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
#9601
Richard Bader
#9611
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Richard F. W. Bader was a Canadian quantum chemist, noted for his work on the Atoms in molecules theory. This theory attempts to establish a physical basis for many of the working concepts of chemistry, such as atoms in molecules and bonding, in terms of the topology of the electron density function in three-dimensional space. Alongside the eminent chemist Ronald Gillespie, he had a significant influence on inorganic chemistry education in Canada.
Go to Profile#9602
Melvyn B. Nathanson
#9612
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Melvyn Bernard Nathanson is an American mathematician, specializing in number theory, and a Professor of Mathematics at Lehman College and The Graduate Center . His principal work is in additive and combinatorial number theory. He is the author of over 200 research papers in mathematics, and author or editor of 27 books.
Go to Profile#9603
Julius Adams Stratton
#9613
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Julius Adams Stratton was a U.S. electrical engineer, physicist, and university administrator. He attended the University of Washington for one year, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, then transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , from which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1923 and a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1926. He then followed graduate studies in Europe and the Technische Hochschule of Zürich , Switzerland, awarded him the degree of Doctor of Science in 1928.
Go to Profile#9604
John Mayer
#9614
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
John Clayton Mayer is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Born and raised in Fairfield County, Connecticut, Mayer attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, but he left and moved to Atlanta in 1997 with Clay Cook. Together, they formed a short-lived two-man band called Lo-Fi Masters. After their split, Mayer continued to play local clubs, refining his skills and gaining a following. After his appearance at the 2000 South by Southwest festival, he was signed to Aware Records, and eventually to Columbia Records, which released his first extended play Inside Wants Out. His following...
Go to Profile#9605
Ed Miliband
#9615
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Edward Samuel Miliband is a British politician serving as Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero since 2021. He has been the Member of Parliament for Doncaster North since 2005. Miliband was Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition between 2010 and 2015. Alongside his brother, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, he served in the Cabinet from 2007 to 2010 under Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Go to Profile#9606
Tony Cragg
#9616
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sir Anthony Douglas Cragg is an Anglo-German sculptor, resident in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977. Early life and training Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool. His father was an aerospace engineer. He first worked as a lab technician for the British Rubber Producers Research Association after high school. He studied art at Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology, Cheltenham, from 1968 to 1970, and painted at the Wimbledon School of Art, London, from 1970 to 1973. The same year he went on to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London, completing an MA in 1977.
Go to Profile#9607
Rose Whelan Sedgewick
#9617
Overall Influence
1903 - 2000 (97 years)
Rose Whelan Sedgewick was an American mathematician. She was the first person to earn a PhD in mathematics from Brown University, in 1929. Her subsequent career in mathematics included assistant professorships at the University of Rochester, the University of Connecticut, Hillyer College, and the University of Maryland.
Go to Profile#9608
Süreyya Serdengeçti
#9618
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Süreyya Serdengeçti is a Turkish economist and former Governor of the Central Bank of Turkey. He is currently working as a lecturer in Economics at the TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara, Turkey.
Go to Profile#9609
Huai-Dong Cao
#9619
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Huai-Dong Cao is a Chinese–American mathematician. He is the A. Everett Pitcher Professor of Mathematics at Lehigh University. He is known for his research contributions to the Ricci flow, a topic in the field of geometric analysis.
Go to Profile#9610
Abraham S. Luchins
#9620
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Abraham S. Luchins was an American Gestalt Psychologist and a pioneer of group psychotherapy. He was born in Brooklyn, New York and died in New York. Biography Luchins was a student and staff member of Max Wertheimer, the main originator of Gestalt Psychology. After Max Wertheimer fled to the US and started lecturing at the New School for Social Research, Luchins worked as his assistant and became one of his closest collaborators from 1936 till 1942. In the 1970s he and his wife Edith Hirsch published a series of transcripts and reports on Wertheimer's advanced seminars and workshops.
Go to Profile#9611
Syun-Ichi Akasofu
#9621
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Syun-Ichi Akasofu is the founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks , serving in that position from the center's establishment in 1998 until January 2007. Previously he had been director of the university's Geophysical Institute from 1986.
Go to Profile#9612
Keshav K Pingali
#9622
Overall Influence
Keshav K Pingali is an American computer scientist, currently the W.A."Tex" Moncrief Chair of Grid and Distributed Computing at the University of Texas at Austin, and also a published author. He previously also held the India Chair of Computer Science at Cornell University and also the N. Rama Rao Professorship at Indian Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Computing Machinery and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 2020, he was elected a Foreign Member of the Academia Europeana.
Go to Profile#9613
Bill Mauldin
#9623
Overall Influence
1921 - 2003 (82 years)
William Henry Mauldin was an American editorial cartoonist who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work. He was most famous for his World War II cartoons depicting American soldiers, as represented by the archetypal characters Willie and Joe, two weary and bedraggled infantry troopers who stoically endure the difficulties and dangers of duty in the field. His cartoons were popular with soldiers throughout Europe, and with civilians in the United States as well. However, his second Pulitzer Prize was for a cartoon published in 1958, and possibly his best-known cartoon was after the Kennedy assassi...
Go to Profile#9614
Peter J. Conradi
#9624
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Peter J. Conradi is a British author and academic, best known for his studies of writer and philosopher, Iris Murdoch, who was a close friend. He is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kingston and has been visiting fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, and research fellow at University College London.
Go to Profile#9615
Chris Cornell
#9625
Overall Influence
1964 - 2017 (53 years)
Christopher John Cornell was an American singer, songwriter, and musician best known as the lead vocalist, rhythm guitarist, and primary lyricist for the rock bands Soundgarden and Audioslave. He also had a solo career and contributed to numerous movie soundtracks. Cornell was the founder and frontman of Temple of the Dog, a one-off tribute band dedicated to his late friend Andrew Wood. Several music journalists, fan polls and fellow musicians have regarded Cornell as one of the greatest rock singers of all time.
Go to Profile#9616
Gerolf Steiner
#9626
Overall Influence
1908 - 2009 (101 years)
Gerolf Steiner was a German zoologist. Life and career Steiner was born in Strasbourg, Alsace in March 1908. He earned his doctorate in 1931 at the University of Heidelberg. He completed his habilitation in 1942 at the Technical University Darmstadt and 1947 at the University of Heidelberg, where he was appointed as professor in 1949. In 1962, he was an associate professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, becoming full professor in 1966 and occupying the chair of zoology from 1962 to 1973. He died five months after his 101st birthday on August 14, 2009.
Go to Profile#9617
Shlomo Eckstein
#9627
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Shlomo Raber Eckstein was an Israeli economist, and President of Bar-Ilan University. Biography Eckstein was born in Wiesbaden, Germany. His family emigrated from Germany before World War II to Mexico, which is where he was raised.
Go to Profile#9618
Edward Winter
#9628
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Edward Winter is an English chess journalist, archivist, historian, collector and author. He writes a regular column on chess history, Chess Notes. Chess Notes Chess Notes started as a bimonthly periodical, and was described by its author, in the first issue , as "A forum for aficionados to discuss all matters relating to the Royal Pastime". At the end of 1989, the periodical ceased publication. In 1993, Winter resumed publication of Chess Notes, which appeared, this time, as a syndicated column, in many languages around the world. From 1998 to 2001, it was published exclusively in New In Chess.
Go to Profile#9619
Ernst Neizvestny
#9629
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Ernst Iosifovich Neizvestny was a Russian sculptor, painter, graphic artist, and art philosopher. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1976 and lived and worked in New York City. His last name in Russian literally means "unknown".
Go to Profile#9620
John A. Rogers
#9630
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
#9621
Maria Siemionow
#9631
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Maria Siemionow is a Polish transplant surgeon and scientist. She is known for leading a team of eight surgeons through the first near-total face transplant performed in the United States at the Cleveland Clinic in 2008. The patient, Connie Culp, a 45-year-old woman from a small town in Ohio, was exceedingly disfigured by a close range shotgun blast in 2004. The procedure took 22 hours.
Go to Profile#9622
Kazuya Kato
#9632
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
is a Japanese mathematician who works at the University of Chicago and specializes in number theory and arithmetic geometry. Early life and education Kazuya Kato grew up in the prefecture of Wakayama in Japan. He attended college at the University of Tokyo, from which he also obtained his master's degree in 1975, and his PhD in 1980.
Go to Profile#9623
Sandra Ciesek
#9633
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Sandra Ciesek is a German physician and virologist. She is the director of the Institute of Medical Virology at the Universitätsklinikum Frankfurt and professor of medical virology at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Her main areas of research include new forms of therapy for hepatitis C and, more recently, the search for drugs against COVID-19.
Go to Profile#9624
Alexei Kostrikin
#9634
Overall Influence
1929 - 2000 (71 years)
Alexei Ivanovich Kostrikin was a Russian mathematician, specializing in algebra and algebraic geometry. Life Kostrikin graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics at Moscow State University in 1952. In 1960, he earned a Doctor of Sciences degree under Igor Shafarevich at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics with a thesis on the Burnside problem. He became a faculty member at Moscow State University in 1963 and became a professor at the same university in 1976. In 1998, he became Honoured Professor of Moscow State University.
Go to Profile#9625
Vitali Milman
#9635
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Vitali Davidovich Milman is a mathematician specializing in analysis. He is a professor at the Tel Aviv University. In the past he was a President of the Israel Mathematical Union and a member of the “Aliyah” committee of Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#9626
Denis Law
#9636
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Denis Law is a Scottish former footballer who played as a forward. His career as a football player began at Second Division Huddersfield Town in 1956. After four years at Huddersfield, he was signed by Manchester City for an estimated transfer fee of £55,000, which set a new British record. Law spent one year there before Torino bought him for £110,000, this time setting a new record fee for a transfer involving a British player. Although he played well in Italy, he found it difficult to settle there and signed for Manchester United in 1962, setting another British record transfer fee of £11...
Go to Profile#9627
Leonard Liggio
#9637
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Leonard P. Liggio was a classical liberal author, research professor of law at George Mason University and executive vice president of the Atlas Network in Fairfax, Virginia. Career In 1965, Liggio gave lectures with Russell Stetler on "Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism: The Ideological Question in Vietnam" for the newly founded Free University of New York. Liggio provided editorial direction for Literature of Liberty: A Review of Contemporary Liberal Thought, a periodical published by the Cato Institute from 1978 to 1979, then by the Institute for Humane Studies from 1980 to 1982.
Go to Profile#9628
Robert A. Holton
#9638
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Robert A. Holton is an American academic chemist who is known for his work regarding the chemical synthesis for Taxol , a widely utilized and highly effective anti-cancer drug. He is a Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University.
Go to Profile#9629
Paul Manafort
#9639
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Paul John Manafort Jr. is an American lobbyist, political consultant, attorney, and convicted felon. A long-time Republican Party campaign consultant, he chaired the Trump presidential campaign from June to August 2016. Manafort served as an adviser to the U.S. presidential campaigns of Republicans Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole. In 1980, he co-founded the Washington, D.C.–based lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone, along with principals Charles R. Black Jr. and Roger J. Stone, joined by Peter G. Kelly in 1984. Manafort often lobbied on behalf of foreign leaders ...
Go to Profile#9630
Benjamin M. Friedman
#9640
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Benjamin Morton Friedman is an American political economist, who is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute's Panel on Economic Activity, and the editorial board of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He is a recipient of the John R. Commons Award, given by the economics honor society Omicron Delta Epsilon.
Go to Profile#9631
Xiaoming Fu
#9641
Overall Influence
Xiaoming Fu is a Chinese German computer scientist. He is a Full Professor of Computer Science with focus on Internet technologies at Universität Göttingen. His research interests include architecture, protocols and applications of networked systems including mobile and cloud computing, network security, social computing and big data.
Go to Profile#9632
Michael Stocker
#9642
Overall Influence
Michael Adam Gerber Stocker is an American philosopher and Irwin & Marjorie Guttag Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Syracuse University. He is known for his works on ethics. Stocker is the author of the seminal paper The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories.
Go to Profile#9633
Fayyazuddin
#9643
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Fayyazuddin, also spelled as Fayyaz Uddin , is a Pakistani theoretical physicist, emeritus professor, specialising in theoretical physics and mathematical physics at Quaid-e-Azam University campus National Centre for Physics, Islamabad. He is a senior scientist at the National Center for Physics. Fayyaz is doing research in the fields of quantum mechanics, particle physics, and meson physics. He has published numerous physics papers accompanied by Riazuddin and has co-authored Quantum Mechanics by Fayyazuddin and Riazuddin published in 1990.
Go to Profile#9634
Lawrence Paulson
#9644
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Lawrence Charles Paulson is an American computer scientist. He is a Professor of Computational Logic at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Education Paulson graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1977, and obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981 for research on programming languages and compiler-compilers supervised by John L. Hennessy.
Go to Profile#9635
Stacy Schiff
#9645
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Stacy Madeleine Schiff is an American former editor, essayist, and author of five biographies. Her biography of Vera Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's fellow Founding Father Samuel Adams, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#9636
Wojciech Zaremba
#9646
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Wojciech Zaremba is a Polish computer scientist, a founding team member of OpenAI , where he leads both the Codex research and language teams. The teams actively work on AI that writes computer code and creating successors to GPT-3 respectively. The mission of OpenAI is to build safe artificial intelligence , and ensure that its benefits are as evenly distributed as possible.
Go to Profile#9637
Moses Malone
#9647
Overall Influence
1955 - 2015 (60 years)
Moses Eugene Malone Sr. was an American professional basketball player who played in both the American Basketball Association and the National Basketball Association from 1974 through 1995. A center, he was named the NBA Most Valuable Player three times, was a 12-time NBA All-Star and an eight-time All-NBA Team selection. Malone led the Philadelphia 76ers to an NBA championship in 1983, winning both the league and Finals MVP. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility in 2001. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the spo...
Go to Profile#9638
Enrico Giovannini
#9648
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Enrico Giovannini is an Italian economist, statistician and academic, member of the Club of Rome. Since February 2021, he has been serving as Minister of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility in the Draghi Government. From April 2013 to February 2014, he served as Minister of Labour and Social Policies in the Letta Government. From 2009 to 2013, he held the office of President of the Italian National Institute of Statistics .
Go to Profile#9639
Faith Ringgold
#9649
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Faith Ringgold is an American painter, painting on different materials including fabric, a published author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.
Go to Profile#9640
Corwin Hansch
#9650
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
Corwin Herman Hansch was a professor of chemistry at Pomona College in California. He became known as the 'father of computer-assisted molecule design.' Education and career Hansch was born on October 6, 1918, in Kenmare, North Dakota. He earned a BS from the University of Illinois in 1940 and a PhD from New York University in 1944. He briefly worked as a postdoc at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Go to Profile#9641
Amélie Mauresmo
#9651
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Amélie Simone Mauresmo is a French former world No. 1 tennis player and tournament director. Mauresmo won two major singles titles at the 2006 Australian Open and Wimbledon Championships, and also won the silver medal in singles at the 2004 Summer Olympics and the singles title at the 2005 year-end championships.
Go to Profile#9642
Lev Gor'kov
#9652
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Lev Petrovich Gor'kov was a Russian-American research physicist internationally known for his pioneering work in the field of superconductivity. He was particularly famous for developing microscopic foundations of the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity . Gor'kov was a professor of physics at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, and a program director in Condensed Matter at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. He was one of the Magnet Lab's founding scientists.
Go to Profile#9643
Gareth Bale
#9653
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Gareth Frank Bale is a Welsh former professional footballer who played as a winger, most notably for Tottenham Hotspur, Real Madrid and Wales. He is widely regarded as one of the best footballers of his generation and one of the greatest Welsh players of all time. He was best known for his explosive pace, athleticism, and powerful strikes from distance.
Go to Profile#9644
Jean Fréchet
#9654
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jean M.J. Fréchet is a French-American chemist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his work on polymers including polymer-supported chemistry, chemically amplified photoresists, dendrimers, macroporous separation media, and polymers for therapeutics. Ranked among the top 10 chemists in 2021, he has authored nearly 900 scientific paper and 200 patents including 96 US patents. His research areas include organic synthesis and polymer chemistry applied to nanoscience and nanotechnology with emphasis on the design, fundamental understanding, syn...
Go to Profile#9645
George Koval
#9655
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
George Abramovich Koval was an American engineer who acted as a Soviet intelligence officer for the Soviet atomic bomb project. Koval's infiltration of the Manhattan Project as a GRU agent reduced the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons.
Go to Profile#9646
Sean B. Carroll
#9656
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Sean B. Carroll is an American evolutionary developmental biologist, author, educator and executive producer. He is a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland and professor emeritus of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His studies focus on the evolution of cis-regulatory elements in the regulation of gene expression in the context of biological development, using Drosophila as a model system. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society , of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#9647
David Salle
#9657
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
David Salle is an American Postmodern painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer. Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma, and lives and works in East Hampton, New York. He earned a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California, where he studied with John Baldessari. Salle’s work first came to public attention in New York City in the early 1980s.
Go to Profile#9648
Milos Raonic
#9658
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Milos Raonic is a Canadian professional tennis player. He has been ranked as high as world No. 3 in singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals , which he first achieved on 21 November 2016, making him the highest-ranked Canadian player in history. Raonic is the first Canadian man in the Open Era to reach the Australian Open semifinals, the French Open quarterfinals, and the Wimbledon final. He has won eight ATP Tour titles.
Go to Profile#9649
Michael Marrus
#9659
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Michael Robert Marrus was a Canadian historian of the Holocaust, modern European and Jewish history and international humanitarian law. He is the author of eight books on the Holocaust and related subjects.
Go to Profile#9650
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
#9660
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian specializing in early America and the history of women, and a professor at Harvard University. Her approach to history has been described as a tribute to "the silent work of ordinary people". Ulrich has also been a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient. Her most famous book, A Midwife’s Tale, was later the basis for a PBS documentary film.
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