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
#901
Sammy Gravano
#901
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano is an American former mobster who became underboss of the Gambino crime family. As the underboss, Gravano played a major role in prosecuting John Gotti, the crime family's boss, by agreeing to testify as a government witness against him and other mobsters in a deal in which he confessed to involvement in 19 murders.
Go to Profile#902
Alex Ferguson
#902
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Sir Alexander Chapman Ferguson is a Scottish former football manager and player, best known for managing Manchester United from 1986 to 2013. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest managers of all time and has won more trophies than any other manager in the history of football. Ferguson is often credited for valuing youth during his time with Manchester United, particularly in the 1990s with the "Class of '92", who contributed to making the club one of the richest and most successful in the world.
Go to Profile#903
Michael Graves
#903
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Michael Graves was an American architect, designer, and educator, and principal of Michael Graves and Associates and Michael Graves Design Group. He was a member of The New York Five and the Memphis Group and a professor of architecture at Princeton University for nearly forty years. Following his own partial paralysis in 2003, Graves became an internationally recognized advocate of health care design.
Go to Profile#904
Richard Smalley
#904
Overall Influence
1943 - 2005 (62 years)
Richard Errett Smalley was an American chemist who was the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry, Physics, and Astronomy at Rice University. In 1996, along with Robert Curl, also a professor of chemistry at Rice, and Harold Kroto, a professor at the University of Sussex, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of a new form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene, also known as buckyballs. He was an advocate of nanotechnology and its applications.
Go to Profile#905
Hideo Kojima
#905
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
is a Japanese video game designer. He is regarded as an auteur of video games. He developed a strong passion for action/adventure cinema and literature during his childhood and adolescence. In 1986, he was hired by Konami, for which he designed and wrote Metal Gear for the MSX2, a game that laid the foundations for stealth games and the Metal Gear series, his best known and most appreciated works. At Konami, he also produced the Zone of the Enders series, as well as wrote and designed Snatcher and Policenauts , graphic adventure games regarded for their cinematic presentation.
Go to Profile#906
Abbas Milani
#906
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Abbas Malekzadeh Milani is an Iranian-American historian, educator, and author. Milani is a visiting professor of political science, and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. He is also a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. In Milani's book, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran , he has found evidence that Persian modernism dates back to more than 1,000 years ago.
Go to Profile#907
Mohamed ElBaradei
#907
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Mohamed Mostafa ElBaradei is an Egyptian law scholar and diplomat who served as the vice president of Egypt on an interim basis from 14 July 2013 until his resignation on 14 August 2013. He was the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency , an intergovernmental organization under the auspices of the United Nations , from 1997 to 2009. At the end of his tenure he was appointed “Director General Emeritus of the International Atomic Energy Agency”. He and the IAEA were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 "for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for...
Go to Profile#908
Andrew Strominger
#908
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Andrew Eben Strominger is an American theoretical physicist who is the director of Harvard's Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature. He has made significant contributions to quantum gravity and string theory. These include his work on Calabi–Yau compactification and topology change in string theory, and on the stringy origin of black hole entropy. He is a senior fellow at the Society of Fellows, and is the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics.
Go to Profile#909
Gerhard Richter
#909
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction.
Go to Profile#910
Carlos Fuentes
#910
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Carlos Fuentes Macías was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz , Aura , Terra Nostra , The Old Gringo and Christopher Unborn . In his obituary, The New York Times described Fuentes as "one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world" and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the "explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s", while The Guardian called him "Mexico's most celebrated novelist". His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor .
Go to Profile#911
Michael O. Rabin
#911
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Michael Oser Rabin is an Israeli mathematician, computer scientist, and recipient of the Turing Award. Biography Early life and education Rabin was born in 1931 in Breslau, Germany , the son of a rabbi. In 1935, he emigrated with his family to Mandate Palestine. As a young boy, he was very interested in mathematics and his father sent him to the best high school in Haifa, where he studied under mathematician Elisha Netanyahu, who was then a high school teacher.
Go to Profile#912
Rita Levi-Montalcini
#912
Overall Influence
1909 - 2012 (103 years)
Rita Levi-Montalcini was an Italian neurobiologist. She was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with colleague Stanley Cohen for the discovery of nerve growth factor . From 2001 until her death, she also served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life. This honor was given due to her significant scientific contributions. On 22 April 2009, she became the first Nobel laureate to reach the age of 100, and the event was feted with a party at Rome's City Hall.
Go to Profile#913
Eric Maskin
#913
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Eric Stark Maskin is an American economist and mathematician. He was jointly awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory". He is the Adams University Professor and Professor of Economics and Mathematics at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#914
Robert Tarjan
#914
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robert Endre Tarjan is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the discoverer of several graph theory algorithms, including his strongly connected components algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps. Tarjan is currently the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#915
Navi Pillay
#915
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Navanethem "Navi" Pillay is a South African jurist who served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014. A South African of Indian Tamil origin, she was the first non-white woman judge of the High Court of South Africa, and she has also served as a judge of the International Criminal Court and President of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Her four-year term as High Commissioner for Human Rights began on 1 September 2008 and was extended an additional two years in 2012. She was succeeded in September 2014 by Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad. In April 2015 Pillay became the 16th Commissioner of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty.
Go to Profile#916
Dick Cavett
#916
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Richard Alva Cavett is an American television personality and former talk show host. He appeared regularly on nationally broadcast television in the United States for five decades, from the 1960s through the 2000s.
Go to Profile#917
Paul Romer
#917
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Paul Michael Romer is an American economist and policy entrepreneur who is a University Professor in Economics at Boston College. Romer is best known as the former Chief Economist of the World Bank and for co-receiving the 2018 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in endogenous growth theory. He also coined the term "mathiness," which he describes as misuse of mathematics in economic research.
Go to Profile#918
Donald Keene
#918
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Donald Lawrence Keene was an American-born Japanese scholar, historian, teacher, writer and translator of Japanese literature. Keene was University Professor emeritus and Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he taught for over fifty years. Soon after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, he retired from Columbia, moved to Japan permanently, and acquired citizenship under the name . This was also his poetic pen name and occasional nickname, spelled in the ateji form .
Go to Profile#919
Arne Næss
#919
Overall Influence
1912 - 2009 (97 years)
Arne Dekke Eide Næss was a Norwegian philosopher who coined the term "deep ecology", an important intellectual and inspirational figure within the environmental movement of the late twentieth century, and a prolific writer on many other philosophical issues. Næss cited Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring as being a key influence in his vision of deep ecology. Næss combined his ecological vision with Gandhian nonviolence and on several occasions participated in direct action.
Go to Profile#920
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
#920
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a Kenyan author and academic who writes primarily in Gikuyu and who formerly wrote in English. He has been described as having been "considered East Africa's leading novelist". His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal Mũtĩiri. His short story The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright, is translated into 100 languages from around the world.
Go to Profile#921
Esther Duflo
#921
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
#922
John Mearsheimer
#922
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#923
Michael Hardt
#923
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book Empire, which was co-written with Antonio Negri. Hardt and Negri suggest that several forces which they see as dominating contemporary life, such as class oppression, globalization and the commodification of services , have the potential to spark social change of unprecedented dimensions. A sequel, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire was published in August 2004. It outlines an idea first propounded in Empire, which is that of the multitude as possible locus of a democratic movement of global proportions.
Go to Profile#924
Ghil'ad Zuckermann
#924
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Ghil'ad Zuckermann is an Israeli-born language revivalist and linguist who works in contact linguistics, lexicology and the study of language, culture and identity. Zuckermann is Professor of Linguistics and Chair of Endangered Languages at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He is the president of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies.
Go to Profile#925
John Perry Barlow
#925
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
John Perry Barlow was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and an early fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Go to Profile#926
Steven Rose
#926
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Steven Peter Russell Rose is an English neuroscientist, author, and social commentator. He is an emeritus professor of biology and neurobiology at the Open University and Gresham College, London. Early life Born in London, United Kingdom, he was brought up as an Orthodox Jew. Rose says that he decided to become an atheist when he was eight years old. He went to a direct grant school in northwest London which operated a numerus clausus restricting the numbers of Jewish students. He studied biochemistry at King's College, Cambridge, and neurochemistry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's Coll...
Go to Profile#927
Georg Henrik von Wright
#927
Overall Influence
1916 - 2003 (87 years)
Georg Henrik von Wright was a Finnish philosopher. Biography G. H. von Wright was born in Helsinki on 14 June 1916 to Tor von Wright and his wife Ragni Elisabeth Alfthan. On the retirement of Ludwig Wittgenstein as professor at the University of Cambridge in 1948, von Wright succeeded him. He published in English, Finnish, German, and Swedish, belonging to the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. Von Wright was of both Finnish and 17th-century Scottish ancestry, and the family was raised to nobility in 1772.
Go to Profile#928
Patty Hearst
#928
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Patricia Campbell Hearst is the granddaughter of American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. She first became known for the events following her 1974 kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was found and arrested 19 months after being abducted, by which time she was a fugitive wanted for serious crimes committed with members of the group. She was held in custody, and there was speculation before trial that her family's resources would enable her to avoid time in prison.
Go to Profile#929
David Souter
#929
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
David Hackett Souter is an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1990 until his retirement in 2009. Appointed by President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat that had been vacated by William J. Brennan Jr., Souter sat on both the Rehnquist and the Roberts courts.
Go to Profile#930
Thor Heyerdahl
#930
Overall Influence
1914 - 2002 (88 years)
Thor Heyerdahl KStJ was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in biology with specialization in zoology, botany and geography. Heyerdahl is notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he sailed 8,000 km across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. The expedition was designed to demonstrate that ancient people could have made long sea voyages, creating contacts between societies. This was linked to a diffusionist model of cultural development.
Go to Profile#931
Mario Capecchi
#931
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Mario Ramberg Capecchi is an Italian-born molecular geneticist and a co-awardee of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a method to create mice in which a specific gene is turned off, known as knockout mice. He shared the prize with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#932
Jean-Marie Lehn
#932
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#933
Nicolas Sarkozy
#933
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa is a French politician who served as the President of France from 2007 to 2012. Born in Paris, he is of Hungarian, Greek Jewish, and French origin. Mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine from 1983 to 2002, he was Minister of the Budget under Prime Minister Édouard Balladur during François Mitterrand's second term. During Jacques Chirac's second presidential term he served as Minister of the Interior and as Minister of Finances. He was the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement party from 2004 to 2007.
Go to Profile#934
Alan Guth
#934
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Alan Guth currently holds the title of Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at MIT. Previously, Guth has held postdoctoral positions at Princeton University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). He earned his B.S. in physics at MIT in 1968, and completed his MS and PhD there by 1971. Guth is a theoretical particle physicist and cosmologist, best known for developing the idea of cosmic inflation (a theory that revises the Big Band theory to explain the expansion of the universe). Over the years, Guth has continued to develop this idea through numerous papers, and it has become a major theory in current cosmology.
Go to Profile#935
Ernest Gellner
#935
Overall Influence
1925 - 1995 (70 years)
Ernest André Gellner FRAI was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist described by The Daily Telegraph, when he died, as one of the world's most vigorous intellectuals, and by The Independent as a "one-man crusader for critical rationalism".
Go to Profile#936
Kent Beck
#936
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Kent Beck is an American software engineer and the creator of extreme programming,<noinclude></noinclude> a software development methodology that eschews rigid formal specification for a collaborative and iterative design process. Beck was one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto,<noinclude></noinclude> the founding document for agile software development. Extreme and Agile methods are closely associated with Test-Driven Development , of which Beck is perhaps the leading proponent.
Go to Profile#937
Eric Lander
#937
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Areas of Specialization: Systems Biology, Genetics Eric Lander is founding director of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Professor of Biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He graduated from Princeton University as valedictorian, with a BS in mathematics. He went on to attend University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned his PhD He is a founder of Verastem and a founding advisor of Foundation Medicine. He began his career in mathematics, but soon started looking at mathematical applications in neurobiology.
Go to Profile#938
Sean Spicer
#938
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Sean Michael Spicer is a former American political aide who served as the 30th White House Press Secretary and as White House Communications Director under President Donald Trump in 2017. Spicer was communications director of the Republican National Committee from 2011 to 2017, and its chief strategist from 2015 to 2017.
Go to Profile#939
Greg Mankiw
#939
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Nicholas Gregory Mankiw is an American macroeconomist who is currently the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Mankiw is best known in academia for his work on New Keynesian economics.
Go to Profile#940
Bruce Perens
#940
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bruce Perens is an American computer programmer and advocate in the free software movement. He created The Open Source Definition and published the first formal announcement and manifesto of open source. He co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric S. Raymond.
Go to Profile#941
Alexander Shulgin
#941
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Alexander Theodore "Sasha" Shulgin was an American medicinal chemist, biochemist, organic chemist, pharmacologist, psychopharmacologist, and author. He is credited with introducing 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine to psychologists in the late 1970s for psychopharmaceutical use and for the discovery, synthesis and personal bioassay of over 230 psychoactive compounds for their psychedelic and entactogenic potential.
Go to Profile#942
Joyce Carol Oates
#942
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water , What I Lived For , and Blonde , and her short story collections The Wheel of Love and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them , two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize .
Go to Profile#943
Kenneth E. Iverson
#943
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Kenneth Eugene Iverson was a Canadian computer scientist noted for the development of the programming language APL. He was honored with the Turing Award in 1979 "for his pioneering effort in programming languages and mathematical notation resulting in what the computing field now knows as APL; for his contributions to the implementation of interactive systems, to educational uses of APL, and to programming language theory and practice".
Go to Profile#944
Zodiac Killer
#944
Overall Influence
The Zodiac Killer is the pseudonym of an unidentified serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s. The case has been described as the most famous unsolved murder case in American history. It became a fixture of popular culture and has inspired numerous amateur detectives to attempt to solve it.
Go to Profile#945
Stephen Krashen
#945
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Stephen D. Krashen is an American linguist, educational researcher and activist, who is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southern California. He moved from the linguistics department to the faculty of the School of Education in 1994.
Go to Profile#946
Harold Garfinkel
#946
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Harold Garfinkel was an American sociologist and ethnomethodologist, who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. Having developed and established ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology, he is probably best known for Studies in Ethnomethodology , a collection of articles. Selections from unpublished materials were later published in two volumes: Seeing Sociologically and Ethnomethodology's Program. Moreover, during his time at University of Newark, which became Rutgers University, and enrolled in Theory of Accounts, a course that covered accounting and bookkeeping procedures.
Go to Profile#947
Kurt Vonnegut
#947
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death.
Go to Profile#948
Thomas Luckmann
#948
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Thomas Luckmann was an American-Austrian sociologist of German and Slovene origin who taught mainly in Germany. Born in Jesenice, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Luckmann studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck. He married Benita Petkevic in 1950. His contributions were central to studies in sociology of communication, sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the philosophy of science. His best-known titles are the 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge , The Invisible Religion , and The S...
Go to Profile#949
Richard Holbrooke
#949
Overall Influence
1941 - 2010 (69 years)
Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was an American diplomat and author. He was the only person to have held the position of Assistant Secretary of State for two different regions of the world . From 1993 to 1994, he was U.S. Ambassador to Germany. He was long well-known among journalists and in diplomatic circles. Holbrooke became familiar to the wider public in 1995 when, with former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, they brokered a peace agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia leading to the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords. Holbrooke was a prime contender to succeed Warren Christo...
Go to Profile#950
Farah Pahlavi
#950
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Farah Pahlavi is the widow of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and was successively Queen and Empress of Iran from 1959 to 1979. She was born into a prosperous family whose fortunes were diminished after her father's early death. While studying architecture in Paris, she was introduced to the Shah at the Iranian embassy, and they were married in December 1959. The Shah's first two marriages had not produced a son—necessary for royal succession—resulting in great rejoicing at the birth of Crown Prince Reza in October of the following year. Diba was then free to pursue interests other than domestic duties, though she was not allowed a political role.
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