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
#10301
Otohiko Kaga
#10311
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Otohiko Kaga was a Japanese author. Biography Kaga was born in Tokyo, and studied psychiatry and criminology at the University of Tokyo Medical School. He worked in a hospital and then prison before going to France in 1957 for further studies. After returning to Japan in 1960, Kaga took up university teaching, and was a psychology professor at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University and Sophia University .
Go to Profile#10302
Richard Lindzen
#10312
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
#10303
Olav Kallenberg
#10313
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Olav Kallenberg is a probability theorist known for his work on exchangeable stochastic processes and for his graduate-level textbooks and monographs. Kallenberg is a professor of mathematics at Auburn University in Alabama in the USA.
Go to Profile#10304
Bob Knight
#10314
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Robert Montgomery Knight was an American men's college basketball coach. Often referred to as Bobby Knight and nicknamed "the General", he won 902 NCAA Division I men's basketball games, a record at the time of his retirement and sixth all-time record at the time of his death.
Go to Profile#10305
David A. Kessler
#10315
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
David Aaron Kessler is an American pediatrician, attorney, author, and administrator serving as Chief Science Officer of the White House COVID-19 Response Team since 2021. Kessler was the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from November 8, 1990, to February 28, 1997. He co-chaired the Biden-Harris transition’s COVID-19 Advisory Board from November 2020 to January 2021 and was the head of Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government program to accelerate the development of COVID-19 vaccines and other treatments, from January to February 2021.
Go to Profile#10306
Susan George
#10316
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Susan George is an American and French political and social scientist, activist and writer on global social justice, Third World poverty, underdevelopment and debt. She is the president of the Transnational Institute, a think-tank located in Amsterdam. She is a fierce critic of the present policies of the International Monetary Fund , World Bank and what she calls their 'maldevelopment model'. She similarly criticizes the structural reform policies of the Washington Consensus on Third World development. She is of U.S. birth but now resides in France, and has had dual citizenship since 1994.
Go to Profile#10307
George Stanley
#10317
Overall Influence
1907 - 2002 (95 years)
Colonel George Francis Gillman Stanley was a Canadian historian, author, soldier, teacher, public servant, and designer of the Canadian Flag. Early life and education George F. G. Stanley was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1907 and received a BA from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He went to Keble College, University of Oxford, in 1929 as the Rhodes Scholar from Alberta, and held a Beit Fellowship in Imperial Studies and a Royal Society of Canada Scholarship. He earned a BA, MA, MLitt and DPhil. Always a keen athlete, he played for the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club, which won the Spengler Cup in 1931.
Go to Profile#10308
Robert Williams
#10318
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert L. Williams, often styled Robt. Williams , is an American painter, cartoonist, and founder of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine. Williams was one of the group of artists who produced Zap Comix, along with other underground cartoonists, such as Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and Gilbert Shelton. His mix of California car culture, cinematic apocalypticism, and film noir helped to create a new genre of psychedelic imagery.
Go to Profile#10309
Louis Lévy-Garboua
#10319
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Louis Lévy-Garboua is a French economist whose work focuses on behavioral economics and microeconomics. He is a distinguished professor at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne and at the Paris School of Economics.
Go to Profile#10310
Gustav Victor Rudolf Born
#10320
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Gustav Victor Rudolf Born FRCP, HonFRCS, FRS was a German-British professor of Pharmacology at King's College London and Research Professor at the William Harvey Research Institute, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry.
Go to Profile#10311
Darrell Duffie
#10321
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
James Darrell Duffie is a Canadian financial economist and is Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is the author of numerous research articles, and several books, including Futures Markets, Dynamic Asset Pricing Theory, and—with Kenneth Singleton—Credit Risk.
Go to Profile#10312
Richard Löwenthal
#10322
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
Richard Löwenthal was a German journalist and professor who wrote mostly on the problems of democracy, communism, and world politics. Life Löwenthal was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Ernst and Anna Löwenthal. His father was a real estate agent. From 1926 until 1931, Löwenthal studied political science, economics, and sociology at Berlin University and Heidelberg University. His major intellectual influences were Max Weber and Karl Mannheim. From 1926 until 1929, Löwenthal was a member of the Communist Party of Germany, which he left over opposition to the tactics of the Comintern. Remai...
Go to Profile#10313
Amos Horev
#10323
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (102 years)
Amos Horev is an Israeli military official and expert. He served as a commander in the Palmach the elite force of the Haganah before the founding of the state, and was later an Israeli Defense Forces Major-General, Chief of Ordnance and subsequently Quartermaster General and Chief Scientist of the IDF, nuclear scientist, President of Technion University, and Chairman of Rafael. In June 2010, he was appointed to the Israeli special independent Turkel Commission of Inquiry into the Gaza flotilla raid.
Go to Profile#10314
Nadine Strossen
#10324
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
#10315
J. W. S. Cassels
#10325
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
John William Scott "Ian" Cassels, FRS was a British mathematician. Biography Cassels was educated at Neville's Cross Council School in Durham and George Heriot's School in Edinburgh. He went on to study at the University of Edinburgh and graduated with an undergraduate Master of Arts degree in 1943.
Go to Profile#10316
John Elliott
#10326
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Sir John Huxtable Elliott was a British historian and Hispanist who was Regius Professor at the University of Oxford and honorary fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge. He published under the name J. H. Elliott.
Go to Profile#10317
Keith Waldrop
#10327
Overall Influence
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
Bernard Keith Waldrop was an American poet, translator, publisher, and academic. He won the National Book Award for Poetry for his 2009 collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. Early life and education Bernard Keith Waldrop was born in Emporia, Kansas, to Arthur Waldrop, a railroad worker, and Opal , a piano teacher. He received his bachelor's degree from the Kansas State Teachers College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Michigan .
Go to Profile#10318
Neil Warnock
#10328
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Neil Warnock is an English football manager and former player who was most recently the manager of Championship club Huddersfield Town. He is also a television and radio pundit. In a managerial career spanning five decades, Warnock has managed sixteen different clubs from the Premier League to non-league. He holds the record for the most promotions in English football, with eight and the most games as a professional manager with 1626, beating the previous record of 1601.
Go to Profile#10319
Ian Rush
#10329
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Ian James Rush is a Welsh former professional footballer who played as a forward. He is regarded as one of the best strikers of all time and one of the best Welsh players in the history of the sport. At club level Rush played for Liverpool from 1980–1987 and 1988–1996. Additionally, he is the club's all-time leading goalscorer, having scored a total of 346 goals in all competitions at the club. He also holds the records for being the highest goalscorer in the history of the EFL cup and the finals of the FA cup. At international level, Rush made 73 appearances for the Wales national football ...
Go to Profile#10320
Sergio Fubini
#10330
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Sergio Fubini was an Italian theoretical physicist. He was one of the pioneers of string theory. He was engaged in peace activism in the Middle East. Biography Fubini was born in Turin. In 1938, he fled the country as a politically persecuted Jew to Switzerland. In 1945, he attended the Lycée in Turin, where he studied physics and in 1950 graduated "cum laude." Afterwards, he was an assistant in Turin. From 1954 to 1957, he was in the USA. From 1958 to 1967, he was at CERN in Geneva. In 1959, he became a professor of nuclear physics at University of Padua. In 1961, he became a professor of theoretical physics at University of Turin.
Go to Profile#10321
Mary F. Lyon
#10331
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Mary Frances Lyon was an English geneticist best known for her discovery of X-chromosome inactivation, an important biological phenomenon. Early life and education Mary Lyon was born on 15 May 1925 in Norwich, England as the eldest out of three children of a civil servant and a schoolteacher. She was educated at a grammar school in Birmingham. During that time, she said, she became interested in science thanks to a good schoolteacher and nature books she won in an essay competition. During the Second World War in 1943, she began her studies at Girton College, Cambridge at the University of ...
Go to Profile#10322
Artur Ekert
#10332
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Artur Konrad Ekert is a British-Polish professor of quantum physics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, professorial fellow in quantum physics and cryptography at Merton College, Oxford, Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore and the founding director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies . His research interests extend over most aspects of information processing in quantum-mechanical systems, with a focus on quantum communication and quantum computation. He is best known as one of the pioneers of quantum cryptography.
Go to Profile#10323
Carol Cohn
#10333
Overall Influence
Carol Cohn is the founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights and a Lecturer of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Cohn is recognised for addressing issues of gender in global politics, particularly conflict and security issues. She has published in academic and policy contexts with major research interests lying in the realm of gender and armed conflict, the gendered discourses of US national security elites and gender mainstreaming in international security institutions. In addition to her research, Cohn facilitates training and workshops ...
Go to Profile#10324
Joshua Muravchik
#10334
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Joshua Muravchik is a neoconservative political scholar. He resides in Washington, DC based World Affairs Institute, he is also an adjunct professor at the DC based Institute of World Politics and a former fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies . He was formerly a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute , a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute , and a scholar in residence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy .
Go to Profile#10325
Timothy P. White
#10335
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Timothy Peter White is a retired academic administrator and kinesiologist. He served as the chancellor of the California State University system from December 2012 to December 2020. He was the chancellor of the Riverside campus of the University of California from 2008 to 2012.
Go to Profile#10326
Barry Manilow
#10336
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Barry Manilow is an American singer and songwriter with a career that spans seven decades. His hit recordings include "Could It Be Magic", "Looks Like We Made It", "Mandy", "I Write the Songs", "Can't Smile Without You", "Weekend in New England" and "Copacabana ".
Go to Profile#10327
Joseph Felsenstein
#10337
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Joseph "Joe" Felsenstein is a Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Genome Sciences and Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is best known for his work on phylogenetic inference, and is the author of Inferring Phylogenies, and principal author and distributor of the package of phylogenetic inference programs called PHYLIP. Closely related to his work on phylogenetic inference is his introduction of methods for making statistically independent comparisons using phylogenies.
Go to Profile#10328
Michael R. Powers
#10338
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Michael Roland Powers is an American academic who is the Chair Professor of Finance at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management in China. Since 2014, he has held a dual appointment as professor at Tsinghua's Schwarzman College. An internationally recognized risk and insurance expert, he was a 2011 recipient of China’s Thousand Talents Plan award. In 2013, he won the Kulp-Wright Book Award for Acts of God and Man: Ruminations on Risk and Insurance .
Go to Profile#10329
Melissa Harris-Perry
#10339
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Melissa Victoria Harris-Perry , formerly known as Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, is an American writer, professor, television host, and political commentator with a focus on African-American politics. Harris-Perry hosted the Melissa Harris-Perry weekend news and opinion television show on MSNBC from 2012 to February 27, 2016.
Go to Profile#10330
Robert Kurzban
#10340
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Robert Kurzban is an American freelance writer and former psychology professor specializing in evolutionary psychology. Career Kurzban was a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania until 2018, when he resigned following allegations of inappropriate relationships with undergraduate students. Following his resignation, he was dismissed as the director of the department's honors program. He also resigned as president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society and as Editor-in-Chief of the Society’s journal, Evolution and Human Behavior. Since then he has worked as a fr...
Go to Profile#10331
Xiang Zhang
#10341
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Zhang Xiang is a Chinese-American academic administrator, material scientist, optical engineer and physicist. He is the current vice-chancellor and president of the University of Hong Kong, where he also serves as professor.
Go to Profile#10332
Jay Earley
#10342
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jay Earley is an American computer scientist and psychologist. He invented the Earley parser in his early career in computer science. Later he became a clinical psychologist specializing in group therapy and Internal Family Systems Therapy , including working with the inner critic. He has created the Pattern System, a personality system, and Self-Therapy Journey, a web application for psychological healing and behavior change.
Go to Profile#10333
Sergio Ferrara
#10343
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sergio Ferrara is an Italian physicist working on theoretical physics of elementary particles and mathematical physics. He is renowned for the discovery of theories introducing supersymmetry as a symmetry of elementary particles and of supergravity, the first significant extension of Einstein's general relativity, based on the principle of "local supersymmetry" . He is an emeritus staff member at CERN and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#10334
Kathleen Hall Jamieson
#10344
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is an American professor of communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She co-founded FactCheck.org, and she is an author, most recently of Cyberwar, in which she argues that Russia very likely helped Donald J. Trump become the U.S. President in 2016.
Go to Profile#10335
Ken Livingstone
#10345
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Kenneth Robert Livingstone is an English former politician who served as the Leader of the Greater London Council from 1981 until the council was abolished in 1986, and as Mayor of London from the creation of the office in 2000 until 2008. He also served as the Member of Parliament for Brent East from 1987 to 2001. A former member of the Labour Party, he was on the party's hard left, ideologically identifying as a socialist.
Go to Profile#10336
Seymour Hersh
#10346
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the CIA's program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military's torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won a record five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards.
Go to Profile#10337
Jodie Foster
#10347
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Alicia Christian "Jodie" Foster is an American actress and filmmaker. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. For her work as a producer and director, she has been nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards. She has also earned numerous honors such as the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2013 and the Honorary Palme d'Or in 2021.
Go to Profile#10338
Léon Krier
#10348
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Léon Krier CVO is a Luxembourgish architect, architectural theorist, and urban planner, a prominent critic of modernist architecture and advocate of New Classical architecture and New Urbanism. Krier combines an international architecture and planning practice with writing and teaching. He is well known for his master plan for Poundbury, in Dorset, England. He is the younger brother of architect Rob Krier.
Go to Profile#10339
Melvin Dresher
#10349
Overall Influence
1911 - 1992 (81 years)
Melvin Dresher was a Polish-born American mathematician, notable for developing, with Merrill Flood, the game theoretical model of cooperation and conflict known as the Prisoner's dilemma while at RAND in 1950 .
Go to Profile#10340
Rick Santorum
#10350
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Richard John Santorum Sr. is an American politician, attorney, author, and political commentator who represented Pennsylvania in the United States Senate from 1995 to 2007. He was the Senate's third-ranking Republican during the final six years of his tenure. He also ran unsuccessfully for President of the United States in the 2012 Republican primaries, finishing second to Mitt Romney.
Go to Profile#10341
Sugar Ray Leonard
#10351
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ray Charles Leonard , best known as "Sugar" Ray Leonard, is an American former professional boxer, motivational speaker, and occasional actor. Often regarded as one of the greatest boxers of all time, he competed professionally between 1977 and 1997, winning world titles in five weight classes; the lineal championship in three weight classes; as well as the undisputed welterweight championship. Leonard was part of the "Four Kings", a group of boxers who all fought each other throughout the 1980s, consisting of Leonard, Roberto Durán, Thomas Hearns, and Marvin Hagler. Leonard also won a light w...
Go to Profile#10342
Gary Shteyngart
#10352
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Gary Shteyngart is a Soviet-born American writer. He is the author of five novels and a memoir. Much of his work is satirical. Early life Born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart in the Soviet Union, he spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in what is now St. Petersburg—which he alternately calls "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg". He comes from a Jewish family, with an ethnically Russian maternal grandparent, and describes his family as typically Soviet. His father worked as an engineer in a LOMO camera factory; his mother was a pianist.
Go to Profile#10343
Carl Lewis
#10353
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Frederick Carlton Lewis is an American former track and field athlete who won nine Olympic gold medals, one Olympic silver medal, and 10 World Championships medals, including eight gold. His career spanned from 1979 to 1996, when he last won an Olympic event. He is one of only six Olympic athletes who won a gold medal in the same individual event in four consecutive Olympic Games.
Go to Profile#10344
Gabriele Oettingen
#10354
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Princess Gabriele of Oettingen-Oettingen and Oettingen-Spielberg, known professionally as Gabriele Oettingen, is a German academic and psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on how people think about the future, and how this impacts cognition, emotion, and behavior.
Go to Profile#10345
Brad Fitzpatrick
#10355
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Bradley Joseph Fitzpatrick is an American programmer. He is best known as the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached, PubSubHubbub, OpenID, and Perkeep.
Go to Profile#10346
Shaban Demiraj
#10356
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Shaban Demiraj was an Albanian albanologist, linguist, professor at the University of Tirana from 1972–1990, and chairman of the Academy of Sciences of Albania during the period of 1993-1997. Life Demiraj was born on 1 January 1920 in Vlorë. Despite financial difficulties and the lack of academic institutions in Albania, he managed to study and learn Latin, ancient Greek, and the major European languages. After finishing the Madrasa in Tirana in 1939, he studied Albanian language in the two-year curriculum Pedagogical Institute, branch of Albanian language and literature , and later in the High Pedagogical Institute .
Go to Profile#10347
Sidney Lumet
#10357
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Sidney Arthur Lumet was an American film director. Lumet started his career in theatre before transitioning to film where he gained a reputation for making realistic and gritty New York dramas which focused on the working class, tackled social injustices and often questioned authority. Lumet is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers such as Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Woody Allen.
Go to Profile#10348
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
#10358
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is a Spanish politician and member of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party . He was the Prime Minister of Spain being elected for two terms, in the 2004 and 2008 general elections. On 2 April 2011 he announced he would not stand for re-election in the 2011 general election and left office on 21 December 2011.
Go to Profile#10349
Sean Scully
#10359
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sean Scully is an Irish-born American-based artist working as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and photographer. His work is held in museum collections worldwide and he has twice been named a Turner Prize nominee. Moving from London to New York in 1975, Scully helped lead the transition from Minimalism to Emotional abstraction in painting, abandoning the reduced vocabulary of Minimalism in favor of a return to metaphor and spirituality in art.
Go to Profile#10350
G. Robert Blakey
#10360
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
George Robert Blakey is an American attorney and law professor. He is best known for his work in connection with drafting the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and for scholarship on that subject.
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