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
#10051
J. J. Abrams
#10061
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Jeffrey Jacob Abrams is an American filmmaker and composer. He is best known for his works in the genres of action, drama, and science fiction. Abrams wrote and produced such films as Regarding Henry , Forever Young , Armageddon , Cloverfield , Star Trek , Star Wars: The Force Awakens , and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker .
Go to Profile#10052
Suzanne Fortier
#10062
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Suzanne Fortier is a Canadian crystallographer and the 17th Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University. Early life and education Fortier was born in Saint-Timothée, Quebec, a town on Île-de-Salaberry in the St. Lawrence River. Her parents ran a small local hotel. She grew up speaking only French and attended a small local convent, which served as elementary school. A nun who taught chemistry and was enthusiastic about the subject inspired her to pursue science.
Go to Profile#10053
Craig Hogan
#10063
Overall Influence
Craig Hogan is a Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics. He is known for his theory of "holographic noise", which holds that holographic principle may imply quantum fluctuations in spatial position that would lead to apparent background noise or holographic noise measurable at gravitational wave detectors, in particular GEO 600.
Go to Profile#10054
Johnny Marr
#10064
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
John Martin Marr is an English musician, songwriter and singer. He first achieved fame as the guitarist and co-songwriter of the Smiths, who were active from 1982 to 1987. He has since performed with numerous other bands and embarked on a solo career.
Go to Profile#10055
David Musser
#10065
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David "Dave" Musser is a professor emeritus of computer science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, United States. He is known for his work in generic programming, particularly as applied to C++, and his collaboration with Alexander Stepanov. Their work together includes coining the term "generic programming" in , and led to the creation of the C++ Standard Template Library .
Go to Profile#10056
Gary Habermas
#10066
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Gary Robert Habermas is an American New Testament scholar and theologian who frequently writes and lectures on the resurrection of Jesus. He has specialized in cataloging and communicating trends among scholars in the field of historical Jesus and New Testament studies. He is distinguished research professor and chair of the department of philosophy and theology at Liberty University.
Go to Profile#10057
Chris Hayes
#10067
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Christopher Loffredo Hayes is an American political commentator, television news anchor, activist, and author. Hayes hosts All In with Chris Hayes, a weekday news and opinion television show on MSNBC. Hayes also hosts a weekly MSNBC podcast, Why Is This Happening? Hayes formerly hosted a weekend MSNBC show, Up with Chris Hayes. He is an editor-at-large of The Nation magazine.
Go to Profile#10058
Kamal Sarabandi
#10068
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Kamal Sarabandi is an Iranian-American scientist and the Fawwaz T. Ulaby Distinguished University Professor of EECS and the Rufus S. Teesdale endowed Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he teaches and conducts research on the science and technology of microwave and millimeter wave radar remote sensing, wireless technology, electromagnetic wave propagation and scattering, metamaterials, antenna miniaturization, and nano antennas.
Go to Profile#10059
Mihai Șora
#10069
Overall Influence
1916 - 2023 (107 years)
Mihai Șora was a Romanian philosopher and essayist. Career After travelling back to Romania in 1948, Șora became a member of the Romanian Communist Party and was employed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the time led by communist leader Ana Pauker. In interviews published after the fall of Communist Party rule in 1989, Șora said that he was unofficially "arrested". He was barred from holding a teaching appointment in Communist Romania, but nevertheless became an influential editor for one of the main Romanian publishers, ESPLA. Șora's family emigrated to the West in the 1970s, and he was allowed to visit them in the 1980s.
Go to Profile#10060
Ebrahim Mamdani
#10070
Overall Influence
1942 - 2010 (68 years)
Ebrahim H. Mamdani was a mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer and artificial intelligence researcher. He worked at the Imperial College London. Life Abe Mamdani was born in Tanzania in June 1942. He was educated in India and in 1966 he went to the UK.
Go to Profile#10061
Sergei Godunov
#10071
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Sergei Konstantinovich Godunov was a Soviet and Russian professor at the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, Russia. Biography Godunov's most influential work is in the area of applied and numerical mathematics, particularly in the development of methodologies used in Computational Fluid Dynamics and other computational fields. Godunov's theorem : Linear numerical schemes for solving partial differential equations, having the property of not generating new extrema , can be at most first-order accurate. Godunov's scheme is a conservative numerical scheme for solving partial differential equations.
Go to Profile#10062
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
#10072
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Sanjay Subrahmanyam is an Indian historian who specialises in the early modern period and in connected history. He is the author of several books and publications. He holds the Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA which he joined in 2004.
Go to Profile#10063
Jerry A. Hausman
#10073
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jerry Allen Hausman is the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a notable econometrician. He has published numerous influential papers in microeconometrics. Hausman is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the John Bates Clark Medal in 1985 and the Frisch Medal in 1980.
Go to Profile#10064
Jeffrey Alan Gray
#10074
Overall Influence
1934 - 2004 (70 years)
Jeffrey Alan Gray was a British psychologist who is notable for his contributions to the theory of consciousness. Life and work He was born in the East End of London. His father was a tailor, but died when Jeffrey was only seven. His mother, who ran a haberdashery, brought him up alone. Following military service , he took up a MacKinnon scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford, with a place to study Law. In the event he negotiated a switch to Modern Languages, obtaining a first in French and Spanish. He stayed on to take a second BA, this time in Psychology and Philosophy, which he completed ...
Go to Profile#10065
Abbas Bahri
#10075
Overall Influence
1955 - 2016 (61 years)
Abbas Bahri was a Tunisian mathematician. He was the winner of the Fermat Prize and the Langevin Prize in mathematics. He was a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. He mainly studied the calculus of variations, partial differential equations, and differential geometry. He introduced the method of the critical points at infinity, which is a fundamental step in the calculus of variations.
Go to Profile#10066
Jeffrey M. Drazen
#10076
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jeffrey M. Drazen was the editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine from 2000 to 2019. He currently holds the positions of senior physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Distinguished Parker B. Francis Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, professor of physiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, and adjunct professor of medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine. He is the recipient of honorary degrees from the University of Ferrara, the University of Athens, the University of Modena and the University of Paris-Sud.
Go to Profile#10067
Chuck Schumer
#10077
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Charles Ellis Schumer is an American politician serving as Senate Majority Leader since 2021 and the senior United States senator from New York since 1999. A member of the Democratic Party, he has led the Senate Democratic Caucus since 2017 and was Senate Minority Leader from 2017 to 2021. Schumer is in his fifth Senate term, making him the longest-serving US senator from New York, having surpassed Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jacob K. Javits in 2023. He is the dean of New York's congressional delegation.
Go to Profile#10068
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
#10078
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam was an Indian aerospace scientist and statesman who served as the 11th president of India from 2002 to 2007. He was born and raised in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu and studied physics and aerospace engineering. He spent the next four decades as a scientist and science administrator, mainly at the Defence Research and Development Organisation and Indian Space Research Organisation and was intimately involved in India's civilian space programme and military missile development efforts. He thus came to be known as the Missile Man of India for his work on the development of ballistic missile and launch vehicle technology.
Go to Profile#10069
John Langdon
#10079
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Langdon is an American graphic designer, ambigram artist, painter, and writer. Langdon has been a freelance artist specializing in logos, type, and lettering since 1977. He retired from teaching in Drexel University's graphic design program in November 2015 after 27 years of service.
Go to Profile#10070
José Argüelles
#10080
Overall Influence
1939 - 2011 (72 years)
José Argüelles was an American New Age author and artist. He was the co-founder, along with Lloydine Argüelles, of the Planet Art Network and the Foundation for the Law of Time. As one of the originators of the Earth Day concept, Argüelles founded the first Whole Earth Festival in 1970, at Davis, California.
Go to Profile#10071
Reuven Feuerstein
#10081
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Reuven Feuerstein was a Romanian-born Israeli clinical, developmental, and cognitive psychologist, known for his theory of intelligence which states “it is not ‘fixed’, but rather modifiable”. Feuerstein is recognized for his work in developing the theories and applied systems of structural cognitive modifiability, mediated learning experience, cognitive map, deficient cognitive functions, learning propensity assessment device, instrumental enrichment programs, and shaping modifying environments. These interlocked practices provide educators with the skills and tools to systematically develop...
Go to Profile#10072
Ahmed Subhy Mansour
#10082
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ahmed Subhy Mansour is an Egyptian American activist, Islamic Quranist scholar dealing with Islamic history, culture, theology, and politics. He founded a small Egyptian Quranist group that is neither Sunni nor Shia, was exiled from Egypt, and lives in the United States as a political refugee.
Go to Profile#10073
Jianqing Fan
#10083
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jianqing Fan is a statistician, financial econometrician, and data scientist. He is currently the Frederick L. Moore '18 Professor of Finance, Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Professor of Statistics and Machine Learning, and a former Chairman of Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering and a former director of Committee of Statistical Studies at Princeton University, where he directs both statistics lab and financial econometrics lab since 2008.
Go to Profile#10074
Thomas A. DeFanti
#10084
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Thomas Albert "Tom" DeFanti is an American computer graphics researcher and pioneer. His work has ranged from early computer animation, to scientific visualization, virtual reality, and grid computing. He is a distinguished professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a research scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology .
Go to Profile#10075
Nikolay Davydenko
#10085
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Nikolay Vladimirovich Davydenko is a Russian former professional tennis player. He achieved a career-high singles ranking of World No. 3 in November 2006. Davydenko's best result in a Grand Slam tournament was reaching the semi-finals, which he accomplished on four occasions: twice each at the French Open and the U.S. Open, losing to Roger Federer in all but one of them. His biggest achievement was winning the 2009 ATP World Tour Finals, and he also won three ATP Masters Series. In mid-October 2014 Davydenko retired from playing professionally .
Go to Profile#10076
Emmanuel Farhi
#10086
Overall Influence
1978 - 2020 (42 years)
Emmanuel Farhi was a French economist and professor of economics at Harvard University. His research focused on macroeconomics, taxation and finance. He was a member of the French Economic Analysis Council to the French Prime Minister from 2010 to 2012.
Go to Profile#10077
Joyce Appleby
#10087
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Joyce Oldham Appleby was an American historian. She was a professor of history at UCLA. She was president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association . Life Appleby was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Her father was a businessman and she attended public schools in Omaha, Dallas, Kansas City, Evanston, Phoenix and Pasadena.
Go to Profile#10078
Edwin Morgan
#10088
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Edwin George Morgan was a Scottish poet and translator associated with the Scottish Renaissance. He is widely recognised as one of the foremost Scottish poets of the 20th century. In 1999, Morgan was made the first Glasgow Poet Laureate. In 2004, he was named as the first Makar or National Poet for Scotland.
Go to Profile#10079
Lewis Trondheim
#10089
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Lewis Trondheim is a French cartoonist and one of the founders of the independent publisher L'Association. Both his silent comic La Mouche and Kaput and Zösky have been made into animated cartoons. He explained his choice of pseudonym after the Norwegian city of Trondheim as follows: "As a last name I wanted to use a city's name, but Lewis Bordeaux or Lewis Toulouse didn't sound so good. Then I thought about this city, Trondheim… Maybe someday I will publish a book under my real name, in order to remain anonymous."
Go to Profile#10080
Cloé Madanes
#10090
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Cloé Madanes is a teacher in family therapy and brief therapy. She has teamed up with Tony Robbins since 2002 to train strategic interventionists for finding solutions to interpersonal conflicts, preventing violence, and contributing to the creation of a more cohesive and civil community.
Go to Profile#10081
Philip Converse
#10091
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Philip Ernest Converse was an American political scientist. He was a professor in political science and sociology at the University of Michigan who conducted research on public opinion, survey research, and quantitative social science.
Go to Profile#10082
Robert Mehrabian
#10092
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Robert Mehrabian is an Armenian-American materials scientist and the executive chairman of Teledyne Technologies Incorporated. He assumed this position on January 1, 2019. He was chairman, president, and chief executive officer of the company from 2000 to December 31, 2018, and president and a chief executive officer from 1999 to 2000. Mehrabian held various senior executive positions at Allegheny Teledyne Incorporated starting in July 1997 before the spin-off of Teledyne Technologies Incorporated in November 1999. Previously he was president of Carnegie Mellon University from 1990 to 1997....
Go to Profile#10083
David Greenwalt
#10093
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David Greenwalt is an American screenwriter, director, and producer. He was the co-executive producer of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and co-creator of its spinoff, Angel. He is also co-creator of the short-lived cult television show Profit. He co-created the NBC supernatural drama Grimm.
Go to Profile#10084
Tadamitsu Kishimoto
#10094
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Tadamitsu Kishimoto is a Japanese immunologist known for research on IgM and cytokines, most famously, interleukin 6. He did postdoctoral work under Kimishige Ishizaka, the discoverer of IgE at Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#10085
Miguel Ángel Virasoro
#10095
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Miguel Ángel Virasoro was an Argentine theoretical physicist. Virasoro worked in Argentina, Israel, the United States, and France, but he spent most of his professional career in Italy at La Sapienza University of Rome. He shared a name with his father, the philosopher Miguel Ángel Virasoro. He was known for his foundational work in string theory, the study of spin glasses, and his research in other areas of mathematical and statistical physics. The Virasoro–Shapiro amplitude, the Virasoro algebra, the super Virasoro algebra, the Virasoro vertex operator algebra, the Virasoro group, the Vira...
Go to Profile#10086
Michael Whelan
#10096
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michael Whelan is an American artist of imaginative realism. For more than 30 years, he worked as an illustrator, specializing in science fiction and fantasy cover art. Since the mid-1990s, he has pursued a fine art career, selling non-commissioned paintings through galleries in the United States and through his website.
Go to Profile#10087
Eric Pianka
#10097
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Eric Rodger Pianka was an American herpetologist and evolutionary ecologist. Early life Pianka was born in Siskiyou County in 1939. At age 13, he was seriously injured in a bazooka blast in the front yard of his childhood home in Yreka, California. His left leg became gangrenous, and he lost 10 cm of his tibia, as well as the terminal digit of the middle finger on his right hand. Pianka's childhood injury left him with a short and partially paralyzed leg. In later life, his short leg resulted in spinal scoliosis and cervical spondylosis.
Go to Profile#10088
Rob Schenck
#10098
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Robert Leonard Schenck is an American Evangelical clergyman who has ministered to elected and appointed officials in Washington, D.C. and serves as president of a non-profit organization named for Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Schenck founded the organization Faith and Action in 1995 and led it until 2018. He is the subject of the Emmy Award-winning 2016 Abigail Disney documentary, The Armor of Light. Schenck stated that he was part of a group that paid Norma McCorvey to lie that she had changed her mind and become against abortion. Once a prominent anti-abortion activist, Schenck has since repudiated this work and expressed support for the legality of abortion.
Go to Profile#10089
Ken Forbus
#10099
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kenneth Dale "Ken" Forbus is an American computer scientist working as the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Education at Northwestern University. Education Forbus earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science, Master of Science in computer science, and PhD in artificial intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#10090
Ken Burns
#10100
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Kenneth Lauren Burns is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.
Go to Profile#10091
Tom Paulin
#10101
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Thomas Neilson Paulin is a Northern Irish poet and critic of film, music and literature. He lives in England, where he was the G. M. Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#10092
Philip Levine
#10102
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Philip Levine was an American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for more than thirty years in the English department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012.
Go to Profile#10093
Caucher Birkar
#10103
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Caucher Birkar is an Iranian Kurdish mathematician and a professor at Tsinghua University and at the University of Cambridge. Birkar is an important contributor to modern birational geometry. In 2010 he received the Leverhulme Prize in mathematics and statistics for his contributions to algebraic geometry, and in 2016, shared the AMS Moore Prize for the article "Existence of minimal models for varieties of log general type". He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2018, "for his proof of boundedness of Fano varieties and contributions to the minimal model program". In his office at the University...
Go to Profile#10094
John Frame
#10104
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
John Mcelphatrick Frame is a retired American Christian philosopher and Calvinist theologian especially noted for his work in epistemology and presuppositional apologetics, systematic theology, and ethics. He is one of the foremost interpreters and critics of the thought of Cornelius Van Til.
Go to Profile#10095
Alain Delon
#10105
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon is a French actor, filmmaker, and businessman. He was one of Europe's most prominent actors and screen sex symbols in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In 1985, he won the César Award for Best Actor for his performance in Notre histoire . In 1991, he received France's Legion of Honour. At the 45th Berlin International Film Festival, he won the Honorary Golden Bear. At the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, he received the Honorary Palme d'Or.
Go to Profile#10096
Ram Karmi
#10106
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Ram Karmi was an Israeli architect. He was head of the Tel Aviv-based Ram Karmi Architects company, and is known for his Brutalist style. Biography Ram Karmi was born in Jerusalem. His father was architect Dov Karmi. Karmi grew up in Tel Aviv, served in the Israel Defense Forces in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He was one of the first soldiers to join the Nahal.
Go to Profile#10097
Adin Falkoff
#10107
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Adin D. Falkoff was an engineer and computer systems and programming systems designer who was mostly known for his work on the programming language APL and systems for IBM. Career Falkoff, born in New Jersey, received a Bachelor of Engineering from the City College of New York in 1941, and a Master's degree in Mathematics from Yale University in 1963.
Go to Profile#10098
H. W. Brands
#10108
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Henry William Brands Jr. is an American historian. He holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his PhD in history in 1985. He has authored more than thirty books on U.S. history. His works have twice been selected as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
Go to Profile#10099
Guido Altarelli
#10109
Overall Influence
1941 - 2015 (74 years)
Guido Altarelli was an Italian theoretical physicist. Biography Altarelli graduated in Physics from the Sapienza University of Rome in 1963 with Raoul Gatto whom he followed to the University of Florence . He held positions at New York University , the Rockefeller University , the École Normale Superieure in Paris and Boston University . In 1970-92 he held a faculty position at the Sapienza University of Rome . He was Director of the Rome Section of the INFN . In 1992 he moved to the newly established University of Roma Tre.
Go to Profile#10100
Peyton Young
#10110
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Hobart Peyton Young is an American game theorist and economist known for his contributions to evolutionary game theory and its application to the study of institutional and technological change, as well as the theory of learning in games. He is currently centennial professor at the London School of Economics, James Meade Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Oxford, professorial fellow at Nuffield College Oxford, and research principal at the Office of Financial Research at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
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