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
#10901
Ingemar Cox
#10911
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ingemar J. Cox is Professor and Director of Research in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, where he is Head of the Future Media Group, and he is Professor in the Machine Learning department at the University of Copenhagen. Between 2003 and 2008, he was Director of UCL's Adastral Park Campus.
Go to Profile#10902
Valentin Ceaușescu
#10913
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Valentin Ceaușescu is a Romanian physicist. He is the eldest and only surviving child of former communist President Nicolae Ceaușescu and Elena Ceaușescu. Biography Early life and education Valentin Ceaușescu was born in Bucharest on 17 February 1948. His father, future President Nicolae Ceaușescu, was an active member of the Romanian Workers' Party, earning himself various political and military positions; he was the country's Minister of Agriculture at the time Valentin was born. His mother was Elena Ceaușescu . He had two siblings: Zoia, born in 1949 and Nicu, born in 1951.
Go to Profile#10903
Michael Lerner
#10914
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Michael Lerner is an American political activist, the editor of Tikkun, a progressive Jewish interfaith magazine based in Berkeley, California, and the rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley. Biography
Go to Profile#10904
Yoram Hazony
#10915
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Yoram Reuben Hazony is an Israeli-American philosopher, Bible scholar, and political theorist. He is president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and serves as the chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. He has argued for national conservatism in his 2018 book, The Virtue of Nationalism and 2020's Conservatism: A Rediscovery.
Go to Profile#10905
Mikhail Dyakonov
#10916
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Mikhail Dyakonov is a Russian professor of physics at Laboratoire Charles Coulomb , Université Montpellier - CNRS in France. Career His name is connected with several physical phenomena: Dyakonov–Perel spin relaxation mechanism, Dyakonov–Shur plasma wave instability. In 1971, together with V.I. Perel he predicted the Spin Hall Effect, which has become a field of intense studies.
Go to Profile#10906
Lynn Sherr
#10917
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Lynn Sherr is an American broadcast journalist and author, best known as a correspondent for the ABC news magazine 20/20. Life Sherr was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and attended Lower Merion High School in Ardmore. She received a B.A. from Wellesley College.
Go to Profile#10907
Margaret Sayers Peden
#10918
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Margaret Sayers Peden was an American translator and professor emerita of Spanish at the University of Missouri. Prior to her death in 2020, Peden lived and worked in Columbia, Missouri. Early life and education Peden was born at West Plains, Missouri, daughter of horseman Harvey Monroe Sayers and Eleanor Green , and grew up in many towns across Missouri. She was educated at William Woods University at Fulton, Missouri for two years, then studied at the University of Missouri, where she took bachelors, masters, and PhD degrees.
Go to Profile#10908
Brian Wansink
#10919
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Brian Wansink is a former American professor and researcher who worked in consumer behavior and marketing research. He is the former executive director of the USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion and held the John S. Dyson Endowed Chair in the Applied Economics and Management Department at Cornell University, where he directed the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.
Go to Profile#10909
Denis Sinor
#10920
Overall Influence
1916 - 2011 (95 years)
Denis Sinor was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Central Asian Studies at the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University and a tenured lecturer at Cambridge University between 1948 and 1962, and was one of the world's leading scholars for the history of Central Asia. Under his directorship, the Central Asian Studies at Indiana University became one of the world's foremost centers for Central Asian history, languages and linguistics.
Go to Profile#10910
Kodwo Eshun
#10921
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Kodwo Eshun is a British-Ghanaian writer, theorist and filmmaker. He is perhaps best known for his 1998 book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction and his association with the art collective The Otolith Group. He currently teaches on the MA in Contemporary Art Theory in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and at CCC Research Master Program of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD .
Go to Profile#10911
Abolhassan Banisadr
#10922
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Seyyed Abolhassan Banisadr was an Iranian politician, writer, and political dissident. He was the first president of Iran after the 1979 Iranian Revolution abolished the monarchy, serving from February 1980 until his impeachment by parliament in June 1981. Prior to his presidency, he was the minister of foreign affairs in the interim government. He had resided for many years in France where he co-founded the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
Go to Profile#10912
Thomas Ruff
#10923
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Thomas Ruff is a German photographer who lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He has been described as "a master of edited and reimagined images". Ruff shares a studio on Düsseldorf's Hansaallee, with fellow German photographers Laurenz Berges, Andreas Gursky and Axel Hütte. The studio, a former municipal electricity station, includes a basement gallery.
Go to Profile#10913
Peter Moore
#10924
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Peter B. Moore is Sterling Professor emeritus of Chemistry, Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. He has dedicated his entire career to understanding the structure, function, and mechanism of the ribosome.
Go to Profile#10914
Arun Netravali
#10925
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Arun N. Netravali is an Indian–American computer engineer credited with contributions in digital technology including HDTV. He conducted research in digital compression, signal processing and other fields. Netravali was the ninth President of Bell Laboratories and has served as Lucent's Chief Technology Officer and Chief Network Architect. He received his undergraduate degree from IIT Bombay, India, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from Rice University in Houston, Texas, all in electrical engineering. Several global universities, including the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland, hav...
Go to Profile#10915
Weinan E
#10926
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Weinan E is a Chinese mathematician. He is known for his pathbreaking work in applied mathematics and machine learning. His academic contributions include novel mathematical and computational results in stochastic differential equations; design of efficient algorithms to compute multiscale and multiphysics problems, particularly those arising in fluid dynamics and chemistry; and pioneering work on the application of deep learning techniques to scientific computing. In addition, he has worked on multiscale modeling and the study of rare events.
Go to Profile#10916
Catherine Tucker
#10927
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Catherine Tucker is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT Sloan, where she is also chair of the PhD program. She is known for her research into the consequences of digital data for electronic privacy, algorithmic bias, digital health, social media and online advertising. She is also a research associate at the NBER, cofounder of the Cryptoeconomics lab at MIT with Christian Catalini and coeditor at Quantitative Marketing Economics.
Go to Profile#10917
Dennis Hopper
#10928
Overall Influence
1936 - 2010 (74 years)
Dennis Lee Hopper was an American actor and film director. He is known for his roles as mentally disturbed outsiders and rebels. He earned prizes from the Cannes Film Festival and Venice International Film Festival as well as nominations for two Academy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award and two Golden Globe Awards. Hopper studied acting at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego and the Actors Studio in New York. Hopper also began a prolific and acclaimed photography career in the 1960s.
Go to Profile#10918
Peter Kenez
#10929
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Peter Kenez is a historian specializing in Russian and Eastern European history and politics. Life Kenez was born and grew up in Pesterzsébet, Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary. His father was arrested in March 1944 after Operation Margarethe and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and killed. His mother fled to Budapest with him, where they survived the persecution of the Jews by the Eichmann-Kommando and the Arrow Cross Party.
Go to Profile#10919
José Esteban Muñoz
#10930
Overall Influence
1967 - 2013 (46 years)
José Esteban Muñoz was a Cuban American academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory. His first book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics examines the performance, activism, and survival of queer people of color through the optics of performance studies. His second book, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity, was published by NYU Press in 2009. Muñoz was Professor in, and former Chair of, the Department of Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Go to Profile#10920
Michael Rossmann
#10931
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Michael G. Rossmann was a German-American physicist, microbiologist, and Hanley Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at Purdue University who led a team of researchers to be the first to map the structure of a human common cold virus to an atomic level. He also discovered the Rossmann fold protein motif. His most well recognised contribution to structural biology is the development of a phasing technique named molecular replacement, which has led to about three quarters of depositions in the Protein Data Bank.
Go to Profile#10921
Hélio Gracie
#10932
Overall Influence
1913 - 2009 (96 years)
Hélio Gracie was a Brazilian martial artist who together with his brothers Oswaldo, Gastao Jr, George and Carlos Gracie founded and developed the self-defense martial art system of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, also known as Brazilian jiu-jitsu .
Go to Profile#10922
Roland Fraïssé
#10933
Overall Influence
1920 - 2008 (88 years)
Roland Fraïssé was a French mathematical logician. Life Fraïssé received his doctoral degree from the University of Paris in 1953. In his thesis, Fraïssé used the back-and-forth method to determine whether two model-theoretic structures were elementarily equivalent. This method of determining elementary equivalence was later formulated as the Ehrenfeucht–Fraïssé game.
Go to Profile#10923
Wilferd Madelung
#10934
Overall Influence
1930 - 2023 (93 years)
Wilferd Ferdinand Madelung FBA was a German author and scholar of Islamic history widely recognised for his contributions to the fields of Islamic and Iranian studies. He was appreciated in Iran for his "knowledgeable and fair" treatment of the Shia perspective. In the obituary of the Institute of Ismaili Studies where Madelung worked his last years, it reads: "With particular reference to religious schools and movements in early Islam, his studies, based on a vast array of primary sources, have enriched the discipline’s understanding of almost every major Muslim movement and community – not...
Go to Profile#10924
Nikhat Kazmi
#10935
Overall Influence
1958 - 2012 (54 years)
Nikhat Kazmi was a senior correspondent and well-known film critic from, born Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, who had been writing for The Times of India since 1987. She died of breast cancer in 2012, at age 53.
Go to Profile#10925
Willem Frederik Hermans
#10936
Overall Influence
1921 - 1995 (74 years)
Willem Frederik Hermans was a Dutch author of poetry, novels, short stories, plays, as well as book-length studies, essays, and literary criticism. His most famous works are The House of Refuge , The Darkroom of Damocles , and Beyond Sleep .
Go to Profile#10926
Ted Kaczynski
#10937
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
Theodore John Kaczynski , also known as the Unabomber , was an American mathematician and domestic terrorist. He was a mathematics prodigy but abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a primitive lifestyle.
Go to Profile#10927
Brevard Childs
#10938
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
Brevard Springs Childs was an American Old Testament scholar and Professor of Old Testament at Yale University from 1958 until 1999 , who is considered one of the most influential biblical scholars of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#10928
Kurt W. Fischer
#10939
Overall Influence
1943 - 2020 (77 years)
Kurt W. Fischer was an educator, author, and researcher in the field of neuroscience and education. Until his retirement in 2015, he was the Charles Bigelow Professor of Education and Director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Fischer studied cognitive and emotional development and learning. His work, called dynamic skill theory, is considered to be one of the Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development. It offers an explanation for both consistency and variability in developmental patterns.
Go to Profile#10929
Robert Duvall
#10940
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Robert Selden Duvall is an American actor and filmmaker. With a career spanning eight decades, he is regarded as one of the greatest actors of all time. He is the recipient of an Academy Award, four Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Go to Profile#10930
Albert Ando
#10941
Overall Influence
1929 - 2002 (73 years)
was a Japanese-born economist. Biography He was born in Tokyo, as a member of family running Ando Corporation, a major construction company. He didn't join the family business, and came to the United States after World War II. He received his B.S. in economics from the Seattle University in 1951, his M.A. in economics from St. Louis University in 1953, and an M.S. in economics in 1956 and a Ph.D. in mathematical economics in 1959 from Carnegie Institute of Technology . At Carnegie Mellon he collaborated, among others, with Herbert A. Simon on questions regarding aggregation and causation in ec...
Go to Profile#10931
T. William Olle
#10942
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
T. William Olle was a British computer scientist and consultant and President of T. William Olle Associates, England. Biography Bill Olle was educated at Boston Grammar School . He received an M.Sc. degree in 1954 and a Ph.D. degree in 1957, both in Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, which involved extensive programming work on the Manchester University Electronic Computer.
Go to Profile#10932
Donald Ringe
#10943
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Donald Ringe is an American linguist and Indo-Europeanist. Ringe graduated from University of Kentucky and received a Master of Philosophy in linguistics as a Marshall Scholar from the University of Oxford. He received a Ph.D in linguistics at Yale University in 1984, under the supervision of Warren Cowgill. He taught Classics at Bard College from 1983 to 1985. Since 1985, he has been on the Faculty in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been a full professor since 1996.
Go to Profile#10933
Travis Pastrana
#10944
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Travis Alan Pastrana is an American professional motorsports competitor and stunt performer who has won championships and X Games gold medals in several disciplines, including supercross, motocross, freestyle motocross, rally racing and offshore powerboat racing. He runs a show called Nitro Circus and the rallycross racing series Nitrocross.
Go to Profile#10934
Alan Bennett
#10945
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Alan Bennett is an English playwright, author, actor and screenwriter. Over his entertainment career he has received numerous awards and honours including two BAFTA Awards, four Laurence Olivier Awards, and two Tony Awards. He also earned an Academy Award nomination for his film The Madness of King George . In 2005 he received the Society of London Theatre Special Award.
Go to Profile#10935
D. Richard Hipp
#10946
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Dwayne Richard Hipp is an American software developer and the primary author of SQLite as well as the Fossil SCM. He also authored the Lemon parser generator, and CVSTrac; the latter became the inspiration for Trac. He was also a member of the Tcl core team.
Go to Profile#10936
Andrew Granville
#10947
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Andrew James Granville is a British mathematician, working in the field of number theory. He has been a faculty member at the Université de Montréal since 2002. Before moving to Montreal he was a mathematics professor at the University of Georgia from 1991 until 2002. He was a section speaker in the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians together with Carl Pomerance from UGA.
Go to Profile#10937
Sabina Magliocco
#10948
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Sabina Magliocco , is a professor of anthropology and religion at the University of British Columbia and formerly at California State University, Northridge . She is an author of non-fiction books and journal articles about folklore, religion, religious festivals, foodways, witchcraft and Neo-Paganism in Europe and the United States.
Go to Profile#10938
Takeshi Umehara
#10949
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
was born in Miyagi Prefecture in Tōhoku and graduated from the philosophical faculty of Kyoto University in 1948. He taught philosophy at Ritsumeikan University and was subsequently appointed president of the Kyoto City University of Arts. He is noted for his prolific essays on Japanese culture, in which he has endeavoured to refound the discipline of Japanese studies along more Japanocentric lines, notably in his book written in 1972 in collaboration with Shunpei Ueyama. Aside from his voluminous academic essays on numerous aspects of Japanese culture he has also composed theatrical works o...
Go to Profile#10939
Boris Trakhtenbrot
#10950
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Boris Abramovich Trakhtenbrot was a Russian-Israeli mathematician in logic, algorithms, theory of computation, and cybernetics. Biography Trakhtenbrot was born into a Jewish family in Brichevo, northern Bessarabia . He studied at the Moldovan State Pedagogical Institute in Kishinev, Chernivtsi University, and the Ukrainian Academy of Science's Mathematical Institute, completing a Ph.D. at the latter institution in 1950.
Go to Profile#10940
David Nalbandian
#10951
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
David Pablo Nalbandian is an Argentine former professional tennis player. He reached his highest ranking in singles of world No. 3 in March 2006, during a career that stretched from 2000 to 2013. Nalbandian was runner-up in the singles event at the 2002 Wimbledon Championships. During his career, he won 11 singles titles, including the Tennis Masters Cup in 2005 and two Masters 1000 tournaments. Nalbandian is the only Argentine man in history to reach the semifinals or better at all four majorss and to reach the Wimbledon final.He was a member of the Argentinian Davis Cup team who reached the finals of the World Group in 2006, 2008 and 2011.
Go to Profile#10941
A. Parasuraman
#10952
Overall Influence
A. "Parsu" Parasuraman is an Indian-American marketing professor and author. He is the Professor and the James W. McLamore Chair in Marketing at the University of Miami. Education Parasuraman got his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras and MBA in Marketing from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad in 1970 and 1972 respectively. He then proceeded to the United States where he gained a doctorate in Business Administration from Indiana University in 1975.
Go to Profile#10942
Ralph Pearson
#10953
Overall Influence
1919 - 2022 (103 years)
Ralph Gottfrid Pearson was an American physical inorganic chemist best known for the development of the concept of hard and soft acids and bases . He received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1943 from Northwestern University, and taught chemistry at Northwestern faculty from 1946 until 1976, when he moved to University of California at Santa Barbara . He retired in 1989 but remained active in research in theoretical inorganic chemistry until his death.
Go to Profile#10943
Robert Siegel
#10954
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert Charles Siegel is an American retired radio journalist. He was one of the co-hosts of the National Public Radio evening news broadcast All Things Considered from 1987 until his retirement in January 2018.
Go to Profile#10944
Juan Ramón de la Fuente
#10955
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Juan Ramón de la Fuente Ramírez is a Mexican psychiatrist, academician and politician who served as Secretary of Health in the cabinet of President Ernesto Zedillo and as rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1999 to 2007. He is currently a professor emeritus of Psychiatry at National Autonomous University of Mexico and Chairs the Board of the Aspen Institute Mexico. On 18 February 2019 he began his term as the Permanent Representative of Mexico to the United Nations.
Go to Profile#10945
Rod Ellis
#10956
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Rod Ellis is a Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize-winning British linguist. He is currently a research professor in the School of Education, at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is also a professor at Anaheim University, where he serves as the Vice president of academic affairs. Ellis is a visiting professor at Shanghai International Studies University as part of China’s Chang Jiang Scholars Program and an emeritus professor of the University of Auckland. He has also been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Go to Profile#10946
Daniel Kevles
#10957
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Daniel J. Kevles is an American historian of science best known for his books on American physics and eugenics and for a wide-ranging body of scholarship on science and technology in modern societies. He is Stanley Woodward Professor of History, Emeritus at Yale University and J. O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#10947
Norio Taniguchi
#10958
Overall Influence
1912 - 1999 (87 years)
Norio Taniguchi was a professor of Tokyo University of Science. He coined the term nano-technology in 1974 to describe semiconductor processes such as thin film deposition and ion beam milling exhibiting characteristic control on the order of a nanometer: "Nano-technology' mainly consists of the processing of separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule."
Go to Profile#10948
Mikhail Khovanov
#10959
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Mikhail Khovanov is a Russian-American professor of mathematics at Columbia University who works on representation theory, knot theory, and algebraic topology. He is known for introducing Khovanov homology for links, which was one of the first examples of categorification.
Go to Profile#10949
Emil Wolf
#10960
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Emil Wolf was a Czech-born American physicist who made advancements in physical optics, including diffraction, coherence properties of optical fields, spectroscopy of partially coherent radiation, and the theory of direct scattering and inverse scattering. He was also the author of numerous other contributions to optics.
Go to Profile#10950
Wladimir Klitschko
#10961
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Wladimir Klitschko is a Ukrainian former professional boxer who competed from 1996 to 2017. He held the world heavyweight championship twice, including the unified WBA , IBF, WBO, IBO, and Ring magazine titles. A strategic and intelligent boxer, Klitschko is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweight champions of all time. He was known for his exceptional knockout power, using a strong jab, straight right hand and left hook, quick hand speed, as well as athletic footwork and mobility, unusual for boxers of his size.
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