Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

#10151

Matt Squire

#10161

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Matt Squire is an American record producer, audio engineer, mixing engineer, and songwriter. His production, songwriting, and mixing credits include Underoath, Panic! at the Disco, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, Kesha, One Direction, Bea Miller, Krewella, Sum 41, Simple Plan, All Time Low, Good Charlotte, 3OH!3, Boys Like Girls, The Amity Affliction, The Used, and Taking Back Sunday.

#10152

Lois Haibt

#10162

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Lois B. Mitchell Haibt is an American computer scientist best known for being a member of the ten-person team at IBM that developed FORTRAN, the first successful high-level programming language. She is known as an early pioneer in computer science.

#10153

Lincoln Wolfenstein

#10163

Overall Influence

1923 - 2015 (92 years)

Lincoln Wolfenstein was an American particle physicist who studied the weak interaction. Wolfenstein was born in 1923 and obtained his PhD in 1949 from the University of Chicago. He retired from Carnegie Mellon University in 2000 after being a faculty member for 52 years. Despite being retired, he continued to come into work nearly every day.

#10154

Martin Sharp

#10164

Overall Influence

1942 - 2013 (71 years)

Martin Ritchie Sharp was an Australian artist, cartoonist, songwriter and film-maker. Career Sharp was born in Bellevue Hill, New South Wales in 1942, and educated at Cranbrook private school, where one of his teachers was the artist Justin O'Brien.

#10155

Aldo Rustichini

#10165

Overall Influence

Aldo Rustichini is an Italian-born American economist, academic and researcher. He is a professor of economics at University of Minnesota, where is also associated with the Interdisciplinary Center for Cognitive Sciences.

#10156

Billy Corgan

#10166

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

William Patrick Corgan Jr. is an American musician, songwriter, and wrestling promoter. He is best known as the lead singer, primary songwriter, guitarist, and only constant member of the rock band the Smashing Pumpkins. He is currently the owner and promoter of the National Wrestling Alliance .

#10157

Timothy M. Dolan

#10167

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Timothy Michael Dolan is an American cardinal of the Catholic Church. He is the tenth and current archbishop of New York, having been appointed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009. Dolan served as the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2010 to 2013 and was elevated to the rank of cardinal in 2012.

#10158

Piers Anthony

#10168

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob is an American author in the science fiction and fantasy genres, publishing under the name Piers Anthony. He is best known for his long-running novel series set in the fictional realm of Xanth.

#10159

David Albright

#10169

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

David Albright, M.Sc., is an American physicist and a weapons expert who is the founder of the non-governmental Institute for Science and International Security , its current president, and author of several books on proliferation of atomic weapons. Albright holds a Master of Science in physics from Indiana University in 1980, Master of Science in mathematics from Wright State University in 1977 and a bachelor of science from Wright State University in 1975. He has taught physics at George Mason University in Virginia.

#10160

Kenneth Gentry

#10170

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr. is a Reformed theologian, and an ordained minister in the Reformed Presbyterian Church General Assembly. He is particularly known for his support for and publication on the topics of orthodox preterism and postmillennialism in Christian eschatology, as well as for theonomy and Young Earth creationism. He holds that each of these theological distinctives are logical and theological extensions of his foundational theology.

#10161

Robert Lanza

#10171

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Robert Lanza is an American medical doctor and scientist, currently Head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine, and Chief Scientific Officer of the Astellas Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He is an Adjunct Professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

#10162

Norbert Schwarz

#10172

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Norbert Schwarz is Provost Professor in the Department of Psychology and the USC Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and a co-director of the USC Dornsife Mind and Society Center.

#10163

Wu Jinglian

#10173

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Wu Jinglian is one of the preeminent economists of the People's Republic of China , primarily specializing in economic policy as it applies to China's ongoing series of economic reforms. Renowned for his resolute conviction that socialism is compatible with a market system, he is affectionately referred to in the media as Wu Shichang .

#10164

Phil Esposito

#10174

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Philip Anthony Esposito is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player, coach and executive, and current broadcaster for the Tampa Bay Lightning. A member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, he played 18 seasons in the National Hockey League for the Chicago Black Hawks, Boston Bruins, and New York Rangers, winning two Stanley Cups with Boston.

#10165

George Pataki

#10175

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

George Elmer Pataki is an American politician who served as the 53rd Governor of New York from 1995 to 2006. He previously served in the State Legislature from 1985 to 1994, and as the Mayor of Peekskill from 1981 to 1984. Pataki was the third Republican since 1923 to win New York's governorship, after Thomas E. Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller.

#10166

Helen Garner

#10176

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Helen Garner is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip, published in 1977, immediately established her as an original voice on the Australian literary scene—it is now widely considered a classic. She has a reputation for incorporating and adapting her personal experiences in her fiction, something that has brought her widespread attention, particularly with her novels, Monkey Grip and The Spare Room .

#10167

Vijay Kelkar

#10177

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Vijay L. Kelkar is an Indian economist and academic, who is currently the Chairman of the Forum of Federations, Ottawa & India Development Foundation, New Delhi and Chairman of Janwani – a social initiative of the Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture in Pune. He has been appointed as a trustee of Sri Sathya Sai Central Trust on 4 January 2014. He was also the Chairman of the Finance Commission until January 2010. He was earlier Advisor to the Minister of Finance , and is known for his role in economic reforms in India. Prior to this, he remained Finance Secretary, Gover...

#10168

Rodney E. Slater

#10178

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Rodney Earl Slater is an American politician of the Democratic Party who served as the United States Secretary of Transportation under President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001. Prior to being appointed to the Clinton Cabinet, Slater served as the administrator of the Federal Highway Administration from 1993 to 1997.

#10169

Peter Hall

#10179

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Sir Peter Geoffrey Hall was an English town planner, urbanist and geographer. He was the Bartlett Professor of Planning and Regeneration at The Bartlett, University College London and president of both the Town and Country Planning Association and the Regional Studies Association. Hall was one of the most prolific and influential urbanists of the twentieth century.

#10170

George Alec Effinger

#10180

Overall Influence

1947 - 2002 (55 years)

George Alec Effinger was an American science fiction author, born in Cleveland, Ohio. Writing career Effinger was a part of the Clarion class of 1970 and had three stories in the first Clarion anthology. His first published story was "The Eight-Thirty to Nine Slot" in Fantastic in 1971. During his early period, he also published under a variety of pseudonyms.

#10171

Lyman Wynne

#10181

Overall Influence

1923 - 2007 (84 years)

Lyman C. Wynne was an American psychiatrist and psychologist with a special interest in schizophrenia. His early research helped lay the foundation for family-based therapies, influencing others such as R. D. Laing and Margaret Singer. He made a number of discoveries about the interaction of genetics and the environment in the development of schizophrenia, working with adopted twins. He published numerous articles and co-edited "The Nature of Schizophrenia" , received the Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Award for schizophrenia research from the American Academy of Psychoanalysis in 1965, the Meritorious Service Medal from the U.S.

#10172

Carol P. Christ

#10182

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

Carol Patrice Christ was a feminist historian, thealogian, author, and foremother of the Goddess movement. She obtained her PhD from Yale University and served as a professor at universities such as Columbia University and Harvard Divinity School. Her best-known publication is "Why Women Need The Goddess". It was initially a keynote presentation at the "Great Goddess Re-emerging" conference" at the University of Santa Cruz in 1978. This essay helped to launch the Goddess movement in the U.S. and other countries. It discusses the importance of religious symbols in general, and the effects of male symbolism of God on women in particular.

#10173

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

#10183

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is professor of American history emeritus and an honorary fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh , Scotland. He is an authority on American intelligence history, having written two American intelligence history surveys and studies of the CIA and FBI. He has also written books on women and American foreign policy, America and the Vietnam War, and American labor history.

#10174

Gianni Infantino

#10184

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Giovanni Vincenzo "Gianni" Infantino is a Swiss-Italian football administrator and the president of FIFA since the 2016 FIFA Extraordinary Congress in February 2016. He was re-elected in June 2019 and in March 2023. In January 2020, he was also elected a member of the International Olympic Committee.

#10175

Jay Ruby

#10185

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Jay Ruby was an American scholar who was a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Temple University until his retirement in 2003. He received his B.A. in History and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles.

#10176

Mark McGwire

#10186

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Mark David McGwire , nicknamed "Big Mac", is an American former professional baseball first baseman who played 16 seasons in Major League Baseball from 1986 to 2001 for the Oakland Athletics and the St. Louis Cardinals. He won two World Series championships, one with Oakland as a player in 1989 and one with St. Louis as a coach in 2011. One of the most prolific home run hitters in baseball history, McGwire hit 583 home runs during his career, which ranked 5th-most in MLB history at the time of his retirement and currently ranks 11th. He holds the major-league career record for at bats per hom...

#10177

Robin Holliday

#10187

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Robin Holliday was a British molecular biologist. Holliday described a mechanism of DNA-strand exchange that attempted to explain gene-conversion events that occur during meiosis in fungi. That model first proposed in 1964 and is now known as the Holliday Junction.

#10178

Ivan Sag

#10188

Overall Influence

1949 - 2013 (64 years)

Ivan Andrew Sag was an American linguist and cognitive scientist. He did research in areas of syntax and semantics as well as work in computational linguistics. Personal life Born in Alliance, Ohio on November 9, 1949, Sag attended the Mercersburg Academy but was expelled shortly before graduation. He received a BA from the University of Rochester, an MA from the University of Pennsylvania—where he studied comparative Indo-European languages, Sanskrit, and sociolinguistics—and a PhD from MIT in 1976, writing his dissertation on ellipsis.

#10179

Shelley E. Taylor

#10189

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Shelley Elizabeth Taylor is an American psychologist. She serves as a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University, and was formerly on the faculty at Harvard University. A prolific author of books and scholarly journal articles, Taylor has long been a leading figure in two subfields related to her primary discipline of social psychology: social cognition and health psychology. Her books include The Tending Instinct and Social Cognition, the latter by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor.

#10180

Joan Daemen

#10190

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Joan Daemen is a Belgian cryptographer who co-designed with Vincent Rijmen the Rijndael cipher, which was selected as the Advanced Encryption Standard in 2001. More recently, he co-designed the Keccak cryptographic hash, which was selected as the new SHA-3 hash by NIST in October 2012. He has also designed or co-designed the MMB, Square, SHARK, NOEKEON, 3-Way, and BaseKing block ciphers. In 2017 he won the Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography "for the development of AES and SHA3". He describes his development of encryption algorithms as creating the bricks which are needed to build th...

#10181

Rebecca Skloot

#10191

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Rebecca L. Skloot is an American science writer who specializes in science and medicine. Her first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks , was one of the best-selling new books of 2010, staying on The New York Times Bestseller list for over 6 years and eventually reaching #1. It was adapted into a movie by George C. Wolfe, which premiered on HBO on April 22, 2017, and starred Rose Byrne as Skloot, and Oprah Winfrey as Lacks's daughter Deborah.

#10182

Tom Wesselmann

#10192

Overall Influence

1931 - 2004 (73 years)

Thomas K. Wesselmann was an American artist associated with the Pop Art movement who worked in painting, collage and sculpture. Early years Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati. From 1949 to 1951 he attended college in Ohio; first at Hiram College, and then transferred to major in Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. He was drafted into the US Army in 1952, but spent his service years stateside. During that time he made his first cartoons, and became interested in pursuing a career in cartooning. After his discharge he completed his psychology degree in 1954, whereupon he began to study drawing at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

#10183

Man Mohan Sharma

#10193

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Man Mohan Sharma, is an Indian chemical engineer. He was educated at Jodhpur, Mumbai, and Cambridge. At age 27, he was appointed Professor of Chemical Engineering in the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai. He later went on to become the Director of UDCT, the first chemical engineering professor to do so from UDCT.

#10184

Yakov Rekhter

#10194

Overall Influence

Yakov Rekhter is a well-known network protocol designer and software programmer. He was heavily involved in internet protocol development, and its predecessors, from their early stages. Dr. Rekhter was one of the leading architects and a major software developer of the NSFNET Backbone Phase II. He co-designed the Border Gateway Protocol , the core routing protocol of the Internet. He was also one of the lead designers of Tag Switching , BGP/MPLS based VPNs, and MPLS Traffic Engineering. Among his most recent activities is the work on MPLS Multicast, Multicast in VPLS, and Multicast in BGP/MPLS VPNs .

#10185

Franz Rosenthal

#10195

Overall Influence

1914 - 2003 (89 years)

Franz Rosenthal was the Louis M. Rabinowitz Professor of Semitic Languages at Yale University from 1956 to 1967 and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Arabic, scholar of Arabic literature and Islam at Yale from 1967 to 1985.

#10186

Satoshi Kawata

#10196

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Satoshi Kawata is a scientist based in Japan who is active in nanotechnology, photonics, plasmonics, and other areas of applied physics. He is a Professor of Department of Applied Physics at Osaka University. He is also a Chief Scientist at RIKEN. Kawata was the 2022 president of Optica.

#10187

Len Goodman

#10197

Overall Influence

1944 - 2023 (79 years)

Leonard Gordon Goodman was an English professional ballroom dancer, dance teacher, and dance competition adjudicator. He appeared as head judge on the UK television programme Strictly Come Dancing, where various celebrities compete for the glitter ball trophy, from its beginning in 2004 until 2016 and on the U.S. television programme Dancing with the Stars from 2005 until 2022. He also ran a ballroom dance school in Dartford, Kent.

#10188

Jim Cregan

#10198

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

James Cregan is an English rock guitarist and bassist, best known for his associations with Family, Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel and Rod Stewart. Cregan is a former husband of the singer Linda Lewis and worked with her as a record producer. He has also worked with London Quireboys, Glass Tiger, Katie Melua and formed Farm Dogs with Bernie Taupin.

#10189

Gary Payton

#10199

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Gary Dwayne Payton is an American former professional basketball player who was a point guard in the National Basketball Association . Widely considered one of the greatest point guards of all time, he is best known for his 13-year tenure with the Seattle SuperSonics, where he holds franchise records in assists and steals. He also played with the Milwaukee Bucks, Los Angeles Lakers, Boston Celtics, and Miami Heat. Payton won an NBA championship with the Heat in 2006. Nicknamed "the Glove" for his defensive abilities, Payton was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013. In Oc...

#10190

William Kaelin Jr.

William Kaelin Jr.

#10200

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

William G. Kaelin Jr. is an American Nobel laureate physician-scientist. He is a professor of medicine at Harvard University and the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. His laboratory studies tumor suppressor proteins. In 2016, Kaelin received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the AACR Princess Takamatsu Award. He also won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2019 along with Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza.

#10191

Wei-Liang Chow

#10201

Overall Influence

1911 - 1995 (84 years)

Chow Wei-Liang was a Chinese mathematician and stamp collector born in Shanghai, known for his work in algebraic geometry. Biography Chow was a student in the US, graduating from the University of Chicago in 1931. In 1932 he attended the University of Göttingen, then transferred to the Leipzig University where he worked with van der Waerden. They produced a series of joint papers on intersection theory, introducing in particular the use of what are now generally called Chow coordinates .

#10192

Barry N. Malzberg

#10202

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Barry Nathaniel Malzberg is an American writer and editor, most often of science fiction and fantasy. Biography Malzberg originated from a Jewish family and graduated from Syracuse University in 1960. He worked as an investigator for the New York City Department of Welfare in 1961–1962 and 1963–1964. In 1963, he was employed as a reimbursement agent for the New York State Department of Mental Health. He married Joyce Zelnick in 1964.

#10193

Al Milgrom

#10203

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Allen L. Milgrom is an American comic book writer, penciller, inker and editor, primarily for Marvel Comics. He is known for his 10-year run as editor of Marvel Fanfare; his long involvement as writer, penciler, and inker on Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man; his four-year tenure as West Coast Avengers penciller; and his long stint as the inker of X-Factor. He often inks Jim Starlin's work. Milgrom is the co-creator of DC superhero Firestorm.

#10194

Maurice Casey

#10204

Overall Influence

1942 - 2014 (72 years)

Philip Maurice Casey was a British scholar of New Testament and early Christianity. He was an emeritus professor at the University of Nottingham, having served there as Professor of New Testament Languages and Literature at the Department of Theology.

#10195

Selo Soemardjan

Selo Soemardjan

#10205

Overall Influence

1915 - 2003 (88 years)

Selo Soemardjan , also spelled as Selo Sumarjan or Selo Sumardjan, was a well known senior academic in sociology at the University of Indonesia, and is known as the Pioneer of Indonesian Social Sciences. He was awarded with the title Kanjeng Pangeran Haryo, a knighthood from the Yogyakarta Sultanate.

#10196

Lynn Nadel

#10206

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Lynn Nadel is an American psychologist who is the Regents' Professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. Nadel specializes in memory, and has investigated the role of the hippocampus in memory formation. Together with John O'Keefe, he coauthored the influential 1978 book The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, which defended the theory that the hippocampus learns and stores cognitive maps of portions of space. With Morris Moscovitch, he advanced the multiple trace theory that the hippocampus is always involved in storage and retrieval of episodic memory, but that semantic memory can be es...

#10197

Jan Karel Lenstra

Jan Karel Lenstra

#10207

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Jan Karel Lenstra is a Dutch mathematician and operations researcher, known for his work on scheduling algorithms, local search, and the travelling salesman problem. Lenstra received his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in 1976, advised by Gijsbert de Leve. He then became a researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, where he remained until 1989. After taking positions at the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology, he returned to CWI as its director in 2003. He stepped down in 2011, and at that time became a CWI Fellow. He was editor-in-chief o...

#10198

Vincent Rijmen

#10208

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Vincent Rijmen is a Belgian cryptographer and one of the two designers of the Rijndael, the Advanced Encryption Standard. Rijmen is also the co-designer of the WHIRLPOOL cryptographic hash function, and the block ciphers Anubis, KHAZAD, Square, NOEKEON and SHARK.

#10199

Tom Landry

#10209

Overall Influence

1924 - 2000 (76 years)

Thomas Wade Landry was an American professional football coach, player, and World War II veteran. Regarded as one of the greatest head coaches of all time, he was the first head coach of the Dallas Cowboys in the National Football League , a position he held for 29 seasons. During his coaching career, he created many new formations and methods, such as the now default defense the 4–3 defense that is used by a majority of teams in the NFL, and the "flex defense" system made famous by the "Doomsday Defense" squads he built during his tenure with the Cowboys. His 29 consecutive years from 1960 t...

#10200

Deborah Blum

#10210

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Deborah Blum is an American science journalist and the director of the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several books, including The Poisoner's Handbook and The Poison Squad , and has been a columnist for The New York Times and a blogger, via her blog titled Elemental, for Wired.

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