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
#1001
Harry Atwater
#44474
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Harry Albert Atwater, Jr. is an American physicist and materials scientist and is the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the division of engineering and applied science at the California Institute of Technology. Currently he is the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science and the director for the Liquid Sunlight Alliance , a Department of Energy Hub program for solar fuels. Atwater's scientific effort focuses on nanophotonic light-matter interactions and solar energy conversion. His current research in energy centers on high efficiency photovoltaics, carbon capture and removal, and photoelectrochemical processes for generation of solar fuels.
Go to Profile#1002
Stanford E. Woosley
#44511
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Stanford Earl Woosley is a physicist, and Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He is the director of the Center for Supernova Research at University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published over 300 papers.
Go to Profile#1003
Francis J. Doyle III
#44557
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Francis "Frank" J. Doyle III is an American engineer and academic administrator. He is the dean of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Doyle is also affiliated with the Division of Sleep Medicine of Harvard Medical School. On December 15, 2022, it was announced that Doyle will serve as the 14th provost of Brown University starting in the 2023 academic year.
Go to Profile#1004
Anna Menon
#44601
Overall Influence
Anna Menon is an American engineer scheduled to fly on Polaris Dawn, a private space mission. Menon worked for NASA for seven years before joining SpaceX, where she works as a lead engineer of space operations.
Go to Profile#1005
David Van Essen
#44603
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
David C. Van Essen is an American neuroscientist specializing in neurobiology and studies the structure, function, development, connectivity and evolution of the cerebral cortex of humans and nonhuman relatives. After over two decades of teaching at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine, he currently serves as an Alumni Endowed Professor of Neuroscience and maintains an active laboratory. Van Essen has held numerous positions, including Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neuroscience, Secretary of the Society for Neuroscience, and the President of the Society for Neuroscience from 2006 to 2007.
Go to Profile#1006
David Glover
#44765
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
David Moore Glover is a British geneticist and Research Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. He served as Balfour Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, a Wellcome Trust investigator in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He serves as the first editor-in-chief of the open-access journal Open Biology published by the Royal Society.
Go to Profile#1007
Eric Knudsen
#44817
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Eric Knudsen is a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University. He is best known for his discovery, along with Masakazu Konishi, of a brain map of sound location in two dimensions in the barn owl, tyto alba. His work has contributed to the understanding of information processing in the auditory system of the barn owl, the plasticity of the auditory space map in developing and adult barn owls, the influence of auditory and visual experience on the space map, and more recently, mechanisms of attention and learning. He is a recipient of the Lashley Award, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, ...
Go to Profile#1008
Thomas Eugene Everhart
#44994
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (93 years)
Thomas Eugene Everhart FREng is an American educator and physicist. His area of expertise is the physics of electron beams. Together with Richard F. M. Thornley he designed the Everhart–Thornley detector. These detectors are still in use in scanning electron microscopes, even though the first such detector was made available as early as 1956.
Go to Profile#1009
David Willey
#45061
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
David G. Willey , known as the Mad Scientist, is a former physics instructor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Physics has been a major interest in his life since he attended The Coleshill School and the John Port School in Etwall, Derbyshire. He has been presenting physics shows since the early 1980s. Willey is a scientific consultant for the skeptics group, C.S.I. . He also designs physics apparatus/equipment for the Science Kit Boreal Labs. In his spare time he enjoys hunting, woodworking, working with stained glass, and playing golf.
Go to Profile#1010
Larry W. Esposito
#45206
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Larry W. Esposito is an American planetary astronomer and a professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado Boulder. A 1973 graduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Esposito received his Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1985, he was awarded the H. C. Urey Prize by the American Astronomical Society. He was also awarded The NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, and the Richtmeyer Lecture Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Physical Society. His current work invo...
Go to Profile#1011
Doris Tsao
#45221
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Doris Ying Tsao is an American systems neuroscientist and professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology. She is recognized for pioneering the use of fMRI with single-unit electrophysiological recordings and for discovering the macaque face patch system for face perception. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the director of the T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience. She won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018. Tsao was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in ...
Go to Profile#1012
Gerard J. Holzmann
#45308
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Gerard J. Holzmann is a Dutch-American computer scientist and researcher at Bell Labs and NASA, best known as the developer of the SPIN model checker. Biography Holzmann was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands and received an Engineer's degree in electrical engineering from the Delft University of Technology in 1976. He subsequently also received his PhD degree from Delft University in 1979 under Willem van der Poel and J.L. de Kroes with a thesis entitled Coordination problems in multiprocessing systems. After receiving a Fulbright Scholarship he was a post-graduate student at the University of S...
Go to Profile#1013
James M. Anderson
#45427
Overall Influence
James M. Anderson is an American Professor of Medicine and Cell Biology and is a Chief of Section of Digestive Diseases at the Yale School of Medicine. Anderson is also a director of the Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives at the National Institutes of Health.
Go to Profile#1014
Daniel S. Fisher
#45442
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Daniel S. Fisher is an American theoretical physicist working in statistical physics. Biography Daniel Fisher graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1975 and from Harvard University with a master's degree in physics in 1978 and a doctorate in physics in 1979 working with Bertrand Halperin. He then worked in the theoretical department at Bell Labs until 1987. In 1987 he became a professor of physics at Princeton University and in 1990 at Harvard. In 2005 he moved to Stanford University as a professor of applied physics.
Go to Profile#1015
Judith R. Goodstein
#45602
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Judith Ronnie Goodstein is an American historian of science, historian of mathematics, archivist, and book author. She worked for many years at the California Institute of Technology , where she is University Archivist Emeritus.
Go to Profile#1016
Chia-Hsiung Tze
#45692
Overall Influence
Chia-Hsiung Tze is a professor emeritus at Virginia Tech. He is a theoretical particle physicist focusing on group theory, string theory, supersymmetry, octonions and other topics in theoretical physics.
Go to Profile#1017
Endre Alexander Balazs
#45720
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Endre Alexander Balazs was a Hungarian physician and inventor who transformed a natural lubricant into a palliative for arthritic knees. He devoted seven decades to exploring the therapeutic potential of hyaluronic acid. He was inducted into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame in 2012.
Go to Profile#1018
Nikolai Georgievich Makarov
#45746
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Nikolai Georgievich Makarov is a Russian mathematician. He is known for his work in complex analysis and its applications to dynamical systems, probability theory and mathematical physics. He is currently the Richard Merkin Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Caltech, where he has been teaching since 1991.
Go to Profile#1019
Jiun-Shyan Chen
#45765
Overall Influence
Jiun-Shyan Chen is an American engineer, currently the William Prager Chair Professor in Structural Mechanics at University of California, San Diego, and a publisher author. He is also Elected President for American Society of Civil Engineers's Engineering Mechanics Institute, as well as being a Fellow at ASCE since 2013. He was also formerly the Chancellor's Professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering at University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#1020
Tomas Ganz
#45816
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Tomas Ganz is an American physician-scientist who has made important contributions to innate immunology and the pathophysiology of iron regulation. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1948, and immigrated to the United States in 1966. He studied physics at University of California, Los Angeles and obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1976 and an M.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978. In 1983, after receiving training in pulmonology and internal medicine, he became a faculty member at UCLA in the department of medicine.
Go to Profile#1021
Holt Ashley
#45849
Overall Influence
1923 - 2006 (83 years)
Holt Ashley was an American aeronautical engineer notable for his seminal research on aeroelasticity. Early life and education He was born in San Francisco, California. Ashley attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from which he received a Master of Science degree in aeronautical engineering in 1948 and later a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1951, also in aeronautical engineering.
Go to Profile#1022
Christoff Koch
#45910
Overall Influence
#1023
Ronald Plasterk
#45941
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Ronald Hans Anton Plasterk is a Dutch scientist, entrepreneur and retired politician of the Labour Party . He has earned a PhD degree in biology, specialised in molecular genetics. Being a former Minister of the Dutch government, he has been the founder and CEO of Frame Cancer Therapeutics since December 2018. Next to his work at Frame, he has been appointed as professor at the University of Amsterdam since September 2018.
Go to Profile#1024
Peter Meyer
#46131
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
Peter Meyer was a German-born American astrophysicist notable for his research of cosmic rays. The University of Chicago said that Meyer "conducted pioneering studies on cosmic rays". The American Astronomical Society said that Meyer was "a distinguished astrophysicist and pioneer in cosmic-ray observations". Meyer was director of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, was a chairman of the University of Chicago's physics department, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also chair of the Cosmic Ray Physics Division of the American Physical Society, a...
Go to Profile#1025
Deborah Chung
#46282
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Deborah Duen Ling Chung is an American scientist and university professor. Early life and education Chung was born and raised in Hong Kong. Her mother was Rebecca Chan Chung , whose mother was Lee Sun Chau .
Go to Profile#1026
Marcelo Simoes
#46360
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Marcelo Godoy Simões is a Brazilian-American scientist engineer, professor in Electrical Engineering in Flexible and Smart Power Systems, at the University of Vaasa. He was with Colorado School of Mines, in Golden, Colorado, for almost 21 years, where he is a Professor Emeritus. He was elevated to Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for applications of artificial intelligence in control of power electronics systems.
Go to Profile#1027
James Longuski
#46387
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
James Michael Longuski is an American scientist, inventor, writer, and educator known for his contributions to astrodynamics and space mission design. After working as a space mission designer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA, Longuski has served as a professor at Purdue University School of Aeronautics and Astronautics since 1988.
Go to Profile#1028
Gregory A. Voth
#46399
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 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#1029
Ira B. Bernstein
#46453
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (101 years)
Ira Borah Bernstein is an American theoretical physicist specializing in plasma physics. He was the first person to formulate the theory of electrostatic waves propagating in a magnetized plasma in 1958, which are now commonly known as Bernstein waves in plasma physics.
Go to Profile#1030
Jerry Nelson
#46456
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Jerry Earl Nelson was an American astronomer known for his pioneering work designing segmented mirror telescopes, which led to him sharing the 2010 Kavli Prize for Astrophysics. He was the principal designer and project scientist for the Keck telescopes.
Go to Profile#1031
James P. Quirk
#46470
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
James Patrick Quirk was a Caltech professor of economics. Quirk attended Marquette University in 1944-1945 towards a degree in civil engineering, he changed to economics 1946 while attending University of Minnesota going on to obtain a BBA in in 1948, a MA 1949 and a Ph.D. in 1959 from University of Minnesota. Between 1944 and 1946 he served in the U.S. Navy. He taught at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas , then worked as an economist for the US government
Go to Profile#1032
Robert F. Murphy
#46520
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Robert F. Murphy is Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology Emeritus and Director of the M.S. Program in Automated Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to his retirement in May 2021, he was the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology as well as Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Machine Learning. He was founding Director of the Center for Bioimage Informatics at Carnegie Mellon and founded the Joint CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology. He also founded the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon Uni...
Go to Profile#1033
Lloyd Noel Ferguson
#46684
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
Lloyd Noel Ferguson was an American chemist. Early life As a child in Oakland, California, Ferguson had a backyard laboratory in which he developed a moth repellent, a silverware cleanser, and a lemonade powder. He graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1934, at the age of 16. After working in construction and as a railway porter in order to earn enough money to pay for college, he did his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. from the same university in 1943, the first African American to earn a chemistry Ph.D. there. During his time a...
Go to Profile#1034
James Cullen Martin
#46723
Overall Influence
1928 - 1999 (71 years)
James Cullen Martin was an American chemist. Known in the field as "J.C.", he specialized in physical organic chemistry with an emphasis on main group element chemistry. Martin received his undergraduate and master's degree at Vanderbilt University. His PhD work was conducted with Paul Bartlett at Harvard. Most of his professional career was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a colleague of Roger Adams, Speed Marvel, David Y. Curtin, Nelson J. Leonard, and Reynold C. Fuson. Late in his career, he moved back to Vanderbilt, but soon succumbed to poor health.
Go to Profile#1035
Rina Tannenbaum
#46756
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Rina Tannenbaum is an Israeli/American materials scientist and chemical engineer and presently professor in the program of chemical and molecular engineering in the department of materials science and engineering at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Go to Profile#1036
Ju-Chin Chu
#46761
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Ju-Chin Chu was a Chinese-American chemical engineer. He was the father of Steven Chu. He was born in Liuhe, Taicang, Suzhou. Chu attended Suzhou High School, Tsinghua University and National Southwestern Associated University in China before he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for Ph.D. education in 1946. After graduating from MIT, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis from 1946 to 1949, at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute from 1949 to 1966, and at Virginia Tech from 1967 to 1972. He became an Academia Sinica member in 1964.
Go to Profile#1037
Paul Moskowitz
#46974
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Paul A. Moskowitz works at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York. Moskowitz is a graduate of Stuyvesant High School in New York City, received a Ph.D. in physics at New York University, and has held research and teaching positions at the Université Grenoble, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, and at the University of Colorado Boulder. His early work in the area of nuclear physics resulted in the publication of the Moskowitz-Lombardi rule.
Go to Profile#1038
Y. Austin Chang
#46978
Overall Influence
1932 - 2011 (79 years)
Y. Austin Chang was a material engineering researcher and educator. He was a Wisconsin Distinguished Professor Emeritus, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, and Fellow of ASM International.
Go to Profile#1039
David Beratan
#47007
Overall Influence
David Nathan Beratan is an American chemist and physicist, the R.J. Reynolds Professor of Chemistry at Duke University. He has secondary appointments in the departments of Physics and Biochemistry. He is the director of the Center for Synthesizing Quantum Coherence, a NSF Phase I Center for Chemical Innovation.
Go to Profile#1040
Claire Ellen Max
#47111
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Claire Ellen Max is a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is affiliated with the Lick Observatory. She was the Director of the Center for Adaptive Optics at UCSC, 2007-2014. Max received the E.O. Lawrence Award in Physics.
Go to Profile#1041
Brian M. Hoffman
#47347
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Brian M. Hoffman is an American bioinorganic and physical chemist. Career Hoffman is a graduate of Lane Tech High School in Chicago and then studied chemistry at the University of Chicago receiving a bachelor's degree in 1962 and at Caltech with a PhD in chemistry in 1966 under the direction of Harden M. McConnell. Hoffman was briefly a postdoctoral scholar with Alexander Rich at MIT. In 1967 he started his appointment at Northwestern University, where he has remained throughout his career.
Go to Profile#1042
Gary Borisy
#47367
Overall Influence
Gary G. Borisy is a retired president and director of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In 2013, Borisy joined the Department of Microbiology at the Forsyth Institute. Borisy received his BS in biochemistry and Ph.D. in biophysics under Edwin Taylor from the University of Chicago, characterizing tubulin and its role in cell division. He then did a postdoc at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England under Hugh Huxley.
Go to Profile#1043
John D. Strong
#47390
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
John Donovan Strong was an American physicist and astronomer. One of the world's foremost optical scientists of his day, Strong was known for being the first to detect water vapor in the atmosphere of Venus and for developing a number of innovations in optical devices, ranging from improved telescope mirrors to anti-reflective coatings for optical elements and diffraction gratings.
Go to Profile#1044
Dov Levine
#47417
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Dov I. Levine is an American-Israeli physicist, known for his research on quasicrystals, soft condensed matter physics , and statistical mechanics out of equilibrium. Education and career The son of a professor of physical chemistry, Dov Levine grew up in New York. He graduated in 1979 with a B.S. from Stony Brook University and in 1986 with a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. His Ph.D. thesis Quasicrystals: A New Class of Ordered Structure was supervised by Paul Steinhardt.
Go to Profile#1045
Richard K. Wilson
#47477
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Richard K. Wilson is a leading American molecular geneticist. He is the founding Executive Director of the Institute for Genomic Medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Professor of Pediatrics at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. He received his A.B. degree from Miami University in Ohio in 1981, his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 1986, and was a Research Fellow in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology . In 1990, Dr. Wilson joined the faculty of Washington University School of Medicine where he co-founded the Genome Sequencing Center/McDonnell Genome Institute.
Go to Profile#1046
Antonio Garcia-Bellido
#47484
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Antonio García-Bellido y García de Diego ForMemRS is a Spanish developmental biologist. His ideas and new approaches to the problem of development have been followed and pursued by many researchers worldwide. He is Research Professor at the Spanish National Research Council since 1974.
Go to Profile#1047
Lulu Qian
#47499
Overall Influence
Lulu Qian is a Chinese-American biochemist who is a professor at the California Institute of Technology. Her research uses DNA-like molecules to build artificial machines. Early life and education Qian is from China. She completed her bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering at Southeast University in Nanjing. Qian moved to Shanghai for her doctoral research, where she worked at Shanghai Jiao Tong University on biochemistry. She then moved to the California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow. At Caltech, she worked alongside Erik Winfree on biochemical circuits. She used a rev...
Go to Profile#1048
Alan Harold Luther
#47510
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Alan Harold Luther is an American physicist, specializing in condensed matter physics. Education and career Luther graduated in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. in 1962 and an M.S. in 1963. In 1967 he graduated from the University of Maryland with a Ph.D. in physics under the supervision of Richard Allan Ferrell. As a postdoc Luther was from 1967 to 1969 at the Technical University of Munich and from 1969 to 1971 at Brookhaven National Laboratory. At Harvard University he was from 1971 to 1973 an assistant professor and from 1973 to 1976 an associate professor.
Go to Profile#1049
Rohinton Kamakaka
#47541
Overall Influence
Rohinton T Kamakaka is a professor in the Department of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Prior to that, he was Unit Chief at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He received his PhD degree from the University of Cambridge, U.K.
Go to Profile#1050
Alexander Laszlo
#47565
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Alexander Laszlo is a polycultural systems scientist, currently residing in Argentina. Laszlo was the 57th President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences , known for his work on systems theories and "education ecosystems". He, furthermore, is the President of the Board of Directors of the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science , based in Vienna, Austria. He also functions as the director of research at the Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research , which is based in Trieste, Italy.
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