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
Edward Bennett
#50449
Overall Influence
Edward Bennett was an American physicist, known from his early involvements in wireless transmission. He obtained a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh in 1897. The work was on spark-gap transmitters, jointly with William Bradshaw and supervised by Reginald Fessenden. Working at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he achieved fame in the history of broadcasting from his work with Dr. Earle M. Terry that led to the first transmissions of the WHA radio station . He later headed the electrical engineering department.
Go to Profile#1102
Krishna Shenoy
#50527
Overall Influence
1968 - 2023 (55 years)
Krishna Vaughn Shenoy was an American neuroscientist and neuroengineer at Stanford University. Shenoy was the Hong Seh and Vivian W. M. Lim Professor in the Stanford University School of Engineering. He focused on neuroscience topics, including neurotechnology such as brain-computer interfaces. On 21 January 2023, he died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. According to Google Scholar, he amassed an h-index of 79.
Go to Profile#1103
Elizabeth Roboz Einstein
#50565
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Elizabeth Roboz-Einstein was a biochemist and neuroscientist known for purifying and characterizing myelin basic protein , investigating its potential role in the neurodegenerative disease multiple sclerosis , and helping pioneer the field of neurochemistry.
Go to Profile#1104
John Wilson Moore
#50569
Overall Influence
1920 - 2019 (99 years)
John Wilson Moore was an American biophysicist who pioneered the emergent power of computers, beginning in the 1950s, to reveal how signals are generated, integrated, and then travel in neurons. He is well known for his discovery , that the puffer fish toxin tetrodotoxin causes death by blocking the sodium ion channels that are responsible for nerve activity. Moore was emeritus professor of Neurobiology at Duke University Medical School where he had been a member of the faculty since 1961. Moore's NEURON simulator software, begun with and now carried forward by Michael Hines, is used worldwide.
Go to Profile#1105
Richard S. Muller
#50767
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Richard Stephen Muller is an American professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley. He made contributions to the founding and growth of the field of MicroElectromechanical Systems . Together with student, Roger T. Howe, he made the initial seminal contribution of polysilicon sacrificially-released beams in 1982. This led to a class of micromanufacturing processes called surface micromachining. These processes preceded the creation of low cost, mass-produced commercial micro accelerometers, which are used in automotive collision sensors for airbag deployment.
Go to Profile#1106
Richard A. Andersen
#50841
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Richard Alan Andersen is an American neuroscientist. He is the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. His research focuses on visual physiology with an emphasis on translational research to humans in the field of neuroprosthetics, brain-computer interfaces, and cortical repair.
Go to Profile#1107
Japie van Zyl
#50857
Overall Influence
1957 - 2020 (63 years)
Japie van Zyl was a Namibian electrical engineer working for NASA. Van Zyl was born in Outjo , South West Africa. After matric he attended Stellenbosch University where he obtained an honours degree in electronic engineering cum laude in 1979 . After a further two years in the South African Navy, he went to California in 1982 where he obtained his MSc degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1983. In 1986, he completed his PhD in electrical engineering at Caltech and then joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a researcher.
Go to Profile#1108
Jan Peter Toennies
#50919
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Jan Peter Toennies is an American scientist. Early life and education He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to German immigrant parents. He is the grandson of sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. He graduated from Lower Merion High School, outside of Philadelphia in 1948, from Amherst College, with a B.A. in 1952, and from Brown University, with a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1957. During graduate school he was a Fulbright student in Göttingen 1953–1954.
Go to Profile#1109
Terry Wallace
#50926
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Terry C. Wallace Jr. is an American geophysicist. He was the 11th director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the president of Los Alamos National Security, LLC. He became director on January 1, 2018, succeeding Charles F. McMillan.
Go to Profile#1110
Perry A. Frey
#50958
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Perry A. Frey is professor emeritus of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1998. Research in his laboratory centered on the elucidation of enzymatic reaction mechanisms.
Go to Profile#1111
Lorraine Foster
#50970
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Lorraine Lois Foster is an American mathematician. In 1964 she became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from California Institute of Technology. Her thesis advisor at Caltech was Olga Taussky-Todd. Foster's Erdos number is 2.
Go to Profile#1112
Liu Chen
#50972
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Liu Chen is an American theoretical physicist who has made original contributions to many aspects of plasma physics. He is known for the discoveries of kinetic Alfven waves, toroidal Alfven eigenmodes, and energetic particle modes; the theories of geomagnetic pulsations, Alfven wave heating, and fishbone oscillations, and the first formulation of nonlinear gyrokinetic equations. Chen retired from University of California, Irvine in 2012, assuming the title professor emeritus of physics and astronomy.
Go to Profile#1113
John P. Grotzinger
#50989
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
John P. Grotzinger is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Geology at California Institute of Technology and chair of the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences. His works primarily focus on chemical and physical interactions between life and the environment. In addition to biogeological studies done on Earth, Grotzinger is also active in research into the geology of Mars and has made contributions to NASA's Mars Exploration Program.
Go to Profile#1114
Regis B. Kelly
#51014
Overall Influence
Regis Baker Kelly OBE is a neuroscientist and university administrator who develops academia-industry partnerships and supports early-stage entrepreneurship in the life sciences. Early life Kelly grew up in a working-class family in Edinburgh, Scotland. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1961.
Go to Profile#1115
Thom Dunning Jr.
#51041
Overall Influence
Thom H. Dunning Jr. is an American chemist currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of Illinois.
Go to Profile#1116
Martin Carnoy
#51054
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Martin Carnoy is an American labour economist and Vida Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education as well as of the International Academy of Education. Professor Carnoy has graduated nearly 100 PhD students, a record at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#1117
James W. LaBelle
#51108
Overall Influence
James W. LaBelle is an American physicist. He received his B.S. from Stanford University in 1980, his M.S. from Cornell University in 1982 and his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1985. He is currently professor and former department chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire and has been a professor there since 1989. Since 2010, he has held the Lois L. Rodgers Professorship.
Go to Profile#1118
Marshall Fixman
#51124
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Marshall Fixman was an American physical chemist, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Colorado State University, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Fixman earned his undergraduate degree in 1950 from Washington University in St. Louis, and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1954.
Go to Profile#1119
Blayne Heckel
#51161
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Blayne Ryan Heckel is an American experimental physicist, known for his research involving precision measurements in atomic physics and gravitational physics. He is now a professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Go to Profile#1120
Barry Dickson
#51195
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Barry J. Dickson is an Australian neurobiologist who studies the development of neuronal networks in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Dickson is a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Loudoun County, Virginia and a former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria.
Go to Profile#1121
Steven J. Ostro
#51199
Overall Influence
1946 - 2008 (62 years)
Steven Jeffrey Ostro was an American scientist specializing in radar astronomy. He worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Ostro led radar observations of numerous asteroids, as well as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn's rings, and Mars and its satellites. As of May 2008, Ostro and his collaborators had detected 222 near-Earth asteroids and 118 main belt objects with radar.
Go to Profile#1122
Tord Ekelöf
#51260
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Tord Johan Carl Ekelöf is a Swedish professor of particle physics at Uppsala University. Biography Ekelöf is the son of Per Olof Ekelöf and Marianne Ekelöf. He graduated in 1964 from the Cathedral School in Uppsala. Ekelöf became a bachelor of philosophy in 1966, a master's engineer in 1968 and obtained his PhD in 1972, all at Uppsala University.
Go to Profile#1123
Johnny Lee
#51272
Overall Influence
Johnny Chung Lee is an American computer engineer known for his inventions related to the Wii Remote. He is involved with human-computer interaction. Education Lee earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering at the University of Virginia in 2001 and a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University's Human–Computer Interaction Institute.
Go to Profile#1124
Leslie Leiserowitz
#51336
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
Leslie Leiserowitz is an Israeli chemist and crystallographer. Leiserowitz studied electrical engineering at the University of Cape Town with a bachelor's degree, and then worked briefly as an electrical engineer and received a master's degree in physics . In 1959 he joined the X-ray crystallography department at the Weizmann Institute under Gerhard Schmidt, a student of Dorothy Crowfoot-Hodgkin. The group at the Weizmann Institute has an international reputation in solid-state chemistry. From 1966 to 1968 he set up the organic chemistry X-ray crystallography department at the University of Heidelberg at the invitation of Heinz Staab.
Go to Profile#1125
Peter Jones
#51341
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Peter Wilcox Jones is a mathematician at Yale University, known for his work in harmonic analysis and fractal geometry. He received his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978, under the supervision of John B. Garnett. He received the Salem Prize in 1981. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences , the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences , and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He is not related to the mathematician Vaughan Jones.
Go to Profile#1126
John Yates
#51370
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
John T. Yates Jr. was an American chemist. He was an investigator in the field of surface chemistry and physics, including both the structure and spectroscopy of atoms and molecules on surfaces, the dynamics of surface processes and the development of new methods for research in surface chemistry.
Go to Profile#1127
Kevin K. Lehmann
#51448
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Kevin K. Lehmann is an American chemist and spectroscopist at the University of Virginia, best known for his work in the area of intramolecular and collisional dynamics, and for his advances in the method of cavity ring down spectroscopy .
Go to Profile#1128
Vivian O'Brien
#51473
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Vivian "Vob" O'Brien was an American applied mathematician and physicist whose research included fluid dynamics and visual perception. She worked for many years as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and is the namesake of the Craik–O'Brien–Cornsweet illusion.
Go to Profile#1129
Russell S. Drago
#51529
Overall Influence
1928 - 1997 (69 years)
Russell Stephen Drago was an American professor of inorganic chemistry. He mentored more than 130 PhD students, authored over a dozen textbooks and four hundred research documents, which have been published in several languages. He filed 17 process patents. and established the Florida Catalysis Conference Foundation, Inc.
Go to Profile#1130
Steven Zucker
#51580
Overall Influence
1949 - 2019 (70 years)
Steven Mark Zucker was an American mathematician who introduced the Zucker conjecture, proved in different ways by Eduard Looijenga and by Leslie Saper and Mark Stern . Zucker completed his Ph.D. in 1974 at Princeton University under the supervision of Spencer Bloch. His work with David A. Cox led to the creation of the Cox–Zucker machine, an algorithm for determining if a given set of sections provides a basis for the Mordell–Weil group is isomorphic to the projective line.
Go to Profile#1131
David A. McCormick
#51600
Overall Influence
David Alan McCormick is an American neurobiologist. He holds one of two Presidential chair positions and is director of the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon and co-director of the Neurons to Minds Cluster of Excellence.
Go to Profile#1132
James Andrew Harris
#51736
Overall Influence
1932 - 2000 (68 years)
James Andrew Harris was an American radiochemist who was involved in the discovery of elements 104 and 105 . Harris was the head of the Heavy Isotopes Production Group, part of the Nuclear Chemistry Division of University of California-Berkeley. Harris is known for being the first African American to contribute to the discovery of new elements.
Go to Profile#1133
A. James Hudspeth
#51813
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
A. James Hudspeth is the F.M. Kirby Professor at Rockefeller University in New York City, where he is director of the F.M. Kirby Center for Sensory Neuroscience. His laboratory studies the physiological basis of hearing.
Go to Profile#1134
Dean Oliver
#51821
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Lawrence Dean Oliver is an American statistician and assistant coach for the NBA's Washington Wizards. Oliver is a prominent contributor to the advanced statistical evaluation of basketball. He is the author of Basketball on Paper, the former producer of the defunct Journal of Basketball Studies. More recently, Oliver has served in front office roles with the Sacramento Kings, Seattle SuperSonics and Denver Nuggets of the NBA . In October 2015 Dean Oliver joined TruMedia Networks as Vice President of Data Science. TruMedia Networks is an engineering firm specializing in sports analytics solut...
Go to Profile#1135
Arthur Lupia
#51824
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Arthur Lupia is an American political scientist. He is the Gerald R. Ford University Professor at the University of Michigan and Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation. Prior to joining NSF, he was Chairperson of the Board of the Center for Open Science and Chair of National Research Council's Roundtable on the Application of Behavioral and Social Science. His research concerns how information and institutions affect policy and politics, with a focus on how people make decisions when they lack information. He draws from multiple scientific and philosophical disciplines and uses multiple research methods.
Go to Profile#1136
Nirmal Bose
#51831
Overall Influence
Nirmal Bose was a professor in the Pennsylvania State University Electrical Engineering Department, from 1986 until his death. Before joining the Penn State faculty, he taught at Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#1137
Donat Wentzel
#51845
Overall Influence
1934 - 2013 (79 years)
Donat G. Wentzel was an American astrophysicist, best known as astronomy educator of undergraduates, graduates, and young researchers. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he established himself in plasma astrophysics, working on cosmic magnetism and electrical currents flowing both between the stars and on the Sun. His outstanding contribution was on Alfven waves driven by cosmic rays and the emission processes of solar flares at radio waves. His book on the “Restless Sun,” written for undergraduates, was named Book of the Year by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1989. Wentzel received 2003 the George Van Biesbroeck Prize.
Go to Profile#1138
John M. McQuillan
#51874
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
John M. McQuillan is an American computer scientist who did studies of adaptive routing in the early ARPANET and the subsequent Internet. After receiving his A.B. in 1970 and a M.S. in 1971, he completed a Ph.D. in 1974 in applied mathematics from Harvard University. He was since 1971 employed at the computer networking equipment manufacturer Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, MA, where he programmed the Interface Message Processor, work that in part led to his dissertation Adaptive routing for distributed computer networks advised by Jeffrey P. Buzen in 1974. In his dissertation, McQu...
Go to Profile#1139
Alejandro Jenkins
#51938
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (46 years)
Alejandro Jenkins is a Costa Rican theoretical physicist. He is currently a professor at the University of Costa Rica and a member of Costa Rica's National Academy of Sciences. He has worked on applications of quantum field theory to particle physics and cosmology, as well as on self-oscillating dynamical systems and quantum thermodynamics.
Go to Profile#1140
Nick Scoville
#52017
Overall Influence
Nicholas Zabriskie "Nick" Scoville is the Francis L. Moseley Professor of Astronomy at Caltech. Education Scoville earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Research Scoville's research interests include interstellar molecular clouds and star formation activity within these clouds, interacting ultraluminous-infrared galaxies and active galactic nuclei. He led the Cosmic Evolution Survey that is among the best studied fields in extragalactic astronomy and one of the largest galaxy surveys executed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Go to Profile#1141
Eric Strauss
#52188
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Eric G. Strauss is a President's Professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. He is a member of the Biology Department at the Frank R. Seaver College of Science and Engineering and director of the Ballona Discovery Park. Founder of the Center for Urban Resilience , Strauss aims to create synergistic research and teaching opportunities within LMU as a resource to both government and neighborhoods throughout the greater Los Angeles area. Strauss is the Founding Editor of a web-based peer-reviewed journal, Cities and the Environment, which is funded in part by the USDA Fo...
Go to Profile#1142
Kenneth Farley
#52306
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Kenneth A. Farley is a noble gas isotope geochemist and Professor of Geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. He holds the W. M. Keck Foundation professorship and was the chairman of the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech from 2004 to 2014. Farley specializes in the study of the accumulation of cosmic dust in seafloor sedimentss through analysis of the presence of Helium-3, and in the isotopic composition of mid-oceanic and volcanic island basalts. Farley earned a B.S. in chemistry at Yale University in 1986 and his Ph.D. in geochemistry at the University...
Go to Profile#1143
John Newman
#52376
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
John Scott Newman is an American retired academic. A professor and renowned battery and electrochemical engineer researcher, he worked at the University of California in the Department of Chemical Engineering. The Newman Research Group was established with the goal of identifying "efficient and economical methods for electrochemical energy conversion and storage, development of mathematical models to predict the behavior of electrochemical systems and to identify important process parameters, and experimental verification of the completeness and accuracy of the models". Newman also worked for...
Go to Profile#1144
Ari Ben-Menahem
#52456
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (97 years)
Ari Ben-Menahem has been professor of mathematics and geophysics at the Weizmann Institute of Science since 1964 and visiting professor at MIT. He is a seismologist, author, polymath, and historian of science. He coauthored with Sarvajit Singh, "Seismic Waves and Sources: the mathematical theory of seismology", a pioneering treatise since the nascent of this discipline at the turn of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#1145
Scott D. Emr
#52486
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Scott D. Emr is an American cell biologist and the founding and current Director of the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology at Cornell University, where he is also a Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of 1956 Professor at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics.
Go to Profile#1146
Nathalie Cabrol
#52501
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Nathalie A. Cabrol is a French American astrobiologist specializing in planetary science. Cabrol studies ancient lakes on Mars, and undertakes high-altitude scientific expeditions in the Central Andes of Chile as the principal investigator of the "High Lakes Project" funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute . There, with her team, she documents life's adaptation to extreme environments, the effect of rapid climate change on lake ecosystems and habitats, its geobiological signatures, and relevance to planetary exploration.
Go to Profile#1147
Laura A. Lopez
#52514
Overall Influence
Laura A. Lopez is an associate professor of astronomy at Ohio State University studying the life cycle of stars. She was awarded the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy in 2016, which is awarded by the American Astronomical Society for outstanding research and promise for future research by a postdoctoral woman researcher.
Go to Profile#1148
Louis Lee
#52518
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Louis Lee is a Taiwanese physicist. Academic career Lee earned a bachelor's degree in physics from National Taiwan University in 1969, and obtained a master's and doctorate in the subject from the California Institute of Technology, ending his studies in 1975. Lee then worked at the Goddard Space Flight Center and taught at the University of Maryland before joining the University of Alaska faculty. Lee returned to Taiwan and began teaching at National Cheng Kung University in 1995. He has served as the director of the National Applied Research Laboratories and the National Space Program Office.
Go to Profile#1149
Mark Boslough
#52548
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Mark Boslough is an American physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, research professor at University of New Mexico, fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and chair of the Asteroid Day Expert Panel. He is an expert in the study of planetary impacts and global catastrophes. Due to his work in this field, Asteroid 73520 Boslough was named in his honor.
Go to Profile#1150
John Abelson
#52569
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
John Norman Abelson is an American molecular biologist with expertise in biophysics, biochemistry, and genetics. He was a professor at the California Institute of Technology . Biography Abelson graduated in 1960 with a bachelor's degree in physics from Washington State University. He obtained his Ph.D. in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 1965. He then did a postdoctoral fellowship in biochemistry at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Molecular Genetics Division, Cambridge, England, where he worked with Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick on the mechanism of nonsense suppressors in E.coli.
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