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
#9301
John F. Manning
#9311
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
John F. Manning is an American educator and lawyer. Manning is currently the Morgan and Helen Chu dean and professor of Harvard Law School. Career Manning graduated from Harvard College in 1982 and lived in Thayer Hall during his freshman year. He then graduated from Harvard Law School in 1985. Following law school, he served as a law clerk to Judge Robert Bork at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He then served as a law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia for the Supreme Court's 1988 term. Manning also worked two stints at the Justice Department's Office of...
Go to Profile#9302
Lisa Anthony
#9312
Overall Influence
Lisa Anthony is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the University of Florida. She is also the director of the Intelligent Natural Interaction Technology Laboratory . Her research interests revolve around developing natural user interfaces to allow for greater human-computer interaction, specifically for children as they develop their cognitive and physical abilities.
Go to Profile#9303
Arlene Phillips
#9313
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Dame Arlene Phillips is an English choreographer, talent scout, television judge and presenter, theatre director, and former dancer, who has worked in many fields of entertainment. For many years, she was most noted as the choreographer of numerous West End and Broadway musicals, films, and television shows, but she later achieved mainstream fame as a judge on television talent shows including Strictly Come Dancing and So You Think You Can Dance.
Go to Profile#9304
Alice Echols
#9314
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Alice Echols is Professor of History, and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Education Echols received her bachelor's degree from Macalester College, Minnesota in 1973. She obtained her master's degree and Doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1980 and 1986 respectively.
Go to Profile#9305
Sidney W. Fox
#9315
Overall Influence
1912 - 1998 (86 years)
Sidney Walter Fox was a Los Angeles-born biochemist responsible for discoveries on the origins of biological systems. Fox explored the synthesis of amino acids from inorganic molecules, the synthesis of proteinous amino acids and amino acid polymers called "proteinoids" from inorganic molecules and thermal energy, and created what he thought was the world's first protocell out of proteinoids and water. He called these globules "microspheres". Fox believed in the process of abiogenesis where life spontaneously organized itself from the colloquially known "primordial soup;" poolings of various simple organic molecules that existed during the time before life on Earth.
Go to Profile#9306
Eva Cox
#9316
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Eva Maria Cox is an Austrian-born Australian writer, feminist, sociologist, social commentator and activist. She has been an active advocate for creating a "more civil" society. She was a long-term member of the Women's Electoral Lobby , and is still pursuing feminist change by putting revaluing social contributions and wellbeing onto political agendas, as well as recognising the common ground between Australia's First Nations and feminist values of the importance of the social.
Go to Profile#9307
Ellis Sandoz
#9317
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Ellis Sandoz is the Hermann Moyse Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies at Louisiana State University. Sandoz is also the former chairman of that department.
Go to Profile#9308
Marcelo Bielsa
#9318
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Marcelo Alberto Bielsa Caldera is an Argentine professional football manager who is the current manager of the Uruguay national team. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential coaches of all time. Bielsa is a former player having played as a defender for Newell's Old Boys, Instituto and Argentino de Rosario.
Go to Profile#9309
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
#9319
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan , commonly referred by to his initials RTE, is a Turkish politician who is the 12th and current president of Turkey since 2014. He previously was prime minister of Turkey from 2003 to 2014 and as mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. He also co-founded the Justice and Development Party in 2001.
Go to Profile#9310
John P. Meier
#9320
Overall Influence
1942 - 2022 (80 years)
John Paul Meier was an American biblical scholar and Catholic priest. He was author of the series A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus , six other books, and more than 70 articles for peer-reviewed or solicited journals or books.
Go to Profile#9311
Misha Glenny
#9321
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michael V. E. "Misha" Glenny is a British journalist and broadcaster, specialising in southeast Europe, global organised crime, and cybersecurity. He is multilingual. He is also the writer and producer of the BBC Radio 4 series, How to Invent a Country.
Go to Profile#9312
Sara Roy
#9322
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Sara M. Roy is an American Zona, Magiila Vemehoeret. Zona shel ARAVIM. political economist and scholar. She is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#9313
Emmanuel Rashba
#9323
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Emmanuel I. Rashba is a Soviet-American theoretical physicist of Jewish origin who worked in Ukraine, Russia and in the United States. Rashba is known for his contributions to different areas of condensed matter physics and spintronics, especially the Rashba effect in spin physics, and also for the prediction of electric dipole spin resonance , that was widely investigated and became a regular tool for operating electron spins in nanostructures, phase transitions in spin-orbit coupled systems driven by change of the Fermi surface topology, Giant oscillator strength of impurity excitons, and coexistence of free and self-trapped excitons.
Go to Profile#9314
Willibald Jentschke
#9324
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Willibald Jentschke was an Austrian-German experimental nuclear physicist. During World War II, he made contributions to the German nuclear energy project. After World War II, he emigrated to the United States to work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio, for the Air Force Materiel Command. In 1950, he became a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he became director of the Cyclotron Laboratory there in 1951.
Go to Profile#9315
Nancy Bauer
#9325
Overall Influence
For the Canadian writer and editor, see Nancy Bauer. Nancy Bauer is an American philosopher specializing in feminist philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology, and the work of Simone de Beauvoir. She was recently Chair of the Philosophy Department at Tufts University and is currently Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of Philosophy as well as the Dean of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. Her interests include methodology in philosophy, feminism, metaphysics, social/political/moral philosophy, philosophy of language, phenomenology, and philosophy in film.
Go to Profile#9316
S.-Y. Kuroda
#9326
Overall Influence
1934 - 2009 (75 years)
Sige-Yuki Kuroda, also known as S.-Y. Kuroda, was Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. Although a pioneer in the application of Chomskyan generative syntax to the Japanese language, he is known for the broad range of his work across the language sciences. For instance, in formal language theory, the Kuroda normal form for context-sensitive grammars bears his name.
Go to Profile#9317
David S. Saxon
#9327
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
David S. Saxon was an American physicist and educator who served as the President of University of California system as well as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Corporation.
Go to Profile#9318
Boris Rybakov
#9328
Overall Influence
1908 - 2001 (93 years)
Boris Alexandrovich Rybakov was a Soviet and Russian historian who personified the anti-Normanist vision of Russian history. He is the father of Indologist Rostislav Rybakov. Life and works Rybakov held a chair in Russian history at the Moscow University since 1939, was a deputy dean of the university in 1952–54, and administered the Russian History Institute more than 40 years. In 1954, Rybakov and Andrey Kursanov represented the Soviet Academy of Sciences at the Columbia University Bicentennial in New York City.
Go to Profile#9319
Ngaire Woods
#9329
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Ngaire Tui Woods CBE is the founding dean of the Blavatnik School of Government and professor of Global Economic Governance at the University of Oxford. She founded the Global Economic Governance Programme and is the co-founder of the Oxford–Princeton Global Leaders Fellowship programme. She was born in New Zealand.
Go to Profile#9320
Daniel Markovits
#9330
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Daniel Markovits is the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at the Yale Law School and the founding director of the Yale Center for the Study of Private Law. He is the author of The Meritocracy Trap . Education After earning a B.A. in mathematics, summa cum laude, from Yale University, Markovits received a British Marshall Scholarship to study in England, where he was awarded an M.Sc. in econometrics and mathematical economics from the London School of Economics and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in philosophy from the University of Oxford. Markovits then returned to Yale to study law and, after clerking...
Go to Profile#9321
Xu Zhiyong
#9331
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Xu Zhiyong is a Chinese civil rights activist and formerly a lecturer at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. He was one of the founders of the NGO Open Constitution Initiative and an active rights lawyer in China who campaigned against corruption and helped those underprivileged. He is the main founder and icon of the New Citizens' Movement in China. In January 2014 he was sentenced to four years in prison for "gathering crowds to disrupt public order". He was detained again on February 15, 2020, in the southern city of Guangzhou after two months in hiding, for his partici...
Go to Profile#9322
Georges Vedel
#9332
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Georges Vedel was a French public law professor from Auch, France. Biography Vedel is credited as being "the reviser of public law [in France]." He was a faculty member of universities in Poitiers, Toulouse, and Paris, at both Panthéon-Assas University. He was a published author, having written manuals on constitutional and regulatory law, publications which both left their mark on generations of French legal experts. Vedel was most well known for his theory of the constitutional bases present in regulatory law, a theory that united the field of public law in France.
Go to Profile#9323
Walter Greiner
#9333
Overall Influence
1935 - 2016 (81 years)
Walter Greiner was a German theoretical physicist. His research interests lay in atomic physics, heavy ion physics, nuclear physics, elementary particle physics . He is known for his series of books in theoretical physics, particularly in Germany but also around the world.
Go to Profile#9324
Luis Vega
#9334
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Luis Vega González is a Spanish mathematician, specializing in partial differential equations. Vega graduated from the Complutense University of Madrid with a bachelor's degree in 1982 and received his doctorate in 1988 from Autonomous University of Madrid under Antonio Barba with thesis El multiplicador de Shrödinger la función maximal y los operadores de restriction. Vega was a Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago as a postdoc. He taught, as an assistant professor, until 1993 at the UAM and then at the University of the Basque Country, where he received a full professorship in 1995.
Go to Profile#9325
Dana Perino
#9335
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Dana Marie Perino is an American political commentator and author who was the 26th White House Press Secretary, under President George W. Bush from September 14, 2007, to January 20, 2009. She was the second female White House Press Secretary, after Dee Dee Myers who served during the Clinton administration.
Go to Profile#9326
Cindi Katz
#9336
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Cindi Katz , a geographer, is Professor in Environmental Psychology, Earth and Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Women's Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place and nature; children and the environment; the consequences of global economic restructuring for everyday life; the privatization of the public environment, the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination, and the intertwined spatialities of homeland and home-based security. She is known for her work on social reproduction and every...
Go to Profile#9327
Robert John Russell
#9337
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert John Russell is founder and Director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences . He is also the Ian G. Barbour Professor of Theology and Science in Residence at the Graduate Theological Union . He has written and edited extensively on possible scientific mechanisms of Christian belief.
Go to Profile#9328
Andrew Milner
#9338
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Andrew John Milner is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University. From 2014 until 2019 he was also Honorary Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2013 he was Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the Institut für Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin.
Go to Profile#9329
Eric Kaufmann
#9339
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Eric Peter Kaufmann is a Canadian professor of politics at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a specialist on Orangeism in Northern Ireland, nationalism, and political and religious demography. He has authored, co-authored, and edited multiple books on these subjects.
Go to Profile#9330
Mary Robinson
#9340
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Mary Therese Winifred Robinson is an Irish politician who was the 7th president of Ireland, serving from December 1990 to September 1997, the first woman to hold this office. Prior to her election, Robinson was a senator in between 1969 and 1989, and a councilor on Dublin Corporation from 1979 to 1983. Though briefly affiliated with the Labour Party while a senator, she became the first independent candidate to win the presidency and the first not to have had the support of Fianna Fáil. Following her time as president, Robinson became the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights fro...
Go to Profile#9331
Lee Hsien Loong
#9341
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Lee Hsien Loong is a Singaporean politician and former brigadier-general who has served as the third Prime Minister of Singapore and concurrently as the Secretary-General of the People's Action Party since 2004. He has been the Member of Parliament for the Teck Ghee division of Ang Mo Kio GRC since 1991, and previously Teck Ghee SMC between 1984 and 1991.
Go to Profile#9332
Didier Raoult
#9342
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Didier Raoult is a retired French physician and microbiologist specialising in infectious diseases. He taught about infectious diseases at the Faculty of Medicine of Aix-Marseille University , and in 1984, created the Rickettsia Unit of the university. From 2008 to 2022, Raoult was the director of the Unité de Recherche sur les Maladies Infectieuses et Tropicales Emergentes. He gained significant worldwide attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for vocally promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the disease, despite the lack of evidence for its effectiveness and the subsequent opposit...
Go to Profile#9333
Arthur E. Bryson
#9343
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (101 years)
Arthur Earl Bryson Jr. is the Paul Pigott Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University and the "father of modern optimal control theory". With Henry J. Kelley, he also pioneered an early version of the backpropagation procedure, now widely used for machine learning and artificial neural networks.
Go to Profile#9334
Barbara Aronstein Black
#9344
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Barbara Aronstein Black is an American legal scholar. Born and raised in Brooklyn. She was the first woman to serve as dean of an Ivy League law school. when she became Dean of Columbia Law School in 1986. Black is the George Wellwood Murray Professor of Legal History at Columbia.
Go to Profile#9335
Eiji Ōtsuka
#9345
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Eiji Ōtsuka is a Japanese social critic, folklorist, media theorist, and novelist. He is currently a professor at International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto. He graduated from University of Tsukuba with a degree in anthropology, women's folklore, human sacrifice and post-war manga. In addition to his work with manga he is a critic, essayist, and author of several successful non-fiction books on Japanese popular and otaku subcultures. He has written the Multiple Personality Detective Psycho and The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service manga series. One of his first animation script works was Mahō no Rouge Lipstick, an adult lolicon OVA.
Go to Profile#9336
Alfred Birnbaum
#9346
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Alfred Birnbaum is an American translator. Alfred Birnbaum was born in the United States and raised in Japan from age five. He studied at Waseda University, Tokyo, under a Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship, and has been a freelance literary and cultural translator since 1980.
Go to Profile#9337
Ales Adamovich
#9347
Overall Influence
1927 - 1994 (67 years)
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Adamovich was a Soviet Belarusian writer, screenwriter, literary critic and democratic activist. He wrote in both the Russian and Belarusian languages. Having fought as a child soldier in the Belarusian resistance during World War II, much of Adamovich's work revolved around the German occupation of Byelorussia during World War II and the Belarusian partisan movement. Among his best-known books are Khatyn and The Blockade Book. Adamovich also wrote multiple screenplays, including that of Come and See.
Go to Profile#9338
Albert Goldman
#9348
Overall Influence
1927 - 1994 (67 years)
Albert Harry Goldman was an American academic and author. Goldman wrote about the culture and personalities of the American music industry, both in books and as a contributor to magazines. He is best known for his bestselling book on Lenny Bruce and his controversial biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon.
Go to Profile#9339
Damien Broderick
#9349
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Damien Francis Broderick is an Australian science fiction and popular science writer and editor of some 74 books. His science fiction novel The Dreaming Dragons introduced the trope of the generation time machine, his The Judas Mandala contains the first appearance of the term "virtual reality" in science fiction, and his 1997 popular science book The Spike was the first to investigate the technological singularity in detail.
Go to Profile#9340
Don Henley
#9350
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Donald Hugh Henley is an American musician, and a founding member of the rock band Eagles, for whom he is the drummer and one of the lead vocalists, as well as the sole continuous member of the band. Henley sang the lead vocals on Eagles hits such as "Witchy Woman", "Desperado", "Best of My Love", "One of These Nights", "Hotel California", "Life in the Fast Lane", "Victim of Love", "The Last Resort", "The Long Run", and "Get Over It".
Go to Profile#9341
Cynthia Kenyon
#9351
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Cynthia Jane Kenyon is an American molecular biologist and biogerontologist known for her genetic dissection of aging in a widely used model organism, the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. She is the vice president of aging research at Calico Research Labs, and emeritus professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco .
Go to Profile#9342
Joe Torre
#9352
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Joseph Paul Torre is an American professional baseball executive, serving as a special assistant to the Commissioner of Baseball since 2020. He previously served in the capacity of Major League Baseball's chief baseball officer from 2011 to 2020. He is also a former player, manager and television color commentator. Torre ranks fifth all-time in MLB history with 2,326 wins as a manager. With 2,342 hits during his playing career, Torre is the only major leaguer to achieve both 2,000 hits as a player and 2,000 wins as a manager. From 1996 to 2007, he was the manager of the New York Yankees and ...
Go to Profile#9343
Kenneth D. Bailey
#9353
Overall Influence
1943 - 2009 (66 years)
Kenneth D. Bailey is an American sociologist, systems scientist and professor of sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles. Biography Bailey studied at the University of Texas at Austin. He got there a B.S. in mathematics in 1963, a M.A. in sociology in 1966 and a Ph.D. in sociology in 1968. The last four years he got an N.D.E.A. Fellowships. Summer 1967 he participated in a workshop in mathematical sociology at the Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#9344
Harry Broudy
#9354
Overall Influence
1905 - 1998 (93 years)
Harry Samuel Broudy was a Polish-born American professor of the philosophy of education. Early life and education Broudy was born in Filipów, Grodno Governorate in the Russian Empire on July 27, 1905, but his family emigrated, and moved to Milford, Massachusetts in 1912. Broudy attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, but then transferred to Boston University, where he received his bachelor's degree in German literature and philosophy in 1929. From there, he went to Harvard University and earned his master's degree and Ph.D. there , completing the doctorate in 1935. Hi...
Go to Profile#9345
Rajesh Gopakumar
#9355
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Rajesh Gopakumar is an Indian theoretical physicist and the director of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bangalore, India. He was previously a professor at Harish-Chandra Research Institute in Prayagraj, India. He is known for his work on topological string theory.
Go to Profile#9346
Shania Twain
#9356
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Eilleen Regina "Shania" Twain is a Canadian singer-songwriter. She has sold over 100 million records, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time and the best-selling female artist in country music history. Her success garnered her several titles including the "Queen of Country Pop". Billboard named her as the leader of the '90s country-pop crossover stars.
Go to Profile#9347
Farah Mendlesohn
#9357
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Farah Jane Mendlesohn is a British academic historian, writer on speculative fiction, and active member of science fiction fandom. Mendlesohn is best-known for their 2008 book Rhetorics of Fantasy, which classifies fantasy literature into four modes based on how the fantastic enters the story. Their work as editor includes the Cambridge Companions to science fiction and fantasy, collaborations with Edward James. The science fiction volume won a Hugo Award. Mendlesohn is also known for books on the history of fantasy, including Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, co-written with Michael Levy.
Go to Profile#9348
Li Zehou
#9358
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Li Zehou was a Chinese scholar of philosophy and intellectual history. He resided in the United States. He is considered an important modern scholar of Chinese history and culture whose work was central to the period known as the Chinese Enlightenment in the 1980s.
Go to Profile#9349
Wallace Smith Broecker
#9359
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Wallace "Wally" Smith Broecker was an American geochemist. He was the Newberry Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, a scientist at Columbia's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and a sustainability fellow at Arizona State University. He developed the idea of a global "conveyor belt" linking the circulation of the global ocean and made major contributions to the science of the carbon cycle and the use of chemical tracers and isotope dating in oceanography. Broecker popularized the term "global warming". He received the Crafoord Prize and the Vet...
Go to Profile#9350
Sydney Lamb
#9360
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Sydney MacDonald Lamb is an American linguist and professor at Rice University, whose stratificational grammar is a significant alternative theory to Chomsky's transformational grammar. He has specialized in Neurocognitive Linguistics and a stratificational approach to language understanding.
Go to Profile