his own blog, askblog, which carries the motto: "taking the most charitable views of those who disagree." The "ask" in askblog stands for "Arnold S. Kling." He is an Adjunct Scholar for the Cato Institute and is affiliated with the Mercatus Center.
Go to Profile#8952
Yuji Ijiri
#8962
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Yuji Ijiri was a Japanese economist, accounting researcher and educator. He was the Robert M. Trueblood University Professor of Accounting and Economics at Carnegie Mellon University until his retirement on June 30, 2011. He is noted in economics and finance for his contributions to research on firm growth and the general field of mathematical economics, and in particular power laws in economics. In accounting, he is known for his proposal of triple-entry accounting.
Go to Profile#8953
Robert Jastrow
#8963
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Robert Jastrow was an American astronomer and planetary physicist. He was a NASA scientist, populist author and futurist. Education Jastrow attended Townsend Harris High School. He also attended the summer program at Camp Rising Sun. He entered Columbia University for his undergraduate and graduate college, where he earned the BA, MA , and PhD degrees in physics.
Go to Profile#8954
Roger Norrington
#8964
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Sir Roger Arthur Carver Norrington is an English conductor. He is known for historically informed performances of Baroque, Classical and Romantic music. In November 2021 Norrington announced his retirement.
Go to Profile#8955
Laurent Blanc
#8965
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Laurent Robert Blanc is a French professional football manager and former player who played as a centre-back, and was most recently the manager of Ligue 1 club Lyon. He has the nickname Le Président, which was given to him following his stint at Marseille in tribute to his leadership skills.
Go to Profile#8956
Alexandre Kirillov
#8966
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Alexandre Aleksandrovich Kirilloff is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, known for his works in the fields of representation theory, topological groups and Lie groups. In particular he introduced the orbit method into representation theory. He is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#8957
Ali H. Nayfeh
#8967
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Ali Hasan Nayfeh was a Palestinian-Jordanianian mathematician, mechanical engineer and physicist. He is regarded as the most influential scholar and scientist in the area of applied nonlinear dynamics in mechanics and engineering. He was the inaugural winner of the Thomas K. Caughey Dynamics Award, and was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in mechanical engineering. His pioneering work in nonlinear dynamics has been influential in the construction and maintenance of machines and structures that are common in daily life, such as ships, cranes, bridges, buildings, skyscrapers, jet engines, r...
Go to Profile#8958
Bryan Robson
#8968
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Bryan Robson OBE is an English football manager and former player. He began his career with West Bromwich Albion in 1972, where he amassed over 200 appearances and was club captain before moving to Manchester United in 1981, where he became the longest-serving captain in the club's history and won two Premier League winners' medals, three FA Cups, one Football League Cup, two FA Charity Shields and a European Cup Winners' Cup. In August 2011, Robson was voted as the greatest ever Manchester United player in a poll of the club's former players as part of a book, 19, released to celebrate the c...
Go to Profile#8959
George McTurnan Kahin
#8969
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
George McTurnan Kahin was an American historian and political scientist. He was one of the leading experts on Southeast Asia and a critic of United States involvement in the Vietnam War. After completing his dissertation, which is still considered a classic on Indonesian history, Kahin became a faculty member at Cornell University. At Cornell, he became the director of its Southeast Asia Program and founded the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project. Kahin's incomplete memoir was published posthumously in 2003.
Go to Profile#8960
MrBeast
#8970
Overall Influence
1998 - Present (28 years)
James Stephen "Jimmy" Donaldson , more commonly known as MrBeast, is an American YouTuber. He is known for his fast-paced and high-production videos, which feature elaborate challenges and large giveaways. With over 210 million subscribers, he is the most-subscribed individual on the platform and the second-most-subscribed channel overall.
Go to Profile#8961
David S. Touretzky
#8971
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
David S. Touretzky is a research professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a BA in Computer Science at Rutgers University in 1978, and earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Touretzky has worked as an Internet activist in favor of freedom of speech, especially what he perceives as abuse of the legal system by government and private authorities. He is a notable critic of Scientology.
Go to Profile#8962
Leonard Talmy
#8972
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Leonard Talmy is an emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the University at Buffalo in New York. He is known for his pioneering work in cognitive linguistics, more specifically, in the relationship between semantic and formal linguistic structures and the connections between semantic typologies and universals. He is also specialized in the study of Yiddish and Native American linguistics.
Go to Profile#8963
Gerald Fink
#8973
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Gerald Ralph Fink is an American biologist, who was Director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT from 1990–2001. He graduated from Amherst College in 1962 and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1965, having elucidated the histidine pathway in budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. After postdoctoral study at the National Institutes of Health with Bruce Ames on the regulation of the histidine operon of Salmonella, in 1967 he joined Cornell University where he became a Professor of Genetics and pursued the study of the HIS4 region of yeast. In 1982 he became a founding member of the Whitehead Institute and Professor of Genetics at MIT.
Go to Profile#8964
Antoine Vergote
#8974
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
Antoine Vergote , also known as Antoon Vergote, was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher, psychologist and psychoanalyst. He was an Emeritus Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven. His extensive publications span multiple disciplines including psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, philosophical anthropology, linguistics, theology, cultural anthropology, and phenomenology.
Go to Profile#8965
Michael Owen
#8975
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Michael James Owen is an English former professional footballer who played as a striker for Liverpool, Real Madrid, Newcastle United, Manchester United and Stoke City, as well as for the England national team. Since retiring from football in 2013, he has become a racehorse breeder and owner and regularly features as a sports pundit and commentator. Owen is widely considered to be one of the greatest strikers of his generation and in Premier League history. Moreover, regarded as one of the greatest Liverpool players in their history, Owen came 14th in the "100 Players Who Shook The Kop", an official Liverpool fan poll.
Go to Profile#8966
Peter Ludlow
#8976
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Peter Ludlow , who also writes under the pseudonym Urizenus Sklar, is an American philosopher of language. He is noted for interdisciplinary work on the interface of linguistics and philosophy—in particular on the philosophical foundations of Noam Chomsky's theory of generative linguistics and on the foundations of the theory of meaning in linguistic semantics. He has worked on the application of analytic philosophy of language to topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and logic, among other areas.
Go to Profile#8967
Gillo Dorfles
#8977
Overall Influence
1910 - 2018 (108 years)
Angelo Eugenio "Gillo" Dorfles was an Italian art critic, painter, and philosopher. Biography Born in Trieste to a Gorizian father of Jewish descent and a Genoese mother, Dorfles graduated in medicine, specializing in psychiatry. He was a professor in aesthetics at the University of Trieste, Milan and Cagliari and, in 1948, established the MAC with artists Atanasio Soldati, Galliano Mazzon, Gianni Monnet, and Bruno Munari. His paintings were displayed in two personal exhibitions held in Milan in 1949 and 1950 and also in numerous collective MAC exhibitions in the 1950s. In 1956 Dorfles co-fo...
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Chun Doo-hwan
#8978
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Chun Doo-hwan was a South Korean army general and military dictator who ruled as an unelected strongman from 1979 to 1980 before replacing Choi Kyu-hah as president of South Korea from 1980 to 1988.
Go to Profile#8969
Freddie Mercury
#8979
Overall Influence
1946 - 1991 (45 years)
Freddie Mercury was a British singer and songwriter who achieved worldwide fame as the lead vocalist and pianist of the rock band Queen. Regarded as one of the greatest singers in the history of rock music, he was known for his flamboyant stage persona and four-octave vocal range. Mercury defied the conventions of a rock frontman with his theatrical style, influencing the artistic direction of Queen.
Go to Profile#8970
Shoucheng Zhang
#8980
Overall Influence
1963 - 2018 (55 years)
Shoucheng Zhang was a Chinese-American physicist who was the JG Jackson and CJ Wood professor of physics at Stanford University. He was a condensed matter theorist known for his work on topological insulators, the quantum Hall effect, the quantum spin Hall effect, spintronics, and high-temperature superconductivity. According to the National Academy of Sciences:He discovered a new state of matter called topological insulator in which electrons can conduct along the edge without dissipation, enabling a new generation of electronic devices with much lower power consumption. For this ground brea...
Go to Profile#8971
Cate Blanchett
#8981
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Catherine Elise Blanchett is an Australian actor and producer. Regarded as one of the best performers of her generation, she is recognised for her versatility across independent films, blockbusters, and theatre. She has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, four British Academy Film Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for a Tony Award and two Primetime Emmy Awards.
Go to Profile#8972
Larry Bartels
#8982
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Larry Martin Bartels is an American political scientist and the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and Shayne Chair in Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. Prior to his appointment at Vanderbilt, Bartels served as the Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public Policy and International Relations and founding director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
Go to Profile#8973
Abigail Thernstrom
#8983
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Abigail Thernstrom was an American political scientist and a leading conservative scholar on race relations, voting rights and education. She was an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and vice chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 1975. According to the New York Times, she and her husband Harvard Professor Stephan Thernstrom, "are much in demand on the conservative talk-show circuit,...
Go to Profile#8974
Andrei Broder
#8984
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Andrei Zary Broder is a distinguished scientist at Google. Previously, he was a research fellow and vice president of computational advertising for Yahoo!, and before that, the vice president of research for AltaVista. He has also worked for IBM Research as a distinguished engineer and was CTO of IBM's Institute for Search and Text Analysis.
Go to Profile#8975
Harald Fritzsch
#8985
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Harald Fritzsch was a German theoretical physicist known for his contributions to the theory of quarks, the development of Quantum Chromodynamics and the great unification of the standard model of particle physics.
Go to Profile#8976
Francis E. Low
#8986
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Francis Eugene Low was an American theoretical physicist. He was an Institute Professor at MIT, and served as provost there from 1980 to 1985. He was a member of the influential JASON Defense Advisory Group.
Go to Profile#8977
Albert Neuberger
#8987
Overall Influence
1908 - 1996 (88 years)
Albert Neuberger was a British Professor of Chemical Pathology, St Mary's Hospital, 1955–1973, and later emeritus professor. Education in Germany Born in Hassfurt, northern Bavaria, the first of the three children of Max Neuberger , cloth merchant and businessman, and Bertha, née Hiller , both religious Jews. He studied medicine at the University of Würzburg where he was awarded a summa cum laude medical degree. He also took courses in chemistry there and also attended lectures given by Karl Bonhöffer, the outstanding psychiatrist and neurologist. He also worked for a while in research in Berlin where he began a lifelong friendship with Ernst Chain.
Go to Profile#8978
Rosa Parks
#8988
Overall Influence
1913 - 2005 (92 years)
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". Parks became an NAACP activist in 1943, participating in several high-profile civil rights campaigns. On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to vacate a row of four seats in the "colored" section in favor of a White passenger, once the "White" section was filled. Parks was not t...
Go to Profile#8979
Yury Osipov
#8989
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Yury Sergeyevich Osipov is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1987 and was a president of its successor, the Russian Academy of Sciences from 17 December 1991 to 29 May 2013.
Go to Profile#8980
Bill Mitchell
#8990
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
William Francis Mitchell is a professor of economics at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia and Docent Professor of Global Political Economy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is also a guest professor at Kyoto University, Japan since 2022. He is one of the founding developers of Modern Monetary Theory.
Go to Profile#8981
Russell Wilson
#8991
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Russell Carrington Wilson is an American football quarterback for the Denver Broncos of the National Football League . He previously played his first 10 seasons for the Seattle Seahawks. Wilson has been regarded as one of the greatest dual-threat quarterbacks of all time.
Go to Profile#8982
Jackson Browne
#8992
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Clyde Jackson Browne is an American rock musician, singer, songwriter and political activist who has sold over 18 million albums in the United States. Emerging as a teenage songwriter in mid-1960s Los Angeles, he had his first successes writing songs for others. He wrote "These Days" as a 16-year-old; the song became a minor hit for the German singer and Andy Warhol protégé Nico in 1967. He also wrote several songs for fellow Southern California bands the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Eagles, the latter of whom had their first Billboard Top 40 hit in 1972 with the Browne co-written song "Ta...
Go to Profile#8983
Thomas Cavalier-Smith
#8993
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Thomas Cavalier-Smith, FRS, FRSC, NERC Professorial Fellow , was a professor of evolutionary biology in the Department of Zoology, at the University of Oxford. His research has led to discovery of a number of unicellular organisms and advocated for a variety of major taxonomic groups, such as the Chromista, Chromalveolata, Opisthokonta, Rhizaria, and Excavata. He was known for his systems of classification of all organisms.
Go to Profile#8984
Michael Persinger
#8994
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Michael A. Persinger was an American-Canadian professor of psychology at Laurentian University, a position he had held from 1971 until his death in 2018. His most well-known hypotheses include the temporal lobes of the human brain as the central correlate for mystical experiences, subtle changes in geomagnetic activity as mediators of parapsychological phenomena, the tectonic strain within the Earth's crust as the source of luminous phenomena attributed to unidentified aerial objects, and the importance of specific quantifications for energy , photon flux density , and small shifts in magneti...
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Gary Panter
#8995
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Gary Panter is an American cartoonist, illustrator, painter, designer and part-time musician. Panter's work is representative of the post-underground, new wave comics movement that began with the end of Arcade: The Comics Revue and the initiation of RAW, one of the second generation in American underground comix.
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Richard E. Nisbett
#8996
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Richard Eugene Nisbett is an American social psychologist and writer. He is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished Professor of social psychology and co-director of the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Nisbett's research interests are in social cognition, culture, social class, and aging. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his advisor was Stanley Schachter, whose other students at that time included Lee Ross and Judith Rodin.
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Albert Shiryaev
#8997
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Albert Nikolayevich Shiryaev is a Soviet and Russian mathematician. He is known for his work in probability theory, statistics and financial mathematics. Career He graduated from Moscow State University in 1957. From that time until now he has been working in Steklov Mathematical Institute. He earned his candidate degree in 1961 and a doctoral degree in 1967 for his work "On statistical sequential analysis". He is a professor of the department of mechanics and mathematics of Moscow State University, since 1971. Shiryaev holds a 20% permanent professorial position at the School of Mathematics, University of Manchester.
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Anwar Shaikh
#8998
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Anwar M. Shaikh is a Pakistani American heterodox economist in the tradition of classical political economy and Marxian economics. He is Professor of Economics in the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science at The New School for Social Research in New York City, where he has taught since 1972.
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Woodie Flowers
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#8999
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Woodie Claude Flowers was a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His specialty areas were engineering design and product development; he held the Pappalardo Professorship and was a MacVicar Faculty Fellow.
Go to Profile#8990
Richard Béliveau
#9000
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Richard Béliveau is currently the director of the Molecular Medicine Laboratory and a researcher in the Department of Neurosurgery at Notre-Dame Hospital. Additionally, he holds the Claude-Bertrand Chair in Neurosurgery at the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal.
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Kamau Brathwaite
#9001
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
The Honourable Edward Kamau Brathwaite, CHB , was a Barbadian poet and academic, widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. Formerly a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite was the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry Born to Slow Horses.
Go to Profile#8992
Enoch Powell
#9002
Overall Influence
1912 - 1998 (86 years)
John Enoch Powell, , was a British politician. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament and was Minister of Health then Ulster Unionist Party MP . Before entering politics, Powell was a classical scholar. During the Second World War, he served in both staff and intelligence positions, reaching the rank of brigadier. He also wrote poetry, and many books on classical and political subjects.
Go to Profile#8993
Avril Lavigne
#9003
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Avril Ramona Lavigne is a Canadian singer and songwriter. She is considered a key musician in the development of pop-punk music, as she paved the way for female-driven, punk-influenced pop music in the early 2000s. Her accolades include eight Grammy Award nominations, among others.
Go to Profile#8994
David A. Dodge
#9004
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
David Allison Dodge is a Canadian economist. He served as Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2001 to 2008. Early life Dodge was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1943. He attended Ridley College, a private boarding school in St. Catharines , and graduated from Queen's University with an honours degree in economics. He received his Ph.D in economics from Princeton University in 1972 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "The structure of earnings of Canadian accountants, engineers and scientists and the implications for returns to investment in university education."
Go to Profile#8995
Patrick Vallance
#9005
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Sir Patrick John Thompson Vallance is a British physician, scientist, and clinical pharmacologist who has worked in both academia and industry. He served as the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of the United Kingdom from 2018 to 2023.
Go to Profile#8996
Peter Longerich
#9006
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Peter Longerich is a German professor of history and historian. He is regarded by fellow historians, including Ian Kershaw, Richard Evans, Timothy Snyder, Mark Roseman and Richard Overy, as one of the leading German authorities on the Holocaust.
Go to Profile#8997
James Clifford
#9007
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
James Clifford is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work combines perspectives from history, literature, history of science, and anthropology. Biography He grew up in New York City and was for thirty-three years Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz until his retirement in 2011. Clifford and Hayden White were the first faculty directly appointed to the graduate-only department at UC-Santa Cruz. Clifford served as department Chair from 2004–2007, and was the founding director of UCSC's Center for Cultural Studies. He has been a visiti...
Go to Profile#8998
Joe LaPorta
#9008
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Joseph J. LaPorta is an American mastering engineer at Sterling Sound in New Jersey. Career Born and raised in New York, LaPorta graduated from New York University with a bachelor's degree in Music Technology. He began his mastering career at The Lodge and then joined Sterling Sound in 2013 as a senior engineer.
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Olivia Newton-John
#9009
Overall Influence
1948 - 2022 (74 years)
Dame Olivia Newton-John was a British and Australian singer and actress. She was a four-time Grammy Award winner whose music career included fifteen top-ten singles, including five number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and two number-one albums on the Billboard 200: If You Love Me, Let Me Know and Have You Never Been Mellow . Eleven of her singles and fourteen of her albums have been certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America .
Go to Profile#9000
Robert K. Logan
#9010
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Robert K. Logan , originally trained as a physicist, is a media ecologist. Career He received from MIT a BS in 1961 and a PhD in 1965 under the supervision of Francis E. Low. After two post-doctoral appointments as a research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Toronto , he became a physics professor in 1968 at Toronto until his retirement in 2005. He is now professor emeritus. He is a fellow of St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, the Origins Institute at McMaster University and Institute of Biocomplexity and Informatics at the Universi...
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