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
#10351
Peter G. Schultz
#10361
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#10352
Douglas Groothuis
#10362
Overall Influence
1957 - 2018 (61 years)
Douglas R. Groothuis is professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary. Groothuis was a campus pastor for twelve years prior to obtaining a position as an associate professor of philosophy of religion and ethics at Denver Seminary in 1993. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon. He was married to Rebecca Merrill Groothuis until her death on July 6, 2018.
Go to Profile#10353
Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri
#10363
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri was an Indian physicist, known for his research in general relativity and cosmology. His most significant contribution is the eponymous Raychaudhuri equation, which demonstrates that singularities arise inevitably in general relativity and is a key ingredient in the proofs of the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems. Raychaudhuri was also revered as a teacher during his tenure at Presidency College, Kolkata.
Go to Profile#10354
Rafael Correa
#10364
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado is an Ecuadorian politician and economist who served as President of Ecuador from 2007 to 2017. The leader of the PAIS Alliance political movement from its foundation until 2017, Correa is a democratic socialist and his administration focused on the implementation of left-wing policies. Internationally, he served as president pro tempore of the UNASUR.
Go to Profile#10355
Ian Wright
#10365
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Ian Edward Wright is an English television and radio personality and former professional footballer. Wright enjoyed success with London clubs Crystal Palace and Arsenal as a forward, spending six years with the former and seven years with the latter. With Arsenal he lifted the Premier League title, both the major domestic cup competitions, and the European Cup Winners Cup. Known for his speed, agility, finishing and aggression, he played 581 league games, scoring 287 goals for seven clubs in Scotland and England, while also earning 33 caps for the England national team, and scoring nine inte...
Go to Profile#10356
Veeravalli S. Varadarajan
#10366
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Veeravalli Seshadri Varadarajan was an Indian mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, who worked in many areas of mathematics, including probability, Lie groups and their representations, quantum mechanics, differential equations, and supersymmetry.
Go to Profile#10357
David G. Hartwell
#10367
Overall Influence
1941 - 2016 (75 years)
David Geddes Hartwell was an American critic, publisher, and editor of thousands of science fiction and fantasy novels. He was best known for work with Signet, Pocket, and Tor Books publishers. He was also noted as an award-winning editor of anthologies. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as "perhaps the single most influential book editor of the past forty years in the American [science fiction] publishing world".
Go to Profile#10358
Stuart Dybek
#10368
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Stuart Dybek is an American writer of fiction and poetry. Biography Dybek, a second-generation Polish American, was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Chicago's Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods in the 1950s and early 1960s. He graduated from St. Rita of Cascia High School in 1959 and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has an MA in literature from Loyola University Chicago.
Go to Profile#10359
David Kalupahana
#10369
Overall Influence
1936 - 2014 (78 years)
David J. Kalupahana was a Buddhist scholar from Sri Lanka. He was a student of the late K.N. Jayatilleke, who was a student of Wittgenstein. He wrote mainly about epistemology, theory of language, and compared later Buddhist philosophical texts against the earliest texts and tried to present interpretations that were both historically contextualised and also compatible with the earliest texts, and in doing so, he encouraged Theravada Buddhists and scholars to reevaluate the legitimacy of later, Mahayana texts and consider them more sympathetically.
Go to Profile#10360
Jules Olitski
#10370
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Jevel Demikovski , known professionally as Jules Olitski, was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Early life Olitski was born Jevel Demikovsky in Snovsk, in Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic , a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Soviet government. He emigrated to the United States in 1923 with his mother and grandmother and settled in Brooklyn. His grandmother cared for him while his mother worked to support the family. In 1926 his mother married Hyman Olitsky , a widower with two sons. A daughter was born in 1930.
Go to Profile#10361
Jannis Kounellis
#10371
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Jannis Kounellis was a Greek Italian artist based in Rome. A key figure associated with Arte Povera, he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Life and work Kounellis was born in Piraeus, Greece in 1936. He lived in Greece during the Second World War and Greek Civil War before he moved to Rome in 1956.
Go to Profile#10362
Michel Talagrand
#10372
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Michel Pierre Talagrand is a French mathematician. Docteur ès sciences since 1977, he has been, since 1985, Directeur de Recherches at CNRS and a member of the Functional Analysis Team of the Institut de Mathématique of Paris. Talagrand was elected as correspondent of the Académie des sciences of Paris in March 1997, and then as a full member in November 2004, in the Mathematics section.
Go to Profile#10363
Luc Besson
#10373
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Luc Paul Maurice Besson is a French filmmaker. He directed or produced the films Subway , The Big Blue , and La Femme Nikita . Associated with the Cinéma du look film movement, he has been nominated for a César Award for Best Director and Best Picture for his films Léon: The Professional and the English-language The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc . He won Best Director and Best French Director for his sci-fi action film The Fifth Element . He wrote and directed the 2014 sci-fi action film Lucy and the 2017 space opera film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
Go to Profile#10364
Terrell Owens
#10374
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Terrell Eldorado Owens , nicknamed "T.O.", is an American former football wide receiver who played 15 seasons in the National Football League . Regarded as one of the greatest wide receivers of all time, Owens ranks third in NFL history in career receiving yards and receiving touchdowns.
Go to Profile#10365
Marc Levoy
#10375
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Marc Levoy is a computer graphics researcher and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, a vice president and Fellow at Adobe Inc., and a Distinguished Engineer at Google. He is noted for pioneering work in volume rendering, light fields, and computational photography.
Go to Profile#10366
Keith Johnstone
#10376
Overall Influence
1933 - 2023 (90 years)
Donald Keith Johnstone was a British-Canadian educator and theatre director. A pioneer of improvisational theatre, he was best known for inventing the Impro System, part of which are the Theatresports. He was also an educator, playwright, actor and theatre director.
Go to Profile#10367
Bruce Webster
#10377
Overall Influence
Bruce F. Webster is an American academic and software engineer. He is a principal at Bruce F. Webster & Associates and an adjunct professor in computer science at Brigham Young University. Early life and education Webster received a full National Merit Scholarship to study computer science at Brigham Young University, graduating in 1978 with a bachelor's degree. He went on to work in computer science at the University of Houston-Clear Lake in Houston, Texas.
Go to Profile#10368
Jack Goldstone
#10378
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jack A. Goldstone is an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian, specializing in studies of social movements, revolutions, political demography, and the 'Rise of the West' in world history. He is an author or editor of 13 books and over 150 research articles. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the study of revolutions and long-term social change. His work has made foundational contributions to the fields of cliodynamics, economic history and political demography. He was the first scholar to describe in detail and document the long-term cyclical relationship between global population cycles and cycles of political rebellion and revolution.
Go to Profile#10369
Thomas Lovejoy
#10379
Overall Influence
1941 - 2021 (80 years)
Thomas Eugene Lovejoy III was an American ecologist who was President of the Amazon Biodiversity Center, a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation and a university professor in the Environmental Science and Policy department at George Mason University. Lovejoy was the World Bank's chief biodiversity advisor and the lead specialist for environment for Latin America and the Caribbean as well as senior advisor to the president of the United Nations Foundation. In 2008, he also was the first Biodiversity Chair of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment to 2013.
Go to Profile#10370
Carol Chomsky
#10380
Overall Influence
1930 - 2008 (78 years)
Carol Doris Chomsky was an American linguist and education specialist who studied language acquisition in children. Biography Carol Doris Schatz was born in Philadelphia on July 1, 1930. She married Noam Chomsky in 1949, the two having known each other since she was five years old and he was seven. Her mother had been a teacher at a Hebrew school where his father was the principal. She was awarded a bachelor's degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951.
Go to Profile#10371
Pamela Munro
#10381
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Pamela Munro is an American linguist who specializes in Native American languages. She is a distinguished research professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has held a position since 1974.
Go to Profile#10372
Anita Hill
#10382
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Anita Faye Hill is an American lawyer, educator and author. She is a professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University and a faculty member of the university's Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She became a national figure in 1991 when she accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, her supervisor at the United States Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of sexual harassment.
Go to Profile#10373
Akira Miyawaki
#10383
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
was a Japanese botanist and an expert in plant ecology who specialized in seeds and natural forests. He was active worldwide as a specialist in natural vegetation restoration of degraded land. He was professor emeritus at Yokohama National University and director of the Japanese Center for International Studies in Ecology since 1993. He received the Blue Planet Prize in 2006.
Go to Profile#10374
Bernhard Thalheim
#10384
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Bernhard Karl Thalheim is a German computer scientist and professor of information systems engineering at the University of Kiel in Kiel, Germany. He is known for his work on conceptual modeling and its theoretical foundational contributions.
Go to Profile#10375
Roddam Narasimha
#10385
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Roddam Narasimha FRS was an Indian aerospace scientist and fluid dynamicist. He was a professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science , director of the National Aerospace Laboratories and the chairman of the Engineering Mechanics Unit at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research . He was the DST Year-of-Science Chair Professor at JNCASR and concurrently held the Pratt & Whitney Chair in Science and Engineering at the University of Hyderabad. Narasimha was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian award, in 2013. for his contributions to...
Go to Profile#10376
Arthur R. Miller
#10386
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Arthur Raphael Miller , is a leading scholar in the field of American civil procedure and a University Professor at New York University and Chairman of The NYU Sports & Society Program. Early life and education Miller was born in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Murray Miller, was a lawyer who worked as a solo practitioner, and his mother, Mary, was a legal secretary. He attended college at the University of Rochester, graduating in 1955 with an A.B. with high honors. He then attended the Harvard Law School, where he served as a notes editor for the Harvard Law Review and graduated in 1958 with an LL.B.
Go to Profile#10377
Robert Hessen
#10387
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Robert Hessen is an American economic and business historian. He is a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and a senior research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. He is an Objectivist and has authored several books, analyzing business and economic issues from an Objectivist perspective.
Go to Profile#10378
Robert I. Levy
#10388
Overall Influence
1924 - 2003 (79 years)
Robert I. Levy was an American psychiatrist and anthropologist known for his fieldwork in Tahiti and Nepal and on the cross-cultural study of emotions. Though he did not receive a formal degree in anthropology, he spent most of his adult life conducting anthropological fieldwork or teaching in departments of anthropology. In developing his approach to anthropology, he credited his cousin, the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, and Gregory Bateson .
Go to Profile#10379
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
#10389
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner , often referred to by her initials CFK, is an Argentine lawyer and politician who is serving as the Vice President of Argentina since 2019 under President Alberto Fernández. She also served as the President of Argentina from 2007 to 2015 and the first lady during the tenure of her husband, Néstor Kirchner. She was the second female president of Argentina and the first elected female president of Argentina. Ideologically, she identifies herself as a Peronist and a progressive, with her political approach called Kirchnerism.
Go to Profile#10380
John Behr
#10390
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
John Behr is a British Eastern Orthodox priest and theologian. Since 2020, he has served as the Regius Professor of Humanity at the University of Aberdeen. He is the former dean of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, where he was the director of the Master of Theology Program and the Father Georges Florovsky Distinguished Professor of Patristics. He was ordained to the diaconate on 8 September 2001 and the priesthood on 14 September 2001. He is the editor of the Patristic Series released by St. Vladimir's Press. He was elected dean of the seminary on 18 November 2006 and served from...
Go to Profile#10381
Gilles Simon
#10391
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Gilles Simon is a French former professional tennis player. He had a career-high ATP singles ranking of world No. 6 attained on 5 January 2009. He turned professional in 2002 and won 14 singles titles on the ATP Tour.
Go to Profile#10382
Peter O'Toole
#10392
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Peter Seamus O'Toole was an English stage and film actor. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began working in the theatre, gaining recognition as a Shakespearean actor at the Bristol Old Vic and with the English Stage Company. In 1959 he made his West End debut in The Long and the Short and the Tall, and played the title role in Hamlet in the National Theatre's first production in 1963. Excelling on the London stage, O'Toole was known for his "hellraiser" lifestyle off it.
Go to Profile#10383
Urs Hölzle
#10393
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Urs Hölzle is a Swiss software engineer and technology executive. As Google's eighth employee and its first VP of Engineering, he has shaped much of Google's development processes and infrastructure, as well as its engineering culture. His most notable contributions include leading the development of fundamental cloud infrastructure such as energy-efficient data centers, distributed compute and storage systems, and software-defined networking. Until July 2023, he was the Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure and Google Fellow at Google. In July 2023, he transitioned to being a Go...
Go to Profile#10384
Alice von Hildebrand
#10394
Overall Influence
1923 - 2022 (99 years)
Alice Marie von Hildebrand, GCSG was a Belgian-born American Catholic philosopher, theologian, author, and professor. She taught philosophy at Hunter College for 37 years. She was also the second wife of Dietrich von Hildebrand.
Go to Profile#10385
Alessandro Mendini
#10395
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Alessandro Mendini was an Italian designer and architect. He played an important part in the development of Italian, Postmodern, and Radical design. He also worked, aside from his artistic career, for Casabella, Modo and Domus magazines.
Go to Profile#10386
Betty T. Bennett
#10396
Overall Influence
1935 - 2006 (71 years)
Betty T. Bennett was Distinguished Professor of Literature and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at American University. She was previously Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and acting provost of Pratt Institute from 1979 to 1985. Among her numerous awards and honors, Bennett was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and fellow of American Council of Learned Societies. She won the Keats-Shelley Association of America - Distinguished Scholar Award in 1992 and was Founding President, Phi Beta Kappa, Zeta Chapter at American University. Born in Brooklyn, New...
Go to Profile#10387
Mostafa El-Sayed
#10397
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Mostafa A. El-Sayed is an Egyptian-American physical chemist, a leading nanoscience researcher, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a US National Medal of Science laureate. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry during a critical period of growth. He is also known for the spectroscopy rule named after him, the El-Sayed rule.
Go to Profile#10388
Eleonore Stump
#10398
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Eleonore Stump is an American philosopher and the Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, where she has taught since 1992. Biography Eleonore Stump received her first degree, a B.A. in classical languages from Grinnell College in 1969. She was class valedictorian and received the Archibald Prize for scholarship. She has an M.A. in biblical studies from Harvard University , and an M.A. and Ph.D. in medieval studies from Cornell University . Before coming to Saint Louis University, she taught at Oberlin College, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and University of Notre Dame.
Go to Profile#10389
Matt Cutts
#10399
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Matthew Cutts is an American software engineer. Cutts is the former Administrator of the United States Digital Service. He was first appointed as acting administrator, to later be confirmed as full administrator in October 2018. Cutts previously worked with Google as part of the search quality team on search engine optimization issues. He is the former head of the web spam team at Google.
Go to Profile#10390
Roland Robertson
#10400
Overall Influence
1938 - 2022 (84 years)
Roland Robertson was a sociologist and theorist of globalization who lectured at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Formerly, he was a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, and in 1988 he was the President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.
Go to Profile#10391
R. W. Davies
#10401
Overall Influence
1925 - 2021 (96 years)
Robert William Davies , better known as R. W. Davies or Bob Davies, was a British historian, writer and professor of Soviet Economic Studies at the University of Birmingham. Obtaining his PhD in 1954, Davies was promoted to full professor and made chair of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1965. He retired from active teaching in 1989.
Go to Profile#10392
Jessica Fridrich
#10402
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jessica Fridrich is a professor at Binghamton University, who specializes in data hiding applications in digital imagery. She is also known for documenting and popularizing the CFOP method , one of the most commonly used methods for speedsolving the Rubik's Cube, also known as speedcubing. She is considered one of the pioneers of speedcubing, along with Lars Petrus. Nearly all of the fastest speedcubers have based their methods on Fridrich's, usually referred to as CFOP, that is, .
Go to Profile#10393
Maria Lugones
#10403
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
María Cristina Lugones was an Argentine feminist philosopher, activist, and Professor of Comparative Literature and of women's studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota and at Binghamton University in New York State. She identified as a U.S-based woman of color and theorized this category as a political identity forged through feminist coalitional work.
Go to Profile#10394
Sergio Albeverio
#10404
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Sergio Albeverio is a Swiss mathematician and mathematical physicist working in numerous fields of mathematics and its applications. In particular he is known for his work in probability theory, analysis , mathematical physics, and in the areas algebra, geometry, number theory, as well as in applications, from natural to social-economic sciences.
Go to Profile#10395
Johan van Benthem
#10405
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Johannes Franciscus Abraham Karel van Benthem is a University Professor of logic at the University of Amsterdam at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation and professor of philosophy at Stanford University . He was awarded the Spinozapremie in 1996 and elected a Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2015.
Go to Profile#10396
Whitney Smith
#10406
Overall Influence
1940 - 2016 (76 years)
Whitney Smith Jr. was an American vexillologist. He coined the term vexillology, which refers to the scholarly analysis of all aspects of flags. He was a founder of several vexillology organizations. Smith was a Laureate and a Fellow of the International Federation of Vexillological Associations.
Go to Profile#10397
Max Coltheart
#10407
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Max Coltheart is an Australian cognitive scientist who specialises in cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuropsychiatry. Coltheart was born in Frankston, Victoria and grew up in Brisbane, Canberra and Bega. He commenced a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney in 1957, and completed MA and PhD degrees there, then went on to a succession of academic posts including at the University of Sydney, 1965-1967, Monash University, 1967-1969, University of Waterloo, Canada 1969-1972
Go to Profile#10398
Hope Cooke
#10408
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Hope Cooke was the Gyalmo of the 12th Chogyal of Sikkim, Palden Thondup Namgyal. Their wedding took place in March 1963. She was termed Her Highness The Crown Princess of Sikkim and became the Gyalmo of Sikkim at Palden Thondup Namgyal's coronation in 1965.
Go to Profile#10399
George Scialabba
#10409
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
George Scialabba is an American book critic and retired building manager at Harvard University. His reviews have appeared in Agni, The Boston Globe, Dissent, the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Nation, The American Prospect, and many other publications. In 1991, Scialabba received the first annual Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.
Go to Profile#10400
Jahangir Khan
#10410
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jahangir Khan is a former professional Pakistani squash player. He won the World Open title six times, and the British Open title ten times . Jahangir Khan is widely regarded as the greatest squash player of all time, and one of the greatest sportsmen in Pakistan history. From 1981 to 1986, Khan was unbeaten and during that time won 555 consecutive matches – the longest winning streak by any athlete in top-level professional sport as recorded by Guinness World Records.
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