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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#9001
Bertrand Toën
#9011
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Bertrand Toën is a mathematician who works as a director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique at the Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France. He received his PhD in 1999 from the Paul Sabatier University, where he was supervised by Carlos Simpson and Joseph Tapia.
Go to Profile#9002
Rick Owens
#9012
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Richard Saturnino Owens is an American fashion designer from Porterville, California. In addition to his main line, Owens has a furniture line and a number of diffusion lines. Early life and education Richard Saturnino Owens was raised in Porterville, California. His parents are John and Concepción "Connie" Owens. His mother is Mexican. Owens was raised in a conservative, Catholic household. After graduating high school, he moved to Los Angeles, California to study art at Otis College of Art and Design for two years before taking pattern-making and draping courses at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College.
Go to Profile#9003
Carl A. P. Ruck
#9013
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Carl A. P. Ruck , is a professor in the Classical Studies department at Boston University. He received his B.A. at Yale University, his M.A. at the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. at Harvard University. He lives in Hull, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#9004
Audrey Hepburn
#9014
Overall Influence
1929 - 1993 (64 years)
Audrey Kathleen Hepburn was a British actress. Recognised as a film and fashion icon, she was ranked by the American Film Institute as the third-greatest female screen legend from the Classical Hollywood cinema and was inducted into the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame List.
Go to Profile#9005
Tim Powers
#9015
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Timothy Thomas Powers is an American science fiction and fantasy author. His first major novel was The Drawing of the Dark , but the novel that earned him wide praise was The Anubis Gates , which won the Philip K. Dick Award, and has since been published in many other languages. His other written work include Dinner at Deviant's Palace , Last Call , Expiration Date , Earthquake Weather , Declare , and Three Days to Never . Powers has won the World Fantasy Award twice for his critically acclaimed novels Last Call and Declare. His 1987 novel On Stranger Tides served as inspiration for the Monke...
Go to Profile#9006
Shirley MacLaine
#9016
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Shirley MacLaine is an American actress and author. Known for her portrayals of quirky, strong-willed and eccentric women, she has received numerous accolades over her eight-decade career, including an Academy Award, an Emmy Award, two BAFTA Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Volpi Cups and two Silver Bears. She has been honored with the Film Society of Lincoln Center Tribute in 1995, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1998, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2012, and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2013.
Go to Profile#9007
Anthony Cordesman
#9017
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is a national security analyst on a number of global conflicts. Career He earned his B.A. from the University of Chicago , his M.A. from the Fletcher School, Tufts University , and his Ph.D. from the University of London .
Go to Profile#9008
Tomáš Halík
#9018
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Tomáš Halík is a Czech Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian. He is a professor of sociology at the Charles University in Prague, pastor of the Academic Parish by St. Salvator Church in Prague, and president of the Czech Christian Academy.
Go to Profile#9009
Alan White
#9019
Overall Influence
Alan D. White is a University of Toronto finance professor, a specialist in financial engineering, best known for the Hull-White interest rate model and associated numerical procedures, authored with John Hull.
Go to Profile#9010
K. Mani Chandy
#9020
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Kanianthra Mani Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology . He has been the Executive Officer of the Computer Science Department twice, and he has been a professor at Caltech since 1989. He also served as Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#9011
Leo Kofler
#9021
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Leo Kofler was an Austrian-German Marxist sociologist. He ranks with the Marburg politicologist Wolfgang Abendroth and the Frankfurt school theoreticians Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno among the few well-known Marxist intellectuals in post-war Germany. However, almost nothing of his work was ever translated into English, and he is therefore little known in the English-speaking world. Kofler had his own, distinctive interpretation of Marxism, which connected sociology and history with aesthetics and anthropology.
Go to Profile#9012
Brian MacWhinney
#9022
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Brian James MacWhinney is a Professor of Psychology and Modern Languages at Carnegie Mellon University. He specializes in first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and the neurological bases of language, and he has written and edited several books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. MacWhinney is best known for his competition model of language acquisition and for creating the CHILDES and TalkBank corpora. He has also helped to develop a stream of pioneering software programs for creating and running psychological experiments, including P...
Go to Profile#9013
Theresa Rebeck
#9023
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Theresa Rebeck is an American playwright, television writer, and novelist. Her work has appeared on the Broadway and Off-Broadway stage, in film, and on television. Among her awards are the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award. In 2012, she received the Athena Film Festival Award for Excellence as a Playwright and Author of Films, Books, and Television. She is a 2009 recipient of the Alex Awards. Her works have influenced American playwrights by bringing a feminist edge in her old works.
Go to Profile#9014
He Jifeng
#9024
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
He Jifeng is a Chinese computer scientist. He Jifeng graduated from the mathematics department of Fudan University in 1965. From 1965 to 1985, he was an instructor at East China Normal University. During 1980–81, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and the University of San Francisco in California, United States.
Go to Profile#9015
Karl Shapiro
#9025
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Karl Jay Shapiro was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945 for his collection V-Letter and Other Poems. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.
Go to Profile#9016
Robert Gentleman
#9026
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Robert Clifford Gentleman is a Canadian statistician and bioinformatician who is currently the founding executive director of the Center for Computational Biomedicine at Harvard Medical School. He was previously the vice president of computational biology at 23andMe. Gentleman is recognized, along with Ross Ihaka, as one of the originators of the R programming language and the Bioconductor project.
Go to Profile#9017
John Bockris
#9027
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Bernhardt Patrick John O’Mara Bockris was a South African professor of chemistry, latterly at Texas A&M University. During his long and prolific career he published some 700 papers and two dozen books. His best known work is in electrochemistry but his output also extended to environmental chemistry, photoelectrochemistry and bioelectrochemistry. In the 1990s he experimented with cold fusion and transmutation, topics on which his unorthodox views provoked controversy.
Go to Profile#9018
Walter Kirn
#9028
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Walter Norris Kirn is an American novelist, literary critic, and essayist. He is the author of eight books, most notably Up in the Air, which was made into a film of the same name starring George Clooney.
Go to Profile#9019
Timothy D. Snyder
#9029
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
#9020
Benjamin C. Pierce
#9030
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Benjamin Crawford Pierce is the Henry Salvatori Professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. Pierce joined Penn in 1998 from Indiana University and held research positions at the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991. His research includes work on programming languagess, static type systems, distributed programming, mobile agents, process calculi, and differential privacy.
Go to Profile#9021
Nicola Fusco
#9031
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Nicola Fusco is an Italian mathematician mainly known for his contributions to the fields of calculus of variations, regularity theory of partial differential equations, and the theory of symmetrization. He is currently professor at the Università di Napoli "Federico II". Fusco also taught and conducted research at the Australian National University at Canberra, the Carnegie Mellon University at Pittsburgh and at the University of Florence.
Go to Profile#9022
Jesse Helms
#9032
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. was an American politician. A leader in the conservative movement, he served as a senator from North Carolina from 1973 to 2003. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1995 to 2001, he had a major voice in foreign policy. Helms helped organize and fund the conservative resurgence in the 1970s, focusing on Ronald Reagan's quest for the White House as well as helping many local and regional candidates.
Go to Profile#9023
Nancy Gibbs
#9033
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Nancy Reid Gibbs is an American essayist, speaker, and presidential historian. She is the former managing editor for TIME magazine, an author, and commentator on politics and values in the United States. She is the co-author, with Michael Duffy, of The New York Times Bestsellers The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House and The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity .
Go to Profile#9024
Jeff Dunham
#9034
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jeffrey Douglas Dunham is an American ventriloquist, stand-up comedian and actor who has also appeared on numerous television shows, including Late Show with David Letterman, Comedy Central Presents, The Tonight Show and Sonny With a Chance. He has six specials that run on Comedy Central: Arguing with Myself, Spark of Insanity, Jeff Dunham's Very Special Christmas Special, Controlled Chaos, Minding the Monsters, and All Over the Map. Dunham also starred in The Jeff Dunham Show, a series on the network in 2009.
Go to Profile#9025
Shlomo Riskin
#9035
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Shlomo Riskin is an Orthodox rabbi, and the founding rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue on the Upper West Side of New York City, which he led for 20 years; founding chief rabbi of the Israeli settlement of Efrat in the Israeli-occupied West Bank; former dean of Manhattan Day School in New York City; and founder and Chancellor of the Ohr Torah Stone Institutions, a network of high schools, colleges, and graduate Programs in the United States and Israel.
Go to Profile#9026
Steven E. Shreve
#9036
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Steven Eugene Shreve is a mathematician and currently the Orion Hoch Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of several major books on the mathematics of financial derivatives.
Go to Profile#9027
Tetsuji Miwa
#9037
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Tetsuji Miwa is a Japanese mathematician, specializing in mathematical physics. Career Miwa received his undergraduate degree in 1971 and his master's degree in 1973 from the University of Tokyo. He studied microlocal analysis and hyperfunctions in the early 1970s under the influence of Mikio Satō and Masaki Kashiwara. In 1973 Miwa moved to RIMS at Kyoto University and joined the mathematicians of the Satō school. He received his PhD in 1981 from Kyoto University. There he was a research assistant from 1973 to 1984, an associate professor from 1984 to 1993, and a full professor from 1993, retiring as professor emeritus in 2013.
Go to Profile#9028
Marcel-Paul Schützenberger
#9038
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
Marcel-Paul "Marco" Schützenberger was a French mathematician and Doctor of Medicine. He worked in the fields of formal language, combinatorics, and information theory. In addition to his formal results in mathematics, he was "deeply involved in [a] struggle against the votaries of [neo-]Darwinism", a stance which has resulted in some mixed reactions from his peers and from critics of his stance on evolution. Several notable theorems and objects in mathematics as well as computer science bear his name . Paul Schützenberger was his great-grandfather.
Go to Profile#9029
Ma Ying-jeou
#9039
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ma Ying-jeou is a Taiwanese politician who served as president of the Republic of China from 2008 to 2016. Previously, he served as justice minister from 1993 to 1996 and mayor of Taipei from 1998 to 2006. He served as chairman of the Kuomintang from 2005 to 2007 and from 2009 to 2014.
Go to Profile#9030
Julian Mendelsohn
#9040
Overall Influence
Julian Mendelsohn is an Australian record producer, audio engineer and mixer. Early life After completing school in Australia, Mendelsohn moved to the United Kingdom. He secured his first job in 1974 at Milner Sound Fulham Rd. Chelsea, run by ex-BBC engineer John Milner.
Go to Profile#9031
Thomas Moore
#9041
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Thomas Moore is a psychotherapist, former monk, and writer of popular spiritual books, including the New York Times bestseller Care of the Soul , a "guide to cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life". He writes and lectures in the fields of archetypal psychology, mythology, and imagination. His work is influenced by the writings of Carl Jung and James Hillman.
Go to Profile#9032
William P. Alford
#9042
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
William P. Alford is an American legal scholar. He is currently Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law and Vice Dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is Director of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard Law, and is regarded as an expert in the field of Chinese law.
Go to Profile#9033
Abraham Charnes
#9043
Overall Influence
1917 - 1992 (75 years)
Abraham Charnes was an American mathematician who worked in the area of operations research. Charnes published more than 200 research articles and seven books, including An Introduction to Linear Programming. His works influenced the development of Data envelopment analysis method.
Go to Profile#9034
Brent Berlin
#9044
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Overton Brent Berlin is an American anthropologist, most noted for his work with linguist Paul Kay on color, and his ethnobiological research among the Maya of Chiapas, Mexico. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1964. Until recently, Berlin was Graham Perdue Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia, where he was also director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and co-director for the Laboratories of Ethnobiology.
Go to Profile#9035
Yang Jiang
#9045
Overall Influence
1911 - 2016 (105 years)
Yang Jiang was a Chinese playwright, author, and translator. She wrote several successful comedies, and was the first Chinese person to produce a complete Chinese version of Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote.
Go to Profile#9036
Simon Leys
#9046
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Pierre Ryckmans , better known by his pen name Simon Leys, was a Belgian-Australian writer, essayist and literary critic, translator, art historian, sinologist, and university professor, who lived in Australia from 1970. His work particularly focused on the politics and traditional culture of China, calligraphy, French and English literature, the commercialization of universities, and nautical fiction. Through the publication of his trilogy Les Habits neufs du président Mao , Ombres chinoises and Images brisées , he was one of the first intellectuals to denounce the Cultural Revolution in Chi...
Go to Profile#9037
Bertrand Halperin
#9047
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Bertrand I. Halperin is an American physicist, former holder of the Hollis Chair of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy at the physics department of Harvard University. Biography Halperin was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood and attended public schools. His mother was Eva Teplitzky Halperin and his father Morris Halperin. His mother was a college administrator and his father a customs inspector. Both his parents were born in USSR. His paternal grandmother's family the Maximovs claimed descent from Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the BESHT.
Go to Profile#9038
Robert L. Devaney
#9048
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Robert Luke Devaney is an American mathematician who is the Feld Family Professor of Teaching Excellence at Boston University. His research involves dynamical systems and fractals. Early life and career Devaney was born on April 9, 1948, and grew up in Methuen, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#9039
Paolo Portoghesi
#9049
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Paolo Portoghesi was an Italian architect, theorist, historian, and professor of architecture at the Sapienza University of Rome. He was president of the architectural section of the Venice Biennale , editor-in-chief of the journal Controspazio , and dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano university .
Go to Profile#9040
George Mosse
#9050
Overall Influence
1918 - 1999 (81 years)
Gerhard "George" Lachmann Mosse was an American historian, who emigrated from Nazi Germany to Great Britain, and then to the United States. He was professor of history at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and also in Israel, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Best known for his studies of Nazism, he authored more than 25 books on topics as diverse as constitutional history, Protestant theology, and the history of masculinity. In 1966, he and Walter Laqueur founded The Journal of Contemporary History, which they co-edited.
Go to Profile#9041
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
#9051
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is an American sociologist and professor of sociology at Duke University. He was the 2018 president of the American Sociological Association. Early influences Bonilla-Silva was educated in Puerto Rico where he double majored in Sociology and Economics. In his work White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-civil Rights Era, he says that "Myriam Muniz, Arturo Torrecillas, Carlos Buitrago, Juan Jose Baldrich, Carlos Ramos [...] shaped my sociological imagination." Bonilla-Silva has stated that Jose A. Padin and Charles Camic were two mentors that influenced his development as ...
Go to Profile#9042
Baldomero Olivera
#9052
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Baldomero Olivera is a Filipino chemist known for discovery of many cone snail toxins important for neuroscience. These molecules, called conotoxins, led to a breakthrough in the study of ion channels and neuromuscular synapses. He discovered and first characterized E. coli DNA ligase, a key enzyme of genetic engineering and recombinant DNA technology.
Go to Profile#9043
Dina Gilio-Whitaker
#9053
Overall Influence
Dina Gilio-Whitaker is an American academic, journalist and author, who studies Native Americans in the United States, decolonization and environmental justice. She is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes. In 2019, she published As Long as Grass Grows.
Go to Profile#9044
Mark Goldenberg
#9054
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Mark Goldenberg is an American guitarist and songwriter, noted for his session work and composition of successful songs for Linda Ronstadt, the Pointer Sisters, and others. Biography Early career Raised in Chicago, Illinois, Goldenberg studied at the Music Conservatory at the Chicago College of Performing Arts and its Chicago Musical College division at Roosevelt University. When the band he was in, Eddie Boy Band, signed a record deal with MCA, Goldenberg moved to California. Though the band broke up, he remained there as a singer-songwriter. In 1976, Goldenberg began playing guitar with Al...
Go to Profile#9045
Kim Scott
#9055
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Kim Scott is an Australian novelist of Aboriginal Australian ancestry. He is a descendant of the Noongar people of Western Australia. Biography Scott was born in Perth in 1957 and is the eldest of four siblings with a white mother and an Aboriginal father.
Go to Profile#9046
John Nelder
#9056
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
John Ashworth Nelder was a British statistician known for his contributions to experimental design, analysis of variance, computational statistics, and statistical theory. Contributions Nelder's work was influential in statistics. While leading research at Rothamsted Experimental Station, Nelder developed and supervised the updating of the statistical software packages GLIM and GenStat: Both packages are flexible high-level programming languages that allow statisticians to formulate linear models concisely. GLIM influenced later environments for statistical computing such as S-PLUS and R. Bo...
Go to Profile#9047
Sunil Gangopadhyay
#9057
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Sunil Gangopadhyay or Sunil Ganguly was an Indian poet, historian and novelist in the Bengali language based in the city of Kolkata. He is a former Sheriff of Calcutta. Gangopadhyay obtained his master's degree in Bengali from the University of Calcutta. In 1953 he and a few of his friends started a Bengali poetry magazine, Krittibas. Later he wrote for many different publications.
Go to Profile#9048
Christian Bök
#9058
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Christian Bök, FRSC is a Canadian poet known for his experimental works. He is the author of Eunoia, which has won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize. Life and work He was born "Christian Book", but uses "Bök" as a pseudonym.
Go to Profile#9049
Thomas L. Thompson
#9059
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Thomas L. Thompson is an American-born Danish biblical scholar and theologian. He was professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen from 1993 to 2009. He currently lives in Denmark. Thompson is a part of the minimalist movement known as the Copenhagen School, a group of scholars who hold that the Bible cannot be used as a source to determine the history of ancient Israel, and that "Israel" itself is a problematic concept.
Go to Profile#9050
Grayson L. Kirk
#9060
Overall Influence
1903 - 1997 (94 years)
Grayson Louis Kirk was an American political scientist who served as president of Columbia University during the Columbia University protests of 1968. He was also an advisor to the State Department and instrumental in the formation of the United Nations.
Go to Profile