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

#10701

Herbert Wechsler

#10711

Overall Influence

1909 - 2000 (91 years)

Herbert Wechsler was an American legal scholar and former director of the American Law Institute . He is most widely known for his constitutional law scholarship and for the creation of the Model Penal Code. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Wechsler as one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century.

#10702

Sjaak Brinkkemper

#10712

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Jacobus Nicolaas Brinkkemper is a Dutch computer scientist, and Full Professor of organisation and information at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences of Utrecht University. Biography Brinkkemper received a BA from the University of Amsterdam in 1980 and an MSc from the Radboud University Nijmegen in 1984, both in Mathematics. In 1990 he received a PhD at the same university with his thesis Formalisation of information systems modelling, supervised by Eckhard Falkenberg and Alex Verrijn Stuart.

#10703

Fred Lawrence Whipple

Fred Lawrence Whipple

#10713

Overall Influence

1906 - 2004 (98 years)

Fred Lawrence Whipple was an American astronomer, who worked at the Harvard College Observatory for more than 70 years. Amongst his achievements were asteroid and comet discoveries, the "dirty snowball" hypothesis of comets, and the invention of the Whipple shield.

#10704

Arturo Escobar

#10714

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Arturo Escobar is a Colombian-American anthropologist and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. His academic research interests include political ecology, anthropology of development, social movements, anti-globalization movements, political ontology, and postdevelopment theory.

#10705

Joy Harjo

#10715

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms . Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv . She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the ...

#10706

Søren Johansen

#10716

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Søren Johansen is a Danish statistician and econometrician who is known for his contributions to the theory of cointegration. He is currently a professor at the Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen and in the Center for Research in Econometric Analysis of Time Series of the Aarhus University. He has previously held positions at the Department of Statistics, University of Copenhagen, and the European University Institute in Florence.

#10707

Gordon L. Kane

#10717

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Gordon Leon Kane is Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan and director emeritus at the Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics , a leading center for the advancement of theoretical physics. He was director of the LCTP from 2005 to 2011 and Victor Weisskopf Collegiate Professor of Physics from 2002 - 2011. He received the Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society in 2012, and the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics in 2017.

#10708

W. G. Unruh

#10718

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

William George "Bill" Unruh is a Canadian physicist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver who described the hypothetical Unruh effect in 1976. Early life and education Unruh was born into a Mennonite family in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His parents were Benjamin Unruh, a refugee from Russia, and Anna Janzen, who was born in Canada. He obtained his B.Sc. from the University of Manitoba in 1967, followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University, New Jersey, under the direction of John Archibald Wheeler.

#10709

Boris Zilber

#10719

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Boris Zilber is a Soviet-British mathematician who works in mathematical logic, specifically model theory. He is a professor of mathematical logic at the University of Oxford. He obtained his doctorate from the Novosibirsk State University in 1975 under the supervision of Mikhail Taitslin and his habilitation from the Saint Petersburg State University in 1986.

#10710

Alex Blumberg

#10720

Overall Influence

Alex Blumberg is an American entrepreneur, radio journalist, former producer for public radio and television, best known for his work with This American Life, Planet Money, and How to Save a Planet. He was the co-founder and CEO of the podcast network Gimlet Media.

#10711

Alf Hiltebeitel

#10721

Overall Influence

1942 - 2023 (81 years)

Alfred John Hiltebeitel was Columbian Professor of Religion, History, and Human Sciences at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., US. His academic specialism was in ancient Sanskrit epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, together with Indian religious tradition and folklore.

#10712

Kei Nishikori

#10722

Overall Influence

1989 - Present (37 years)

is a Japanese professional tennis player. He is the second male Japanese player to have been ranked in the top 5 in singles , and the only one to do so in the Open Era. Nishikori first reached his career-high singles ranking of world No. 4 in March 2015. Nishikori has won 6 ATP Tour 500 titles, 6 ATP Tour 250 titles and was runner-up at the 2014 US Open, making him the first man representing an Asian country to reach a major singles final. He also became the first man from Asia to qualify for the ATP Finals, and reached the semifinals in 2014 and 2016. In addition, Nishikori defeated Rafael Na...

#10713

Franz Baader

#10723

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Franz Baader is a German computer scientist at Dresden University of Technology. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1989 from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, where he was a teaching and research assistant for 4 years. In 1989, he went to the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence as a senior researcher and project leader.

#10714

Jean-Claude Casanova

#10724

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Jean-Claude Casanova is a French economist, educator and public intellectual with a lifetime involvement in French civic life. He was the chairman of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques between 2007 and 2016. A centrist in politics, he cofounded the journal Commentaire with Raymond Aron in 1978, and since then has been its editor and publisher .

#10715

Li Na

#10725

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Li Na is a Chinese former professional tennis player. She achieved a career-high WTA ranking of world No. 2 on 17 February 2014. Over the course of her career, Li won nine WTA Tour singles titles including two Grand Slam singles titles at the 2011 French Open and 2014 Australian Open. Those victories made her the first Grand Slam singles champion from Asia, male or female. She also became the first player representing an Asian country to appear in a Grand Slam singles final, finishing as the runner-up at the 2011 Australian Open. Li was also the runner-up at the 2013 Australian Open and 2013 ...

#10716

Neil Immerman

#10726

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Neil Immerman is an American theoretical computer scientist, a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is one of the key developers of descriptive complexity, an approach he is currently applying to research in model checking, database theory, and computational complexity theory.

#10717

Britton Chance

#10727

Overall Influence

1913 - 2010 (97 years)

Britton "Brit" Chance was an American biochemist, biophysicist, scholar, and inventor whose work helped develop spectroscopy as a way to diagnose medical problems. He was "a world leader in transforming theoretical science into useful biomedical and clinical applications" and is considered "the founder of the biomedical photonics." He received the National Medal of Science in 1974.

#10718

Les Dawson

#10728

Overall Influence

1931 - 1993 (62 years)

Leslie Dawson was an English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and pianist. He was known for his deadpan style, curmudgeonly persona, musical routines, and jokes about his mother-in-law and wife.

#10719

Mildred Cohn

#10729

Overall Influence

1913 - 2009 (96 years)

Mildred Cohn was an American biochemist who furthered understanding of biochemical processes through her study of chemical reactions within animal cells. She was a pioneer in the use of nuclear magnetic resonance for studying enzyme reactions, particularly reactions of adenosine triphosphate .

#10720

Alexei Kitaev

#10730

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Alexei Yurievich Kitaev is a Russian–American professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is best known for introducing the quantum phase estimation algorithm and the concept of the topological quantum computer while working at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is also known for introducing the complexity class QMA and showing the 2-local Hamiltonian problem is QMA-complete, the most complete result for k-local Hamiltonians. Kitaev is also known for contributions to research on a model re...

#10721

David L. Heymann

#10731

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

David L. Heymann is an American infectious disease epidemiologist and public health expert, based in London. Early life and education Heymann was born in Pennsylvania, USA. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Pennsylvania State University and later obtained an MD from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He also received a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Heymann did two years of practical epidemiology training with the Epidemic Intelligence Service, during which time Heymann was part of the international team that inve...

#10722

James Wertsch

#10732

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

James V. Wertsch is the David R. Francis Distinguished Professor and Director Emeritus of the McDonnell International Scholars Academy at Washington University in St. Louis. Education and career Wertsch received an A.B. in psychology from University of Illinois, Urbana in 1969, an M.A.T. in education from Northwestern University in 1971, and a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Chicago in 1975. After finishing his Ph.D, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the USSR Academy of Sciences and Moscow State University, where he studied with the neuropsychologist Alexander R. Luria.

#10723

Sapardi Djoko Damono

#10733

Overall Influence

1940 - 2020 (80 years)

Sapardi Djoko Damono was an Indonesian poet known for lyrical poems, and who was widely regarded as the pioneer of lyrical poetry in Indonesia. He died in South Tangerang, Banten on 19 July 2020 after a long illness.

#10724

Steven V. Roberts

#10734

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Steven V. Roberts is an American journalist, writer, and political commentator. Life and career Roberts was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, and graduated from Bayonne High School. He attended Harvard University, where he served as editor of the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. After graduating with a B.A. in Government in 1964, Roberts was hired by The New York Times as research assistant to James Reston, then the paper's Washington, D.C. bureau chief. He was a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report for seven years, and later a contributing editor. As a Washington pundit, Roberts appears regularly on ABC Radio, Washington Week in Review, CNN, Hardball with Chris Matthews.

#10725

Pieter van Vollenhoven

Pieter van Vollenhoven

#10735

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Pieter van Vollenhoven Jr. is the husband of Princess Margriet of the Netherlands and a member, by marriage, of the Dutch royal house. Early life and career Van Vollenhoven was born in Schiedam, he is the second son of Pieter van Vollenhoven Sr. and his wife Jacoba Gijsbertha Stuylingh de Lange . The van Vollenhoven family and the Stuylingh de Lange family belong to the Dutch patriciate.

#10726

Juha Janhunen

#10736

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Juha Janhunen is a Finnish linguist whose wide interests include Uralic and Mongolic languages. Since 1994, he has been Professor in East Asian studies at the University of Helsinki. He has done fieldwork on Samoyedic languages and on Khamnigan Mongol. More recently, he has collaborated with Chinese scholar Wu Yingzhe to produce a critical edition of two newly discovered Liao Dynasty epitaphs written in the Khitan small script.

#10727

Al Sharpton

#10737

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. is an American civil rights and social justice activist, Baptist minister, politician, radio talk show host, and TV personality, who is also the founder of the National Action Network civil rights organization. In 2004, he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidential election. He hosts a weekday radio talk show, Keepin' It Real, which is nationally syndicated by Urban One, and he is a political analyst and weekend host for MSNBC, hosting PoliticsNation.

#10728

Robert Lado

#10738

Overall Influence

1915 - 1995 (80 years)

Dr. Robert Lado was an American expert on modern linguistics. Early life His parents were Spanish immigrants who relocated to Spain before he had a chance to learn English. He returned to the United States at the age of 21 and began to learn English as an adult. This allowed him to develop an understanding of and sensitivity to the challenges confronting immigrants and speakers of other languages learning English as a second language.

#10729

Dan Boneh

#10739

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Dan Boneh is an Israeli–American professor in applied cryptography and computer security at Stanford University. In 2016, Boneh was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the theory and practice of cryptography and computer security.

#10730

Francine Patterson

#10740

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Francine "Penny" Patterson is an American animal psychologist. From 1972 onwards, she taught a modified form of American Sign Language, which she called "Gorilla Sign Language" to a gorilla named Koko. The scientific validity of Patterson's claims about the extent of Koko's language mastery has been debated.

#10731

Robert Fagles

#10741

Overall Influence

1933 - 2008 (75 years)

Robert Fagles was an American professor, poet, and academic. He was best known for his many translations of ancient Greek and Roman classics, especially his acclaimed translations of the epic poems of Homer. He taught English and comparative literature for many years at Princeton University.

#10732

Thomas LeBlanc

#10742

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Thomas John LeBlanc is a computer scientist and academic administrator. He was the 17th President of the George Washington University from July 2017 to December 2021. Education LeBlanc earned a Bachelor of Science in computer sciences from the State University of New York, Plattsburgh. He earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1982.

#10733

Frithjof Bergmann

Frithjof Bergmann

#10743

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Frithjof Harold Bergmann was a German professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, where he taught courses on existentialism, continental philosophy, Hegel, and Marx. He was known for the concept of New Work.

#10734

Alan Dix

#10744

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Alan John Dix FCBS FLSW is a British author, researcher, and university professor, specialising in human–computer interaction . He is one of the four co-authors of the university level textbook Human–Computer Interaction. Dix is the Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University, since May 2018. He was previously a professor at Lancaster University.

#10735

Beatriz Sarlo

#10745

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Beatriz Sarlo is an Argentine literary and cultural critic. She was also founding editor of the cultural journal Punto de Vista . She became an Order of Cultural Merit laureate in 2009. Biography Beatriz Sarlo was born in 1942 and studied literature at the undergraduate and graduate levels at the University of Buenos Aires. The writer, critic, and dramatist David Viñas was an early mentor and influence. In 1978, she co-founded Punto de Vista which was one of the major dissident voices during the military regime which ended in 1983. Because of the authoritarian nature of the regime, Sarlo a...

#10736

Donald Margulies

Donald Margulies

#10746

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Donald Margulies is an American playwright and academic. In 2000, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Dinner with Friends. Background and education Margulies attended John Dewey High School in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from Purchase College where he received a BFA in Visual Arts. Margulies lives with his wife, Lynn Street, a physician, and their son, Miles, in New Haven, Connecticut.

#10737

Robert P. Crease

Robert P. Crease

#10747

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Robert P. Crease is a philosopher and historian of science best known for his work in performance theory and historical research on Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is currently the chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.

#10738

Tessy Thomas

#10748

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Tessy Thomas is an Indian scientist and Director General of Aeronautical Systems and the former Project Director for Agni-IV missile in Defence Research and Development Organisation. She is the first ever woman scientist to head a missile project in India.

#10739

Richard Green

#10749

Overall Influence

1936 - 2019 (83 years)

Richard Green was an American-British sexologist, psychiatrist, lawyer, and author known for his research on homosexuality and transsexualism, specifically gender identity disorder in children. He is known for his behaviorism experiment in which he attempted to prevent male homosexuality and transsexuality by extinguishing feminine behavior in young boys. He later came to favor biological explanations for male homosexuality.

#10740

John Fugh

#10750

Overall Influence

1934 - 2010 (76 years)

Major General John Liu Fugh was the first Chinese American to attain general officer status in the U.S. Army. He was of Manchu descent. He was the 33rd Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Army. Early life and education Fugh was born in Peking, Republic of China, the son of Philip Fugh , who was a Manchu noble from the Fuca clan and a long-time senior staff to John Leighton Stuart, the president of Yenching University and ambassador of the U.S. to China. John Fugh moved to the United States with his family in 1950, when he was 15 years old.

#10741

Gerald E. Brown

Gerald E. Brown

#10751

Overall Influence

1926 - 2013 (87 years)

Gerald Edward Brown was an American theoretical physicist who worked on nuclear physics and astrophysics. Since 1968 he had been a professor at the Stony Brook University. He was a distinguished professor emeritus of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University.

#10742

Marat Safin

#10752

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Marat Mubinovich Safin is a Russian former world No. 1 tennis player and former politician. He achieved the Association of Tennis Professionals top singles ranking on 20 November 2000. Safin began his professional tennis career in 1997, and held the No. 1 ranking for a total of nine weeks between November 2000 and April 2001. He won his first major title at the 2000 US Open, defeating Pete Sampras in the final, and his second at the 2005 Australian Open, defeating Lleyton Hewitt in the final. Safin helped lead Russia to Davis Cup victories in 2002 and 2006. Despite his dislike of grass court...

#10743

Richard Fenno

#10753

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

Richard Francis Fenno Jr. was an American political scientist known for his pioneering work on the U.S. Congress and its members. He was a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Rochester. He published numerous books and scholarly articles focused on how members of Congress interacted with each other, with committees, and with constituents. Political scientists considered the research groundbreaking and startlingly original and gave him numerous awards. Many followed his research design on how to follow members from Washington back to their home districts. Fenno was ...

#10744

C. J. Cherryh

#10754

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Carolyn Janice Cherry , better known by the pen name C. J. Cherryh, is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has written more than 80 books since the mid-1970s, including the Hugo Award–winning novels Downbelow Station and Cyteen , both set in her Alliance–Union universe, and her Foreigner series. She is known for worldbuilding, depicting fictional realms with great realism supported by vast research in history, language, psychology, and archeology.

#10745

Alain Juppé

#10755

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Alain Marie Juppé is a French politician. A member of The Republicans, he was Prime Minister of France from 1995 to 1997 under President Jacques Chirac, during which period he faced major strikes that paralysed the country and became very unpopular. He left office after the victory of the left in the snap 1997 legislative elections. He had previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1993 to 1995, and as Minister of the Budget and Spokesman for the Government from 1986 to 1988. He was president of the political party Union for a Popular Movement from 2002 to 2004 and mayor of Borde...

#10746

George Rieveschl

#10756

Overall Influence

1916 - 2007 (91 years)

George Rieveschl was an American chemist and professor. He was the inventor of the popular antihistamine diphenhydramine , which he first made during a search for synthetic alternatives to scopolamine.

#10747

John Urry

#10757

Overall Influence

1946 - 2016 (70 years)

John Richard Urry was a British sociologist who served as a professor at Lancaster University. He is noted for work in the fields of the sociology of tourism and mobility. He wrote books on many other aspects of modern society including the transition away from "organised capitalism", the sociology of nature and environmentalism, and social theory in general.

#10748

Joseph G. Gall

#10758

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

Joseph Grafton Gall is an American cell biologist who is noted for studies revealing the details of chromosome structure and function. Gall's studies were greatly facilitated by his knowledge of many different organisms because he could select the most favorable organism to study when approaching a specific question about nuclear structure. He was awarded the 2006 Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award. He was also a co-recipient of the 2007 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University. In 1983 he was honored with the highest recognition of the American Society for Cell Biology, the E.

#10749

Uri Alon

#10759

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Uri Alon is a Professor and Systems Biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His highly cited research investigates gene expression, network motifs and the design principles of biological networks in Escherichia coli and other organisms using both computational biology and traditional experimental wet laboratory techniques.

#10750

Xu Bing

#10760

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Xu Bing is a Chinese artist who served as vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is known for his printmaking skills and installation art, as well as his creative artistic use of language, words, and text and how they have affected our understanding of the world. He is an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellows Program in 1999 and the Fukuoka Prize in 2003.

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