Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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List of the most influential people

#9901

Roger Deakins

#9911

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Sir Roger Alexander Deakins is an English cinematographer, best known for his collaborations with directors the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes, and Denis Villeneuve. He is the recipient of five BAFTA Awards for Best Cinematography, and two Academy Awards for Best Cinematography from sixteen nominations. His best-known works include The Shawshank Redemption , Fargo , O Brother, Where Art Thou? , A Beautiful Mind , Skyfall , Sicario , Blade Runner 2049 , and 1917 , the last two of which earned him Academy Awards.

#9902

Iain Sinclair

#9912

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Iain Sinclair FRSL is a writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, recently within the influences of psychogeography. Biography Education Sinclair was born in Cardiff in 1943. From 1956 to 1961, he was educated at Cheltenham College, a boarding school for boys, followed by Trinity College, Dublin . He attended the Courtauld Institute of Art , and the London School of Film Technique .

#9903

Jean Tulard

#9913

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Jean Tulard is a French academic and historian. Considered one of the best specialists of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Napoleonic era , he is nicknamed by his peers "the master of Napoleonic studies".

#9904

Herbert Laming, Baron Laming

#9914

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

William Herbert Laming, Baron Laming, is a British social worker and member of the House of Lords. He served as Convenor of the Crossbench Peers from 2011 to 2015 and as Chairman of Committees from 2015 to 2016.

#9905

Balwant Gargi

#9915

Overall Influence

1916 - 2003 (87 years)

Balwant Gargi was an Indian Punjabi language dramatist, theatre director, novelist, short story writer, and academic. Early life On 4 December 1916, in Canal House in Sehna, Barnala , Balwant Gargi was born in a house near the Sirhind Canal, famous for being the spot where Razia Sultan was imprisoned. The second son in the family of Shiv Chand Garg, a head clerk in the Irrigation Department, he would go on create history in the world of Indian and Punjabi literature.

#9906

David Wolpert

#9916

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

David Hilton Wolpert is an American physicist and computer scientist. He is a professor at Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of three books, three patents, over one hundred refereed papers, and has received two awards. His name is particularly associated with a theorem in computer science known as "no free lunch".

#9907

Roy Thomas

#9917

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Roy William Thomas Jr. is an American comic book writer and editor, who was Stan Lee's first successor as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. He is possibly best known for introducing the pulp magazine hero Conan the Barbarian to American comics, with a series that added to the storyline of Robert E. Howard's character and helped launch a sword and sorcery trend in comics. Thomas is also known for his championing of Golden Age comic-book heroes – particularly the 1940s superhero team the Justice Society of America – and for lengthy writing stints on Marvel's X-Men and The Avengers, and DC Comic...

#9908

Ole Gunnar Solskjær

#9918

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Ole Gunnar Solskjær is a Norwegian professional football manager whose most recent role was manager of Manchester United. He is also a former player who played as a forward. As a player, Solskjær spent the majority of his career with Manchester United and also played 67 times for the Norway national team.

#9909

Ainslie Embree

#9919

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

Ainslie Thomas Embree was a Canadian Indologist and historian. He was considered a leading scholar of modern Indian history and played a seminal role in the introduction of South Asian studies into US college and secondary education curricula. In addition to his academic work, Embree made significant contributions to peace efforts between India and Pakistan as a member of the Kashmir Study Group and the Council on Foreign Relations, and acted as a consultant to the US diplomatic and intelligence communities. He has been described as a "tireless advocate for greater understanding between the U...

#9910

Max Brooks

#9920

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Maximillian Michael Brooks is an American author. He is the son of comedian Mel Brooks and actress Anne Bancroft. Much of Brooks's writing focuses on zombie stories. He is a senior fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, New York.

#9911

Anita Summers

#9921

Overall Influence

1925 - Present (101 years)

Anita Arrow Summers was an American educator of public policy, management, real estate and education and was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Biography Anita Arrow was born in New York City on September 9, 1925. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Romania, Summers received a B.A. in Economics from Hunter College in 1945 and an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1947. She earned an honorary doctorate from Hunter College. She married Robert Summers in 1953 and left the workforce to raise three sons.

#9912

John Gerstner

#9922

Overall Influence

1914 - 1996 (82 years)

John Henry Gerstner was an American Reformed and Presbyterian theologian and professor of Church History at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Knox Theological Seminary. He was an expert on the life and theology of Jonathan Edwards.

#9913

Donald Kuspit

#9923

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Donald Kuspit is an American art critic and poet, known for his practice of psychoanalytic art criticism. He has published on the subjects of avant-garde aesthetics, postmodernism, modern art, and conceptual art.

#9914

Jacob A. Frenkel

Jacob A. Frenkel

#9924

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Jacob Aharon Frenkel is an Israeli economist and the Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International. He served as Governor of the Bank of Israel between 1991 and 2000. Biography Frenkel was born in Mandatory Palestine. He earned a B.A. in economics and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago. He earned his Ph.D. in 1970 with a thesis titled Money, Wealth and the Balance of Payments in a Model of Accumulation.

#9915

Craig Mazin

#9925

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Craig Mazin is an American screenwriter, producer, and director. He is best known for creating, writing, and producing the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and co-creating, co-writing, and executive producing the HBO series The Last of Us , the latter alongside Neil Druckmann. He has won two Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special and Outstanding Limited Series. Before his work on drama shows gained widespread attention, he was primarily known for his writing work on comedy films such as Scary Movie 3 , Scary Movie 4 , The Hangover Part I...

#9916

Benigno Aquino III

Benigno Aquino III

#9926

Overall Influence

1960 - 2021 (61 years)

Benigno Simeon Aquino III , also known as Noynoy Aquino and colloquially as PNoy, was a Filipino politician who served as the 15th president of the Philippines from 2010 to 2016. The son of assassinated politician Benigno Aquino Jr. and 11th president Corazon Aquino, he was a fourth-generation politician as part of the Aquino family of Tarlac.

#9917

Juan Manuel Santos

#9927

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Juan Manuel Santos Calderón is a Colombian politician who was the President of Colombia from 2010 to 2018. He was the sole recipient of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize. An economist by profession and a journalist by trade, Santos is a member of the wealthy and influential Santos family, who from 1913 to 2007 were the majority shareholders of El Tiempo, Colombia's newspaper of record.

#9918

Krassimir Atanassov

#9928

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Krassimir Todorov Atanassov is a Bulgarian mathematician, Corresponding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences . He is best known for introducing the concepts of Generalized nets and Intuitionistic fuzzy sets, which are extensions of the concepts of Petri nets and Fuzzy sets, respectively.

#9919

Karl Rove

#9929

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Karl Christian Rove is an American Republican political consultant, policy advisor, and lobbyist. He was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff during the George W. Bush administration until his resignation on August 31, 2007. He has also headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives.

#9920

Cardi B

#9930

Overall Influence

1992 - Present (34 years)

Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar Cephus , known professionally as Cardi B, is an American rapper. According to various media outlets, she is regarded as one of the most commercially successful female rappers of her generation. Born and raised in New York City, she first gained popularity through videos shared on Vine and Instagram. From 2015 to early 2017, she appeared as a regular cast member on the VH1 reality television series Love & Hip Hop: New York, which depicted her pursuit of her music aspirations, and earned further recognition with the release of her two mixtapes: Gangsta Bitch Music, Vol.

#9921

Ernst Käsemann

#9931

Overall Influence

1906 - 1998 (92 years)

Ernst Käsemann was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of New Testament in Mainz , Göttingen and Tübingen . Study and work Käsemann was born in Bochum. He obtained his PhD in New Testament at the University of Marburg in 1931, having written a dissertation on Pauline ecclesiology, with Rudolf Bultmann as his doctoral supervisor. Käsemann was one of Bultmann's more well-known politically left-of-centre pupils.

#9922

Charles Horioka

#9932

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Charles Yuji Horioka is a Japanese-American economist residing in Japan. Horioka received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University and is currently professor at the Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan. He is concurrently distinguished research professor and director at the Asian Growth Research Institute and invited professor and professor emeritus at the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University . Previously, he taught at Stanford, Columbia, Kyoto, and Osaka Universities and the University of the Philippines, Diliman, where he was Vea Family Professor of Technology and Evolutionary Economics Centennial.

#9923

L. S. Cousins

#9933

Overall Influence

1942 - 2015 (73 years)

Lance Selwyn Cousins was a British scholar who specialised in the field of Buddhist Studies. Biography Born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, he studied history and oriental studies at Cambridge University, and took up a post in the Department of Comparative Religion at Manchester University as lecturer and then senior lecturer. After early retirement in the 1990s he settled in Oxford and continued to publish scholarly papers and reviews including a widely cited historical summary such as "The Dating of the Historical Buddha: A Review article," which was published in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.

#9924

Jerome Swartz

#9934

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Jerome "Jerry" Swartz is a physicist that developed early optical strategies for barcode scanning technologies in the United States and co-founded the corporation, Symbol Technologies on Long Island, New York, with physicist partner, Dr. Shelley A. Harrison in 1973. Swartz was President, becoming the Chairman and Chief Scientist in 1982. In 2006 Symbol Technologies became a wholly owned subsidiary of the multinational telecommunications manufacturer, Motorola Corporation.

#9925

Carl M. Bender

#9935

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Carl M. Bender is an American applied mathematician and mathematical physicist. He currently holds the Wilfred R. and Ann Lee Konneker Distinguished Professorship of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He also has joint positions as professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg and as visiting professor of applied mathematics and mathematical physics at Imperial College, London.

#9926

Dennis McKenna

#9936

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Dennis Jon McKenna is an American ethnopharmacologist, research pharmacognosist, lecturer and author. He is the brother of well-known psychedelics proponent Terence McKenna and is a founding board member and the director of ethnopharmacology at the Heffter Research Institute, a non-profit organization concerned with the investigation of the potential therapeutic uses of psychedelic medicines.

#9927

Tony Abbott

#9937

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Anthony John Abbott is an Australian former politician who served as the 28th prime minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015. He held office as the leader of the Liberal Party of Australia. Abbott was born in London, England, to an Australian mother and a British father, and moved to Sydney at the age of two. He studied economics and law at the University of Sydney, and then attended The Queen's College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics. After graduating from Oxford, Abbott briefly trained as a Roman Catholic seminarian, and later worked as a journalist, manager, and political adviser.

#9928

John McKay

#9938

Overall Influence

1939 - 2022 (83 years)

John K. S. McKay was a British-Canadian mathematician and academic who worked at Concordia University, known for his discovery of monstrous moonshine, his joint construction of some sporadic simple groups, for the McKay conjecture in representation theory, and for the McKay correspondence relating certain finite groups to Lie groups.

#9929

James Tooley

#9939

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

James Nicholas Tooley is a professor of educational entrepreneurship and of education policy at the University of Buckingham. In July 2020 Tooley was appointed as the new Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, succeeding Sir Anthony Seldon from 1 October 2020.

#9930

Steve Reicher

#9940

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Stephen David Reicher is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Social Psychology at the University of St Andrews. His research is in the area of social psychology, focusing on social identity, collective behaviour, intergroup conflict, leadership and mobilisation. He is broadly interested in the issues of group behaviour and the individual-social relationship.

#9931

Jon Jefferson

#9941

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Jon Jefferson is a contemporary American author and television documentary maker. Jefferson has written ten novels in the Body Farm series under the pen name Jefferson Bass, in consultation with renowned forensic anthropologist William M. Bass, as well as two non-fiction books about Bass's life and forensic cases.

#9932

Balamurali Ambati

Balamurali Ambati

#9942

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Balamurali Krishna "Bala" Ambati is an Indian-American ophthalmologist, educator, and researcher. On May 19, 1995, he entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's youngest doctor, at the age of 17 years, 294 days.

#9933

Wendy Wasserstein

Wendy Wasserstein

#9943

Overall Influence

1950 - 2006 (56 years)

Wendy Wasserstein was an American playwright. She was an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She received the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles.

#9934

Jonathan Schaeffer

Jonathan Schaeffer

#9944

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Jonathan Herbert Schaeffer is a Canadian researcher and professor at the University of Alberta and the former Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence. He led the team that wrote Chinook, the world's strongest American checkers player, after some relatively good results in writing computer chess programs. He is involved in the University of Alberta GAMES group developing computer poker systems. Schaeffer is also a member of the research group that created Polaris, a program designed to play the Texas Hold'em variant of poker. He is a Founder of Onlea, which produces online learning e...

#9935

Owen Garriott

#9945

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Owen Kay Garriott was an American electrical engineer and NASA astronaut, who spent 60 days aboard the Skylab space station in 1973 during the Skylab 3 mission, and 10 days aboard Spacelab-1 on a Space Shuttle mission in 1983.

#9936

Jerry Garcia

#9946

Overall Influence

1942 - 1995 (53 years)

Jerome John Garcia was an American musician known for being the principal songwriter, lead guitarist, and a vocalist with the rock band Grateful Dead, which he co-founded and which came to prominence during the counterculture of the 1960s. Although he disavowed the role, Garcia was viewed by many as the leader of the band. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 as a member of the Grateful Dead.

#9937

Simon Brendle

#9947

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Simon Brendle is a German-American mathematician working in differential geometry and nonlinear partial differential equations. He received his Dr. rer. nat. from Tübingen University under the supervision of Gerhard Huisken . He was a professor at Stanford University , and is currently a professor at Columbia University. He has held visiting positions at MIT, ETH Zürich, Princeton University, and Cambridge University.

#9938

János Kis

#9948

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

János Kis is a Hungarian philosopher and political scientist, who served as the inaugural leader of the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats from 1990 to 1991. He is considered to be the first Leader Hungarian parliamentary opposition.

#9939

Anthony Bogaert

#9949

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Anthony Francis "Tony" Bogaert is a Canadian psychologist. He is a professor in both the Departments of Psychology and of Community Health Sciences at Brock University. Research Bogaert is known for studying multiple subjects related to human sexuality, including asexuality. He has also published studies examining the relationship between the number of brothers a man has and his sexual orientation. These studies have concluded that the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay, and that this effect is due to prenatal factors, not environmental ones. In his early career, Bogaert worked with J.

#9940

Dieter Seebach

#9950

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Dieter Seebach is a German chemist known for his synthesis of biopolymers and dendrimers, and for his contributions to stereochemistry. He was born on 31 October 1937 in Karlsruhe. He studied chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe under the supervision of Rudolf Criegee and at Harvard University with Elias Corey finishing in 1969. After his habilitation he became professor for organic chemistry at the University of Giessen. After six years he was appointed professor at the ETH Zurich where he worked until he retired in 2003.

#9941

Graham Hitch

#9951

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Graham Hitch is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of York, best known for his work with Alan Baddeley in developing a Working Memory Model. Education He gained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics from the University of Cambridge, before gaining a Master of Science degree in Experimental Psychology from the University of Sussex. He then returned to Cambridge to complete his PhD in 1972.

#9942

Brian Berry

#9952

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Brian Joe Lobley Berry is a British-American human geographer and city and regional planner. He is Lloyd Viel Berkner Regental Professor in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. His urban and regional research in the 1960s sparked geography’s social-scientific revolution and made him the most-cited geographer for more than 25 years.

#9943

Einar Haugen

#9953

Overall Influence

1906 - 1994 (88 years)

Einar Ingvald Haugen was an American linguist, writer, and professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison and Harvard University. Biography Haugen was born in Sioux City, Iowa, to Norwegian immigrants from the village of Oppdal in Trøndelag, Norway. When he was a young child, the family moved back to Oppdal for a few years, but then returned to the United States. He attended Morningside College in Sioux City but transferred to St. Olaf College to study with Ole Edvart Rølvaag. He earned his B.A. in 1928 and immediately went on to graduate studies in Scandinavian languages under professor George T.

#9944

Yang Mu

#9954

Overall Influence

1940 - 2020 (80 years)

Yang Mu was a pen name of Wang Ching-hsien, a Taiwanese poet, essayist, critic, translator, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, and Founding Dean at NDHU College of Humanities and Social Sciences and HKUST School of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is considered one of the most accomplished poets writing in Chinese in the 20th and 21st century, known for his lyricism and linguistic ingenuity, modernising the Chinese diction and syntax while reviving a sublime style out of the idiom and imagery of Chinese and Western poetic traditions.

#9945

Peter Porter

#9955

Overall Influence

1929 - 2010 (81 years)

Peter Neville Frederick Porter OAM was a British-based Australian poet. Life Porter was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1929. His mother, Marion, died of a burst gall-bladder in 1938. He was educated at the Anglican Church Grammar School and left school at eighteen to work as a trainee journalist at The Courier-Mail. However, he only lasted a year with the paper before he was dismissed. He emigrated to England in 1951. On the boat he met the future novelist Jill Neville. Porter was portrayed in Neville's first book, The Fall Girl . After two suicide attempts, he returned to Brisbane. Ten months later he was back in England.

#9946

John W. N. Watkins

John W. N. Watkins

#9956

Overall Influence

1924 - 1999 (75 years)

John William Nevill Watkins was an English philosopher, a professor at the London School of Economics from 1966 until his retirement in 1989 and a prominent proponent of critical rationalism. Life In 1952, Watkins married Micky Roe .

#9947

Rick Griffin

#9957

Overall Influence

1944 - 1991 (47 years)

Richard Alden "Rick" Griffin was an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters in the 1960s. As a contributor to the underground comix movement, his work appeared regularly in Zap Comix. Griffin was closely identified with the Grateful Dead, designing some of their best-known posters and album covers such as Aoxomoxoa. His work within the surfing subculture included both film posters and his comic strip, Murphy.

#9948

Fernando Codá Marques

Fernando Codá Marques

#9958

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Fernando Codá dos Santos Cavalcanti Marques is a Brazilian mathematician working mainly in geometry, topology, partial differential equations and Morse theory. He is a professor at Princeton University. In 2012, together with André Neves, he proved the Willmore conjecture.

#9949

George E. Fox

#9959

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

George Edward Fox is an astrobiologist, a Professor Emeritus and researcher at the University of Houston. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the International Astrobiology Society. Fox received his B.A. degree in 1967, and completed his Ph.D. degree in 1974; both in chemical engineering at Syracuse University.

#9950

Alison Redford

#9960

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Alison Merrilla Redford is a Canadian lawyer and former politician. She was the 14th premier of Alberta, having served in this capacity from October 7, 2011, to March 23, 2014. Redford was born in Kitimat, British Columbia and grew up all over Canada and overseas before settling in Calgary as a teenager.

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