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
#1051
Tzvetan Todorov
#1051
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Tzvetan Todorov was a Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist and essayist. He was the author of many books and essays, which have had a significant influence in anthropology, sociology, semiotics, literary theory, intellectual history and culture theory.
Go to Profile#1052
Margaret Busby
#1052
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Margaret Yvonne Busby, , Hon. FRSL , also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisher when she and Clive Allison co-founded the London-based publishing house Allison and Busby in the 1960s. She edited the anthology Daughters of Africa , and its 2019 follow-up New Daughters of Africa. She is a recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she was voted one of the "100 Great Black Britons". In 2021, she was honoured with the London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award.
Go to Profile#1053
Angela Merkel
#1053
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Angela Dorothea Merkel is a German former politician and scientist who served as chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. A member of the Christian Democratic Union , she previously served as Leader of the Opposition from 2002 to 2005 and as Leader of the Christian Democratic Union from 2000 to 2018. Merkel was the first female chancellor of Germany. During her chancellorship, Merkel was frequently referred to as the de facto leader of the European Union and the most powerful woman in the world. Beginning in 2016, she was often described as the leader of the free world.
Go to Profile#1054
Charles Krauthammer
#1054
Overall Influence
1950 - 2018 (68 years)
Charles Krauthammer was an American political columnist. A moderate liberal who turned independent conservative as a political pundit, Krauthammer won the Pulitzer Prize for his columns in The Washington Post in 1987. His weekly column was syndicated to more than 400 publications worldwide. While in his first year studying medicine at Harvard Medical School, Krauthammer became permanently paralyzed from the waist down after a diving board accident that severed his spinal cord at cervical spinal nerve 5. After spending 14 months recovering in a hospital, he returned to medical school, graduati...
Go to Profile#1055
Kiyosi Itô
#1055
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Kiyosi Itô was a Japanese mathematician who made fundamental contributions to probability theory, in particular, the theory of stochastic processes. He invented the concept of stochastic integral and stochastic differential equation, and is known as the founder of so-called Itô calculus.
Go to Profile#1056
Frank Cameron Jackson
#1056
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Frank Cameron Jackson is an Australian analytic philosopher and Emeritus Professor in the School of Philosophy at Australian National University where he had spent most of the latter part of his career. His primary research interests include epistemology, metaphysics, meta-ethics and the philosophy of mind. In the latter field he is best known for the "Mary's room" knowledge argument, a thought experiment that is one of the most discussed challenges to physicalism.
Go to Profile#1057
Steven Meisel
#1057
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Steven Meisel is an American fashion photographer, who obtained popularity and critical acclaim with his work in Vogue and Vogue Italia as well as his photographs of friend Madonna in her 1992 book, Sex. He is now considered one of the most successful fashion photographers in the industry. He used to work regularly for both US and Italian Vogue, and W and now exclusively for British Vogue.
Go to Profile#1058
Louis Walsh
#1058
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Michael Louis Vincent Walsh is an Irish music manager and television personality. He has managed Johnny Logan, Boyzone, Jedward and Westlife, four of Ireland's most successful pop acts in the 1990s and 2000s. He has also served as a talent show judge on television shows such as Popstars , You're a Star , The X Factor , and Ireland's Got Talent .
Go to Profile#1059
Nicholas Metropolis
#1059
Overall Influence
1915 - 1999 (84 years)
Nicholas Constantine Metropolis was a Greek-American physicist. Metropolis received his BSc and PhD in physics at the University of Chicago. Shortly afterwards, Robert Oppenheimer recruited him from Chicago, where he was collaborating with Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller on the first nuclear reactors, to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#1060
Donna Karan
#1060
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Donna Karan , also known as DK, is an American fashion designer and the creator of the Donna Karan New York and DKNY clothing labels. Early life Donna Ivy Faske was born to mother Helen "Queenie" Faske and father Gabriel "Gabby" Faske in the Forest Hills neighborhood of the Borough of Queens, New York City. Her family is Jewish. Karan's mother had been a model and had also worked in designer Chester Weinberg's showroom. Her father was a tailor and haberdasher who died when Donna was three years old.
Go to Profile#1061
Michael Albert
#1061
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Michael Albert is an American economist, speaker, writer, and political critic. Since the late 1970s, he has published books, articles, and other contributions on a wide array of subjects. He has also set up his own media outfits, magazines, and podcasts. He is known for helping to develop the socioeconomic theory of participatory economics.
Go to Profile#1062
José Mourinho
#1062
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
José Mário dos Santos Mourinho Félix GOIH , is a Portuguese professional football manager and former player who is the current head coach of Italian Serie A club Roma. Dubbed "The Special One" by the British media, Mourinho is one of the most decorated managers ever and is widely considered to be among the greatest managers of all time.
Go to Profile#1063
Tom Clancy
#1063
Overall Influence
1947 - 2013 (66 years)
Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. was an American novelist. He is best known for his technically detailed espionage and military-science storylines set during and after the Cold War. Seventeen of his novels have been bestsellers and more than 100 million copies of his books have been sold. His name was also used on screenplays written by ghostwriters, nonfiction books on military subjects occasionally with co-authors, and video games. He was a part-owner of his hometown Major League Baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles, and vice-chairman of their community activities and public affairs committees.
Go to Profile#1064
James C. Scott
#1064
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
#1065
Barry Commoner
#1065
Overall Influence
1917 - 2012 (95 years)
Barry Commoner was an American cellular biologist, college professor, and politician. He was a leading ecologist and among the founders of the modern environmental movement. He was the director of the Center for Biology of Natural Systems and its Critical Genetics Project. He ran as the Citizens Party candidate in the 1980 U.S. presidential election. His work studying the radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.
Go to Profile#1066
Paul J. Crutzen
#1066
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Paul Jozef Crutzen was a Dutch meteorologist and atmospheric chemist. He and Mario Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for their work on atmospheric chemistry and specifically for his efforts in studying the formation and decomposition of atmospheric ozone. In addition to studying the ozone layer and climate change, he popularized the term Anthropocene to describe a proposed new epoch in the Quaternary period when human actions have a drastic effect on the Earth. He was also amongst the first few scientists to introduce the idea of a nuclear win...
Go to Profile#1067
Roger Ebert
#1067
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Roger Joseph Ebert was an American film critic, film historian, journalist, essayist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times said Ebert "was without question the nation's most prominent and influential film critic," and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called him "the best-known film critic in America."
Go to Profile#1068
Hans Köchler
#1068
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hans Köchler is a retired professor of philosophy at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and president of the International Progress Organization, a non-governmental organization in consultative status with the United Nations. In his general philosophical outlook he is influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, his legal thinking has been shaped by the approach of Kelsen. Köchler has made contributions to phenomenology and philosophical anthropology and has developed a hermeneutics of trans-cultural understanding that has influenced the discourse on the relations between Islam and the West.
Go to Profile#1069
David Easton
#1069
Overall Influence
1917 - 2014 (97 years)
David Easton was a Canadian-born American political scientist. From 1947 to 1997, he served as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. At the forefront of both the behavioralist and post-behavioralist revolutions in the discipline of political science during the 1950s and 1970s, Easton provided the discipline's most widely used definition of politics as the authoritative allocation of values for the society. He was renowned for his application of systems theory to the study of political science. Policy analysts have utilized his five-fold scheme for studying the policy-making process: input, conversion, output, feedback and environment.
Go to Profile#1070
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#1070
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger's work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II. Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian" to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963.
Go to Profile#1071
Éric Zemmour
#1071
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Éric Zemmour is a French far-right politician, essayist, writer and former political journalist and pundit. He was an editor and panelist on Face à l'Info, a daily show broadcast on CNews, from 2019 to 2021. He ran in the 2022 French presidential election, in which he placed fourth in the first round.
Go to Profile#1072
Michael Gazzaniga
#1072
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#1073
Michael Artin
#1073
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Michael Artin is a German-American mathematician and a professor emeritus in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mathematics Department, known for his contributions to algebraic geometry. Life and career Michael Artin or Artinian of Armenian origin was born in Hamburg, Germany, and brought up in Indiana. His parents were Natalia Naumovna Jasny and Emil Artin, preeminent algebraist of the 20th century of Armenian descent. Artin's parents left Germany in 1937, because his mother's father was Jewish. His elder sister is , who was married to mathematician John Tate until the late 1980s.
Go to Profile#1074
Isadore Singer
#1074
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
#1075
Fumihiko Maki
#1075
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Fumihiko Maki is a Japanese architect who teaches at Keio University SFC. In 1993, he received the Pritzker Prize for his work, which often explores pioneering uses of new materials and fuses the cultures of east and west.
Go to Profile#1076
Mary Midgley
#1076
Overall Influence
1919 - 2018 (99 years)
Mary Beatrice Midgley was a British philosopher. A senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, she was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast and Man , when she was in her late fifties, and went on to write over 15 more, including Animals and Why They Matter , Wickedness , The Ethical Primate , Evolution as a Religion , and Science as Salvation . She was awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, was published in 2005.
Go to Profile#1077
Leon M. Lederman
#1077
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Leon Max Lederman was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was resident scholar emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.
Go to Profile#1078
Svante Pääbo
#1078
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Svante Pääbo is the director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and an expert in the field of evolutionary genetics. He earned his Ph.D. from Uppsala University. Among the founders of the field of paleogenetics, Pääbo has conducted significant research into early human genetics and has successfully sequenced Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA from a sample found in modern-day Germany. In 2009, he and his colleagues announced that they had completed their first attempt at a complete mapping of the Neanderthal genome. This discovery was followed i...
Go to Profile#1079
J. Gordon Melton
#1079
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
John Gordon Melton is an American religious scholar who was the founding director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and is currently the Distinguished Professor of American Religious History with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where he resides. He is also an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.
Go to Profile#1080
Christiaan Barnard
#1080
Overall Influence
1922 - 2001 (79 years)
Christiaan Neethling Barnard was a South African cardiac surgeon who performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant operation. On 3 December 1967, Barnard transplanted the heart of accident victim Denise Darvall into the chest of 54-year-old Louis Washkansky, with Washkansky regaining full consciousness and being able to talk easily with his wife, before dying eighteen days later of pneumonia, largely brought on by the anti-rejection drugs that suppressed his immune system. Barnard had told Mr. and Mrs. Washkansky that the operation had an 80% chance of success, an assessment which has been criticised as misleading.
Go to Profile#1081
Yuri Manin
#1081
Overall Influence
1937 - 2023 (86 years)
Yuri Ivanovich Manin was a Russian mathematician, known for work in algebraic geometry and diophantine geometry, and many expository works ranging from mathematical logic to theoretical physics. Life and career Manin was born on 16 February 1937 in Simferopol, Crimean ASSR, Soviet Union.
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Anthony Powell
#1082
Overall Influence
1905 - 2000 (95 years)
Anthony Dymoke Powell was an English novelist best known for his 12-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975. It is on the list of longest novels in English. Powell's major work has remained in print continuously and has been the subject of television and radio dramatisations. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Powell among their list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945."
Go to Profile#1083
John Berger
#1083
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to the BBC series of the same name, was influential. He lived in France for over fifty years.
Go to Profile#1084
Kristalina Georgieva
#1084
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Kristalina Ivanova Georgieva-Kinova is a Bulgarian economist serving as the 12th managing director of the International Monetary Fund since 2019. She was the Chief Executive of the World Bank Group from 2017 to 2019 and served as Acting President of the World Bank Group from 1 February to 8 April 2019 following the resignation of Jim Yong Kim. She previously served as Vice-President of the European Commission under Jean-Claude Juncker from 2014 to 2016.
Go to Profile#1085
Robert Keohane
#1085
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#1086
Tom Brady
#1086
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
Thomas Edward Patrick BradyJr. is a former American football quarterback who played in the National Football League for23 seasons. He spent his first20 seasons with the New England Patriots and was a central contributor to the franchise's dynasty from 2001 to 2019 under head coach Bill Belichick. In his final three seasons, he was a member of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Brady is widely regarded as the greatest quarterback of all time and one of the greatest players in NFL history.
Go to Profile#1087
Ernest Walton
#1087
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton was an Irish physicist and Nobel laureate who first split the atom. He is best known for his work with John Cockcroft to construct one of the earliest types of particle accelerator, the Cockcroft–Walton generator. In experiments performed at Cambridge University in the early 1930s using the generator, Walton and Cockcroft became the first team to use a particle beam to transform one element to another. According to their Nobel Prize citation: "Thus, for the first time, a nuclear transmutation was produced by means entirely under human control."
Go to Profile#1088
Ben Shneiderman
#1088
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ben Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the founding director of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. He conducted fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, developing new ideas, methods, and tools such as the direct manipulation interface, and his eight rules of design.
Go to Profile#1089
Timothy Williamson
#1089
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#1090
Stuart Hameroff
#1090
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Stuart Hameroff is an American anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his studies of consciousness and his controversial contention that consciousness originates from quantum states in neural microtubules. He is the lead organizer of the Science of Consciousness conference.
Go to Profile#1091
Peter Senge
#1091
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Peter Michael Senge is an American systems scientist who is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute, and the founder of the Society for Organizational Learning. He is known as the author of the book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization .
Go to Profile#1092
Anton LaVey
#1092
Overall Influence
1930 - 1997 (67 years)
Anton Szandor LaVey was an American author, musician, and Satanist. He was the founder of the Church of Satan and the religion of Satanism. He authored several books, including The Satanic Bible, The Satanic Rituals, The Satanic Witch, The Devil's Notebook, and Satan Speaks! In addition, he released three albums, including The Satanic Mass, Satan Takes a Holiday, and Strange Music. He played a minor on-screen role and served as technical advisor for the 1975 film The Devil's Rain and served as host and narrator for Nick Bougas' 1989 mondo film Death Scenes.
Go to Profile#1093
John Tate
#1093
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
John Torrence Tate Jr. was an American mathematician distinguished for many fundamental contributions in algebraic number theory, arithmetic geometry, and related areas in algebraic geometry. He was awarded the Abel Prize in 2010.
Go to Profile#1094
David Scott
#1094
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
David Randolph Scott is an American retired test pilot and NASA astronaut who was the seventh person to walk on the Moon. Selected as part of the third group of astronauts in 1963, Scott flew to space three times and commanded Apollo 15, the fourth lunar landing; he is one of four surviving Moon walkers and the only living commander of a spacecraft that landed on the Moon.
Go to Profile#1095
Edward Tufte
#1095
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Edward Rolf Tufte , sometimes known as "ET", is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization.
Go to Profile#1096
Mancur Olson
#1096
Overall Influence
1932 - 1998 (66 years)
Mancur Lloyd Olson Jr. was an American economist and political scientist who taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. His most influential contributions were in institutional economics, and in the role which private property, taxation, public goods, collective action, and contract rights play in economic development.
Go to Profile#1097
I. J. Good
#1097
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Irving John Good was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. After the Second World War, Good continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester. Good moved to the United States where he was professor at Virginia Tech.
Go to Profile#1098
Alan Ayckbourn
#1098
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Sir Alan Ayckbourn is a prolific British playwright and director. He has written and produced as of 2023, 89 full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967.
Go to Profile#1099
Alain Colmerauer
#1099
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Alain Colmerauer was a French computer scientist. He was a professor at Aix-Marseille University, and the creator of the logic programming language Prolog. Early life Alain Colmerauer was born on 24 January 1941 in Carcassonne. He graduated from the Grenoble Institute of Technology, and he earned a PhD from the Ensimag in Grenoble.
Go to Profile#1100
Seth Lloyd
#1100
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Seth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research area is the interplay of information with complex systems, especially quantum systems. He has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation, quantum communication and quantum biology, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon's noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduct...
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