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
#9101
Alan Weisman
#9111
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Alan H. Weisman is an American author, professor and journalist. Education and career Weisman was born on March 24, 1947, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He holds a bachelor's degree in literature and a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. From 2004 to 2013, he was Laureate Professor in Journalism and Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona, where he led an annual field program in international field journalism. He has also taught writing and journalism at Prescott College and Williams College and has been a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia.
Go to Profile#9102
Kiran Bedi
#9112
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Kiran Bedi, is a former tennis player who became the first woman in India to join the officer ranks of the Indian Police Service in 1972 and was the 24th Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry from 28 May 2016 to 16 February 2021. She remained in service for 35 years before taking voluntary retirement in 2007 as Director General, Bureau of Police Research and Development.
Go to Profile#9103
Gabriel Liiceanu
#9113
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Gabriel Liiceanu is a Romanian philosopher. He graduated from the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Philosophy in 1965, and from Faculty of Classical Languages in 1973. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Bucharest in 1976. Between 1965 and 1975, Liiceanu was a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, and between 1975 and 1989 at the Institute of Art History. He received a fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation between 1982 and 1984.
Go to Profile#9104
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
#9114
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali , commonly known as Ben Ali or Ezzine was a Tunisian politician who served as the 2nd president of Tunisia from 1987 to 2011. In that year, during the Tunisian revolution, he fled to Saudi Arabia.
Go to Profile#9105
Dorit Beinisch
#9115
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Dorit Beinisch is a retired Israeli jurist. She was the 9th president of the Supreme Court of Israel. Appointed on September 14, 2006, after the retirement of Aharon Barak, she served in this position until February 28, 2012. She was the first woman to serve as president of the Israeli Supreme Court.
Go to Profile#9106
J. Halcombe Laning
#9116
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
J. Halcombe "Hal" Laning Jr. was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer pioneer who in 1952 invented an algebraic compiler called George that ran on the MIT Whirlwind, the first real-time computer. Laning designed George to be an easier-to-use alternative to assembly language for entering mathematical equations into a computer. He later became a key contributor to the 1960s race to the Moon, with pioneering work on space-based guidance systems for the Apollo Moon missions. From 1955 to 1980, he was deputy associate director of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory.
Go to Profile#9107
Chris Hani
#9117
Overall Influence
1942 - 1993 (51 years)
Chris Hani , born Martin Thembisile Hani , was the leader of the South African Communist Party and chief of staff of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress . He was a fierce opponent of the apartheid government, and was assassinated by Janusz Waluś, a Polish immigrant and sympathiser of the Conservative opposition on 10 April 1993, during the unrest preceding the transition to democracy.
Go to Profile#9108
Jonathan R. Cole
#9118
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jonathan R. Cole , is an American sociologist, John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University at Columbia University. He is best known for his scholarly work developing the sociology of science and his work on science policy. From 1989 to 2003 he was Columbia’s chief academic officer – its Provost and Dean of Faculties.
Go to Profile#9109
Rogers Brubaker
#9119
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Rogers Brubaker is professor of sociology at University of California, Los Angeles and UCLA Foundation Chair. He has written academic works on social theory, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, ethnicity, religion, diasporas, gender, populism, and digital hyperconnectivity.
Go to Profile#9110
Robert Pollin
#9120
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Robert Pollin is an American economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also founding co-director of its Political Economy Research Institute . Pollen received his PhD in economics from the New School for Social Research in 1982. He has worked as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Energy, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and United Nations Development Program. He has also worked as an advisor to US Senator Bernie Sanders.
Go to Profile#9111
Edwin S. Shneidman
#9121
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Edwin S. Shneidman was an American clinical psychologist, suicidologist and thanatologist. Together with Norman Farberow and Robert Litman, in 1958, he founded the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center where the men were instrumental in researching suicide and developing a crisis center and treatments to prevent deaths.
Go to Profile#9112
Susan Lindquist
#9122
Overall Influence
1949 - 2016 (67 years)
Susan Lee Lindquist, ForMemRS was an American professor of biology at MIT specializing in molecular biology, particularly the protein folding problem within a family of molecules known as heat-shock proteins, and prions. Lindquist was a member and former director of the Whitehead Institute and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010.
Go to Profile#9113
Evan Thomas
#9123
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Evan Welling Thomas III is an American journalist, historian, and author. He is the author of 11 books, including two New York Times bestsellers. Early life and career Thomas was born in Huntington, New York, and raised in nearby Cold Spring Harbor. A graduate of Phillips Academy, Harvard University , and the University of Virginia School of Law , from 1991 he was a reporter, writer, and editor at Newsweek for 24 years. Prior to that, he was at Time. Thomas began his reporting career at The Bergen Record in northeastern New Jersey.
Go to Profile#9114
Rakesh Sharma
#9124
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma, AC is a former Indian Air Force pilot who flew aboard Soyuz T-11 on 3 April 1984 as part of the Soviet Interkosmos programme. He is the only Indian citizen to travel in space, although there have been other astronauts of Indian origin who travelled to space, who were not Indian citizens. Another Air Force pilot, Ravish Malhotra, was placed on standby.
Go to Profile#9115
James J. Sheehan
#9125
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
James J. Sheehan is an American historian of modern Germany and the former president of the American Historical Association . Biography Born in San Francisco in 1937, Sheehan earned a B.A. from Stanford University in 1958 and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. He taught at Northwestern University between 1964 and 1979, then moved back to Stanford to succeed Gordon A. Craig as Stanford's historian of modern Germany. At Stanford, Sheehan is Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of History, and FSI senior fellow .
Go to Profile#9116
Shyamala Gopalan
#9126
Overall Influence
1938 - 2009 (71 years)
Shyamala Gopalan was a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose work in isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene stimulated advances in breast biology and oncology. She is the mother of Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris and Maya Harris, a lawyer and political commentator.
Go to Profile#9117
Hans-Joachim Bremermann
#9127
Overall Influence
1926 - 1996 (70 years)
Hans-Joachim Bremermann was a German-American mathematician and biophysicist. He worked on computer science and evolution, introducing ideas of how mating generates new gene combinations. Bremermann's limit, named after him, is the maximum computational speed of a self-contained system in the material universe.
Go to Profile#9118
Takaaki Yoshimoto
#9128
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
, also known as Ryūmei Yoshimoto, was a Japanese poet, philosopher, and literary critic. As a philosopher, he is remembered as a founding figure in the emergence of the New Left in Japan, and as a critic, he was at the forefront of a movement to force writers to confront their responsibility as wartime collaborators.
Go to Profile#9119
Donald Davie
#9129
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Donald Alfred Davie, FBA was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes. Biography Davie was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, a son of Baptist parents. He began his education at Barnsley Holgate Grammar School, and then attended St Catharine's College, Cambridge, to study English on a scholarship, beating his future Movement associate Kingsley Amis in the process. His studies there were interrupted by service during the war in the Royal Navy in Arctic Russia, where he taught himself the language. In the last year of the war, in Devon, he married Doreen John.
Go to Profile#9120
Kelly D. Brownell
#9130
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Kelly David Brownell is a clinical psychologist and scholar of public health and public policy at Duke University whose work focuses on obesity and food policy. He is a former dean of Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy. Noted for his research dealing primarily with obesity prevention, as well as the intersection of behavior, environment, and health with public policy, Brownell advised former First Lady Michelle Obama's initiatives to address childhood obesity and has testified before Congress. He is credited with coining the term "yo-yo dieting", and was named as one of "The World's 100 M...
Go to Profile#9121
Duane Clarridge
#9131
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Duane Ramsdell "Dewey" Clarridge was an American senior operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency and supervisor for more than 30 years. Clarridge was the chief of the Latin American division from 1981 to 1987 and a key figure in the Iran-Contra Affair. Clarridge pleaded guilty to seven counts of perjury and making false statements relating to 1985 shipment to Iran.
Go to Profile#9122
Peter Borwein
#9132
Overall Influence
1953 - 2020 (67 years)
Peter Benjamin Borwein was a Canadian mathematician and a professor at Simon Fraser University. He is known as a co-author of the paper which presented the Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe algorithm for computing π.
Go to Profile#9123
Peter Schäfer
#9133
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Peter Schäfer is a prolific German scholar of ancient religious studies, who has made contributions to the field of ancient Judaism and early Christianity through monographs, co-edited volumes, numerous articles, and his trademark synoptic editions. He was a Professor of Religion and the Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Judaic Studies at Princeton University from 1998 to 2013.
Go to Profile#9124
Georg Nees
#9134
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Georg Nees was a German academic who was a pioneer of computer art and generative graphics. He studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Erlangen and Stuttgart and was scientific advisor at the SEMIOSIS, International Journal of semiotics and aesthetics. In 1977, he was appointed Honorary Professor of Applied computer science at the University of Erlangen Nees is one of the "3N" computer pioneers, an abbreviation that has become acknowledged for Frieder Nake, Georg Nees and A. Michael Noll, whose computer graphics were created with digital computers.
Go to Profile#9125
Geir Lundestad
#9135
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Geir Lundestad was a Norwegian historian, who until 2014 served as the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute when Olav Njølstad took over. In this capacity, he also served as the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. However, he was not a member of the committee itself.
Go to Profile#9126
Fred Diamond
#9136
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Fred Irvin Diamond is a mathematician, known for his role in proving the modularity theorem for elliptic curves. His research interest is in modular forms and Galois representations. Life Diamond received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1984, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1988 as a doctoral student of Andrew Wiles. He has held positions at Brandeis University and Rutgers University, and is currently a professor at King's College London.
Go to Profile#9127
Eric Horvitz
#9137
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Eric Joel Horvitz is an American computer scientist, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where he serves as the company's first Chief Scientific Officer. He was previously the director of Microsoft Research Labs, including research centers in Redmond, WA, Cambridge, MA, New York, NY, Montreal, Canada, Cambridge, UK, and Bangalore, India.
Go to Profile#9128
Joseph Estrada
#9138
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Joseph Ejercito Estrada, , also known by the nickname Erap, is a Filipino politician and former actor. He served as the 13th president of the Philippines from 1998 to 2001, the 9th vice president of the Philippines from 1992 to 1998, and the 26th mayor of the City of Manila, the country's capital, from 2013 to 2019. In 2001, he became the first chief executive in Asia to be formally impeached and resigned from power. At the age of , he is currently the oldest living former Philippine president.
Go to Profile#9129
Donald D. Hoffman
#9139
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Donald David Hoffman is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science.
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László Fejes Tóth
#9140
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
László Fejes Tóth was a Hungarian mathematician who specialized in geometry. He proved that a lattice pattern is the most efficient way to pack centrally symmetric convex sets on the Euclidean plane . He also investigated the sphere packing problem. He was the first to show, in 1953, that proof of the Kepler conjecture can be reduced to a finite case analysis and, later, that the problem might be solved using a computer.
Go to Profile#9131
B.B. King
#9141
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
#9132
Gillian Flynn
#9142
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Gillian Schieber Flynn is an American author, screenwriter, and producer. She is known for writing the thriller and mystery novels Sharp Objects , Dark Places , and Gone Girl , which are all critically acclaimed. Her books have been published in 40 languages and according to The Washington Post, as of 2016 Gone Girl alone has sold more than 15 million copies.
Go to Profile#9133
Pradeep Dubey
#9143
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Pradeep Dubey is an Indian game theorist. He is a Professor of Economics at the State University of New York, Stony Brook , and a member of the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory. He also holds a visiting position at Cowles Foundation, Yale University. He did his schooling at the St. Columba's School, Delhi. He received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Cornell University and B.Sc. from the University of Delhi. His research areas of interest are game theory and mathematical economics. He has published, among others, in Econometrica, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Theory , and Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Go to Profile#9134
Eric-Jan Wagenmakers
#9144
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Eric-Jan Wagenmakers is a Dutch mathematical psychologist. He is a professor at the Methodology Unit in the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam . Since 2012, he has also been Professor of Neurocognitive Modeling: Interdisciplinary Integration at UvA's Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences. A noted expert on research methods in psychology, he has been highly critical of some dubious practices by his fellow psychologists, including Daryl Bem's research purporting to find support for the parapsychological concept of extrasensory perception, and the tendency for psychologists in general to favor the publication of studies with surprising, eye-catching results.
Go to Profile#9135
Carolyn See
#9145
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Carolyn See was a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of ten books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, an advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and the novels There Will Never Be Another You, Golden Days, and The Handyman. See was also a book critic for the Washington Post for 27 years.
Go to Profile#9136
Jack Nasher
#9146
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Jack Nasher is a German author, negotiation advisor. Early life and education Nasher went to school in Germany, France, and in the United States. He received a master's degree in Philosophy and Psychology at Trier University. He graduated with law degree from Frankfurt University, received a master's degree in management studies from Oxford University; and was a Research Associate of Holywell Manor, Oxford,. He completed a doctorate in philosophy at Vienna University. Nasher concluded his legal training at the European Court of Justice, at the European Parliament, and at the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
Go to Profile#9137
Kathleen Sullivan
#9147
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kathleen Marie Sullivan is an American lawyer and name partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, a global, litigation-only law firm headquartered in Los Angeles, California. Based in the firm's New York City office, Sullivan chairs its national appellate practice group. She is the first and only female name partner at an Am Law 100 law firm. Previously, Sullivan served as dean of Stanford Law School, where she was the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law.
Go to Profile#9138
Ward Goodenough
#9148
Overall Influence
1919 - 2013 (94 years)
Ward Hunt Goodenough II was an American anthropologist, who has made contributions to kinship studies, linguistic anthropology, cross-cultural studies, and cognitive anthropology. Biography and major works Goodenough was born May 30, 1919, in Cambridge Massachusetts, the son of Helen Miriam and Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, a scholar in the history of religion, who was then a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School. He was a brother to noted solid-state physicist John B. Goodenough. As a child his family moved between Europe and Germany as his father conducted research on a Ph.D. As a result Goodenough developed an early interest in German and languages in general.
Go to Profile#9139
Samuel L. Popkin
#9149
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Samuel L. Popkin is an American political scientist who teaches at the University of California, San Diego. Popkin has played a role in the development of rational choice theory within political science. He is also noted for his work as a pollster.
Go to Profile#9140
F. J. Duarte
#9150
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Francisco Javier "Frank" Duarte is a laser physicist and author/editor of several books on tunable lasers. His research on physical optics and laser development has won several awards, including an Engineering Excellence Award in 1995 for the invention of the N-slit laser interferometer.
Go to Profile#9141
Adrian Piper
#9151
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper is an American conceptual artist and Kantian philosopher. Her work addresses how and why those involved in more than one discipline may experience professional ostracism, otherness, racial passing, and racism by using various traditional and non-traditional media to provoke self-analysis. She uses reflection on her own career as an example.
Go to Profile#9142
James R. Taylor
#9152
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
James Renwick Taylor , sometimes known as Jim Taylor, was a Canadian academic and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Communication of the Université de Montréal, which he founded with Annie Méar and André H. Caron Ed.D in the early 1970s.
Go to Profile#9143
Karl Johan Åström
#9153
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Karl Johan Åström is a Swedish control theorist, who has made contributions to the fields of control theory and control engineering, computer control and adaptive control. In 1965, he described a general framework of Markov decision processes with incomplete information, what ultimately led to the notion of a Partially observable Markov decision process.
Go to Profile#9144
Larry Selinker
#9154
Overall Influence
Larry Selinker is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Michigan and former director of the university's English Language Institute. In 1972, Selinker introduced the concept of interlanguage, which built upon Pit Corder's previous work on the nature of language learners' errors. Corder's and Selinker's work became the foundation of modern research into second-language acquisition, and interlanguage is accepted as a basic principle of the discipline.
Go to Profile#9145
Georges J. F. Köhler
#9155
Overall Influence
1946 - 1995 (49 years)
Georges Jean Franz Köhler was a German biologist. Together with César Milstein and Niels Kaj Jerne, Köhler won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984, "for work on the immune system and the production of monoclonal antibodies". Milstein and Köhler's technique for producing monoclonal antibodies laid the foundation for the exploitation of antibodies for diagnostics, therapeutics and many other scientific applications.
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Peter Gruss
#9156
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Peter Gruss is a German developmental biologist, president of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, and the former president of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft . Gruss's research has generally covered the topic of control mechanisms in the development of mammals, especially in the development of the nervous system. He has been able to produce insulin using stem cells.
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Lawrence F. Katz
#9157
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Lawrence Francis Katz is the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Education and career Katz graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.
Go to Profile#9148
Dan Slobin
#9158
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Dan Isaac Slobin is a professor emeritus of psychology and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Slobin has made major contributions to the study of children's language acquisition, and his work has demonstrated the importance of cross-linguistic comparison for the study of language acquisition and psycholinguistics in general.
Go to Profile#9149
Nur Yalman
#9159
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Nur Yalman is a leading Turkish social anthropologist at Harvard University, where he serves as senior Research Professor of Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. Career Yalman received his high school diploma from Robert College, Istanbul, one of Turkey’s premier private high schools. For his BA and PhD, he studied Social Anthropology at Cambridge University under the mentorship of Edmund Leach and carried out fieldwork in Sri Lanka. At Cambridge, Yalman was a Bye-Fellow of Peterhouse, and subsequently joined the anthropology faculty at the University of Chicago. During his stay at Chicago, he served as director for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 1968-1972.
Go to Profile#9150
Ali H. Sayed
#9160
Overall Influence
Ali H. Sayed is the dean of engineering at EPFL , where he teaches and conducts research on Adaptation, Learning, Statistical Signal Processing, and Signal Processing for Communications. He is the Director of the EPFL Adaptive Systems Laboratory. He has authored several books on estimation and filtering theories, including the textbook Adaptive Filters, published by Wiley & Sons in 2008. Professor Sayed received the degrees of Engineer and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1987 and 1989, respectively, and the Doctor of Philosophy degree i...
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