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
#951
Peter Woit
#951
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Peter Woit is an American theoretical physicist. He is a senior lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Woit, a critic of string theory, has published a book Not Even Wrong and writes a blog of the same name.
Go to Profile#952
Jack W. Szostak
#952
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Jack William Szostak is a Canadian American biologist of Polish British descent, Nobel Prize laureate, University Professor at the University of Chicago, former Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Szostak has made significant contributions to the field of genetics. His achievement helped scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and to develop techniques for manipulating genes. His research findings in this area are also instrumental to the Human Genome Project. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W.
Go to Profile#953
John Hick
#953
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
John Harwood Hick was a philosopher of religion and theologian born in England who taught in the United States for the larger part of his career. In philosophical theology, he made contributions in the areas of theodicy, eschatology, and Christology, and in the philosophy of religion he contributed to the areas of epistemology of religion and religious pluralism.
Go to Profile#954
Ulric Neisser
#954
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Ulric Richard Gustav Neisser was a German-American psychologist, Cornell University professor, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been referred to as the "father of cognitive psychology". Neisser researched and wrote about perception and memory. He posited that a person's mental processes could be measured and subsequently analyzed. In 1967, Neisser published Cognitive Psychology, which he later said was considered an attack on behaviorist psychological paradigms. Cognitive Psychology brought Neisser instant fame and recognition in the field of psychology. While Cogniti...
Go to Profile#955
Michael Kors
#955
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Michael David Kors is an American fashion designer. He is the chief creative officer of his brand, Michael Kors, which sells men's and women's ready-to-wear, accessories, watches, jewelry, footwear, and fragrance. Kors was the first women's ready-to-wear designer for the French house Celine, from 1997 to 2003. On January 2, 2019, Michael Kors Holdings Limited officially changed its name to Capri Holdings Limited . Michael Kors, Jimmy Choo, and Versace are the three founder-led brands under Capri Holdings Limited.
Go to Profile#956
David Cameron
#956
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
David William Donald Cameron, Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton, is a British politician who has served as Foreign Secretary since 2023. He previously served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2010 to 2016, as Leader of the Conservative Party from 2005 to 2016, and as Leader of the Opposition from 2005 to 2010, while serving as Member of Parliament for Witney from 2001 to 2016. He identifies as a one-nation conservative and has been associated with both economically liberal and socially liberal policies.
Go to Profile#957
J. M. Coetzee
#957
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John Maxwell Coetzee FRSL OMG is a South African and Australian novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is one of the most critically acclaimed and decorated authors in the English language. He has won the Booker Prize , the CNA Literary Award , the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina étranger, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and holds a number of other awards and honorary doctorates.
Go to Profile#958
Martin Feldstein
#958
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Martin Stuart Feldstein was an American economist. He was the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and the president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research . He served as president and chief executive officer of the NBER from 1978 to 2008 . From 1982 to 1984, Feldstein served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan . Feldstein was also a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body the Group of Thirty from 2003.
Go to Profile#959
Hans-Ulrich Wehler
#959
Overall Influence
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
Hans-Ulrich Wehler was a German left-liberal historian known for his role in promoting social history through the "Bielefeld School", and for his critical studies of 19th-century Germany. Life Wehler was born in Freudenberg, Westphalia. He studied history and sociology in Cologne, Bonn and, on a Fulbright scholarship, at Ohio University in the United States; working for six months as a welder and a truck driver in Los Angeles. He took his PhD in 1960 under Theodor Schieder at the University of Cologne. His dissertation examined social democracy and the nation state and the question of nationality in Germany between 1840 and 1914.
Go to Profile#960
Whitfield Diffie
#960
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie , ForMemRS, is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.
Go to Profile#961
Peter Tatchell
#961
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Peter Gary Tatchell is an Australian-born British human rights campaigner, best known for his work with LGBTQI+ social movements. Tatchell was selected as the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate for Bermondsey in 1981. He was then denounced by party leader Michael Foot for ostensibly supporting extra-Parliamentary action against the Thatcher government. Labour subsequently allowed him to stand in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election in February 1983, in which the party lost the seat to the Liberals. In the 1990s he campaigned for LGBT rights through the direct action group OutRage!, which he co-founded.
Go to Profile#962
David Gorski
#962
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
David Henry Gorski is an American surgical oncologist and professor of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine. He specializes in breast cancer surgery at the Karmanos Cancer Institute. Gorski is an outspoken skeptic and critic of alternative medicine and the anti-vaccination movement. A prolific blogger, he writes as Orac at Respectful Insolence, and as himself at Science-Based Medicine where he is the managing editor.
Go to Profile#963
William Alfred Fowler
#963
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
William Alfred Fowler was an American nuclear physicist, later astrophysicist, who, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is known for his theoretical and experimental research into nuclear reactions within stars and the energy elements produced in the process and was one of the authors of the influential BFH paper.
Go to Profile#964
Irving Kristol
#964
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Irving Kristol was an American journalist who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism". As a founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual and political culture of the latter half of the twentieth century. After his death, he was described by The Daily Telegraph as being "perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the century".
Go to Profile#965
Ernst Gombrich
#965
Overall Influence
1909 - 2001 (92 years)
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936, became a naturalised British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom.
Go to Profile#966
Vladimir Vapnik
#966
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik is a computer scientist, researcher, and academic. He is one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory of statistical learning and the co-inventor of the support-vector machine method and support-vector clustering algorithms.
Go to Profile#967
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
#967
Overall Influence
1921 - 2021 (100 years)
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh , was the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. As such, he was the consort of the British monarch from Elizabeth's accession on 6 February 1952 until his death in 2021, making him the longest-serving royal consort in history.
Go to Profile#968
Menachem Mendel Schneerson
#968
Overall Influence
1902 - 1994 (92 years)
Menachem Mendel Schneerson , known to adherents of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement as the Lubavitcher Rebbe or simply the Rebbe, was an Orthodox rabbi and the most recent Rebbe of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty. He is considered one of the most influential Jewish leaders of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#969
John Hopcroft
#969
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John Edward Hopcroft is an American theoretical computer scientist. His textbooks on theory of computation and data structures are regarded as standards in their fields. He is the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science at Cornell University, Co-Director of the Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies at Peking University, and the Director of the John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Go to Profile#970
Arthur Danto
#970
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Arthur Coleman Danto was an American art critic, philosopher, and professor at Columbia University. He was best known for having been a long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he contributed significantly to a number of fields, including the philosophy of action. His interests included thought, feeling, philosophy of art, theories of representation, philosophical psychology, Hegel's aesthetics, and the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Go to Profile#971
Peter Checkland
#971
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Peter Checkland is a British management scientist and emeritus professor of systems at Lancaster University. He is the developer of soft systems methodology : a methodology based on a way of systems thinking systems practice. Systems practice is the idea of uncovering an optimal solution within complex environments, thus leading to a thorough understanding of the system, analysing and adapting to change in the environment. In an important way his work preceded data science and change management disciplines in the next century.
Go to Profile#972
Rick Riordan
#972
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Richard Russell Riordan Jr. is an American author, best known for writing the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. Riordan's books have been translated into forty-two languages and sold more than thirty million copies in the United States. 20th Century Fox adapted the first two books of his Percy Jackson series as part of a series of films, while a Disney+ adaptation is in production. His books have spawned related media, such as graphic novels and short story collections.
Go to Profile#973
George Steiner
#973
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Francis George Steiner, FBA was a Franco-American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist and educator. He wrote extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, as well as the impact of the Holocaust. A 2001 article in The Guardian described Steiner as a "polyglot and polymath".
Go to Profile#974
Mike Leigh
#974
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Mike Leigh is an English writer-director with a career spanning film, theatre and television. He has received numerous accolades, including prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, the Venice International Film Festival, three BAFTA Awards, and nominations for seven Academy Awards. He also received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2014, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1993 Birthday Honours for services to the film industry.
Go to Profile#975
Walter Burkert
#975
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Walter Burkert was a German scholar of Greek mythology and cult. A professor of classics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, he taught in the UK and the US. He has influenced generations of students of religion since the 1960s, combining in the modern way the findings of archaeology and epigraphy with the work of poets, historians, and philosophers. He was a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#976
Edmund Phelps
#976
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Edmund Strother Phelps is an American economist and the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Early in his career, he became known for his research at Yale's Cowles Foundation in the first half of the 1960s on the sources of economic growth. His demonstration of the golden rule savings rate, a concept related to work by John von Neumann, started a wave of research on how much a nation should spend on present consumption rather than save and invest for future generations.
Go to Profile#977
Quentin Skinner
#977
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner is a British intellectual historian. He is regarded as one of the founders of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. He has won numerous prizes for his work, including the Wolfson History Prize in 1979 and the Balzan Prize in 2006. Between 1996 and 2008 he was Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He is the Emeritus Professor of the Humanities and Co-director of The Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary University of London.
Go to Profile#978
Pascal Boyer
#978
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Pascal Robert Boyer is an American cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist of French origin, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambridge for eight years, before taking up the position of Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches classes on evolutionary psychology and anthropology. He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Lyon, France. He studied philosophy and anthropolo...
Go to Profile#979
Cumrun Vafa
#979
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Cumrun Vafa is an Iranian-American theoretical physicist and the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University. Early life and education Cumrun Vafa was born in Tehran, Iran on 1 August 1960. He became interested in physics as a young child, specifically how the moon was not falling from the sky, and he later grew his interests in math by high school and was fascinated by how mathematics could predict the movement of objects.
Go to Profile#980
Nevill Francis Mott
#980
Overall Influence
1905 - 1996 (91 years)
Sir Nevill Francis Mott was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 for his work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, especially amorphous semiconductors. The award was shared with Philip W. Anderson and J. H. Van Vleck. The three had conducted loosely related research. Mott and Anderson clarified the reasons why magnetic or amorphous materials can sometimes be metallic and sometimes insulating.
Go to Profile#981
Ashley Montagu
#981
Overall Influence
1905 - 1999 (94 years)
Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu was a British-American anthropologist who popularized the study of topics such as race and gender and their relation to politics and development. He was the rapporteur, in 1950, for the UNESCO "statement on race".
Go to Profile#982
Angus Deaton
#982
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#983
Luciano Floridi
#983
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
#984
Lionel Messi
#984
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Lionel Andrés Messi , also known as Leo Messi, is an Argentine professional footballer who plays as a forward for and captains both Major League Soccer club Inter Miami and the Argentina national team. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, Messi has won a record eight Ballon d'Or awards and a record six European Golden Shoes, and in 2020 he was named to the Ballon d'Or Dream Team. Until leaving the club in 2021, he had spent his entire professional career with Barcelona, where he won a club-record 34 trophies, including ten La Liga titles, seven Copa del Rey titles and the UEFA Champions League four times.
Go to Profile#985
Vincent Bugliosi
#985
Overall Influence
1934 - 2015 (81 years)
Vincent T. Bugliosi Jr. was an American prosecutor and author who served as Deputy District Attorney for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office between 1964 and 1972. He became best known for successfully prosecuting Charles Manson and other defendants accused of the Tate–LaBianca murders that took place between August 9 and August 10, 1969.
Go to Profile#986
Geoffrey Bennington
#986
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Geoffrey Bennington is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University in Georgia, United States, and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, as well as a member of the International College of Philosophy in Paris. He is a literary critic and philosopher, best known as an expert on deconstruction and the works of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. Bennington has translated many of Derrida's works into English.
Go to Profile#987
Jon Krakauer
#987
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jon Krakauer is an American writer and mountaineer. He is the author of bestselling non-fiction books—Into the Wild; Into Thin Air; Under the Banner of Heaven; and Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman—as well as numerous magazine articles. He was a member of an ill-fated expedition to summit Mount Everest in 1996, one of the deadliest disasters in the history of climbing Everest.
Go to Profile#988
John Barth
#988
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
John Simmons Barth is an American writer who is best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include The Sot-Weed Factor, a whimsical retelling of Maryland's colonial history, Giles Goat-Boy, a satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world, and Lost in the Funhouse, a self-referential and experimental collection of short stories. He was co-recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.
Go to Profile#989
Jaegwon Kim
#989
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Jaegwon Kim was one of the most influential philosophers during his lifetime. His work has had a profound impact on a wide range of fields, including philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. Kim was also a highly respected thinker within the Korean philosophical tradition.
Go to Profile#990
Marija Gimbutas
#990
Overall Influence
1921 - 1994 (73 years)
Marija Gimbutas was a Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.
Go to Profile#991
Garry Wills
#991
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Garry Wills is an American author, journalist, political philosopher, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993.
Go to Profile#992
Avram Hershko
#992
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Avram Hershko is a Hungarian-Israeli biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004. Biography He was born Herskó Ferenc in Karcag, Hungary, into a Jewish family, the son of Shoshana/Margit 'Manci' and Moshe Hershko, both teachers. During the Second World War, his father was forced into labor service in the Hungarian army and then taken as a prisoner by the Soviet Army. For years, Avram's family didn't known anything about what had happened to his father. Avram, his mother and older brother were put in a ghetto in Szolnok. During the final days of the ghetto, most Jews were sen...
Go to Profile#993
Leonid Levin
#993
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Leonid Anatolievich Levin is a Soviet-American mathematician and computer scientist. He is known for his work in randomness in computing, algorithmic complexity and intractability, average-case complexity, foundations of mathematics and computer science, algorithmic probability, theory of computation, and information theory. He obtained his master's degree at Moscow University in 1970 where he studied under Andrey Kolmogorov and completed the Candidate Degree academic requirements in 1972.
Go to Profile#994
Mark Granovetter
#994
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
#995
Girish Karnad
#995
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Girish Karnad was an Indian actor, film director, Kannada writer, playwright and a Jnanpith awardee, who predominantly worked in Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi films. His rise as a playwright in the 1960s marked the coming of age of modern Indian playwriting in Kannada, just as Badal Sarkar did in Bengali, Vijay Tendulkar in Marathi, and Mohan Rakesh in Hindi. He was a recipient of the 1998 Jnanpith Award, the highest literary honour conferred in India.
Go to Profile#996
Edward O. Thorp
#996
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Edward Oakley Thorp is an American mathematics professor, author, hedge fund manager, and blackjack researcher. He pioneered the modern applications of probability theory, including the harnessing of very small correlations for reliable financial gain.
Go to Profile#997
Ben Kiernan
#997
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Benedict F. "Ben" Kiernan is an Australian-born American academic and historian who is the Whitney Griswold Professor Emeritus of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University.
Go to Profile#998
Tommaso Buscetta
#998
Overall Influence
1928 - 2000 (72 years)
Tommaso Buscetta was a powerful Italian mobster and a member of the Sicilian Mafia. He became one of the first of its members to turn informant and explain the inner workings of the organization. Buscetta participated in criminal activity in Italy, the United States and Brazil before being arrested and extradited from Brazil to Italy. He became disillusioned with the Mafia after the murders of several of his family members, and in 1984, decided to cooperate with the authorities. He provided important testimony at the 1986/87 Maxi Trial, the largest anti-Mafia trial in history. After the murde...
Go to Profile#999
Alice Walker
#999
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she was awarded for her novel The Color Purple. Over the span of her career, Walker has published seventeen novels and short story collections, twelve non-fiction works, and collections of essays and poetry.
Go to Profile#1000
Robert Christgau
#1000
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Thomas Christgau is an American music journalist and essayist. Among the most well-known and influential music critics, he began his career in the late 1960s as one of the earliest professional rock critics and later became an early proponent of musical movements such as hip hop, riot grrrl, and the import of African popular music in the West. Christgau spent 37 years as the chief music critic and senior editor for The Village Voice, during which time he created and oversaw the annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. He has also covered popular music for Esquire, Creem, Newsday, Playboy, Rolli...
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