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
#9251
Yoshito Kishi
#9261
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
was a Japanese chemist who was the Morris Loeb Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. He was known for his contributions to the sciences of organic synthesis and total synthesis. Early life and education Kishi was born in Nagoya, Japan and attended Nagoya University, where he obtained both his BS and PhD degrees. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University where he worked with Robert Burns Woodward. From 1966 through 1974, he was a professor of chemistry at Nagoya University. Since 1974, Kishi had been a professor of chemistry at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#9252
Scott Kim
#9262
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Scott Kim is an American puzzle and video game designer, artist, and author of Korean descent. He started writing an occasional "Boggler" column for Discover magazine in 1990, and became an exclusive columnist in 1999, and created hundreds of other puzzles for magazines such as Scientific American and Games, as well as thousands of puzzles for computer games. He was the holder of the Harold Keables chair at Iolani School in 2008.
Go to Profile#9253
Carlos Vega
#9263
Overall Influence
1956 - 1998 (42 years)
Carlos Vega was a Cuban-born Los Angeles-based session drummer best known for his performances with James Taylor. As a part of the L.A. studio scene from the late 1970s through the 1990s, Vega contributed to a wide variety of music during the rise and popularity of the California singer-songwriter movement.
Go to Profile#9254
Ernie Harwell
#9264
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
William Earnest Harwell was an American sportscaster, known for his long career calling play-by-play of Major League Baseball games. For 55 seasons, 42 of them with the Detroit Tigers, Harwell called the action on radio and/or television. In January 2009, the American Sportscasters Association ranked Harwell 16th on its list of Top 50 Sportscasters of All Time.
Go to Profile#9255
Julia Annas
#9265
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Julia Elizabeth Annas is a British philosopher who has taught in the United States for the last quarter-century. She is Regents Professor of Philosophy Emerita at the University of Arizona. Education and career Annas graduated from Oxford University in 1968 with a B.A. and from Harvard University with an A.M. and a Ph.D. . She was a Fellow and Tutor at St Hugh's College, Oxford for fifteen years before joining the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1986, where she taught until her retirement, apart for one year as a professor at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#9256
Richard Diebenkorn
#9266
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.
Go to Profile#9257
Stefan Homburg
#9267
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Stefan Homburg is a German professor of economics. He was the director of the Institute of Public Finance at the University of Hannover, Lower Saxony, Germany until 2021. Outside academia he is best known for his controversial statements regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
Go to Profile#9258
Eric Holder
#9268
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Eric Himpton Holder Jr. is an American lawyer who served as the 82nd United States attorney general from 2009 to 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, Holder was the first African American to hold the position.
Go to Profile#9259
Raymond Domenech
#9269
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Raymond Manuel Albert Domenech is a French football manager and former player. He managed the France national team from 2004 to 2010, reaching the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final. He was dismissed after their elimination from the 2010 FIFA World Cup, for serious misconduct.
Go to Profile#9260
Rodney Huddleston
#9270
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Rodney D. Huddleston is a British linguist and grammarian specializing in the study and description of English. Huddleston is the primary author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , which presents a comprehensive descriptive grammar of English.
Go to Profile#9261
Yann Martel
#9271
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Yann Martel, is a Canadian author who wrote the Man Booker Prize–winning novel Life of Pi, an international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other best-selling lists. Life of Pi was adapted for a movie directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars including Best Director and winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
Go to Profile#9262
Chris Lintott
#9272
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Christopher John Lintott is a British astrophysicist, author and broadcaster. He is a Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, and since 2023 is the Gresham Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London. Lintott is involved in a number of popular science projects aimed at bringing astronomy to a wider audience and is also the primary presenter of the BBC television series The Sky at Night, having previously been co-presenter with Patrick Moore until Moore's death in 2012. He co-authored Bang! – The Complete History of the Universe and The Cosmic...
Go to Profile#9263
Clyde Drexler
#9273
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Clyde Austin Drexler is an American former professional basketball player and the commissioner of the Big3 3-on-3 basketball league. Nicknamed "Clyde the Glide", he played 15 seasons in the National Basketball Association , spending a majority of his career with the Portland Trail Blazers before finishing with the Houston Rockets. He was a ten-time NBA All-Star and named to the NBA's 50th and 75th anniversary teams. Drexler won an NBA championship with Houston in 1995, and earned a gold medal on the 1992 United States Olympic team known as "The Dream Team". He was inducted twice into the Nais...
Go to Profile#9264
William Landes
#9274
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
William M. Landes is an American economist who has written about the economic analysis of law and an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which cited him for his work in the field. He is among the most cited law professors in American law reviews. Landes also is the original founder of Lexecon , a legal and economic consulting firm.
Go to Profile#9265
Aamir Khan
#9275
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Mohammed Aamir Hussain Khan is an Indian actor who works in Hindi films. Referred to in the media as "Mr. Perfectionist", through his career spanning over 30 years, Khan has established himself as one of the most notable actors of Indian cinema. Khan is the recipient of numerous awards, including nine Filmfare Awards, four National Film Awards, and an AACTA Award, with one of his film productions also receiving an Academy Award nomination. He was honoured by the Government of India with the Padma Shri in 2003 and the Padma Bhushan in 2010, and received an honorary title from the Government of...
Go to Profile#9266
Alex Waibel
#9276
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Alexander Waibel is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Waibel's research interests focus on speech recognition and translation and human communication signals and systems. Waibel is known for the time delay neural network , which he developed. It is the first convolutional neural network trained by gradient descent, using the backpropagation algorithm. Alex Waibel introduced the TDNN 1987 at ATR in Japan.
Go to Profile#9267
Steven G. Krantz
#9277
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Steven George Krantz is an American scholar, mathematician, and writer. He has authored more than 350 research papers and published more than 150 books. Additionally, Krantz has edited journals such as the Notices of the American Mathematical Society and The Journal of Geometric Analysis.
Go to Profile#9268
Petra Kvitová
#9278
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Petra Kvitová, OLY is a Czech professional tennis player. Known for her powerful left-handed groundstrokes and variety, Kvitová has won 31 career singles titles, including two major titles at Wimbledon in 2011 and in 2014. She also won a bronze medal in singles while representing the Czech Republic at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Her career-high ranking of world No. 2 was achieved on 31 October 2011.
Go to Profile#9269
Derek Mahon
#9279
Overall Influence
1941 - 2020 (79 years)
Derek Mahon was an Irish poet. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his, "influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense". President of Ireland Michael D Higgins said of Mahon; "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness."
Go to Profile#9270
Dick Ayers
#9280
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Richard Bache Ayers was an American comic book artist and cartoonist best known for his work as one of Jack Kirby's inkers during the late-1950s and 1960s period known as the Silver Age of Comics, including on some of the earliest issues of Marvel Comics' The Fantastic Four. He is the signature penciler of Marvel's World War II comic Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos, drawing it for a 10-year run, and he co-created Magazine Enterprises' 1950s Western-horror character the Ghost Rider, a version of which he would draw for Marvel in the 1960s.
Go to Profile#9271
J. Ann Tickner
#9281
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Judith Ann Tickner is an Anglo-American feminist international relations theorist. Tickner is a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC.
Go to Profile#9272
Mark Galeotti
#9282
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Mark Galeotti is a British historian, lecturer and writer on transnational crime and Russian security affairs and director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence. He is an honorary professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, and an associate fellow in Euro-Atlantic geopolitics at the Council on Geostrategy.
Go to Profile#9273
Jay Rubin
#9283
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jay Rubin is an American academic and translator. He is one of the main translators of the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami into English. He has also written a guide to Japanese, Making Sense of Japanese , and a biographical literary analysis of Murakami.
Go to Profile#9274
Nick Zangwill
#9284
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Nick Zangwill is a British philosopher and honorary research professor at University College London and Lincoln University. He is known for his expertise on moral philosophy , and aesthetics . He has also written on metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and logic.
Go to Profile#9275
Ciprian Manolescu
#9285
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Ciprian Manolescu is a Romanian-American mathematician, working in gauge theory, symplectic geometry, and low-dimensional topology. He is currently a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#9276
Sabine Hossenfelder
#9286
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Areas of Specialization: Theorectical Physics, Quantum Gravity Sabine Hossenfelder is currently a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, and heads the Analog Systems for Gravity Duals group. She was previously a professor at Nordita in Stockholm, Sweden, and has held fellowships at University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Arizona. Hossenfelder completed her BS in mathematics at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany in 1997, and stayed there for her MS and PhD studies in theoretical physics, completed in 2003. Hossenfelder is well known as a promine...
Go to Profile#9277
Eddie Long
#9287
Overall Influence
1953 - 2017 (64 years)
Eddie Lee Long was an American pastor who served as the senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, a megachurch in unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, from 1987 until his death in 2017.
Go to Profile#9278
Steve Kerr
#9288
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Stephen Douglas Kerr is an American professional basketball coach and former player who is the head coach for the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association . He is known as one of the most accurate three-point shooters in NBA history. Kerr is a nine-time NBA champion, having won five titles as a player and four as head coach of the Warriors.
Go to Profile#9279
Leonid Keldysh
#9289
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Leonid Veniaminovich Keldysh was a Soviet and Russian physicist. Keldysh was a professor in the I.E. Tamm Theory division of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and a faculty member at Texas A&M University. He is known for developing the Keldysh formalism, a powerful quantum field theory framework designed to describe a system in a non-equilibrium state, as well as for the theory of excitonic insulators . Keldysh's awards include the 2009 Rusnanoprize, an international nanotechnology award, for his work related to molecular-beam epitaxy, the 2011 Evgeni...
Go to Profile#9280
Ronald Grigor Suny
#9290
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Ronald Grigor Suny is an American historian and political scientist. Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and served as director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, 2009 to 2012 and was the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2015, and is Emeritus Professor of political science and history at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#9281
David Bartel
#9291
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
David P. Bartel is an American molecular biologist best known for his work on microRNAs. Bartel is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Member of the Whitehead Institute, and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute .
Go to Profile#9282
John Derbyshire
#9292
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John Derbyshire is a British-born American white supremacist political commentator, writer, journalist and computer programmer. He was noted for being one of the last paleoconservatives in the National Review, until he was fired in 2012 for writing an article for Taki's Magazine that was widely viewed as racist. Since 2012 he has written for white nationalist website VDARE.
Go to Profile#9283
Ellen Datlow
#9293
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ellen Datlow is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor and anthologist. She is a winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award . Career Datlow began her career working for Holt, Rinehart and Winston for three years, as well as doing a stint at Crown Publishing Group. She went on to be fiction editor at Omni magazine and Omni Online from 1981 through 1998, and edited the ten associated Omni anthologies. She co-edited the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror series from 1988 to 2008 . She was also editor of the webzine Event Horizon: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror...
Go to Profile#9284
Vilmos Zsigmond
#9294
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Vilmos Zsigmond ASC was a Hungarian-American cinematographer. His work in cinematography helped shape the look of American movies in the 1970s, making him one of the leading figures in the American New Wave movement.
Go to Profile#9285
Christiane Fellbaum
#9295
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Christiane D. Fellbaum is an American linguist and computational linguistics researcher who is Lecturer with Rank of Professor in the Program in Linguistics and the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. The co-developer of the WordNet project, she is also its current director.
Go to Profile#9286
David Halpern
#9296
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
David Solomon Halpern is a British civil servant, heading the Behavioural Insights Team spun out from the Cabinet Office. Education Halpern attended King's School, Rochester, before attending Christ's College, University of Cambridge achieving a 1st in natural Sciences specialising in experimental psychology. He then went on to complete a PhD in social and political sciences, also at St John's College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#9287
Majrooh Sultanpuri
#9297
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Asrar ul Hassan Khan , better known as Majrooh Sultanpuri, was an Indian Urdu poet and lyricist in India's Hindi language film industry. He wrote Hindustani lyrics for numerous Hindi film soundtracks.
Go to Profile#9288
Anand Yang
#9298
Overall Influence
Anand A. Yang is a history professor at the University of Washington, United States. He has also served as the Chair of the University of Washington's Department of History and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. From 2006 to 2007, he served as the President for the Association for Asian Studies, and from 2007 to 2009 he was the President of the World History Association. His scholarship has focused on agricultural and peasant life in colonial India, social history, law and criminality, and life in Indian markets.
Go to Profile#9289
Colin Greenland
#9299
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Colin Greenland is a British science fiction writer, whose first story won the second prize in a 1982 Faber & Faber competition. His best-known novel is Take Back Plenty , winner of both major British science fiction awards, the 1990 British SF Association award and the 1991 Arthur C. Clarke Award, as well as being a nominee for the 1992 Philip K. Dick Award for the best original paperback published that year in the United States.
Go to Profile#9290
Richard Layard, Baron Layard
#9300
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Peter Richard Grenville Layard, Baron Layard FBA is a British labour economist, currently working as programme director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. Layard was Senior Research Officer for the Robbins Committee on Higher Education. His work on mental health, including publishing The Depression Report in 2006, led to the establishment of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme in England. He is co-editor of the World Happiness Report, with John F. Helliwell and Jeffrey Sachs.
Go to Profile#9291
Ángel Gabilondo
#9301
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ángel Gabilondo Pujol is a Spanish university professor, currently serving as the 6th Ombudsman of Spain. Between 2009 and 2011, he was Minister of Education in José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's Cabinet.
Go to Profile#9292
Francis Perrin
#9302
Overall Influence
1901 - 1992 (91 years)
Francis Perrin was a French physicist, the son of Nobel prize-winning physicist Jean Perrin. Physicist Francis Perrin was born in Paris and attended École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 1928 he obtained a doctorate in mathematical sciences from the faculté des sciences of Paris, based upon a thesis on Brownian motion and became a faculty member of Collège de France. In 1933, in connection with the neutrino, Francis Perrin estimated that "the mass must be null—or at least small compared to the mass of the electron". Subsequently, he worked at the Collège de France on the fission of uranium. W...
Go to Profile#9293
Philip Cox
#9303
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Philip Sutton Cox is an Australian architect. Cox is the founding partner of Cox Architecture, one of the largest architectural practices in Australia. He commenced his first practice with Ian McKay in 1962, and in 1967 he founded his own practice, Philip Cox and Associates. The firm has grown to become Cox Architecture, with offices across Australia as well as in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Involved in much of concept design for each project over fifty years, Cox stepped back from the business in 2015 that is now responsible for projects throughout Australia and also in Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East, South Africa and Europe.
Go to Profile#9294
Tim Crane
#9304
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Timothy Martin Crane is a British philosopher specialising in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, philosophy of psychology and metaphysics. His contributions to philosophy include a defence of a non-physicalist account of the mind; a defence of intentionalism about consciousness; a defence of the thesis that perceptual experience has non-conceptual content; a psychologistic approach to the objects of thought; and a defence of the thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental. He is currently the Head of Department and Professor of Philosophy at Central European University...
Go to Profile#9295
Gilbert Achcar
#9305
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gilbert Achcar is a Lebanese socialist academic and writer. He is a Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.
Go to Profile#9296
Joel Slemrod
#9306
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Joel Brian Slemrod is an American economist and academic, currently serving as a professor of economics at the University of Michigan and the Paul W. McCracken Collegiate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#9297
Hiroshi Ishiguro
#9307
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Hiroshi Ishiguro is a Japanese engineer and director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, part of the Department of Systems Innovation in the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University, Japan. A notable development of the laboratory is the Actroid, a humanoid robot with lifelike appearance and visible behaviour such as facial movements.
Go to Profile#9298
Samuel J. Danishefsky
#9308
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Samuel J. Danishefsky is an American chemist working as a professor at both Columbia University and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Birth and education Samuel J. Danishefsky was born in 1936 in the United States. He completed his B.S. from Yeshiva University in 1956. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1962 with Peter Yates, which partially overlapped with a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Gilbert Stork at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#9299
Igor Klebanov
#9309
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Igor R. Klebanov is an American theoretical physicist. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at Princeton University where he is currently a Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and the director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2022, he is the director of the Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings.
Go to Profile#9300
Philip Woodward
#9310
Overall Influence
1919 - 2018 (99 years)
Philip Mayne Woodward was a British mathematician, radar engineer and horologist. He achieved notable success in all three fields. Before retiring, he was a deputy chief scientific officer at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defence in Malvern, Worcestershire.
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