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
#9401
Nick Cave
#9411
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Nicholas Edward Cave is an Australian musician, writer and actor. Known for his baritone voice and for fronting the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cave's music is characterised by emotional intensity, a wide variety of influences and lyrical obsessions with death, religion, love and violence.
Go to Profile#9402
Murat Belge
#9412
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Murat Belge is a Turkish academic, translator, literary critic, columnist, civil rights activist, and occasional tour guide. Career Belge was a member of the organizing committee for a two-day academic conference that started on 24 September 2005, held at Istanbul Bilgi University in Istanbul, titled "Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy". The conference offered an open dispute of the official Turkish account of the Armenian genocide, and was denounced by nationalists as treacherous.
Go to Profile#9403
Neil Gross
#9413
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Neil Louis Gross is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology and chair of the department of sociology at Colby College. He is also a visiting scholar of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. He has written several books on sociological and political topics, and also blogs for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Gross edited the American Sociological Association's journal Sociological Theory from 2009 to 2015. He previously taught at the University of Southern California, Harvard University, Princeton University, and at the University of British Columbia.
Go to Profile#9404
Peter Cosgrove
#9414
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
General Sir Peter John Cosgrove, is an Australian retired senior Army officer who served as the 26th governor-general of Australia, in office from 2014 to 2019. A graduate of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, Cosgrove fought in the Vietnam War, receiving the Military Cross in 1971. From 1983 to 1984, he was commander of the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, and he later served as commander of the 6th Brigade and the 1st Division. Cosgrove rose to prominence in 1999, when he served as commander of the International Force for East Timor , which oversaw the peacekeeping mission in East Timor during its transition to independence.
Go to Profile#9405
D. J. Enright
#9415
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
Dennis Joseph Enright OBE FRSL was a British academic, poet, novelist and critic. He authored Academic Year , Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor and a wide range of essays, reviews, anthologies, children's books and poems.
Go to Profile#9406
Erdem Başçı
#9416
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Erdem Başçı is a Turkish economist and the former Governor of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey in 2010s. Early life He was born in 1966 in Ankara. After finishing the high school at TED Ankara College in 1983, Erdem Başçı was educated in electrical engineering at the Middle East Technical University , and graduated 1987 with a bachelor's degree. He received master's degrees in 1989 in business administration, and in 1990 in economics from Bilkent University, and in 1993 in economics from the Johns Hopkins University. In 1995, Erdem Başçı earned a PhD degree in economics from Bilkent...
Go to Profile#9407
Jeff Jarrett
#9417
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Jeffrey Leonard Jarrett is an American professional wrestler and promoter. He is currently signed to All Elite Wrestling , where he also serves as Director of Business Development. Beginning his career in his father Jerry Jarrett's Continental Wrestling Association in 1986, Jarrett first came to prominence upon debuting with a country music star gimmick in the World Wrestling Federation in 1993. Over the next nine years, he alternated between the WWF and its main competitor, World Championship Wrestling . After WCW was purchased by the WWF in 2001, Jarrett joined the upstart World Wrestling All-Stars promotion.
Go to Profile#9408
Alasdair Gray
#9418
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Alasdair James Gray was a Scottish writer and artist. His first novel, Lanark , is seen as a landmark of Scottish fiction. He published novels, short stories, plays, poetry and translations, and wrote on politics and the history of English and Scots literature. His works of fiction combine realism, fantasy, and science fiction with the use of his own typography and illustrations, and won several awards.
Go to Profile#9409
Wojciech H. Zurek
#9419
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Wojciech Hubert Zurek is a theoretical physicist and a leading authority on quantum theory, especially decoherence and non-equilibrium dynamics of symmetry breaking and resulting defect generation .
Go to Profile#9410
Earl Lovelace
#9420
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Earl Wilbert Lovelace is a Trinidadian novelist, journalist, playwright, and short story writer. He is particularly recognized for his descriptive, dramatic fiction on Trinidadian culture: "Using Trinidadian dialect patterns and standard English, he probes the paradoxes often inherent in social change as well as the clash between rural and urban cultures." As Bernardine Evaristo notes, "Lovelace is unusual among celebrated Caribbean writers in that he has always lived in Trinidad. Most writers leave to find support for their literary endeavours elsewhere and this, arguably, shapes the literature, especially after long periods of exile.
Go to Profile#9411
George Batchelor
#9421
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
George Keith Batchelor FRS was an Australian applied mathematician and fluid dynamicist. He was for many years a Professor of Applied Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, and was founding head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics . In 1956 he founded the influential Journal of Fluid Mechanics which he edited for some forty years. Prior to Cambridge he studied at Melbourne High School and University of Melbourne.
Go to Profile#9412
Douglas Wilson
#9422
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Douglas James Wilson is a conservative Reformed and evangelical theologian, pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, faculty member at New Saint Andrews College, and author and speaker. Wilson is known for his writing on classical Christian education, Reformed theology, as well as general cultural commentary. His most controversial work is Southern Slavery, As It Was, which he coauthored with Steve Wilkins. He is also featured in the documentary film Collision documenting his debates with anti-theist Christopher Hitchens on their promotional tour for the book Is Christianity Good for the Wor...
Go to Profile#9413
Ian Foster
#9423
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ian Tremere Foster is a New Zealand-American computer scientist. He is a distinguished fellow, senior scientist, and director of the Data Science and Learning division at Argonne National Laboratory, and a professor in the department of computer science at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#9414
James Garner
#9424
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
James Scott Garner was an American actor. He played leading roles in more than 50 theatrical films, which included The Great Escape with Steve McQueen; Paddy Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily with Julie Andrews; Cash McCall with Natalie Wood; The Wheeler Dealers with Lee Remick; Darby's Rangers with Stuart Whitman; Roald Dahl's 36 Hours with Eva Marie Saint; Raymond Chandler's Marlowe with Bruce Lee; Support Your Local Sheriff! with Walter Brennan; Blake Edwards's Victor/Victoria with Julie Andrews; and Murphy's Romance with Sally Field, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.
Go to Profile#9415
Andreas Grünschloß
#9425
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Andreas Gruenschloss is a German scholar and the current Professor of Religious Studies at University of Göttingen. An ordained Protestant pastor, he is the author of books and scholarly articles about interfaith matters and new religious movements. He publishes both in German and in English and is a co-editor of the Marburg Journal of Religion.
Go to Profile#9416
Jeffrey Snover
#9426
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jeffrey Snover is a Distinguished Engineer at Google. Previously a Microsoft Technical Fellow, PowerShell Chief Architect, and the Chief Architect for Windows Server and the Azure Infrastructure and Management group which includes Azure Stack, System Center and Operations Management Suite. Snover is the inventor of Windows PowerShell, an object-based distributed automation engine, scripting language, and command line shell and was the chief architect for Windows Server.
Go to Profile#9417
Amin Maalouf
#9427
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese-born French author who has lived in France since 1976. Although his native language is Arabic, he writes in French, and his works have been translated into over 40 languages.
Go to Profile#9418
Kenneth V. Thimann
#9428
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
Kenneth Vivian Thimann was an English-American plant physiologist and microbiologist known for his studies of plant hormones, which were widely influential in agriculture and horticulture. He isolated and determined the structure of auxin, the first known plant hormone. He spent most of his early career at Harvard University, and his later career at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Go to Profile#9419
Omid Djalili
#9429
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Omid Djalili is an Iranian-British actor, comedian, and writer. Early life and education Djalili was born on 30 September 1965 in Chelsea, London, to Iranian Baháʼí parents. He attended Holland Park School where he failed A-level exams a record six times and faked his results to gain entry to Ulster University in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, studying English and theatre studies having been turned down by 16 drama schools.
Go to Profile#9420
Eric J. Barron
#9430
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Eric James Barron is an American academic administrator who was the 18th president of Pennsylvania State University from 2014 until 2022. He previously was the 14th president of Florida State University and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Go to Profile#9421
Miroslav Volf
#9431
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Miroslav Volf is a Croatian Protestant theologian and public intellectual and Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology and director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale University. He previously taught at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in his native Osijek, Croatia and Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California .
Go to Profile#9422
Jitendra Malik
#9432
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Jitendra Malik is an Indian-American academic who is the Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his research in computer vision.
Go to Profile#9423
Barbara Engelhardt
#9433
Overall Influence
Barbara Elizabeth Engelhardt is an American computer scientist and specialist in bioinformatics. Working as a Professor at Stanford University, her work has focused on latent variable models, exploratory data analysis for genomic data, and QTLs. In 2021, she was awarded the Overton Prize by the International Society for Computational Biology.
Go to Profile#9424
Kendall Thomas
#9434
Overall Influence
Kendall Thomas is Nash Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture, at Columbia Law School. Biography Kendall Thomas did his J.D. at Yale University's Law School in 1983 after having obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Yale in 1978.
Go to Profile#9425
Simon White
#9435
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Simon David Manton White , FRS, is a British astrophysicist. He was one of directors at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics before his retirement in late 2019. Life White studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge in the University of Cambridge and Astronomy at the University of Toronto . In 1977 he obtained a doctorate in Astronomy under Donald Lynden-Bell entitled "The Clustering of Galaxies" at the University of Cambridge. After a few years at the University of California, Berkeley, the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona and the University of Cambridge he was appoi...
Go to Profile#9426
Dines Bjørner
#9436
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Professor Dines Bjørner is a Danish computer scientist. He specializes in research into domain engineering, requirements engineering and formal methods. He worked with Cliff Jones and others on the Vienna Development Method at IBM Laboratory Vienna . Later he was involved with producing the RAISE formal method with tool support.
Go to Profile#9427
Paul Chemetov
#9437
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Paul Chemetov is a French architect and urbanist. He is best known for his collaborations with Borja Huidobro. Biography Chemetov was born in Paris on 6 September 1928. As a student, he belonged to the Union of Communist Students. He graduated from the National School of Fine Arts in 1959. Chemetov taught at the École des Ponts ParisTech until 1989, at which time he switched to the . In 1961, he joined the AAU. He has designed several buildings with Borja Huidobro since 1983. Chemetov has received several awards and honors including the Grand prix national de l'architecture , Officer of the Legion of Honour, Officer of the , and Officer of the .
Go to Profile#9428
Slash
#9438
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Saul Hudson , known professionally as Slash, is a British-American musician who serves as the lead guitarist of the hard rock band Guns N' Roses, with whom he achieved worldwide success in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Slash has received critical acclaim and is considered one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
Go to Profile#9429
Beno Eckmann
#9439
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Beno Eckmann was a Swiss mathematician who made contributions to algebraic topology, homological algebra, group theory, and differential geometry. Life Born in Bern, Eckmann received his master's degree from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich in 1939. Later, he studied there under Heinz Hopf, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1941. Eckmann was the 2008 recipient of the Albert Einstein Medal.
Go to Profile#9430
Walter W. Powell
#9440
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Walter W. Powell , born August 15, 1951, is a contemporary American sociologist. Powell is Professor of Education, Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication at Stanford University and the Stanford Graduate School of Education since 1999 and is known for his contributions to organizational theory, in particular to the new institutionalism and network theory. Since 2000, he has been an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute.
Go to Profile#9431
Pierre Chaunu
#9441
Overall Influence
1923 - 2009 (86 years)
Pierre Chaunu was a French historian. His specialty was Latin American history; he also studied French social and religious history of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. A leading figure in French quantitative history as the founder of "serial history", he was professor emeritus at Paris IV-Sorbonne, a member of the Institut de France, and a commander of the Légion d'Honneur. A convert to Protestantism from Roman Catholicism, he defended his far-right views most notably in a longtime column in Le Figaro and on Radio Courtoisie.
Go to Profile#9432
Jerry Lawler
#9442
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jerry O'Neil Lawler , better known as Jerry "the King" Lawler, is an American color commentator and professional wrestler. He is currently signed to WWE, although he has not performed as a full-time commentator since April 2020.
Go to Profile#9433
James Durbin
#9443
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
James Durbin FBA was a British statistician and econometrician, known particularly for his work on time series analysis and serial correlation. Education The son of a greengrocer, Durbin was born in Widnes, where he attended the Wade Deacon Grammar School. He studied mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge, where his contemporaries included David Cox and Denis Sargan. After wartime service in the Army Operational Research Group, he worked as a statistician for two years with the British Boot, Shoe and Allied Trades Research Association and took a postgraduate diploma in mathematical stat...
Go to Profile#9434
Digby Smith
#9444
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Digby Smith is a British military historian. The son of a British career soldier, he was born in Hampshire, England, but spent several years in India and Pakistan as a child and youth. As a "boy soldier", he entered training in the British Army at the age of 16. He was later commissioned in the Royal Corps of Signals, and held several postings with the British Army of the Rhine.
Go to Profile#9435
James Gowan
#9445
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
James Gowan was a Scottish-born architect known for his post-modernist designs of the "engineering style" which influenced a generation of British architects. Life Gowan was born in Pollokshields, Glasgow in 1923. He was brought up by his grandparents in Partick after his parents' separation, but went to live with his mother aged 12 and attended Hyndland Secondary School. He studied architecture at the Glasgow School of Art before joining the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He was stationed in Palestine as a radar operator. After the war, he moved to London and completed his studies at Kingston School of Architecture.
Go to Profile#9436
Herbert Schiller
#9446
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Herbert Irving Schiller was an American media critic, sociologist, author, and scholar. He earned his PhD in 1960 from New York University. Schiller warned of two major trends in his prolific writings and speeches: the private takeover of public space and public institutions at home, and U.S. corporate domination of cultural life abroad, especially in the developing nations. His eight books and hundreds of articles in both scholarly and popular journals made him a key figure both in communication research and in the public debate over the role of the media in modern society. He was widely kn...
Go to Profile#9437
Derek McAuley
#9447
Overall Influence
Derek Robert McAuley FREng is a British academic who is Professor of Digital Economy in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham and director of Horizon Digital Economy Research, an interdisciplinary research institute funded through the RCUK Digital Economy programme. He acted as a Specialist Advisor to the House of Lords European Union Committee into online platforms, and Chief Innovation Officer during the founding of the Digital Catapult. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and member of the UKCRC, a computing research expert panel of the Institution of ...
Go to Profile#9438
Gilles-Éric Séralini
#9448
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Gilles-Éric Séralini is a French molecular biologist, political advisor and activist on genetically modified organisms and foods. He is of Algerian-French origin. Séralini has been a professor of molecular biology at the University of Caen since 1991, and is president and chairman of the board of CRIIGEN.
Go to Profile#9439
Nathan Lewis
#9449
Overall Influence
Nathan S. Lewis is the George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology . He specializes in functionalization of silicon and other semiconductor surfaces, chemical sensing using chemiresistive sensor arrays, and alternative energy and artificial photosynthesis.
Go to Profile#9440
George C. Rable
#9450
Overall Influence
George C. Rable is an American historian and author. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Alabama. He received the Lincoln Prize in 2003 for his 2002 book Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Education He received a bachelor of arts degree from Bluffton College in 1972 and a Master of Arts degree from Louisiana State University in 1973. He received his doctoral degree from Louisiana State University in 1978.
Go to Profile#9441
Raghunath Anant Mashelkar
#9451
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Raghunath Anant Mashelkar, , also known as Ramesh Mashelkar, is an Indian Chemical Engineer, born in a village named Marcel in Goa and brought up in Maharashtra. He is a former Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research . He was also the President of Indian National Science Academy , President of Institution of Chemical Engineers as also the President of Global Research Alliance . He was also first Chairperson of Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research . He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering , Foreign associate of US ...
Go to Profile#9442
Emir Sader
#9452
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Emir Simão Sader is a Brazilian sociologist and political scientist of Lebanese origin. Biography Sader received all his higher education credentials from the University of São Paulo. He did his bachelor's degree in philosophy, his master's degree in political philosophy and his doctoral degree in political science. He also worked at the University of São Paulo as a professor of philosophy and later of political science. He also worked as a professor of political science at University of Campinas in Brazil and as a researcher at the Center for Socioeconomic Studies at the University of Chile....
Go to Profile#9443
Caroline Wozniacki
#9453
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Caroline Wozniacki is a Danish professional tennis player. She was ranked world No. 1 in singles for a total of 71 weeks, including at the end of 2010 and 2011. She achieved the top ranking for the first time on 11 October 2010, becoming the 20th player in the Open Era and the first from a Scandinavian country to hold the top position. In 2018, she became the first Dane to win a major singles title, at the Australian Open.
Go to Profile#9444
Geoffrey Hosking
#9454
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Geoffrey Alan Hosking is a British historian of Russia and the Soviet Union and formerly Leverhulme Research Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College, London. He also co-founded Nightline.
Go to Profile#9445
George M. Sheldrick
#9455
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
George Michael Sheldrick, FRS is a British chemist who specialises in molecular structure determination. He is one of the most cited workers in the field, having over 280,000 citations as of 2020 and an h-index of 113. He was a professor at the University of Göttingen from 1978 until his retirement in 2011.
Go to Profile#9446
Donald J. Boudreaux
#9456
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Donald Joseph Boudreaux is an American economist, author, professor, and co-director of the Program on the American Economy and Globalization at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
Go to Profile#9447
Semih Tezcan
#9457
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Semih Tezcan is a Turkish academic. He graduated from Istanbul Technical University Faculty of Civil engineering in 1954. In 1962, he went to Canada, and joined University of British Columbia as an assistant professor.
Go to Profile#9448
Howie Hawkins
#9458
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Howard Gresham Hawkins III is an American trade unionist, environmental activist, and perennial candidate from New York. A co-founder of the Green Party of the United States, Hawkins was the party's presidential nominee in the 2020 presidential election. His ideological platform includes enacting an eco-socialist version of the Green New Deal—which he first proposed in 2010—and building a viable, independent working-class political and social movement in opposition to the country's two major political parties, and capitalism in general.
Go to Profile#9449
Fran Tarkenton
#9459
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Francis Asbury Tarkenton is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 18 seasons, primarily with the Minnesota Vikings. He played college football at the University of Georgia, where he was recognized as a twice first-team All-SEC, and was selected by the Vikings in the third round of the 1961 NFL Draft. After retiring from football, he became a media personality and computer software executive.
Go to Profile#9450
Robert L. Carroll
#9460
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Robert "Bob" Lynn Carroll was an American–Canadian vertebrate paleontologist who specialised in Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians and reptiles. Biography Carroll was an only child and grew up on a farm near Lansing, Michigan. He was introduced to paleontology by his father shortly after his fifth birthday, and by the time he was eight he had decided he wanted to be a vertebrate paleontologist. In that same year he received as a Christmas present the left femur of an Allosaurus, courtesy of Edwin H. Colbert, whom his father had told about his interest. In his teen years his parents took him...
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