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
#101
Gary Becker
#101
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Gary Stanley Becker was an American economist who received the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, and was a leader of the third generation of the Chicago school of economics.
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Douglas Hofstadter
#102
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#103
Vint Cerf
#103
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Vinton Gray Cerf is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering.
Go to Profile#104
John Archibald Wheeler
#104
Overall Influence
1911 - 2008 (97 years)
John Archibald Wheeler was an American theoretical physicist. He was largely responsible for reviving interest in general relativity in the United States after World War II. Wheeler also worked with Niels Bohr to explain the basic principles of nuclear fission. Together with Gregory Breit, Wheeler developed the concept of the Breit–Wheeler process. He is best known for popularizing the term "black hole" for objects with gravitational collapse already predicted during the early 20th century, for inventing the terms "quantum foam", "neutron moderator", "wormhole" and "it from bit", and for hypothesizing the "one-electron universe".
Go to Profile#105
Julia Kristeva
#105
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arend...
Go to Profile#106
Antonin Scalia
#106
Overall Influence
1936 - 2016 (80 years)
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the history of the Supreme Court. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 20...
Go to Profile#107
Harold Pinter
#107
Overall Influence
1930 - 2008 (78 years)
Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming and Betrayal , each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant , The Go-Between , The French Lieutenant's Woman , The Trial and Sleuth . He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.
Go to Profile#108
Jerome Bruner
#108
Overall Influence
1915 - 2016 (101 years)
Jerome Seymour Bruner was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received a BA in 1937 from Duke University and a PhD from Harvard University in 1941. He taught and did research at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and New York University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bruner as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#109
Alan Kay
#109
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented." He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts.
Go to Profile#110
Jeffrey Sachs
#110
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#111
Glenn Greenwald
#111
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Glenn Edward Greenwald is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer. In 1996, Greenwald founded a law firm concentrating on First Amendment litigation. He began blogging on national security issues in October 2005, when he was becoming increasingly concerned with what he viewed as attacks on civil liberties by the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. He became a vocal critic of the Iraq War and has maintained a critical position of American foreign policy.
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Mikhail Gorbachev
#112
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to the country's dissolution in 1991. He served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 and additionally as head of state beginning in 1988, as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet from 1988 to 1989, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet from 1989 to 1990 and the only President of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1991. Ideologically, Gorbachev initially adhered to Marxism–Leninism but moved towards social democracy by the early 1990s.
Go to Profile#113
Sydney Brenner
#113
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Sydney Brenner was a South African biologist. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston. Brenner made significant contributions to work on the genetic code, and other areas of molecular biology while working in the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He established the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of developmental biology, and founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, United States.
Go to Profile#114
Martin Seligman
#114
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#115
Jean-Pierre Serre
#115
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1954, the Wolf Prize in 2000 and the inaugural Abel Prize in 2003.
Go to Profile#116
Alvin Plantinga
#116
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Alvin Plantinga currently holds the title of the William Harry Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin University. Previously, Plantinga has taught at Wayne State University and the University of Notre Dame. Additionally, Plantinga was the president of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division from 1981 to 1982. As an undergraduate, Plantinga studied at Jamestown College, Calvin College, and Harvard University. Plantinga went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of Michigan, before transferring to Yale University in 1955 and earning his PhD there in 1958. Plantinga is o...
Go to Profile#117
Philip Roth
#117
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books.
Go to Profile#118
Gloria Steinem
#118
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Gloria Marie Steinem is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Go to Profile#119
Bob Woodward
#119
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Upshur Woodward is an American investigative journalist. He started working for The Washington Post as a reporter in 1971 and now holds the title of associate editor. While a reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein, and the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal. These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Rober...
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Stephen Cole Kleene
#120
Overall Influence
1909 - 1994 (85 years)
Stephen Cole Kleene was an American mathematician. One of the students of Alonzo Church, Kleene, along with Rózsa Péter, Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others, is best known as a founder of the branch of mathematical logic known as recursion theory, which subsequently helped to provide the foundations of theoretical computer science. Kleene's work grounds the study of computable functions. A number of mathematical concepts are named after him: Kleene hierarchy, Kleene algebra, the Kleene star , Kleene's recursion theorem and the Kleene fixed-point theorem. He also invented regular expressions in...
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Louis Farrakhan
#121
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Louis Farrakhan is an American black supremacist and religious leader who heads the Nation of Islam . Prior to joining the NOI, he was a calypso singer who used the stage name Calypso Gene. Earlier in his career, he served as the minister of mosques in Boston and Harlem and was appointed National Representative of the Nation of Islam by then NOI leader Elijah Muhammad. He adopted the name Louis X, before being named Louis Farrakhan.
Go to Profile#122
Thomas Nagel
#122
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
#123
Angela Davis
#123
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Angela Yvonne Davis is an American revolutionary Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author; she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism . She was active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Go to Profile#124
Fredric Jameson
#124
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and The Political Unconscious .
Go to Profile#125
Dennis Ritchie
#125
Overall Influence
1941 - 2011 (70 years)
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist. He is best known for creating the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the "R" in K&R C, and commonly known by his username dmr.
Go to Profile#126
Jerry Fodor
#126
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." At the time of his death in 2017, he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University, and had taught previously at the City University of New York Graduate C...
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Akira Kurosawa
#127
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese filmmaker and painter who directed 30 films in a career spanning over five decades. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. Kurosawa displayed a bold, dynamic style, strongly influenced by Western cinema yet distinct from it; he was involved with all aspects of film production.
Go to Profile#128
Cass Sunstein
#128
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#129
Erich Honecker
#129
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
Erich Ernst Paul Honecker was a German communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic from 1971 until shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. He held the posts of General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and Chairman of the National Defence Council; in 1976, he replaced Willi Stoph as Chairman of the State Council, the official head of state. As the leader of East Germany, Honecker was viewed as a dictator. During his leadership, the country had close ties to the Soviet Union, which maintained a large army in the country.
Go to Profile#130
Walter Cronkite
#130
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Walter Leland Cronkite Jr. was an American broadcast journalist who served as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years, from 1962 to 1981. During the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll. Cronkite received numerous honors including two Peabody Awards, a George Polk Award, an Emmy Award and in 1981 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.
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Alex Jones
#131
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Alexander Emerick Jones is an American far-right, alt-right radio show host and prominent conspiracy theorist. He hosts The Alex Jones Show from Austin, Texas, which the Genesis Communications Network broadcasts across the United States via syndicated and internet radio. Jones's website, InfoWars, promotes conspiracy theories and fake news, as do his other websites, NewsWars and PrisonPlanet. Jones has provided a platform and support for white nationalists, giving Unite the Right rally attendee and white supremacist Nick Fuentes a platform on his website, Banned.Video, as well as giving an "entry point" to their ideology.
Go to Profile#132
Alan Dershowitz
#132
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
#133
James M. Buchanan
#133
Overall Influence
1919 - 2013 (94 years)
James McGill Buchanan Jr. was an American economist known for his work on public choice theory originally outlined in his most famous work, The Calculus of Consent, co-authored with Gordon Tullock in 1962. He continued to develop the theory, eventually receiving the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986. Buchanan's work initiated research on how politicians' and bureaucrats' self-interest, utility maximization, and other non-wealth-maximizing considerations affect their decision-making. He was a member of the Board of Advisors of The Independent Institute as well as of the Institu...
Go to Profile#134
Bruno Latour
#134
Overall Influence
1947 - 2022 (75 years)
Areas of Specialization: Actor Network Theory, Social Theory Bruno Latour is an anthropologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tours. Soon after graduating, he became interested in anthropology, and set out on a study of race and decolonization in Ivory Coast. He is best known for his work, Nous n’avons jamais ete modernes: Essais d’anthropologie symetrique (translated: We Have Never Been Modern). This theme, of challenging methods and findings of scientific inquiry, is revisited in his later work, Pandora’s Hope. His work in Science, Technology and Modernity has been provocative, to say the least.
Go to Profile#135
Philip Johnson
#135
Overall Influence
1906 - 2005 (99 years)
Philip Cortelyou Johnson was an American architect best known for his works of modern and postmodern architecture. Among his best-known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; the postmodern 550 Madison Avenue in New York, designed for AT&T; 190 South La Salle Street in Chicago; the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art; and the Pre-Columbian Pavilion at Dumbarton Oaks. In his obituary in 2005, The New York Times wrote that his works "were widely considered among the architectural masterpieces of the 20th century."
Go to Profile#136
Douglas Engelbart
#136
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Douglas Carl Engelbart was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, which resulted in creation of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces. These were demonstrated at The Mother of All Demos in 1968. Engelbart's law, the observation that the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential, is named after him.
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Lawrence Summers
#137
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Lawrence Henry Summers is an American economist who served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, where he is the Charles W. Eliot university professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. In November 2023, Summers joined the board of directors of artificial general intelligence company OpenAI.
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Clifford Geertz
#138
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades... the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Go to Profile#139
Elia Kazan
#139
Overall Influence
1909 - 2003 (94 years)
Elias Kazantzoglou , known as Elia Kazan , was an American film and theatre director, producer, screenwriter and actor, described by The New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history".
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Geoffrey Hinton
#140
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#141
Ursula von der Leyen
#141
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen is a German physician and politician serving as the 13th president of the European Commission since 2019. She served in the German federal government between 2005 and 2019, holding successive positions in Angela Merkel's cabinet, most recently as minister of defence. Von der Leyen is a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and its EU affiliated group, the European People's Party .
Go to Profile#142
Michael Porter
#142
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Michael Eugene Porter is an American academic known for his theories on economics, business strategy, and social causes. He is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School, and was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group and FSG, a social impact consultancy. He is credited for creating Porter's five forces analysis, which is instrumental in business strategy development at present. He is generally regarded as the father of the modern strategy field. He is also regarded as one of the world's most influential thinkers on management and competitiveness as well as one of the most influential business strategists.
Go to Profile#143
Frederick Sanger
#143
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Frederick Sanger was a British biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice. He won the 1958 Chemistry Prize for determining the amino acid sequence of insulin and numerous other proteins, demonstrating in the process that each had a unique, definite structure; this was a foundational discovery for the central dogma of molecular biology.
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Barbara Walters
#144
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Barbara Jill Walters was an American broadcast journalist and television personality. Known for her interviewing ability and popularity with viewers, she appeared as a host of numerous television programs, including Today, the ABC Evening News, 20/20, and The View. Walters was a working journalist from 1951 until her retirement in 2015. Walters was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1989, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the NATAS in 2000 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007.
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Coretta Scott King
#145
Overall Influence
1927 - 2006 (79 years)
Coretta Scott King was an American author, activist, and civil rights leader and the wife of Martin Luther King Jr. from 1953 until his death. As an advocate for African-American equality, she was a leader for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. King was also a singer who often incorporated music into her civil rights work. King met her husband while attending graduate school in Boston. They both became increasingly active in the American civil rights movement.
Go to Profile#146
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#146
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński , known as Zbig, was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. As a scholar, Brzezinski belonged to the realist school of international relations, standing in the geopolitical tradition of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman, while elements of liberal idealism have also been identified in his outlook. Brzezinski was the primary organizer of The Trilateral Commission.
Go to Profile#147
Matt Groening
#147
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Matthew Abram Groening is an American cartoonist, writer, producer, and animator. He is best known as the creator of the comic strip Life in Hell and the television series The Simpsons , Futurama , and Disenchantment . The Simpsons is the longest-running U.S. primetime television series in history and the longest-running U.S. animated series and sitcom.
Go to Profile#148
Alan Sokal
#148
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alan David Sokal is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. He is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University Press's Social Text. He also co-authored a paper criticizing the critical positivity ratio concept in positive psychology.
Go to Profile#149
Jane Goodall
#149
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Dame Jane Morris Goodall , formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. She is considered the world's foremost expert on chimpanzeess, after 60 years studying the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees. Goodall first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to observe its chimpanzees in 1960.
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Jean Baudrillard
#150
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction , Simulacra and Simulation , , and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place . His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.
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