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
#9351
Gérard Granel
#9361
Overall Influence
1930 - 2000 (70 years)
Gérard Granel was a French philosopher and translator. Life and work Born in Paris, Granel attended the lycée Louis-le-Grand and the courses of Michel Alexandre, Jean Hyppolite and, later, of Louis Althusser and Jean Beaufret. He taught in Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Aix, before being appointed professor of philosophy at the Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail, a position he held from 1972 until his death.
Go to Profile#9352
Peter Balakian
#9362
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Peter Balakian is an Armenian-American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller . Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Dir...
Go to Profile#9353
Matt Selman
#9363
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Matt Selman is an American writer and producer. Early life Selman is a native of Watertown, Massachusetts. He graduated from Beaver Country Day School in 1989 and the University of Pennsylvania in 1993.
Go to Profile#9354
Louis Feldman
#9364
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Louis Harry Feldman was an American professor of classics and literature. He was the Abraham Wouk Family Professor of Classics and Literature at Yeshiva University, the institution at which he taught since 1955.
Go to Profile#9355
Jerome Busemeyer
#9365
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jerome Robert Busemeyer is a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University Bloomington in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Cognitive Science Program. Busemeyer completed his undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Cincinnati in 1973, which he followed with both a masters and Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of South Carolina in 1976 and 1979 respectively. He was a NIMH post doctoral fellow in the Quantitative program at University of Illinois until 1980. Afterwards, he became a faculty member at Purdue University until 1997, and then he joined the faculty at Indiana University-Bloomington.
Go to Profile#9356
Franklin Allen
#9366
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Franklin Allen, is a British economist and academic. Since 2014, he has been professor of finance and economics, and executive director of the Brevan Howard Centre at Imperial College London. He was the Nippon Life Professor of Finance and Economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is most active in the research areas of financial innovations, asset price bubbles, the comparison of financial systems, and financial crises.
Go to Profile#9357
Hiroshi Sugimoto
#9367
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer and architect. He leads the Tokyo-based architectural firm New Material Research Laboratory. Early life and education Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. He reportedly took his earliest photographs in high school, photographing film footage of Audrey Hepburn as it played in a movie theater. In 1970, Sugimoto studied politics and sociology at Rikkyō University in Tokyo. In 1974, he retrained as an artist and received his BFA in Fine Arts at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. Afterwards, Sugimoto settled in New York City.
Go to Profile#9358
Leon Glass
#9368
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Leon Glass is an American scientist who has studied various aspects of the application of mathematical and physical methods to biology, with special interest in vision, cardiac arrhythmia, and genetic networks.
Go to Profile#9359
Jon Favreau
#9369
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Jonathan Edward Favreau is an American political commentator, podcaster, and the former director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama. Favreau attended the College of the Holy Cross, where he participated in community and civic programs, graduating as valedictorian. After graduation, he went to work for the John Kerry presidential campaign in 2004, working to collect talk radio news for the campaign and was promoted to the role of Deputy Speechwriter. Favreau first met Barack Obama, then a state senator from Illinois, while working on the Kerry campaign.
Go to Profile#9360
F. Paul Wilson
#9370
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Francis Paul Wilson is an American medical doctor and author of horror, adventure, medical thrillers, science fiction, and other genres of literary fiction. His books include the Repairman Jack novels—including Ground Zero, The Tomb, and Fatal Error—the Adversary cycle—including The Keep—and a young adult series featuring the teenage Jack. Wilson has won the Prometheus Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Inkpot Award from the San Diego ComiCon, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers of America, among other honors. He lives in Wall, New Jersey.
Go to Profile#9361
William Barrett
#9371
Overall Influence
1913 - 1992 (79 years)
William Christopher Barrett was a professor of philosophy at New York University from 1950 to 1979, and later at Pace University. Biography Precociously, Barrett began post-secondary studies at the City College of New York when 15 years old. He received his PhD at Columbia University. He was an editor of Partisan Review and later the literary critic of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. Barrett wrote philosophical works for nonexperts, including Irrational Man and The Illusion of Technique, which remain in print.
Go to Profile#9362
Andrea Prader
#9372
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Andrea Prader was a Swiss scientist, physician, and pediatric endocrinologist. He co-discovered Prader–Willi syndrome and created two physiological sex development scales, the Prader scale and the orchidometer.
Go to Profile#9363
Yuri Burago
#9373
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Yuri Dmitrievich Burago is a Russian mathematician. He works in differential and convex geometry. Education and career Burago studied at Leningrad University, where he obtained his Ph.D. and Habilitation degrees. His advisors were Victor Zalgaller and Aleksandr Aleksandrov.
Go to Profile#9364
Mary Ellen Rudin
#9374
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Mary Ellen Rudin was an American mathematician known for her work in set-theoretic topology. In 2013, Elsevier established the Mary Ellen Rudin Young Researcher Award, which is awarded annually to a young researcher, mainly in fields adjacent to general topology.
Go to Profile#9365
David F. Duncan
#9375
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David F. Duncan is president of Duncan & Associates, a firm providing consultation on research design and data collection for behavioral and policy studies. He is also Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health at Brown University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#9366
Philippe Dreyfus
#9376
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Philippe Dreyfus is a French informatics pioneer. After gaining his master's degree in physics in 1950 from the École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris, he became a professor at the Informatics faculty at Harvard University using Mark I, the first automated computer ever built. In 1958 he was nominated director of the Bull Calculus Centre. In 1962 he coined the new term informatique.
Go to Profile#9367
Thomas Zurbuchen
#9377
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Thomas Hansueli Zurbuchen is a Swiss-American astrophysicist. From October 2016 until the end of 2022, he was the longest continually running Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA. Prior to this, he was Professor of Space Science and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he helped found the Center for Entrepreneurship.
Go to Profile#9368
Alexander Belavin
#9378
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Alexander "Sasha" Abramovich Belavin is a Russian physicist, known for his contributions to string theory. He is a professor at the Independent University of Moscow and а researcher at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is also a member of the editorial board of the Moscow Mathematical Journal.
Go to Profile#9369
Nina Burleigh
#9379
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Nina D. Burleigh is an American writer and investigative journalist, She writes books, articles, essays and reviews. Burleigh is a supporter of secular liberalism, and is known for her interest in issues of women's rights.
Go to Profile#9370
Alan Sherman
#9380
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Alan Theodore Sherman is a full professor of computer science at UMBC, director of the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance , and director of the UMBC Chess Program. Sherman is an editor for Cryptologia, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi.
Go to Profile#9371
Waldo R. Tobler
#9381
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Waldo Rudolph Tobler was an American-Swiss geographer and cartographer. Tobler is regarded as one of the most influential geographers and cartographers of the late 20th century and early 21st century. Tobler is most well known for his proposed idea that "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things," which has come to be referred to as the "first law of geography." He proposed a second law as well: "The phenomenon external to an area of interest affects what goes on inside."
Go to Profile#9372
S. F. C. Milsom
#9382
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Stroud Francis Charles Milsom was an English legal historian, best known for his challenge to aspects of the works of F. W. Maitland. He was Professor of Law at the University of Cambridge from 1976 to 1990 and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge from 1976 until his death. He was President of the Selden Society from 1985 to 1988.
Go to Profile#9373
Shahn Majid
#9383
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Shahn Majid is an English pure mathematician and theoretical physicist, trained at Cambridge University and Harvard University and, since 2001, a professor of mathematics at the School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London.
Go to Profile#9374
Marcel Fratzscher
#9384
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Marcel Fratzscher is a German economist and professor at Humboldt-University of Berlin. Since February 2013 he has been president of the Berlin-based economic research institute DIW Berlin. He was previously head of International Policy Analysis at the European Central Bank. He also teaches International Finance in the Ph.D. programme in Economics at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Go to Profile#9375
Jürgen Jost
#9385
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jürgen Jost is a German mathematician specializing in geometry. He has been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig since 1996. Life and work In 1975, he began studying mathematics, physics, economics and philosophy. In 1980 he received a Dr. rer. nat. from the University of Bonn under the supervision of . In 1984 he was at the University of Bonn for the habilitation. After his habilitation, he was at the Ruhr University Bochum, the chair of Mathematics X, Analysis. During this time he was the coordinator of the project "Stochastic Analysis and system...
Go to Profile#9376
Mary Jane Irwin
#9386
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Mary Jane Irwin is an Emerita Evan Pugh Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. She has been on the faculty at Penn State since 1977. She is an international expert in computer architecture. Her research and teaching interests include computer architecture, embedded and mobile computing systems design, power and reliability aware design, and emerging technologies in computing systems.
Go to Profile#9377
Toru Iwatani
#9387
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Toru Iwatani is a Japanese video game designer who spent much of his career working for Namco. He is best known as the creator of the arcade game Pac-Man . In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.
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Jim Butcher
#9388
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Jim Butcher is an American author. He has written the contemporary fantasy The Dresden Files, Codex Alera, and Cinder Spires book series. Personal life Butcher was born in Independence, Missouri, in 1971. He is the youngest of three children, having two older sisters. He has one son, James J. Butcher.
Go to Profile#9379
Michael Tye
#9389
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Michael Tye is a British philosopher who is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He has made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind. Education and career Tye completed his undergraduate education at Oxford University in England, studying first physics and then physics and philosophy. He went on to complete a PhD in philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Before moving to Texas, Tye taught at Haverford College in suburban Philadelphia and Temple University in Philadelphia proper. He was also a visiting professor at King's Co...
Go to Profile#9380
Michael Freeden
#9390
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Michael Freeden is a Professor at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is also Emeritus Professorial Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford. Between 2013 and 2015, he was Professor of Political Theory in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He is a leading theorist of ideology and the founding editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies.
Go to Profile#9381
Sugata Mitra
#9391
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sugata Mitra is an Indian computer scientist and educational theorist. He is best known for his "Hole in the Wall" experiment, and widely cited in works on literacy and education. He is Professor Emeritus at NIIT University, Rajasthan, India. A Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he retired in 2019 as Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University in England, after 13 years there including a year in 2012 as visiting professor at MIT MediaLab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He won the TED Prize 2013.
Go to Profile#9382
Dan Kaminsky
#9392
Overall Influence
1979 - 2021 (42 years)
Dan Kaminsky was born in 1979 in San Francisco, California. From an early age, he was fascinated with computers and electronics, and he had taught himself to code by age 5. By the time he was 11, his capabilities were so advanced that his family received a call from the Pentagon because he had infiltrated military computers. Kaminsky was a student at St. Ignatius High School before pursuing a degree at Santa Clara University. Kaminsky’s career in computer security was so successful that the New York Times hailed him as a “digital Paul Revere” and claimed that modern internet users owe their online safety to his work.
Go to Profile#9383
Yoky Matsuoka
#9393
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Yoky Matsuoka is the CEO and Founder of Yohana . She was the CTO of Google Nest, a co-founder of Google X and previously held roles as VP of Technology and Analytics at Twitter, technology executive at Apple, and as VP of Technology at Nest.
Go to Profile#9384
Sarah Thomason
#9394
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Sarah Grey Thomason is an American scholar of linguistics, Bernard Bloch distinguished professor emerita at the University of Michigan. She is best known for her work on language contact, historical linguistics, pidgins and creoles, Slavic Linguistics, Native American languages and typological universals. She also has an interest in debunking linguistic pseudoscience, and has collaborated with publications such as the Skeptical Inquirer, The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal and American Speech, in regard to claims of xenoglossy.
Go to Profile#9385
Shigeo Maruyama
#9395
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
is a Japanese businessman. He is best known for being the founder of Epic/Sony Records, former chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment and former CEO of Sony Music Entertainment. He is known for discovering artists such as Motoharu Sano and Tetsuya Komuro.
Go to Profile#9386
Ben Wheatley
#9396
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Benjamin Wheatley is an English filmmaker, film editor, and animator. Beginning his career in advertising, Wheatley first gained recognition and acclaim for his commercials and short films, before transitioning into feature films and television programmes. He is best known for his work in the thriller and horror genres, with his films frequently incorporating heavy elements of black comedy and satire.
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Christina Lamb
#9397
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Christina Lamb OBE is a British journalist and author. She is the chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times. Lamb has won eighteen major awards including five British Press Awards and the European Prix Bayeux-Calvados for war correspondents. She is an Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Global Fellow for the Wilson Centre for International Affairs in Washington D.C. In 2013 she was appointed an OBE by the Queen for services to journalism. In November 2018, Lamb received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the University o...
Go to Profile#9388
Robert Wald
#9398
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert M. Wald is an American theoretical physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. He studies general relativity, black holes, and quantum gravity and has written textbooks on these subjects.
Go to Profile#9389
Daniel Walker Howe
#9399
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Daniel Walker Howe is an American historian who specializes in the early national period of U.S. history, with a particular interest in its intellectual and religious dimensions. He was Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University in England and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History for What Hath God Wrought , his most famous book. He was president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in 2001, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal H...
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Kumpati S. Narendra
#9400
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Kumpati S. Narendra is an American control theorist, who currently holds the Harold W. Cheel Professorship of Electrical Engineering at Yale University. He received the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award in 2003. He is noted "for pioneering contributions to stability theory, adaptive and learning systems theory". He is also well recognized for his research work towards learning including Neural Networks and Learning Automata.
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Francis Boyle
#9401
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Francis Anthony Boyle is an American human rights lawyer and professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law. He has served as counsel for Bosnia and Herzegovina and has supported the rights of Palestinians and indigenous peoples.
Go to Profile#9392
George Novacky
#9402
Overall Influence
George A. Novacky was an Assistant Department Chair and Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, and an Assistant Dean of CAS for Undergraduate Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Education and career Novacky first received a mathematics degree from Wheeling Jesuit College in 1968. In 1971, he received his MA in mathematics followed by a PhD in mathematics in 1981. Both his MA and PhD were from University of Pittsburgh. Novacky's dissertation was Chromaticity of Extremal Graphs.
Go to Profile#9393
Rosemarie Trockel
#9403
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Rosemarie Trockel is a German conceptual artist. She has made drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos and installations, and has worked in mixed media. From 1985, she made pictures using knitting-machines. She is a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, in Düsseldorf in Nordrhein-Westfalen.
Go to Profile#9394
Hector Zagal
#9404
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Héctor Jesús Zagal Arreguín is a Mexican philosopher, essayist, novelist, and associate member of Opus Dei. As a scholar he specializes in Aristotle. Academic career Zagal has written books on ecology, ethics, Aristotle, gastronomy and literature. He obtained a PhD from the Universidad de Navarra, with a dissertation on Aristotle's epagoge and has since then written several articles and books on Aristotle. He has written on several topics of culture, politics, art history and literature. He gained notoriety in the 2006 presidential election, when he wrote two books on two respective candidates...
Go to Profile#9395
Andrew McAfee
#9405
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Andrew Paul McAfee is a principal research scientist at MIT and cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies how digital technologies are changing the world.
Go to Profile#9396
Richard Wall Lyman
#9406
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Richard Wall Lyman , the seventh president of Stanford University, was an American educator, historian, and professor. Biography An historian of the British Labour Party, Lyman spent two years at the London School of Economics in 1951 and 1952, researching for his PhD on the first Labour Government. He spent the period 1954-1958 teaching at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1957 his PhD was published as a book, entitled The First Labour Government, 1924. He joined Stanford in 1958.
Go to Profile#9397
Léon Bottou
#9407
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Léon Bottou is a researcher best known for his work in machine learning and data compression. His work presents stochastic gradient descent as a fundamental learning algorithm. He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology , and the maintainer of DjVuLibre, the open source implementation of DjVu. He is the original developer of the Lush programming language.
Go to Profile#9398
Alphonse Chapanis
#9408
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Alphonse Chapanis was an American pioneer in the field of industrial design, and is widely considered one of the fathers of ergonomics or human factors – the science of ensuring that design takes account of human characteristics.
Go to Profile#9399
Carol Folt
#9409
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Carol Lynn Folt is an American academic administrator who is the 12th president of the University of Southern California. She is also the first female president in the university’s 142-year history. She assumed her duties on July 1, 2019. She was previously the 11th chancellor, and the 29th chief executive, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the first woman to hold the post. Prior to that, she was provost and interim president of Dartmouth College. On January 14, 2019, she announced her resignation as UNC chancellor.
Go to Profile#9400
Tony Dungy
#9410
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Anthony Kevin Dungy is an American former football player and coach who served as a head coach in the National Football League for 13 seasons with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Indianapolis Colts. Dungy's teams became perennial postseason contenders under his leadership, missing the playoffs only twice with Tampa Bay. He led the Colts to victory in Super Bowl XLI over the Chicago Bears, making him the first African-American head coach to win the Super Bowl.
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