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
Morris Edward Opler
#39848
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Morris Edward Opler , American anthropologist and advocate of Japanese American civil rights, was born in Buffalo, New York. He was the brother of Marvin Opler, an anthropologist and social psychiatrist.
Go to Profile#102
Daryl Bem
#39864
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
#103
Christopher Csíkszentmihályi
#40317
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Christopher Csíkszentmihályi is an American artist and technologist. He is an Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. Life Csíkszentmihályi was born June 1968 in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, was a psychologist who coined the concept of psychological flow. After leaving Reed College in 1988, Csíkszentmihályi earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 1998.
Go to Profile#104
Johanna Brenner
#41992
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Johanna Brenner is an American feminist and sociologist whose writing and thought is in the socialist-feminist vein. A graduate of Reed College and the University of California, Los Angeles , she spent four years as a telephone installation technician worker in the 1970s. In 1981 she began teaching in the sociology department at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where she served from 1982 to 2005 as coordinator of its women's studies program. She is now emeritus professor.
Go to Profile#105
Julia Adams
#43019
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Julia Potter Adams is an American sociologist who works in the area of comparative and historical sociology. Julia Adams is a professor of Sociology. She conducts research in the areas of state building, gender and family, social theory and knowledge, early modern European politics, and Colonialism and empire. Her current research focuses on the historical sociology of agency relations and modernity, gender, race, and the representation of academic knowledge on Wikipedia and on other digital platforms. Adams is Professor of Sociology and International & Area Studies and Head of Grace Hopper College, Yale.
Go to Profile#106
Murray Leaf
#43027
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Murray John Leaf is an American social and cultural anthropologist. Education He was born in New York City in 1939, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. After active duty for training in the United States Army Reserves in 1957, he attended the University of Arizona and Reed College, receiving a B.A. in Philosophy from Reed in 1961. He received a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1966. He has taught at Pomona College, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Texas at Dallas.
Go to Profile#107
Eric T. Olson
#43496
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Eric Todd Olson is an American philosopher who specializes in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Olson is best known for his research in the field of personal identity, and for advocating animalism, the theory that persons are animals. Olson received a BA from Reed College and a PhD from Syracuse University. Olson is currently a professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield.
Go to Profile#108
Theodore James Courant
#44910
Overall Influence
Theodore James "Ted" Courant is an American mathematician who has conducted research in the fields of differential geometry and classical mechanics. In particular, he made seminal contributions to the study of Dirac manifolds, which generalize both symplectic manifolds and Poisson manifolds, and are related to the Dirac theory of constraints in physics. Some mathematical objects in this field have since been named after him, including the Courant bracket and Courant algebroid.
Go to Profile#109
Gina G. Turrigiano
#45355
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Gina G. Turrigiano is an American neuroscientist, and is the Levitan Chair of Vision Science at Brandeis University. Turrigiano is known for her pioneering work on the mechanisms that allow brain circuits to remain both flexible and stable. Turrigiano and colleagues discovered several forms of "homeostatic" plasticity, most notably Synaptic scaling and intrinsic homeostatic plasticity, and have characterized how these forms of plasticity contributes to learning and experience-dependent plastic changes in the brain.
Go to Profile#110
Peter Dobkin Hall
#46008
Overall Influence
1946 - 2015 (69 years)
Peter Dobkin Hall was an American author and historian. He was Professor of History and Theory in the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College, City University of New York, and Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations.
Go to Profile#111
Ross Starr
#46300
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ross Marc Starr is an American economist who specializes in microeconomic theory, monetary economics and mathematical economics. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego. Starr grew up in Los Angeles where he attended high school. He attended UCLA and Reed College before obtaining his Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Stanford in 1966. He completed his PhD in economics at Stanford in 1972. His dissertation was supervised by Kenneth Arrow.
Go to Profile#112
Gregory A. Voth
#46399
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Gregory A. Voth is a theoretical chemist and Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. He is also a professor of the James Franck Institute and the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics.
Go to Profile#113
Arthur Ogus
#46758
Overall Influence
Arthur Edward Ogus is an American mathematician. His research is in algebraic geometry; he has served as chair of the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley. Ogus did his undergraduate studies at Reed College, graduating in 1968, and earned his doctorate in 1972 from Harvard University under the supervision of Robin Hartshorne. His doctoral students at Berkeley include Kai Behrend.
Go to Profile#114
Leonard Shapiro
#46996
Overall Influence
Leonard D. Shapiro is an American computer scientist. He is a professor emeritus at Portland State University. Education Shapiro graduated from Reed College in 1965, Phi Beta Kappa. He earned a doctor of philosophy from Yale University in 1969.
Go to Profile#115
James L. Powell
#47069
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
James Lawrence Powell is an American geologist, writer, former college president and museum director. He chaired the geology department at Oberlin College later serving as its provost and president. Powell also served as president of Franklin & Marshall College as well as Reed College. Following his positions in higher education, Powell presided over the Franklin Institute and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#116
Jane Burbank
#47596
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jane Richardson Burbank is an American historian who is emeritus professor of history at New York University. She is known for her scholarship on Russia and its empire, as well as global history more broadly.
Go to Profile#117
Jon Westling
#49477
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Jon Westling was an American educator, and was president of Boston University from 1996 until 2002. Biography Raised in Yakima, Washington, he took his undergraduate degree from Reed College and studied history at St. John's College, Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. Before joining B.U., Westling taught at Centre College in Kentucky, Reed College, the University of California, Irvine, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a Freedom Rider. In 1963, his participation in a sit-in in southern Virginia landed him several days in jail.
Go to Profile#118
Hopi Hoekstra
#49549
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Danielle "Hopi" Elizabeth Hoekstra is an evolutionary biologist working at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and serving as the Dean of its Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her lab uses natural populations of rodents to study the genetic basis of adaptation. She is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. She is also the Curator of Mammals at the Museum of Comparative Zoology and a Harvard College Professor. In 2014, Hoekstra became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
Go to Profile#119
Alafair Burke
#49752
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Alafair S. Burke is an American crime novelist, professor of law, and legal commentator. She is a New York Times bestselling author of twenty crime novels, including The Ex, The Wife, and The Better Sister, and two series—one featuring NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher, and the other, Portland, Oregon, prosecutor Samantha Kincaid. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Go to Profile#120
David Gieseker
#50011
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
David Arends Gieseker is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Gieseker received his bachelor's degree in 1965 from Reed College and his master's degree from Harvard University in 1967. In 1970 he received his Ph.D. under Robin Hartshorne with thesis Contributions to the Theory of Positive Embeddings in Algebraic Geometry. Gieseker became a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1975 and became professor emeritus in 2022.
Go to Profile#121
Mary Jo Ondrechen
#50215
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Mary Jo Ondrechen is an American chemist, educator, researcher, community leader and activist. She serves as Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Principal Investigator of the Computational Biology Research Group at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#122
George Steinmetz
#51151
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Sociology and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He has taught at the New School for Social Research, the University of Chicago, and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences . He is a historical sociologist of empires, states, and cities, with a focus on modern Germany, France, and Britain and their colonies. His other main areas of research are social theory and the history and philosophy of the social sciences.
Go to Profile#123
Tom Wasow
#51841
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Thomas A. Wasow is an American linguist, the academic secretary to the university at Stanford University. He is also professor of linguistics, emeritus, and the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy, emeritus.
Go to Profile#124
Catherine Otto
#52398
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Catherine Mary Otto is an echocardiography specialist who serves as J. Ward Kennedy-Hamilton Endowed Chair in Cardiology at the University of Washington Medical Center. She has authored echocardiography textbooks. The major fields she works in are valvular heart disease, adult congenital heart disease, and echocardiography.
Go to Profile#125
Donald Engelman
#52425
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Donald Max Engelman is Higgins Professor of Biochemistry at Yale University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences , fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the National Institutes of Health, and has been a Guggenheim fellow. He served as the editor of the Annual Review of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry .
Go to Profile#126
Sheperd S. Doeleman
#52874
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Sheperd "Shep" S. Doeleman is an American astrophysicist. His research focuses on super massive black holes with sufficient resolution to directly observe the event horizon. He is a senior research fellow at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian and the Founding Director of the Event Horizon Telescope project. He led the international team of researchers that produced the first directly observed image of a black hole.
Go to Profile#127
John Kroger
#53104
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
John Richard Kroger is an American lawyer who served as the president of Reed College. He served as Attorney General for the U.S. state of Oregon from 2009 to 2012. Prior to being elected in 2008, he had earlier served in the Marine Corps, was an Assistant United States Attorney in New York, and a law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland. He resigned as Attorney General effective June 29, 2012. On February 9, 2018, he announced that he would be resigning as President of Reed College come the conclusion of the academic year. After leaving Reed in June 2018, Kroger went to teach at Harvard University for the 2018–2019 academic year.
Go to Profile#128
Aaron Rhodes
#53499
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Aaron Anthony Rhodes is an international human rights activist and writer. He is a senior fellow at Common Sense Society and President of the Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe, an independent nongovernmental organization. Rhodes served as Executive Director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights between 1993 and 2007, during which period the IHF was engaged inter alia in human rights challenges in the Balkans, in Chechnya, and in Central Asia, and the organization expanded significantly. He has been active in civil society campaigns vis a vis the Human Dimension of the O...
Go to Profile#129
Eduardo M. Ochoa
#53570
Overall Influence
Eduardo M. Ochoa is an Argentinean-American economist and academic administrator who served as the president of California State University, Monterey Bay, from 2012 to 2022. Ochoa was the assistant secretary of education for postsecondary education during the Obama administration from 2010 to 2012.
Go to Profile#130
Rachel E. Klevit
#53597
Overall Influence
Rachel E. Klevit is professor of biochemistry, adjunct professor of chemistry, and adjunct professor of pharmacology at the University of Washington. She holds the Edmond H. Fischer-Washington Research Foundation Endowed Chair in Biochemistry. Klevit's research focuses on molecular interactions in human diseases and includes research on BRCA1, the protein ubiquitination system, and human heat shock proteins.
Go to Profile#131
Nita Kumar
#53962
Overall Influence
Nita Kumar completed her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in History and has taught at the University of Chicago, Brown University, and the University of Michigan among other places. She presently holds the Brown Family Chair of South Asian History at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, California. Kumar studied Anthropology alongside History and has been productive in research and publishing in both fields. She has further moved on to include women's and gender studies, literary criticism, education and performance studies in her approach.
Go to Profile#132
William D. McElroy
#54715
Overall Influence
1917 - 1999 (82 years)
William David McElroy was an American biochemist and academic administrator. Biography Early years McElroy was born to William D. McElroy and Ora Shipley in Rogers, Texas. After graduating from McAllen High School in McAllen, Texas in 1935, he attended Pasadena Junior College in California, and went on to Stanford University on a football scholarship where he received his bachelor's degree in 1937. He earned his master's degree in biology at Reed College and his PhD at Princeton University in 1943.
Go to Profile#133
Hans A. Linde
#56266
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Hans Arthur Linde was a German Jewish American legal scholar who served as a justice of the Oregon Supreme Court from 1977 to 1990. Born in Berlin, Germany, Justice Linde relocated with his family to Denmark in 1933, and then immigrated to Portland, Oregon, in 1939. After serving in the United States Army during World War II, he received a B.A. from Reed College in 1947 and a J.D. at UC Berkeley School of Law in 1950. Linde served as law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas , as attorney in the Office of the Legal Adviser to the United States Department of State , and as legislative assistant to Oregon Sen.
Go to Profile#134
Phoebe Stanton
#56673
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Phoebe Baroody Stanton was an American architectural historian, professor and urban planner. She taught at Johns Hopkins University, from 1955 until 1982. Stanton was outspoken about the architectural history and design for the city of Baltimore. She wrote and published three books.
Go to Profile#135
Daniel S. Kemp
#57778
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Daniel Schaeffer Kemp was an American organic chemist, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kemp's work was focused on the synthesis and conformational analysis of peptides. He developed several chemical ligation strategies and methods for templating the formation of helices and sheets. The eponymous and the reaction are among his developments. He was the author of an organic chemistry textbook. He died from COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#136
Paul Knoepfler
#58036
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Paul S. Knoepfler is an American biologist, writer, and blogger. He is a professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Human Anatomy, the Genome Center, and the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine. In 2013, Knoepfler was named one of the 50 most influential people in the stem cell field.
Go to Profile#137
Shannon Lee Dawdy
#60775
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Shannon Lee Dawdy is an American anthropologist, historian, and archaeologist. She is a professor at the University of Chicago and a MacArthur Fellow. Education Dawdy holds a PhD in anthropology and history and an MA in history from the University of Michigan, an MA in anthropology from the College of William and Mary and a BA in anthropology from Reed College.
Go to Profile#138
Christopher Amos
#60881
Overall Influence
Christopher Ian Amos is an American genetic epidemiologist and the director of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also the associate director for quantitative science at the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center. He is known for his research on the genetic basis of certain types of human cancer.
Go to Profile#139
Arthur H. Livermore
#64302
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
Arthur Hamilton Livermore was a science educator. He was educated at Reed College in Portland and in the University of Rochester in New York, where he worked on the synthesis of penicillin under Vincent du Vigneaud, who won the 1955 Nobel Prize in chemistry. He obtained a PhD in Chemistry in 1944. He taught biochemistry at Cornell University and Reed College to 1963. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954 for work in Molecular & Cellular Biology.
Go to Profile#140
Alan H. Borning
#64427
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Alan H. Borning is an American Computer Scientist noted for his research on human computer interaction and object-oriented programming. In particular his research in human-computer interaction is on designing for human values. He works on systems to support civic engagement and deliberation, and works on tools to make public transportation easier to use. He has also worked on constraint-based languages and systems, and cooperating constraint languages and solvers.
Go to Profile#141
Joel Robbins
#64571
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Joel Robbins is an American socio-cultural anthropologist; he is at the University of Cambridge, where he is the Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology and the Deputy Head of Division and REF Coordinator for Division of Social Anthropology, as well as a Fellow at Trinity College. He was previously employed at the University of California, San Diego , and at Reed College , and was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1998. He has published works on the anthropology of Papua New Guinea, anthropological theory, the anthropology of Christianity, religious change, the anthropology of ethics and morals, and the anthropology of value.
Go to Profile#142
Kevin McCrimmon
#65302
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Kevin Mor McCrimmon is an American mathematician, specializing in Jordan algebras. He is known for his introduction of quadratic Jordan algebras in 1966. McCrimmon attended secondary school in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois and then received his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1960 from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1965 with thesis Norms and Noncommutative Jordan Algebras supervised by Nathan Jacobson. McCrimmon spent his final year as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, when Nathan Jacobson spent a year of unpaid leave visiting Chicago and Japan for the academic year 1964–1965.
Go to Profile#143
Michael Skinner
#65550
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Michael Kirtland Skinner is a U.S. biologist specializing in reproductive biology and epigenetics. Skinner was born in Redmond, Oregon to Hugh Kirtland Skinner and Tonya Valorie Skinner Wolf. He obtained A.S. at Warner Pacific College in Portland in 1977, B.A. in chemistry at Reed College, Portland, in 1979, Ph.D. in biochemistry at Washington State University in 1982, and post-doc at the University of Toronto until 1984. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Environmental Epigenetics published by Oxford University Press.
Go to Profile#144
Hope Lange
#66398
Overall Influence
1933 - 2003 (70 years)
Hope Elise Ross Lange was an American film, stage, and television actress. She was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Selena Cross in the 1957 film Peyton Place. In 1969 and 1970, she twice won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her role as Carolyn Muir in the sitcom The Ghost & Mrs. Muir.
Go to Profile#145
Victor Nizet
#67099
Overall Influence
Victor Nizet is an American microbiologist who is a professor of pediatrics. He is a Distinguished Professor and Vice Chair of Basic Research at the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine. He is also a Distinguished Professor at UCSD Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences in La Jolla, California. He is known for his research in the areas of molecular microbiology and the innate immune system, with a particular focus on infectious diseases caused by common Gram-positive bacterial pathogens such as Group A Streptococcus, Group B Str...
Go to Profile#146
Kevan Shokat
#68600
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Kevan Michael Shokat is an American chemical biologist. He is a Professor and chair in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at University of California, San Francisco, a professor in the Department of Chemistry at University of California, Berkeley, and an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Go to Profile#147
Larry Sanger
#68617
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Lawrence Mark Sanger is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who was the editor-in-chief of the online encyclopedia Nupedia and co-founded its successor Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name 'Wikipedia', and wrote many of Wikipedia's early guidelines, including the "Neutral point of view" and "Ignore all rules" policies. Sanger later worked on other encyclopedic projects, including Encyclopedia of Earth, Citizendium, and Everipedia, and advised the nonprofit American political encyclopedia Ballotpedia.
Go to Profile#148
Marilyn Olmstead
#70609
Overall Influence
1943 - 2020 (77 years)
Marilyn Olmstead was an American chemist, an expert in small molecule crystallography and an international leader in the crystallographic study of fullerenes, or "Buckyballs." She held the position of professor emerita of chemistry at the University of California Davis.
Go to Profile#149
Joe P. Buhler
#71647
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Joe Peter Buhler is an American mathematician known for his contributions to algebraic number theory, algebra and cryptography. Education and career Buhler received his undergraduate degree from Reed College in 1972, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977 with thesis Icosahedral Galois Representations and thesis advisor John Tate. Buhler was a professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon from 1980 until his retirement in 2005. From 2004 to 2017, he was director of the IDA Center for Communications Research in La Jolla, California.
Go to Profile#150
Alison Butler
#73879
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Alison Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She works on bioinorganic chemistry and metallobiochemistry. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Chemical Society , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and the Royal Society of Chemistry . She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
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