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
#10751
Heidi Hartmann
#10761
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Heidi I. Hartmann is an American feminist economist who is founder and president emerita of the Washington-based Institute for Women's Policy Research , a research organization created to conduct women-centered, public policy research. She retired from her position as President and CEO in 2019.
Go to Profile#10752
Barry Gibb
#10762
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Sir Barry Alan Crompton Gibb is a British musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. He rose to worldwide fame as a member of the Bee Gees, with his younger brothers, Robin and Maurice Gibb, one of the most commercially successful groups in the history of popular music.
Go to Profile#10753
Luiz Felipe Scolari
#10763
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Luiz Felipe Scolari , also known as Felipão , is a Brazilian football manager and former player. He is the current head coach of Atlético Mineiro. Scolari was a defender during his playing days, and notably represented Caxias before moving to a managerial role in 1982. After leading the Brazil national team to a FIFA World Cup win in 2002, he was manager of the Portugal national team from July 2003 to June 2008. He led Portugal to the final of UEFA Euro 2004, which they lost 0–1 to Greece, and to a fourth-place finish in the 2006 World Cup. Scolari also managed Portugal through UEFA Euro 2008...
Go to Profile#10754
Savas Dimopoulos
#10764
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Savas Dimopoulos is a particle physicist at Stanford University. He worked at CERN from 1994 to 1997. Dimopoulos is well known for his work on constructing theories beyond the Standard Model. Life He was born an ethnic Greek in Istanbul, Turkey and later moved to Athens due to ethnic tensions in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s.
Go to Profile#10755
James G. Mitchell
#10765
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
James George Mitchell is a Canadian computer scientist. He has worked on programming language design and implementation , interactive programming systems, dynamic interpreting and compiling, document preparing systems, user interface design, distributed transactional file systems, and distributed, object-oriented operating systems. He has also worked on the design of hardware for computer graphics, high-level programming language execution, and audio input/output.
Go to Profile#10756
Amir Aczel
#10766
Overall Influence
1950 - 2015 (65 years)
Amir Dan Aczel was an Israeli-born American lecturer in mathematics and the history of mathematics and science, and an author of popular books on mathematics and science. Biography Amir D. Aczel was born in Haifa, Israel. Aczel's father was the captain of a passenger ship that sailed primarily in the Mediterranean Sea. When he was ten, Aczel's father taught his son how to steer a ship and navigate. This inspired Aczel's book The Riddle of the Compass. Amir graduated from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, in 1969.
Go to Profile#10757
David Lindsay-Abaire
#10767
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
David Lindsay-Abaire is an American playwright, lyricist and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2007 for his play Rabbit Hole, which also earned several Tony Award nominations. Lindsay-Abaire won both the 2023 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical and Tony Award for Best Original Score for the musical adaptation of his play Kimberly Akimbo.
Go to Profile#10758
Wang Xiaobo
#10768
Overall Influence
1952 - 1997 (45 years)
Wang Xiaobo was a renowned contemporary Chinese novelist and essayist from Beijing. Wang was born into a family of Intellectuals in Beijing. he was transferred to a collective farm in Yunnan during the Cultural Revolution, which later became the writing background for his most famous novel Golden Age. This novel won him the 1991 United Daily News novella award. In just a few years he wrote an avalanche of novels, stories, essays and newspaper articles, especially popular among young people. He died of heart attack in 1997.
Go to Profile#10759
Ian Ayres
#10769
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ian Ayres is an American lawyer and economist. Ayres is a professor at the Yale Law School and at the Yale School of Management. Early life and education Ayres grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, where they graduated from Pembroke Country Day School in 1977. They played varsity basketball, ran cross country, and served as executive editor of their high school newspaper. Ayres wrote an op-ed piece their senior year called "Black Like Me" , a controversial piece detailing the consequences of their checking the "African- American" box for race on his PSAT, which led to consideration for academic awards.
Go to Profile#10760
Pierre Baldi
#10770
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Pierre Baldi is a distinguished professor of computer science at University of California Irvine and the director of its Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics. Education and early life Born in Rome , Pierre Baldi received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees at the University of Paris, in France. He then obtained his Ph.D. degree in mathematics at the California Institute of Technology in 1986 supervised by R. M. Wilson.
Go to Profile#10761
Valter Longo
#10771
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Valter D. Longo is an Italian-American biogerontologist and cell biologist known for his studies on the role of fasting and nutrient response genes on cellular protection aging and diseases and for proposing that longevity is regulated by similar genes and mechanisms in many eukaryotes. He is currently a professor at the USC Davis School of Gerontology with a joint appointment in the department of Biological Sciences as well as serving as the director of the USC Longevity Institute.
Go to Profile#10762
Edward Farhi
#10772
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Edward Henry Farhi is a physicist working on quantum computation as a principal scientist at Google. In 2018 he retired from his position as the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT from 2004 until 2016. He made contributions to particle physics, general relativity and astroparticle physics before turning to his current interest, quantum computation.
Go to Profile#10763
Ruth Chang
#10773
Overall Influence
Ruth Chang is an American legal scholar who serves as the Professor and Chair of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, a Professorial Fellow of University College, Oxford, and an American professor of philosophy. She was previously a professor at Rutgers University from 1998 to 2019. She is known for her research on the incommensurability of values and on practical reason and normativity. She is also widely known for her work on decision-making and is lecturer or consultant on choice at institutions ranging from video-gaming to pharmaceuticals, the U.S. Navy, World Bank, and CIA.
Go to Profile#10764
Adam Penenberg
#10774
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Adam L. Penenberg is an American journalist and educator, currently associate professor of journalism at New York University and director of undergraduate studies. He had previously served as editor of PandoDaily, wrote for Forbes, Fast Company, The New York Times, Wired News, and Playboy. While at Forbes, Penenberg gained national attention in 1998 for helping reveal The New Republic reporter Stephen Glass had been fabricating his stories.
Go to Profile#10765
William Chambliss
#10775
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
William Joseph Chambliss was an American criminologist and sociologist. He was a professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at The George Washington University for over 20 years. He was a pioneer of the conflict theory which concluded, among other things, that conflict between different social classes is the fundamental force in capitalist societies. In addition to his transformative scholarly contributions, he was a teacher-scholar and mentor to many of today’s leading criminologists and sociologists.
Go to Profile#10766
Robert Steinberg
#10776
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Robert Steinberg was a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. He introduced the Steinberg representation, the Lang–Steinberg theorem, the Steinberg group in algebraic K-theory, Steinberg's formula in representation theory, and the Steinberg groups in Lie theory that yield finite simple groups over finite fields.
Go to Profile#10767
Andrew Jaspan
#10777
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Andrew Jaspan AM is a British-Australian journalist and Founding Director and Editor-in-Chief of 360info. He is the Founder of The Conversation. He was previously editor-in-chief of Melbourne'sThe Age, editor of London's The Observer, The Sunday Times Scotland , Scotland on Sunday , The Scotsman EdinburghGlasgow
Go to Profile#10768
Ray Wu
#10778
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Ray Jui Wu was a Chinese-born American geneticist and served as Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Molecular Genetics and Biology at Cornell University. In 1970, Wu created the first approach for DNA sequencing, earlier than the Frederick Sanger's method in 1975 and Walter Gilbert's chemical procedure in 1977. Wu's contributions on DNA sequencing are fundamental to the general sequencing methods today.
Go to Profile#10769
Enzo Traverso
#10779
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Enzo Traverso is an Italian scholar of European intellectual history. He is the author of several books on critical theory, the Holocaust, Marxism, memory, totalitarianism, revolution, and contemporary historiography. His books have been translated into numerous languages. After living and working in France for over 25 years, he is currently the Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#10770
Clemens C. J. Roothaan
#10780
Overall Influence
1918 - 2019 (101 years)
Clemens C. J. Roothaan was a Dutch physicist and chemist known for his development of the self-consistent field theory of molecular structure. Biography Roothaan was born in Nijmegen. He enrolled TU Delft in 1935 to study electrical engineering. During World War II he was first detained in a prisoner of war camp. Later he and his brother were sent to the Vught concentration camp for involvement with the Dutch Resistance. On September 5, 1944, the remaining prisoners of the camp were moved to the Sachsenhausen camp in Germany ahead of the advancing Allies. Near the end of the war, the Sachsen...
Go to Profile#10771
Umran Inan
#10781
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Umran Savaş İnan is a Turkish scientist at Koç University and Stanford University in the field of geophysics and very low frequency radio science. İnan was the president of Koç University between 2009 and 2021.
Go to Profile#10772
Ernst Tugendhat
#10782
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Ernst Tugendhat was a Czechoslovakian-born German philosopher. He was a scion of the wealthy and influential Jewish Tugendhat family. They lived in Venezuela during the Nazi regime, and he studied first in Stanford University, then in Freiburg. He taught internationally in Europa and South America, with a focus on language analysis.
Go to Profile#10773
Mike Wallace
#10783
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Mike Wallace is an American historian. He specializes in the history of New York City, and in the history and practice of "public history". In 1998 he co-authored Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, which in 1999 won the Pulitzer Prize in History. In 2017, he published a successor volume, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919. Wallace is a Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice , and at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Go to Profile#10774
Bernardo Huberman
#10784
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Bernardo Huberman is a fellow and vice president of the Next-Gen Systems Team at CableLabs. He is also a consulting professor in the Department of Applied Physics and the Symbolic System Program at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#10775
Simon Wessely
#10785
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Sir Simon Charles Wessely is a British psychiatrist. He is Regius Professor of Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London and head of its department of psychological medicine, vice dean for academic psychiatry, teaching and training at the Institute of Psychiatry, as well as Director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research. He is also honorary consultant psychiatrist at King's College Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital, as well as civilian consultant advisor in psychiatry to the British Army. He was knighted in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to military healthcare and to psychological medicine.
Go to Profile#10776
Brendan Rodgers
#10786
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Brendan Rodgers is a Northern Irish professional football manager and former player who is manager of Scottish Premiership club Celtic. Rodgers began his career as a defender at Ballymena United, where he stayed until he was signed by Reading at the age of 18, although a genetic knee condition forced him to retire at age 20. He remained at Reading as a coach and then academy director, and continued to play non-league football at Newport, Witney Town and Newbury Town for several years. After a period travelling around Spain to study coaching methods, he was invited by José Mourinho to leave Re...
Go to Profile#10777
Kees Schouhamer Immink
#10787
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Kornelis Antonie "Kees" Schouhamer Immink is a Dutch engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur, who pioneered and advanced the era of digital audio, video, and data recording, including popular digital media such as compact disc , DVD and Blu-ray disc. He has been a prolific and influential engineer, who holds more than 1100 U.S. and international patents. A large portion of the commonly used audio and video playback and recording devices use technologies based on his work. His contributions to coding systems assisted the digital video and audio revolution, by enabling reliable data storage at in...
Go to Profile#10778
Tom Goldstein
#10788
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Thomas Che Goldstein is an American lawyer. He is known for his advocacy before and blog about the Supreme Court of the United States. He was a founding partner of Goldstein and Howe , a Washington, D.C., firm specializing in Supreme Court litigation, and was, until the end of 2010, a partner at Akin Gump, where he was co-head of the litigation and Supreme Court practices. He retired from Goldstein & Russell in March 2023.
Go to Profile#10779
Prosper Weil
#10789
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Prosper Weil , was a French lawyer, professor emeritus of Panthéon-Assas University's law school and, since 1999, a member of the Institut de France's Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Life Weil was born in Strasbourg. His doctoral thesis, titled Les conséquences de l’annulation d’un acte administratif pour excès de pouvoir, earned him the prix de thèse de la Faculté de droit de Paris.
Go to Profile#10780
Vladislav Krapivin
#10790
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Vladislav Petrovich Krapivin was a Soviet and Russian children's books writer. Biography Vladislav Petrovich Krapivin was born in the city of Tyumen on 14 October 1938. He received a degree in journalism from the Ural State University. In the course of his studies, he started working at the newspaper "Evening Sverdlovsk", followed by several years in the periodical "Ural Pathfinder". Krapivin has been a full-time writer since 1965. His first book, The Voyage of Orion , was printed by the Sverdlovsk Publishing House in 1962. Over the course of his literary career, Krapivin became the author of...
Go to Profile#10781
Drew McDermott
#10791
Overall Influence
1949 - 2022 (73 years)
Drew McDermott was a professor of Computer Science at Yale University. He was known for his contributions in artificial intelligence and automated planning. Education Drew McDermott earned B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
Go to Profile#10782
David Steindl-Rast
#10792
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
David Steindl-Rast OSB is an Austrian-American Catholic Benedictine monk, author, and lecturer. He is committed to interfaith dialogue and has dealt with the interaction between spirituality and science.
Go to Profile#10783
Alp Ikizler
#10793
Overall Influence
T. Alp Ikizler is a nephrologist, currently holding the Catherine McLaughlin Hakim chair in Medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he does clinical work and heads a research lab. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, he received his M.D. from the Istanbul University Faculty of Medicine.
Go to Profile#10784
Horng-Tzer Yau
#10794
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Horng-Tzer Yau is a Taiwanese-American mathematician. He received his B.Sc. in 1981 from National Taiwan University and his Ph.D. in 1987 from Princeton University. Yau joined the faculty of NYU in 1988, and became a full professor at its Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1994. He moved to Stanford in 2003, and then to Harvard University in 2005. He was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1987–88, 1991–92, and 2003, and was a distinguished visiting professor in 2013–14.
Go to Profile#10785
Anil K. Rajvanshi
#10795
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Anil K. Rajvanshi is an academic from India, and is the current director of the Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute . Rajvanshi was born and raised in Lucknow, India. He has been the director of NARI at Maharashtra, India since 1981. Prior to taking this position he served on the faculty at the University of Florida. Rajvanshi has more than 40 years of experience in renewable energy research, rural and sustainable development. He has more than 250 publications and 7 patents to his credit.
Go to Profile#10786
Amélie Rorty
#10796
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty was a Belgian-born American philosopher known for her work in the philosophy of mind , history of philosophy , and moral philosophy. Career Rorty received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1951, M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in 1954 and 1961 respectively, and an M.A. from Princeton University in anthropology. She began her academic career at Wheaton College , then began teaching at Rutgers in 1962 and taught there through to 1988, by which time she had achieved the rank of distinguished professor. She was also professor in the history of ideas ...
Go to Profile#10787
Andreas Maislinger
#10797
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Andreas Maislinger is an Austrian historian and political scientist and founder and former chairman of the Austrian Service Abroad. He also is the founder of the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award, the Braunau Contemporary History Days and the inventor of the idea of the House of Responsibility.
Go to Profile#10788
Vahid Tarokh
#10798
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Vahid Tarokh is an Iranian–American electrical engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, and professor. Since 2018, he has served as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a Professor of Mathematics, and the Rhodes Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. From 2019 to 2021, he was a Microsoft Data Science Investigator at Microsoft Innovation Hub at Duke University. Tarokh works with complex datasets and uses machine learning algorithms to predict catastrophic events.
Go to Profile#10789
Herman Branson
#10799
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
Herman Russell Branson was an American physicist, chemist, best known for his research on the alpha helix protein structure, and was also the president of two colleges. He received a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation.
Go to Profile#10790
John Quelch
#10800
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
John Anthony Quelch CBE is a British-American academic and professor. He is the former dean of the University of Miami School of Business at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida from 2017 to 2022.
Go to Profile#10791
Dennis Bergkamp
#10801
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Dennis Nicolaas Maria Bergkamp is a Dutch professional football coach and former player who was most recently the Assistant manager of Ajax. Originally a wide midfielder, Bergkamp was moved to main striker and then to second striker, where he remained throughout his playing career. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest players of his generation, one of the greatest forwards in Premier League history and amongst Ajax's and Arsenal's greatest ever players.
Go to Profile#10792
Gilles Lipovetsky
#10802
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Gilles Lipovetsky is a French philosopher, writer, and sociologist, professor at Stendhal University in Grenoble, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France. Life and career Lipovetsky was born in Millau in 1944. He studied philosophy at University of Grenoble, and participated in the 1968 student uprising in Paris to change the French educational model. However he criticizes the model that came from that as producing alienated individuals with fragile personalities prone to emotional disorder due to hedonism and immediate gratification.
Go to Profile#10793
M. R. D. Foot
#10803
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Michael Richard Daniell Foot, was a British political and military historian, and former British Army intelligence officer with the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War. Biography The son of a career soldier, Foot was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he became involved romantically with Iris Murdoch.
Go to Profile#10794
Mike Krzyzewski
#10804
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Michael William Krzyzewski , nicknamed "Coach K", is an American former college basketball coach. He served as the head coach at Duke University from 1980 to 2022, during which he led the Blue Devils to five national titles, 13 Final Fours , 15 ACC tournament championships, and 13 ACC regular season titles. Among men's college basketball coaches, only UCLA's John Wooden has won more NCAA championships, with a total of ten. Krzyzewski is widely regarded as one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all time.
Go to Profile#10795
Aaron Siskind
#10805
Overall Influence
1903 - 1991 (88 years)
Aaron Siskind was an American photographer whose work focuses on the details of things, presented as flat surfaces to create a new image independent of the original subject. He was closely involved with, if not a part of, the abstract expressionist movement, and was close friends with painters Franz Kline , Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.
Go to Profile#10796
Ellis Paul Torrance
#10806
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Ellis Paul Torrance was an American psychologist best known for his research in creativity. After completing his undergraduate degree at Mercer University, Torrance acquired a Master's degree at the University of Minnesota and then a doctorate from the University of Michigan. His teaching career spanned from 1957 to 1984. First, he taught at the University of Minnesota and then later at the University of Georgia, where he became professor of Educational Psychology in 1966.
Go to Profile#10797
Jeff VanderMeer
#10807
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Jeff VanderMeer is an American author, editor, and literary critic. Initially associated with the New Weird literary genre, VanderMeer crossed over into mainstream success with his bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy. The trilogy's first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, and was adapted into a Hollywood film by director Alex Garland. Among VanderMeer's other novels are Shriek: An Afterword and Borne. He has also edited with his wife Ann VanderMeer such influential and award-winning anthologies as The New Weird, The Weird, and The Big Book of Science Fiction.
Go to Profile#10798
Michael Beschloss
#10808
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Michael Richard Beschloss is an American historian specializing in the United States presidency. He is the author of nine books on the presidency. Early life Beschloss was born in Chicago, grew up in Flossmoor, Illinois, and was educated at Eaglebrook School, Phillips Academy , Williams College and Harvard University. He majored in political science, studying under James MacGregor Burns at Williams, from which he graduated with Highest Honors, and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School, with the original intention of writing history while serving as a foundation executive.
Go to Profile#10799
Shlomo Shamai
#10809
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Professor Shlomo Shamai is a distinguished professor at the Department of Electrical engineering at the Technion − Israel Institute of Technology. Professor Shamai is an information theorist and winner of the 2011 Shannon Award.
Go to Profile#10800
Mats Alvesson
#10810
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mats Alvesson is a Swedish management scholar and professor of business administration at Lund University, particularly known for having made key contributions in forming the field of critical management studies.
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