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

#9951

Don Woods

#9961

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Donald R. Woods is an American hacker and computer programmer. He is best known for his role in the development of the Colossal Cave Adventure game. Biography Early programming career Woods teamed with James M. Lyon while both were attending Princeton in 1972 to produce the unprecedented, excursive INTERCAL programming language. Later, he worked at the Stanford AI lab , where among other things he became the SAIL contact for, and a contributor to, the Jargon File. He also co-authored "The Hacker's Dictionary" with Mark Crispin, Raphael Finkel, and Guy L. Steele Jr.

#9952

Pierre Joris

#9962

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Pierre Joris is a Luxembourg-American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He has moved between Europe, North Africa and the United States for fifty-five years, publishing over eighty books of poetry, essays, translations and anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows and Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Microliths They Are, Little Stones and The Collected Earlier Poetry . In 2019 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Arabia Deserta . Other recent bo...

#9953

Alan Macfarlane

#9963

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Alan Donald James Macfarlane is an anthropologist and historian, and a Professor Emeritus of King's College, Cambridge. He is the author or editor of 20 books and numerous articles on the anthropology and history of England, Nepal, Japan and China. He has focused on comparative study of the origins and nature of the modern world. In recent years he has become increasingly interested in the use of visual material in teaching and research. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society.

#9954

Richard Hunt

#9964

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Richard Hunt is an American sculptor. In the second half of the 20th century, he became "the foremost African-American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture." Hunt, the descendant of enslaved people brought from West Africa through the port of Savannah, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s. While there received multiple prizes for his work. In 1971, he was the first African American sculptor to have a retrospective at Museum of Modern Art. Hunt has created over 160 public sculpture commissions, more than any other sculptor in prominent locations in 24...

#9955

Dieter Henrich

#9965

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Dieter Henrich was a German philosopher. A contemporary thinker in the tradition of German idealism, Henrich is considered "one of the most respected and frequently cited philosophers in Germany today", whose "extensive and highly innovative studies of German Idealism and his systematic analyses of subjectivity have significantly impacted on advanced German philosophical and theological debates."

#9956

Ben Katchor

#9966

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Ben Katchor is an American cartoonist and illustrator best known for the comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. He has contributed comics and drawings to The Forward, The New Yorker, Metropolis, and weekly newspapers in the United States. A Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, Katchor was described by author Michael Chabon as "the creator of the last great American comic strip."

#9957

Christina Sormani

#9967

Overall Influence

Christina Sormani is a professor of mathematics at City University of New York affiliated with Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is known for her research in Riemannian geometry, metric geometry, and Ricci curvature, as well as her work on the notion of intrinsic flat distance.

#9958

Marc Fumaroli

#9968

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Marc Fumaroli was a French historian and essayist who was widely respected as an advocate for French literature and culture. While born in Marseille, Fumaroli grew up in the Moroccan city of Fez, and served in the French army during the Algerian War.

#9959

Beverly Daniel Tatum

#9969

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Beverly Christine Daniel Tatum is an American psychologist, administrator, and educator who has conducted research and written books on the topic of racism. Focusing specifically on race in education, racial identity development in teenagers, and assimilation of black families and youth in white neighborhoods. Tatum uses works from her students, personal experience, and psychology learning. Tatum served from 2002 to 2015 as the ninth president of Spelman College, the oldest historically black women's college in the United States.

#9960

Chad Mirkin

#9970

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Chad Alexander Mirkin is an American chemist. He is the George B. Rathmann professor of chemistry, professor of medicine, professor of materials science and engineering, professor of biomedical engineering, and professor of chemical and biological engineering, and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology and Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly at Northwestern University.

#9961

Barry Bogin

#9971

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Barry Bogin is an American physical anthropologist trained at Temple University who researches physical growth in Guatemalan Maya children, and is a theorist upon the evolutionary origins of human childhood. He is a professor at Loughborough University in the UK, after professorships at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and Wayne State University. During 1974–1976, he was a visiting professor at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala.

#9962

Roger E. Olson

#9972

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Roger Eugene Olson is an American Baptist theologian and Professor of Christian Theology of Ethics at the Baylor University. Biography Personal life Olson was born on February 2, 1952, in Des Moines, Iowa. He is married and he and his wife have two daughters and one granddaughter. He is member of Calvary Baptist Church in Waco.

#9963

Steve Spurrier

#9973

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Stephen Orr Spurrier is an American former football player and coach. He played ten seasons in the National Football League before coaching for 38 years, primarily in college. He is often referred to by his nickname, "the Head Ball Coach". He played college football as a quarterback for the Florida Gators, where he won the 1966 Heisman Trophy. The San Francisco 49ers selected him in the first round of the 1967 NFL draft, and he spent a decade playing in the National Football League , mainly as a backup quarterback and punter. Spurrier was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a...

#9964

Archie Brown

#9974

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Archibald Haworth Brown, is a British political scientist. In 2005, he became an emeritus professor of politics at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, where he served as a professor of politics and director of St Antony's Russian and East European Centre. He has written widely on Soviet and Russian politics, on communist politics more generally, on the Cold War, and on political leadership.

#9965

Paula Johnson

#9975

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Paula Adina Johnson is a cardiologist and the current president of Wellesley College. She is the first Black woman to serve in this role. The first Black graduate of Wellesley College came in the year 1887, and 129 years later President Johnson became the first Black leader. Prior to her role as president of Wellesley, Johnson founded and served as the inaugural executive director of the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women's Health & Gender Biology, as well as Chief of the Division of Women's Health at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Johnson's background in working for the betterment of ...

#9966

Jean-Michel Bismut

Jean-Michel Bismut

#9976

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Jean-Michel Bismut is a French mathematician who has been a professor at the Université Paris-Sud since 1981. His mathematical career covers two apparently different branches of mathematics: probability theory and differential geometry. Ideas from probability play an important role in his works on geometry.

#9967

Jack Elton Bresenham

#9977

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Jack Elton Bresenham is a former professor of computer science. Biography Bresenham retired from 27 years of service at IBM as a Senior Technical Staff Member in 1987. He taught for 16 years at Winthrop University and has nine patents. He has four children.

#9968

Bill Plympton

#9978

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Bill Plympton is an American animator, graphic designer, cartoonist, and filmmaker best known for his 1987 Academy Awards-nominated animated short Your Face and his series of shorts featuring a dog character starting with 2004's Guard Dog.

#9969

David Montgomery

#9979

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

David Montgomery was a Farnam Professor of History at Yale University. Montgomery was considered one of the foremost academics specializing in United States labor history and wrote extensively on the subject. He is credited, along with David Brody and Herbert Gutman, with founding the field of "new labor history" in the U.S.

#9970

Volker Braun

#9980

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Volker Braun is a German writer. His works include Provokation für mich – a collection of poems written between 1959 and 1964 and published in 1965, a play, Die Kipper , and Das ungezwungene Leben Kasts .

#9971

Kan'ichi Kuroda

#9981

Overall Influence

1927 - 2006 (79 years)

Kan'ichi Kuroda was a self-taught Japanese political philosopher and social theorist, associated with Trotskyism, who was deeply involved in far-left political movements. Nearly blind, Kuroda was affectionately nicknamed "The Blind Prophet" and "KuroKan" by his followers.

#9972

Hank Haney

#9982

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Hank Haney is an American professional golf instructor best known for coaching Tiger Woods and two-time major championship winner Mark O'Meara. Graduate of the University of Tulsa. Biography Haney says, "My philosophy as a teacher is to teach my students to become their own best teacher by getting them to understand the flight of the golf ball and how it relates to the swing, with emphasis on swinging the golf club on their own correct swing plane".

#9973

Reimar Lüst

#9983

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

Reimar Lüst was a German astrophysicist. He worked in European space science from its beginning, as the scientific director of the European Space Research Organisation from 1962 and as Director General of the European Space Agency from 1984 until 1990.

#9974

Jerry Seinfeld

#9984

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Jerome Allen Seinfeld is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and producer. From 1989 to 1998, he played a semi-fictionalized version of himself in the sitcom Seinfeld, which he created and wrote with Larry David. The show aired on NBC from 1989 until 1998, becoming one of the most acclaimed and popular sitcoms of all time. As a stand-up comedian, Seinfeld specializes in observational comedy. In 2004, Comedy Central named him the 12th-greatest stand-up comedian of all time.

#9975

Robert F. Bales

#9985

Overall Influence

1916 - 2004 (88 years)

Robert Freed Bales was an American social psychologist. He specialized in small group interpersonal interaction and developed the SYMLOG method of group observation. Biography Bales was born in Ellington, Missouri on March 9, 1916. He received a B.A. and M.S. in sociology from the University of Oregon. In 1945 he received a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. Bales then became a professor at Harvard, working in the university's Laboratory of Human Relations. In 1950, Bales published a book titled Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups in which he describ...

#9976

Katharine, Duchess of Kent

#9986

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Katharine, Duchess of Kent, , is a member of the British royal family. She is married to Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, a grandson of King George V. The Duchess of Kent converted to Catholicism in 1994; she was the first member of the royal family to convert publicly since the passing of the Act of Settlement 1701. The Duchess is strongly associated with the world of music and has performed as a member of several choirs.

#9977

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk

#9987

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is a professor at the University of Miami's School of Architecture and an architect and urban planner in Miami, Florida. Plater-Zyberk is considered to be a representative of the New Urbanism school of urban planning, and an advocate of the New Classical school of architecture. She is also a co-founder and principal of DPZ CoDesign, a Miami-based architecture firm.

#9978

Usain Bolt

#9988

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Usain St. Leo Bolt is a Jamaican retired sprinter, widely considered to be the greatest sprinter of all time. He is the world record holder in the 100 metres, 200 metres, and 4 × 100 metres relay.

#9979

Bernard Maris

#9989

Overall Influence

1946 - 2015 (69 years)

Bernard Henri Maris , also known as "Oncle Bernard", was a French economist, writer and journalist who was also a shareholder in Charlie Hebdo magazine. He was murdered on 7 January 2015, during the shooting at the headquarters of the magazine in Paris.

#9980

Yascha Mounk

#9990

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Yascha Benjamin Mounk is a German-born American political scientist. He is Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D. C. In July 2020, he founded Persuasion, an online magazine devoted to defending the values of free societies.

#9981

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Peter Godfrey-Smith

#9991

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Peter Godfrey-Smith is an Australian philosopher of science and writer, who is currently Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He works primarily in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind, and also has interests in general philosophy of science, pragmatism , and some parts of metaphysics and epistemology. Godfrey-Smith was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

#9982

Hans Grauert

#9992

Overall Influence

1930 - 2011 (81 years)

Hans Grauert was a German mathematician. He is known for major works on several complex variables, complex manifolds and the application of sheaf theory in this area, which influenced later work in algebraic geometry. Together with Reinhold Remmert he established and developed the theory of complex-analytic spaces. He became professor at the University of Göttingen in 1958, as successor to C. L. Siegel. The lineage of this chair traces back through an eminent line of mathematicians: Weyl, Hilbert, Riemann, and ultimately to Gauss. Until his death, he was professor emeritus at Göttingen.

#9983

Stephen Altschul

#9993

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Stephen Frank Altschul is an American mathematician who has designed algorithms that are used in the field of bioinformatics . Altschul is the co-author of the BLAST algorithm used for sequence analysis of proteins and nucleotides.

#9984

William Kennedy

#9994

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

William Joseph Kennedy is an American writer and journalist who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 novel Ironweed. Kennedy's other works include The Ink Truck , Legs , Billy Phelan's Greatest Game , Roscoe and Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes . Many of his novels feature the interactions of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family in Albany, New York.

#9985

George Mostow

#9995

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

George Daniel Mostow was an American mathematician, renowned for his contributions to Lie theory. He was the Henry Ford II Professor of Mathematics at Yale University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the 49th president of the American Mathematical Society , and a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1982 to 1992.

#9986

Laurie Garrett

#9996

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Laurie Garrett is an American science journalist and author. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1996 for a series of works published in Newsday that chronicled the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire.

#9987

John Stockton

#9997

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

John Houston Stockton is an American former professional basketball player. Regarded as one of the greatest point guards, players, and passers of all time, he spent his entire NBA career with the Utah Jazz, and the team made the playoffs in each of his 19 seasons. In 1997 and 1998, together with his longtime teammate Karl Malone, Stockton led the Jazz to the franchise's only two NBA Finals appearances, both of which were losses to the Chicago Bulls.

#9988

Etienne Vermeersch

Etienne Vermeersch

#9998

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

Etienne Vermeersch was a Belgian moral philosopher, skeptic, opinion maker and debater. He is one of the founding fathers of the abortion, euthanasia law, and the Law on Patients' Rights in Belgium. Vermeersch became an atheist after five years with the Society of Jesus . Later he became a philosophical materialist. In January 2008, Vermeersch was chosen by hundred prominent Flemings as the most influential intellectual of Flanders. He died in a hospital in Ghent on 18 January 2019 by euthanasia after a long illness.

#9989

Wolfe Mays

#9999

Overall Influence

1912 - 2005 (93 years)

Wolfe Mays was a British philosopher. He was the founder of British Society for Phenomenology and the editor of its journal. Mays is known for his efforts for introducing phenomenology in England. He taught at the University of Manchester from 1946 until his retirement in 1979. His students included Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith.

#9990

Brian Druker

#10000

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Brian J. Druker is a physician-scientist at Oregon Health & Science University , in Portland, Oregon. He is the director of OHSU's Knight Cancer Institute, JELD-WEN Chair of Leukemia Research, Associate Dean for Oncology in the OHSU School of Medicine, and professor of medicine.

#9991

David Gabai

#10001

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

David Gabai is an American mathematician and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. Focused on low-dimensional topology and hyperbolic geometry, he is a leading researcher in those subjects.

#9992

Janet G. Travell

Janet G. Travell

#10002

Overall Influence

1901 - 1997 (96 years)

Janet Graham Travell was an American physician and medical researcher. Early life and education She was born in 1901 to John Willard and Janet Eliza Travell. Heavily influenced by her father's profession of physician, Travell made the decision to pursue a career in the medical field. In June 1929, in New York City, Janet married John William Gordon Powell, who was an investment counselor. They had two daughters—Janet and Virginia. At the age of 95, Travell died of heart failure at her home in Northampton, Massachusetts.

#9993

Dennis Slamon

#10003

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Dennis Joseph Slamon , is an American oncologist and chief of the division of Hematology-Oncology at UCLA. He is best known for his work identifying the HER2/neu oncogene that is amplified in 25–33% of breast cancer patients and the resulting treatment trastuzumab.

#9994

Mick Aston

#10004

Overall Influence

1946 - 2013 (67 years)

Michael Antony Aston was an English archaeologist who specialised in Early Medieval landscape archaeology. Over the course of his career, he lectured at both the University of Bristol and University of Oxford and published fifteen books on archaeological subjects. A keen populariser of the discipline, Aston was widely known for appearing as the resident academic on the Channel 4 television series Time Team from 1994 to 2011.

#9995

Beau Biden

#10005

Overall Influence

1969 - 2015 (46 years)

Joseph Robinette "Beau" Biden III was an American politician, lawyer, and officer in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps from Wilmington, Delaware. The oldest child of President Joe Biden and Neilia Hunter Biden, he served as the 44th attorney general of Delaware from 2007 to 2015 and was a major in the Delaware Army National Guard in the Iraq War. He died of glioblastoma in 2015 at the age of 46.

#9996

Edward S. Casey

Edward S. Casey

#10006

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Edward S. Casey is an American philosopher and university professor. He has published several volumes on phenomenology, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of space and place. His work is widely cited in contemporary continental philosophy. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York and distinguished visiting faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

#9997

Gerhard Hochschild

Gerhard Hochschild

#10007

Overall Influence

1915 - 2010 (95 years)

Gerhard Paul Hochschild was a German-born American mathematician who worked on Lie groups, algebraic groups, homological algebra and algebraic number theory. Early life On April 29, 1915, Hochschild was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Berlin, Germany, the son of Lilli and Heinrich Hochschild. Hochschild had an older brother. His father was a patent attorney who had an engineering degree. After the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1933, his father sent him to South Africa where he was able to enroll in school with funding from the Hochschild Family Foundation es...

#9998

Akhtar Hameed Khan

#10008

Overall Influence

1914 - 1999 (85 years)

Akhter Hameed Khan was a Pakistani development practitioner and social scientist. He promoted participatory rural development in Pakistan and other developing countries, and widely advocated community participation in development. His particular contribution was the establishment of a comprehensive project for rural development, the Comilla Model . It earned him the Ramon Magsaysay Award from the Philippines and an honorary Doctorate of law from Michigan State University.

#9999

Mark Jerrum

#10009

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Mark Richard Jerrum is a British computer scientist and computational theorist. Jerrum received his Ph.D. in computer science 'On the complexity of evaluating multivariate polynomials' in 1981 from University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Leslie Valiant. He is professor of pure mathematics at Queen Mary, University of London.

#10000

Maria Lipman

#10010

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Maria Alexandrovna Lipman is a Russian journalist, political scientist and Russia expert, who edited the magazine of the Carnegie Moscow Center until 2014. She is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University and Co-Editor of the Institute’s website Russia.Post. She also writes for Foreign Affairs.

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