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
#9151
Gene Simmons
#9161
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Gene Simmons is an American musician. Also known by his stage persona "The Demon", he is the bassist and co-lead singer of the hard rock band Kiss, which he co-founded with Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss in the early 1970s. Simmons was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 as a member of Kiss.
Go to Profile#9152
Zhiwei Yun
#9162
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
#9153
Michael Rapoport
#9163
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Michael Rapoport is an Austrian mathematician. Career Rapoport received his PhD from Paris-Sud 11 University in 1976, under the supervision of Pierre Deligne. He held a chair for arithmetic algebraic geometry at the University of Bonn, as well as a visiting appointment at the University of Maryland. In 1992, he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, in 1999 he won the Gay-Lussac Humboldt Prize, and he is the recipient of the 2011 Heinz Hopf Prize. In 1994, he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Zürich.
Go to Profile#9154
Ole Wæver
#9164
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ole Wæver is a professor of international relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. He has published and broadcast extensively in the field of international relations, and is one of the main architects of the so-called Copenhagen School in International Relations.
Go to Profile#9155
Herbert Fröhlich
#9165
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Herbert Fröhlich FRS was a German-born British physicist. Career In 1927, Fröhlich entered Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich to study physics, and received his doctorate under Arnold Sommerfeld in 1930. His first position was as Privatdozent at the University of Freiburg. Due to rising anti-Semitism and the Deutsche Physik movement under Adolf Hitler, and at the invitation of Yakov Frenkel, Fröhlich went to the Soviet Union, in 1933, to work at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad. During the Great Purge following the murder of Sergei Kirov, he fled to England in 1935. Exc...
Go to Profile#9156
Victor Yngve
#9166
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Victor H. Yngve was a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was one of the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the use of computers to analyze and process languages. He created the first program to produce random but well-formed output sentences, given a text, a children's book called Engineer Small and the Little Train.
Go to Profile#9157
Herbert A. Hauptman
#9167
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Herbert Aaron Hauptman was an American mathematician and Nobel laureate. He pioneered and developed a mathematical method that has changed the whole field of chemistry and opened a new era in research in determination of molecular structures of crystallized materials. Today, Hauptman's direct methods, which he continued to improve and refine, are routinely used to solve complicated structures. It was the application of this mathematical method to a wide variety of chemical structures that led the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to name Hauptman and Jerome Karle recipients of the 1985 Nobel ...
Go to Profile#9158
G. V. Loganathan
#9168
Overall Influence
1954 - 2007 (53 years)
Gobichettipalayam Vasudevan "G. V." Loganathan was an Indian-American professor, who, at the time of his death, was a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental engineering, part of the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, United States.
Go to Profile#9159
Herbert Callen
#9169
Overall Influence
1919 - 1993 (74 years)
Herbert Bernard Callen was an American physicist specializing in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. He is considered one of the founders of the modern theory of irreversible thermodynamics, and is the author of the classic textbook Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics, published in two editions. During World War II, his services were invoked in the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project.
Go to Profile#9160
Neva Goodwin
#9170
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Neva Goodwin Rockefeller , known professionally as Neva Goodwin, is co-director of the Global Development And Environment Institute at Tufts University, where she is a research associate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and director of the Social Science Library: Frontier Thinking in Sustainable Development and Human Well-Being.
Go to Profile#9161
Ladipo Ayodeji Banjo
#9171
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Ladipo Ayodeji Banjo, is a Nigerian Emeritus professor of English language, educational administrator, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria as well as former pro-chancellor of Ajayi Crowther University.
Go to Profile#9162
Gillian Triggs
#9172
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Gillian Doreen Triggs is an Australian academic specialising in public international law. In 2019, she was appointed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres as Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations. In this capacity, she will serve as the Assistant High Commissioner for Protection in the team of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi.
Go to Profile#9163
Kathleen Cleaver
#9173
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Kathleen Neal Cleaver is an American law professor and activist, known for her involvement with the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party, a political and revolutionary. Early life Juette Kathleen Neal was born in Dallas, Texas, on May 13, 1945. Her parents were both activists and college graduates of the University of Michigan. Her father, Ernest Eugene Neal, was a sociology professor at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and her mother, Pearl Juette Johnson, earned a master's degree in mathematics. Three years after Cleaver was born, her father accepted a job as the director of th...
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Robert A. Parker
#9174
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Robert Allan Ridley Parker is an American physicist and astronomer, former director of the NASA Management Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a retired NASA astronaut. He was a mission specialist on two Space Shuttle missions, STS-9 and STS-35.
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Henry L. Roediger III
#9175
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Henry L. "Roddy" Roediger III is an American psychology researcher in the area of human learning and memory. He rose to prominence for his work on the psychological aspects of false memories. Biography Born in Roanoke, Virginia, and raised in Danville, Virginia, Roediger received his undergraduate education from Washington and Lee University, graduating magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1969. He went on to study at Yale University, receiving his PhD in 1973 with his dissertation "Inhibition in recall from cueing with recall targets". After receiving his doctorate he joined the faculty at Purdue University, where he stayed for fifteen years .
Go to Profile#9166
George Szirtes
#9176
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
George Szirtes is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. Szirtes was a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.
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George Irish
#9177
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
James Alfred George Patrick Irish, generally known as George Irish or J. A. George Irish , was a Montserratian academic, musician, composer of the national song, community leader and social engineer.
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Don Nelson
#9178
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Donald Arvid Nelson is an American former professional basketball player and head coach. Nelson is second all-time in regular season wins of any coach in NBA history, with 1,335 . He coached the Milwaukee Bucks, the New York Knicks, the Dallas Mavericks, and the Golden State Warriors. After an All-American career at the University of Iowa, Nelson won five NBA championships playing with the Boston Celtics, with his number 19 retired by the franchise in 1978.
Go to Profile#9169
Vera T. Sós
#9179
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Vera Turán Sós was a Hungarian mathematician who specialized in number theory and combinatorics. She was a student and close collaborator of both Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi. She also collaborated frequently with her husband Pál Turán, an analyst, number theorist, and combinatorist. Until 1987, she worked at the Department of Analysis at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Afterwards, she was employed by the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics. She was elected a corresponding member and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1997, Sós was awarded the Széchenyi Prize.
Go to Profile#9170
Richard W. Rahn
#9180
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Richard W. Rahn is an American economist, syndicated columnist, and entrepreneur. He is chairman of Improbable Success Productions and the Institute for Global Economic Growth. Rahn writes a syndicated weekly economic column which is published in The Washington Times, Real Clear Markets and elsewhere. He was the vice president and chief economist of the United States Chamber of Commerce during the Reagan administration and remains a staunch advocate of supply-side economics, small government, and classical liberalism.
Go to Profile#9171
Victoria Chick
#9181
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Victoria Chick was a Post Keynesian economist known for her essays on monetary theory, banking and methodology. Her writing on Keynes's General Theory made her one of the foremost interpreters of his work. After the 2008 banking crisis she coined a corollary to Gresham's Law, arguing that in orthodox economics "bad theory drives out good."
Go to Profile#9172
James Corner
#9182
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
James Corner is a landscape architect and theorist whose works exhibit a focus on "developing innovative approaches toward landscape architectural design and urbanism." His designs of note include Fresh Kills Park on Staten Island and the High Line in Manhattan, and Domino Park in Brooklyn, all in New York City.
Go to Profile#9173
Petra Schwille
#9183
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Petra Schwille is a German professor and a researcher in the area of biophysics. Since 2011, she has been a director of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. She is known for her ground-laying work in the field of fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy, and numerous contributions on model membranes. Her current research focuses around bottom-up approaches to building an artificial cell within a broader area of synthetic biology. In 2010, Schwille received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.
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Joseph Henry Wegstein
#9184
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Joseph Henry Wegstein was an American computer scientist. Wegstein attended the University of Illinois, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1944, and graduated with a Master of Science in engineering physics in 1948. He worked as Acting Chief of the Office for Information Processing Standards, at the National Bureau of Standards, now National Institute of Standards and Technology , where he specialized in technical standards for automatic data processing, especially in the technology of fingerprint recognition.
Go to Profile#9175
Mark Walport
#9185
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Sir Mark Jeremy Walport is an English medical scientist and was the Government Chief Scientific Adviser in the United Kingdom from 2013 to 2017 and Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation from 2017 to 2020. In 2023 he became the Foreign Secretary of The Royal Society .
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Lorraine Daston
#9186
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Lorraine Daston is an American historian of science. Director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, she is an authority on Early Modern European scientific and intellectual history. In 1993, she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a permanent fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#9177
Raúl Rojas
#9187
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Raúl Rojas González is an emeritus professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Free University of Berlin, and a renowned specialist in artificial neural networks. The FU-Fighters, football-playing robots he helped build, were world champions in 2004 and 2005. He is now leading an autonomous car project called Spirit of Berlin.
Go to Profile#9178
Henry Stapp
#9188
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Henry Pierce Stapp is an American mathematical physicist, known for his work in quantum mechanics, particularly the development of axiomatic S-matrix theory, the proofs of strong nonlocality properties, and the place of free will in the "orthodox" quantum mechanics of John von Neumann.
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Howard Markel
#9189
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Howard Markel is an American physician and medical historian. Markel is the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan and Director of the University of Michigan's Center for the History of Medicine. He is also a professor of psychiatry, health management and policy, history, and pediatrics and communicable diseases. Markel writes extensively on major topics and figures in the history of medicine and public health.
Go to Profile#9180
Robert Morris
#9190
Overall Influence
1932 - 2011 (79 years)
Robert H. Morris Sr. was an American cryptographer and computer scientist. Family and education Morris was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were Walter W. Morris, a salesman, and Helen Kelly Morris, a homemaker. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1957 and a master's degree in applied mathematics from Harvard in 1958.
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Billy Idol
#9191
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
William Michael Albert Broad , known professionally as Billy Idol, is a British and American singer, songwriter, musician and actor. He first achieved fame in the 1970s emerging from the London punk rock scene as the lead singer of the group Generation X. Subsequently, he embarked on a solo career which led to international recognition and made Idol a lead artist during the MTV-driven "Second British Invasion" in the US. The name "Billy Idol" was inspired by a schoolteacher's description of him as "idle".
Go to Profile#9182
Ryōji Noyori
#9192
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Ryōji Noyori is a Japanese chemist. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001, Noyori shared a half of the prize with William S. Knowles for the study of chirally catalyzed hydrogenations; the second half of the prize went to K. Barry Sharpless for his study in chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions .
Go to Profile#9183
Iker Casillas
#9193
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Iker Casillas Fernández is a Spanish former professional footballer who played as a goalkeeper and currently works as a football commentator. Popularly dubbed "San Iker" for his ability to produce spectacular saves, Casillas is widely considered to be one of the greatest goalkeepers of all time. He is known for his athleticism, quick reactions and outstanding shot-stopping ability. Having spent the majority of his career at Real Madrid, Casillas is one of the few players to achieve over 1000 professional career matches, and holds the record for the most clean sheets in the UEFA Champions League, as well as for the Spain national team.
Go to Profile#9184
Gareth Southgate
#9194
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Gareth Southgate is an English professional football manager and former player who played as a defender and midfielder. He has been the manager of the England national team since 2016. Southgate won the League Cup with both Aston Villa and Middlesbrough and captained Crystal Palace to win the First Division championship in 1993–94. He also played in the 2000 FA Cup Final for Villa and the 2006 UEFA Cup Final for Middlesbrough. Internationally, Southgate made 57 appearances for the England team between 1995 and 2004. He played every game of England's campaign in UEFA Euro 1996, but his penalty miss sent England out in the semi-final.
Go to Profile#9185
Siegfried Lenz
#9195
Overall Influence
1926 - 2014 (88 years)
Siegfried Lenz was a German writer of novels, short stories and essays, as well as dramas for radio and the theatre. In 2000 he received the Goethe Prize on the 250th Anniversary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's birth. He won the 2010 International Nonino Prize in Italy.
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Mani Lal Bhaumik
#9196
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Mani Lal Bhaumik is an Indian American physicist and an internationally bestselling author, celebrated lecturer, entrepreneur and philanthropist. Early life Mani Lal Bhaumik was born in a Bengali Mahishya family on March 30, 1931 in a small village in Tamluk, Medinipore, West Bengal, India and attended the Kola Union High School. His father Gunodhar Bhaumik was a notable freedom fighter. As a teenager, Bhaumik spent some time with Mahatma Gandhi in his Mahisadal camp. In his boyhood Mani Lal was hugely influenced by freedom fighter Matangini Hazra, popularly known as Lady Gandhi. He received a B.Sc.
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Cliff Joslyn
#9197
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Cliff Joslyn is an American mathematician, cognitive scientist, and cybernetician. He is currently the Chief Knowledge Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Seattle, Washington, US, and visiting professor of Systems Science at Binghamton University .
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Ralph Asher Alpher
#9198
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Ralph Asher Alpher was an American cosmologist, who carried out pioneering work in the early 1950s on the Big Bang model, including Big Bang nucleosynthesis and predictions of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
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Virginia Held
#9199
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Virginia Potter Held is an American moral, social/political and feminist philosopher whose work on the ethics of care sparked significant research into the ethical dimensions of providing care for others and critiques of the traditional roles of women in society.
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Leo J. O'Donovan
#9200
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Leo Jeremiah O'Donovan III is an American Catholic priest, Jesuit, and theologian who served as the president of Georgetown University from 1989 to 2001. Born in New York City, he graduated from Georgetown, and while studying in France, decided to enter the Society of Jesus. He went on to receive advanced degrees from Fordham University and Woodstock College, and received his doctorate in theology from the University of Münster, where he studied under Karl Rahner. Upon returning to the United States, he became a professor at Woodstock College and the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, before ...
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Jonathan Lear
#9201
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jonathan Lear is an American philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and served as the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago from 2014 to 2022.
Go to Profile#9192
Ron MacLean
#9202
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ronald Joseph Corbett MacLean is a Canadian sportscaster for the CBC and Rogers Media, best known as the host of Hockey Night in Canada from 1986 to 2014 and again since 2016, and is also a hockey referee.
Go to Profile#9193
Christian Welzel
#9203
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Christian Welzel is a German political scientist at the Leuphana University Lueneburg and director of research at the World Values Survey Association. He is known for the model of cultural dimensions which measures emancipative values and secular values.
Go to Profile#9194
Azer Bestavros
#9204
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Azer Bestavros , is the Inaugural Associate Provost for Computing and Data Sciences and the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Boston University. Prior to his appointment in 2019 to lead the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences, he was the Founding Director of The Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering. He joined Boston University in 1991 as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, which is part of the university's College of Arts & Sciences. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 1998 and to the rank of full professor in 2003.
Go to Profile#9195
Maxine Singer
#9205
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Maxine Frank Singer is an American molecular biologist and science administrator. She is known for her contributions to solving the genetic code, her role in the ethical and regulatory debates on recombinant DNA techniques , and her leadership of Carnegie Institution of Washington. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
Go to Profile#9196
Riffat Hassan
#9206
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Riffat Hassan is a Pakistani-American theologian and a leading Islamic feminist scholar of the Qur'an. Early life and career Hassan was born in Lahore, Pakistan, to an upper-class Sayid Muslim family. Hassan's maternal grandfather was Hakim Ahmad Shuja, a Pakistani poet, writer and playwright. She lived a comfortable childhood, but was affected by the conflict between her father's traditional views and her mother's nonconformism. For most of her life, she hated her father's traditionalism because of his views of sex roles, but she later came to appreciate it because of his kindness and compassion.
Go to Profile#9197
Richard Petty
#9207
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Richard Lee Petty , nicknamed "the King", is an American former stock car racing driver who competed from 1958 to 1992 in the former NASCAR Grand National and Winston Cup Series , most notably driving the No. 43 Plymouth/Pontiac for Petty Enterprises. He is a member of the Petty racing family. He was the first driver to win the Cup Series championship seven times , while also winning a record 200 races during his career. This included winning the Daytona 500 a record seven times and winning a record 27 races in one season .
Go to Profile#9198
Robert James Waller
#9208
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Robert James Waller was an American author best known for The Bridges of Madison County. He was also a professor, photographer, and musician. Biography Robert James Waller Jr. was born in Charles City, Iowa, and grew up in Rockford, Iowa. In 1961, he married Georgia Ann Wiedmeier. Waller received his BA and MA from University of Northern Iowa . He received his PhD in business from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington in 1968.
Go to Profile#9199
Ron Goulart
#9209
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Ronald Joseph Goulart was an American popular culture historian and mystery, fantasy and science fiction author. He worked on novels and novelizations being published under various pseudonyms such as: Kenneth Robeson, Con Steffanson, Chad Calhoun, R. T. Edwards, Ian R. Jamieson, Josephine Kains, Jillian Kearny, Howard Lee, Zeke Masters, Frank S. Shawn, and Joseph Silva.
Go to Profile#9200
Noah Shachtman
#9210
Overall Influence
Noah Shachtman is an American journalist, and musician. He is the editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone. From 2018 to 2021, he served as the editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. He previously was the executive editor of the site. A former non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, he also worked as executive editor for News at Foreign Policy and as a contributing editor at Wired.
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