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).
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List of the most influential people
#1001
Richard Florida
#1001
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Richard L. Florida is an American urban studies theorist focusing on social and economic theory. He is a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a Distinguished Fellow at NYU's School of Professional Studies.
Go to Profile#1002
Benny Morris
#1002
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Benny Morris is an Israeli historian. He was a professor of history in the Middle East Studies department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the city of Beersheba, Israel. He is a member of the group of Israeli historians known as the "New Historians", a term Morris coined to describe himself and historians Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Simha Flapan.
Go to Profile#1003
Norberto Bobbio
#1003
Overall Influence
1909 - 2004 (95 years)
Norberto Bobbio was an Italian philosopher of law and political sciences and a historian of political thought. He also wrote regularly for the Turin-based daily La Stampa. Bobbio was a social liberal in the tradition of Piero Gobetti, Carlo Rosselli, , and Aldo Capitini. He was also strongly influenced by Hans Kelsen and Vilfredo Pareto.
Go to Profile#1004
Massimo Pigliucci
#1004
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Massimo Pigliucci is an Italian-American philosopher and biologist who is professor of philosophy at the City College of New York, former co-host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast, and former editor in chief for the online magazine Scientia Salon. He is a critic of pseudoscience and creationism, and an advocate for secularism and science education.
Go to Profile#1005
Philip W. Anderson
#1005
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Philip Warren Anderson was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate. Anderson made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism, symmetry breaking , and high-temperature superconductivity, and to the philosophy of science through his writings on emergent phenomena. Anderson is also responsible for naming the field of physics that is now known as condensed matter physics.
Go to Profile#1006
Robert Caro
#1006
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Robert Allan Caro is an American journalist and author known for his biographies of United States political figures Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson. After working for many years as a reporter, Caro wrote The Power Broker , a biography of New York urban planner Robert Moses, which was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. He has since written four of a planned five volumes of The Years of Lyndon Johnson , a biography of the former president. Caro has been described as "the most influential biographer of the last century".
Go to Profile#1007
Ole-Johan Dahl
#1007
Overall Influence
1931 - 2002 (71 years)
Ole-Johan Dahl was a Norwegian computer scientist. Dahl was a professor of computer science at the University of Oslo and is considered to be one of the fathers of Simula and object-oriented programming along with Kristen Nygaard.
Go to Profile#1008
Gerald Jay Sussman
#1008
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#1009
Maurice Allais
#1009
Overall Influence
1911 - 2010 (99 years)
Maurice Félix Charles Allais was a French physicist and economist, the 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources", along with John Hicks and Paul Samuelson , to neoclassical synthesis. They formalize the self-regulation of markets, that Keynes refuted, while reiterating some of his ideas.
Go to Profile#1010
Robert C. Solomon
#1010
Overall Influence
1942 - 2007 (65 years)
Robert C. Solomon was a philosopher and business ethicist, notable author, and "Distinguished Teaching Professor of Business and Philosophy" at the University of Texas at Austin, where he held a named chair and taught for more than 30 years, authoring The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life and more than 45 other books and editions. Critical of the narrow focus of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which he thought denied human nature and abdicated the important questions of life, he instead wrote analytically in response to the continental discourses of phenomenology and existentia...
Go to Profile#1011
Cameron Mackintosh
#1011
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Sir Cameron Anthony Mackintosh is a British theatrical producer and theatre owner notable for his association with many commercially successful musicals. At the height of his success in 1990, he was described as being "the most successful, influential and powerful theatrical producer in the world" by the New York Times. He is the producer of shows including Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Miss Saigon, Mary Poppins, Oliver!, and Hamilton.
Go to Profile#1012
Jeremy Rifkin
#1012
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jeremy Rifkin is an American economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist. Rifkin is the author of 23 books about the influence of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His most recent books include The Age of Resilience , The Green New Deal , The Zero Marginal Cost Society , The Third Industrial Revolution , The Empathic Civilization , and The European Dream .
Go to Profile#1013
Robert Axelrod
#1013
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Marshall Axelrod is an American political scientist. He is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan where he has been since 1974. He is best known for his interdisciplinary work on the evolution of cooperation. His current research interests include complexity theory , international security, and cyber security. His research includes innovative approaches to explaining conflict of interest, the emergence of norms, how game theory is used to study cooperation, and cross-disciplinary studies on evolutionary processes.
Go to Profile#1014
Jean Bourgain
#1014
Overall Influence
1954 - 2018 (64 years)
Jean Louis, baron Bourgain was a Belgian mathematician. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994 in recognition of his work on several core topics of mathematical analysis such as the geometry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, ergodic theory and nonlinear partial differential equations from mathematical physics.
Go to Profile#1015
Samantha Power
#1015
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
#1016
Stephen A. Kent
#1016
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Stephen A. Kent is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He researches new religious movements , and has published research on several such groups including the Children of God , the Church of Scientology, and other NRMs operating in Canada.
Go to Profile#1017
Nathan Rosen
#1017
Overall Influence
1909 - 1995 (86 years)
Nathan Rosen was an American-Israeli physicist noted for his study on the structure of the hydrogen atom and his work with Albert Einstein and Boris Podolsky on entangled wave functions and the EPR paradox. The Einstein–Rosen bridge, later named the wormhole, was a theory of Nathan Rosen.
Go to Profile#1018
John le Carré
#1018
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
David John Moore Cornwell , better known by his pen name John le Carré , was an English-Irish author, best known for his espionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. "[A] sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer", he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service . Near the end of his life, due to his strong disapproval of Brexit, he took out Irish citizenship, which was possible due to his having an Irish grandparent.
Go to Profile#1019
Paul Bremer
#1019
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Lewis Paul Bremer III is an American diplomat. He was the de facto head of state of Iraq as leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority following the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States, from May 2003 until June 2004.
Go to Profile#1020
Stephen Hillenburg
#1020
Overall Influence
1961 - 2018 (57 years)
Stephen McDannell Hillenburg was an American animator, voice actor, and marine biology educator. He is best known for creating the animated television series SpongeBob SquarePants for Nickelodeon in 1999 — serving as the showrunner for its first three seasons, and again from season nine until his death — which has become the fifth-longest-running American animated series. He also performed the original voice of Patchy's pet bird Potty the Parrot from the show.
Go to Profile#1021
John D. Caputo
#1021
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John David Caputo is an American philosopher who is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University. Caputo is a major figure associated with postmodern Christianity and continental philosophy of religion, as well as the founder of the theological movement known as weak theology. Much of Caputo's work focuses on hermeneutics, phenomenology, deconstruction, and theology.
Go to Profile#1022
Bernie Grundman
#1022
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Bernie Grundman is an American audio engineer. He is most known for his mastering work and his studio, Bernie Grundman Mastering, which he opened in 1984 in Hollywood. The studio, which includes engineers Chris Bellman, Patricia Sullivan, and Mike Bozzi, mastered 37 projects which received Grammy Award nominations in 2005. In 1997 he opened a studio in Tokyo.
Go to Profile#1023
Ernesto Laclau
#1023
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Ernesto Laclau was an Argentine political theorist and philosopher. He is often described as an 'inventor' of post-Marxist political theory. He is well known for his collaborations with his long-term partner, Chantal Mouffe.
Go to Profile#1024
David Fricke
#1024
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
David Fricke is an American music journalist who serves as the senior editor at Rolling Stone magazine, where he writes predominantly about rock music. One of the best known names in rock journalism, his career has spanned over 40 years. In the 1990s, he was the magazine's music editor before stepping down.
Go to Profile#1025
Ronald Hutton
#1025
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ronald Edmund Hutton is an English historian who specialises in early modern Britain, British folklore, pre-Christian religion and Contemporary Paganism. He is a professor at the University of Bristol, has written 14 books and has appeared on British television and radio. He held a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is a Commissioner of English Heritage.
Go to Profile#1026
John Zachman
#1026
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
John A. Zachman is an American business and IT consultant, early pioneer of enterprise architecture, chief executive officer of Zachman International , and originator of the Zachman Framework. Biography Zachman holds a degree in Chemistry from Northwestern University. He served for a number of years as a line officer in the United States Navy, and is a retired Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve.
Go to Profile#1027
Tucker Carlson
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#1027
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson is an American conservative political commentator and writer who hosted the nightly political talk show Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News from 2016 to 2023. Since his contract with Fox News was terminated, he has hosted Tucker on X. An advocate of former U.S. president Donald Trump, Carlson has been described as "perhaps the highest-profile proponent of "Trumpism" and as "the most influential voice in right-wing media, without a close second."
Go to Profile#1028
Robert Taylor
#1028
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Robert William Taylor , known as Bob Taylor, was an American Internet pioneer, who led teams that made major contributions to the personal computer, and other related technologies. He was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office from 1965 through 1969, founder and later manager of Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory from 1970 through 1983, and founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center until 1996.
Go to Profile#1029
Jagdish Bhagwati
#1029
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Jagdish Natwarlal Bhagwati is an Indian-born naturalized American economist and one of the most influential trade theorists of his generation. He is a University Professor of economics and law at Columbia University and a Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has made significant contributions to international trade theory and economic development.
Go to Profile#1030
Matt Taibbi
#1030
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Matthew Colin Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. A former contributing editor for Rolling Stone, he is the author of several books, co-host of Useful Idiots, and publisher of the Racket News on Substack.
Go to Profile#1031
Michael D. Brown
#1031
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michael DeWayne Brown is an American attorney and former government official who served as the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency from 2003 to 2005. He joined FEMA as general counsel in 2001 and became deputy director the same year. Appointed in January 2003 by President George W. Bush to lead FEMA, Brown resigned in September 2005 following his controversial handling of Hurricane Katrina. Brown currently hosts a radio talk show on 630 KHOW in Denver, Colorado.
Go to Profile#1032
Frederick Crews
#1032
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Frederick Campbell Crews is an American essayist and literary critic. Professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, Crews is the author of numerous books, including The Tragedy of Manners: Moral Drama in the Later Novels of Henry James , E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism , and The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes , a discussion of the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He received popular attention for The Pooh Perplex , a book of satirical essays parodying contemporary casebooks. Initially a proponent of psychoanalytic literary criticism, Crews ...
Go to Profile#1033
Xi Jinping
#1033
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Xi Jinping is a Chinese politician who has been the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the Central Military Commission , and thus as the paramount leader of China, since 2012. Xi has also been the president of the People's Republic of China since 2013. He belongs to the fifth generation of Chinese leadership.
Go to Profile#1034
Endre Szemerédi
#1034
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Endre Szemerédi is a Hungarian-American mathematician and computer scientist, working in the field of combinatorics and theoretical computer science. He has been the State of New Jersey Professor of computer science at Rutgers University since 1986. He also holds a professor emeritus status at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#1035
Sandra Harding
#1035
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Sandra G. Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology, and philosophy of science. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996 to 2000, and co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education and Gender Studies at UCLA and a Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science .
Go to Profile#1036
Israel Kirzner
#1036
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Israel Meir Kirzner is a British-born American economist closely identified with the Austrian School. Early life and education The son of a well-known rabbi and Talmudist, Kirzner was born in London and reached the United States by way of South Africa.
Go to Profile#1037
Armin Laschet
#1037
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Armin Laschet is a German politician who served as Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia from 27 June 2017 to 26 October 2021. He served as Leader of the Christian Democratic Union from 22 January 2021 to 31 January 2022. He was elected to the German Bundestag following the 2021 German federal election.
Go to Profile#1038
Chris Hedges
#1038
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian minister. In his early career, Hedges worked as a freelance war correspondent in Central America for The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, and Dallas Morning News. Hedges reported for The New York Times from 1990 to 2005, and served as the Times Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. In 2001, Hedges contributed to The New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism.
Go to Profile#1039
Nancy Fraser
#1039
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#1040
Larry Niven
#1040
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Laurence van Cott Niven is an American science fiction writer. His 1970 novel Ringworld won the Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. With Jerry Pournelle he wrote The Mote in God's Eye and Lucifer's Hammer . The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave him the 2015 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.
Go to Profile#1041
John D. Barrow
#1041
Overall Influence
1952 - 2020 (68 years)
John David Barrow was an English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and mathematician. He served as Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College from 2008 to 2011. Barrow was also a writer of popular science and an amateur playwright.
Go to Profile#1042
John Bellamy Foster
#1042
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#1043
Ray Hyman
#1043
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
#1044
Ken Jennings
#1044
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Kenneth Wayne Jennings III is an American game show host, author, and former game show contestant. He is the highest-earning American game show contestant, having won money on five different game shows, including $4,522,700 on the U.S. game show Jeopardy!. Since 2021, Jennings and Mayim Bialik have alternated as hosts of that show, as well as Celebrity Jeopardy!. In 2023, Jennings received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Host for a Game Show for hosting Jeopardy!.
Go to Profile#1045
James Patterson
#1045
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
James Brendan Patterson is an American author. Among his works are the Alex Cross, Michael Bennett, Women's Murder Club, Maximum Ride, Daniel X, NYPD Red, Witch & Wizard, Private and Middle School series, as well as many stand-alone thrillers, non-fiction, and romance novels. His books have sold more than 425 million copies, and he was the first person to sell 1 million e-books. In 2016, Patterson topped Forbes list of highest-paid authors for the third consecutive year, with an income of $95 million. His total income over a decade is estimated at $700 million.
Go to Profile#1046
Simon Critchley
#1046
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
#1047
Shun'ichi Amari
#1047
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Shun'ichi Amari, is a Japanese scholar born in 1936 in Tokyo, Japan. Overviews He majored in Mathematical Engineering in 1958 from the University of Tokyo then graduated in 1963 from the Graduate School of the University of Tokyo.
Go to Profile#1048
Carl David Anderson
#1048
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Carl David Anderson was an American physicist. He is best known for his discovery of the positron in 1932, an achievement for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics, and of the muon in 1936.
Go to Profile#1049
Marcel Lefebvre
#1049
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
Marcel François Marie Joseph Lefebvre was a French Catholic archbishop who influenced modern traditional Catholicism. In 1970, five years after the close of the Second Vatican Council, he founded the Society of Saint Pius X , a community to train seminarians in the traditional manner, in the village of Écône, Switzerland. In 1988, Pope John Paul II declared that Archbishop Lefebvre had "incurred the grave penalty of excommunication envisaged by ecclesiastical law" for consecrating four bishops against the pope's express prohibition but, according to Lefebvre, in reliance on an "agreement giv...
Go to Profile#1050
Jay Wright Forrester
#1050
Overall Influence
1918 - 2016 (98 years)
Jay Wright Forrester was a pioneering American computer engineer, management theorist and systems scientist. He spent his entire career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, entering as a graduate student in 1939, and eventually retiring in 1989.
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