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
#1101
Barry Mazur
#1101
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
#1102
Ken Kesey
#1102
Overall Influence
1935 - 2001 (66 years)
Ken Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, and grew up in Springfield, Oregon, graduating from the University of Oregon in 1957. He began writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1960 after completing a graduate fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University; the novel was an immediate commercial and critical success when published two years later. During this period, Kesey participated in CIA-financed studies in...
Go to Profile#1103
Avital Ronell
#1103
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Avital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic languages and literature and comparative literature at New York University, where she co-directs the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies program. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, Ronell also teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.
Go to Profile#1104
Robert Brout
#1104
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Robert Brout was an American theoretical physicist who made significant contributions in elementary particle physics. He was a professor of physics at Université Libre de Bruxelles where he had created, together with François Englert, the Service de Physique Théorique.
Go to Profile#1105
David Ray Griffin
#1105
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
David Ray Griffin was an American professor of philosophy of religion and theology and a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Along with John B. Cobb, Jr., he founded the Center for Process Studies in 1973, a research center of Claremont School of Theology that promotes process thought. Griffin published numerous books about the September 11 attacks, claiming that elements of the Bush administration were involved. An advocate of the controlled demolition conspiracy theory, he was a founder member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth.
Go to Profile#1106
Gulzar
#1106
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Gulzar is an Indian Urdu poet, lyricist, author, screenwriter, and film director known for his works in Hindi cinema. He is regarded as one of greatest Urdu poets of this era. He started his career with music director S.D. Burman as a lyricist in the 1963 film Bandini and worked with many music directors including R. D. Burman, Salil Chowdhury, Vishal Bhardwaj and A. R. Rahman. Gulzar also writes poetry, dialogues and scripts. He directed films such as Aandhi and Mausam during the 1970s and the TV series Mirza Ghalib in the 1980s. He also directed Kirdaar in 1993.
Go to Profile#1107
Matt Lauer
#1107
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Matthew Todd Lauer is an American former television news personality, best known for his work with NBC News. After serving as a local news personality in New York City on WNBC, his first national exposure was as the news anchor for The Today Show from 1994 to 1997. In 1997, he was moved from the news desk to the host's chair, and served as the co-host of NBC's Today show from 1997 to 2017. He was also a frequent contributor for the evening news magazine Dateline NBC. With NBC, Lauer hosted the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and co-hosted the opening ceremonies of several Olympic Games...
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Brent Scowcroft
#1108
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Brent Scowcroft was a United States Air Force officer who was a two-time United States National Security Advisor, first under U.S. President Gerald Ford and then under George H. W. Bush. He served as Military Assistant to President Richard Nixon and as Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He served as Chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005, and advised President Barack Obama on choosing his national security team.
Go to Profile#1109
Matthew Rabin
#1109
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Matthew Joel Rabin is the Pershing Square Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Harvard Economics Department and Harvard Business School. Rabin's research focuses primarily on incorporating psychologically more realistic assumptions into empirically applicable formal economic theory. His topics of interest include errors in statistical reasoning and the evolution of beliefs, effects of choice context on exhibited preferences, reference-dependent preferences, and errors people make in inference in market and learning settings.
Go to Profile#1110
Lawrence Krauss
#1110
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#1111
John Bolton
#1111
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
John Robert Bolton is an American attorney, diplomat, Republican consultant, and political commentator. He served as the 25th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, and as the 26th United States National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019.
Go to Profile#1112
John Kerry
#1112
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Forbes Kerry is an American attorney, politician and diplomat currently serving as the first U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. A member of the Forbes family and the Democratic Party, he previously served as the 68th United States secretary of state from 2013 to 2017 in the administration of Barack Obama and represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1985 to 2013. Kerry was the Democratic nominee for president of the United States in the 2004 election, losing to incumbent President George W. Bush.
Go to Profile#1113
Haruki Murakami
#1113
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been bestsellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the Princess of Asturias Awards.
Go to Profile#1114
Stephen Kosslyn
#1114
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Stephen Michael Kosslyn is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. Kosslyn is best known for his work on visual cognition and the science of learning. Kosslyn currently serves as the president of Active Learning Sciences Inc., which helps institutions design active-learning based courses and educational programs. He is also the founder and chief academic officer of Foundry College, an online two-year college.
Go to Profile#1115
Manuel Blum
#1115
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
#1116
Jacques Cousteau
#1116
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, , called the Aqua-Lung, which assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries.
Go to Profile#1117
Howard T. Odum
#1117
Overall Influence
1924 - 2002 (78 years)
Howard Thomas Odum , usually cited as H. T. Odum, was an American ecologist. He is known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology, and for his provocative proposals for additional laws of thermodynamics, informed by his work on general systems theory.
Go to Profile#1118
Stanley Schachter
#1118
Overall Influence
1922 - 1997 (75 years)
Stanley Schachter was an American social psychologist best known for his development of the two factor theory of emotion in 1962 along with Jerome E. Singer. In his theory he states that emotions have two ingredients: physiological arousal and a cognitive label. A person's experience of an emotion stems from the mental awareness of the body's physical arousal and the explanation one attaches to this arousal. Schachter also studied and published many works on the subjects of obesity, group dynamics, birth order and smoking. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Schac...
Go to Profile#1119
J. D. Salinger
#1119
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Jerome David Salinger was an American author best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger published several short stories in Story magazine in 1940, before serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker, which published much of his later work.
Go to Profile#1120
Gerhard Ertl
#1120
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Gerhard Ertl is a German physicist and a Professor emeritus at the Department of Physical Chemistry, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Germany. Ertl's research laid the foundation of modern surface chemistry, which has helped explain how fuel cells produce energy without pollution, how catalytic converters clean up car exhausts and even why iron rusts, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
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Marshall Warren Nirenberg
#1121
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Marshall Warren Nirenberg was an American biochemist and geneticist. He shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert W. Holley for "breaking the genetic code" and describing how it operates in protein synthesis. In the same year, together with Har Gobind Khorana, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.
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Bert Sakmann
#1122
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Bert Sakmann is a German cell physiologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Erwin Neher in 1991 for their work on "the function of single ion channels in cells," and the invention of the patch clamp. Bert Sakmann was Professor at Heidelberg University and is an Emeritus Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. Since 2008 he leads an emeritus research group at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology.
Go to Profile#1123
Michael Sandel
#1123
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Michael Joseph Sandel is an American political philosopher and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government Theory at Harvard Law School, where his course Justice was the university's first course to be made freely available online and on television. It has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world, including in China, where Sandel was named the 2011's "most influential foreign figure of the year" . He is also known for his critique of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice . He was elected a Fellow of the American Ac...
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Dawon Kahng
#1124
Overall Influence
1931 - 1992 (61 years)
Dawon Kahng was a Korean-American electrical engineer and inventor, known for his work in solid-state electronics. He is best known for inventing the MOSFET , along with his colleague Mohamed Atalla, in 1959. Kahng and Atalla developed both the PMOS and NMOS processes for MOSFET semiconductor device fabrication. The MOSFET is the most widely used type of transistor, and the basic element in most modern electronic equipment.
Go to Profile#1125
Carol W. Greider
#1125
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Carolyn Widney Greider is an American molecular biologist and Nobel laureate. She joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Distinguished Professor in the department of molecular, cell, and developmental biology in October 2020.
Go to Profile#1126
Stevie Wonder
#1126
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Stevland Hardaway Morris , known professionally as Stevie Wonder, is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer. He is credited as a pioneer and influence by musicians across a range of genres that include R&B, pop, soul, gospel, funk, and jazz. A virtual one-man band, Wonder's use of synthesizers and other electronic musical instruments during the 1970s reshaped the conventions of contemporary R&B. He also helped drive such genres into the album era, crafting his LPs as cohesive and consistent, in addition to socially conscious statements with complex compositions. Blind sin...
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Art Spiegelman
#1127
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman , professionally known as Art Spiegelman, is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. His work as co-editor on the comics magazines Arcade and Raw has been influential, and from 1992 he spent a decade as contributing artist for The New Yorker. He is married to designer and editor Françoise Mouly, and is the father of writer Nadja Spiegelman. In September 2022, the National Book Foundation announced that he would receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Go to Profile#1128
Roger Myerson
#1128
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Roger Bruce Myerson is an American economist and professor at the University of Chicago. He holds the title of the David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts in the Harris School of Public Policy, the Griffin Department of Economics, and the college. Previously, he held the title The Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics. In 2007, he was the winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin for "h...
Go to Profile#1129
Larry Wall
#1129
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Larry Arnold Wall is an American computer programmer and author. He created the Perl programming language. Personal life Wall grew up in Los Angeles and then Bremerton, Washington, before starting higher education at Seattle Pacific University in 1976, majoring in chemistry and music and later pre-medicine with a hiatus of several years working in the university's computing center before graduating with a bachelor's degree in Natural and Artificial Languages.
Go to Profile#1130
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
#1130
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Areas of Specialization: Astrophysics, Radio Pulsars Jocelyn Bell Burnell currently holds the title of Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford. Previously, she has held professorial and administrative roles at the University of Bath, Princeton University, the Open University, UCL Institute of Education, and University of Southampton. She was also president of the Royal Astronomical Society, president of the Institute of Physics, worked on the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, and was project manager for the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. Native to Northern Ireland, Bur...
Go to Profile#1131
Bill Bryson
#1131
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
William McGuire Bryson is an American–British journalist and author. Bryson has written a number of nonfiction books on topics including travel, the English language, and science. Born in the United States, he has been a resident of Britain for most of his adult life, returning to the U.S. between 1995 and 2003, and holds dual American and British citizenship. He served as the chancellor of Durham University from 2005 to 2011.
Go to Profile#1132
Cicely Saunders
#1132
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Dame Cicely Mary Strode Saunders was an English nurse, social worker, physician and writer. She is noted for her work in terminal care research and her role in the birth of the hospice movement, emphasising the importance of palliative care in modern medicine, and opposing the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia.
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Patriarch Kirill of Moscow
#1133
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Kirill or Cyril is a Russian Orthodox bishop. He became Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus' and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church on 1 February 2009. Prior to becoming Patriarch, Kirill was Archbishop of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, and also Chairman of the Russian Orthodox Church's Department for External Church Relations. He has been a permanent member of the Holy Synod since 1989.
Go to Profile#1134
Alvin Goldman
#1134
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Alvin Ira Goldman is an American philosopher who is Emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.
Go to Profile#1135
Carlo Rovelli
#1135
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Italian Quantum Physicist Carlo Rovelli currently holds the title of Director of the quantum gravity team at the Centre de Physique Théorique at Aix-Marseille University in Provence, France. Previously, Rovelli was a professor at Pittsburgh University, and held fellowships at Syracuse University and Yale University. Rovelli completed his BS and MS in physics at the University of Bologna in 1981, and his PhD at the University of Padova in 1986. Rovelli is a prominent figure in quantum and theoretical physics. In particular, he is recognized as a co-founder of the loop quantum gravity theory, along with Lee Smolin and Abhay Ashtekar.
Go to Profile#1136
Simon Schama
#1136
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#1137
Ian Stewart
#1137
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ian Nicholas Stewart is a British mathematician and a popular-science and science-fiction writer. He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, England. Education and early life Stewart was born in 1945 in Folkestone, England. While in the sixth form at Harvey Grammar School in Folkestone he came to the attention of the mathematics teacher. The teacher had Stewart sit mock A-level examinations without any preparation along with the upper-sixth students; Stewart was placed first in the examination. He was awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge ...
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Gregory Benford
#1138
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Gregory Benford is an American science fiction author and astrophysicist who is professor emeritus at the department of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a contributing editor of Reason magazine.
Go to Profile#1139
Ikujiro Nonaka
#1139
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Ikujiro Nonaka is a Japanese organizational theorist and Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy of the Hitotsubashi University, best known for his study of knowledge management.
Go to Profile#1140
John Gurdon
#1140
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Sir John Bertrand Gurdon is a British developmental biologist, best known for his pioneering research in nuclear transplantation and cloning. Awarded the Lasker Award in 2009, in 2012, he and Shinya Yamanaka were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that mature cells can be converted to stem cells.
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Pervez Hoodbhoy
#1141
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy is a Pakistani nuclear physicist and activist who serves as a professor at the Forman Christian College and previously taught physics at the Quaid-e-Azam University. Hoodbhoy is also a prominent activist in particular concerned with promotion of freedom of speech, secularism, scientific temper and education in Pakistan.
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Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
#1142
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie was a French historian whose work was mainly focused upon Languedoc in the Ancien Régime, particularly the history of the peasantry. One of the leading historians of France, Le Roy Ladurie has been called the "standard-bearer" of the third generation of the Annales school and the "rock star of the medievalists", noted for his work in social history.
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Joseph Wolpe
#1143
Overall Influence
1915 - 1997 (82 years)
Joseph Wolpe was a South African psychiatrist and one of the most influential figures in behavior therapy. Wolpe grew up in South Africa, attending Parktown Boys' High School and obtaining his MD from the University of the Witwatersrand.
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Jerome Lettvin
#1144
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Jerome Ysroael Lettvin , often known as Jerry Lettvin, was an American cognitive scientist, and Professor of Electrical and Bioengineering and Communications Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He is best known as the lead author of the paper, "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" , one of the most cited papers in the Science Citation Index. He wrote it along with Humberto Maturana, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, and in the paper they gave special thanks and mention to Oliver Selfridge at MIT. Lettvin carried out neurophysiological studies in the spinal cord, m...
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Rudolf E. Kálmán
#1145
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Rudolf Emil Kálmán was a Hungarian-American electrical engineer, mathematician, and inventor. He is most noted for his co-invention and development of the Kalman filter, a mathematical algorithm that is widely used in signal processing, control systems, and guidance, navigation and control. For this work, U.S. President Barack Obama awarded Kálmán the National Medal of Science on October 7, 2009.
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Ned Block
#1146
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Ned Joel Block is an American philosopher working in philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to the understanding of consciousness and the philosophy of cognitive science. He has been professor of philosophy and psychology at New York University since 1996.
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Colin Wilson
#1147
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Colin Henry Wilson was an English existentialist philosopher-novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work was "that of a philosopher, and purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism".
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Sepp Hochreiter
#1148
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Josef "Sepp" Hochreiter is a German computer scientist. Since 2018 he has led the Institute for Machine Learning at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz after having led the Institute of Bioinformatics from 2006 to 2018. In 2017 he became the head of the Linz Institute of Technology AI Lab. Hochreiter is also a founding director of the Institute of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence . Previously, he was at the Technical University of Berlin, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and at the Technical University of Munich. He is a chair of the Critical Assessment of Massive Dat...
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Jim Bakker
#1149
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
James Orsen Bakker is an American televangelist. Between 1974 and 1987, Bakker hosted the television program The PTL Club and its cable television platform, the PTL Satellite Network, with his then wife, Tammy Faye. He also developed Heritage USA, a now-defunct Christian theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina.
Go to Profile#1150
Alain de Benoist
#1150
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Alain de Benoist , also known as Fabrice Laroche, Robert de Herte, David Barney, and other pen names, is a French political philosopher and journalist, a founding member of the Nouvelle Droite , and the leader of the ethno-nationalist think tank GRECE.
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