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
#11001
Myron J. Gordon
#11012
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Myron Jules Gordon, was an American economist. He was Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. In 1956, Gordon along with Eli Shapiro, published a method for valuing a stock or business, now known as the Gordon growth model.
Go to Profile#11002
Serge Brammertz
#11013
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Serge Brammertz is a Belgian prosecutor, academic and jurist. He serves as the chief prosecutor for the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals since 2016. He also served as the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia from 2008 until its closure in 2017.
Go to Profile#11003
John Canny
#11014
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John F. Canny is an Australian computer scientist, and Paul E Jacobs and Stacy Jacobs Distinguished Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley. He has made significant contributions in various areas of computer science and mathematics, including artificial intelligence, robotics, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, computer security, computational algebra, and computational geometry.
Go to Profile#11004
David Weiss Halivni
#11015
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
David Weiss Halivni was a European-born American-Israeli rabbi, scholar in the domain of Jewish sciences, and Professor of Talmud. He served as Reish Metivta of the Union for Traditional Judaism's rabbinical school.
Go to Profile#11005
Sean Slade
#11016
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Sean Slade is an American record producer, engineer, and mixer. On many of his productions he worked in partnership with Paul Q. Kolderie. Career Slade was born in Lansing, Michigan, United States. He graduated from Yale University in 1978. Slade and Kolderie became friends at Yale, where they played in bands together. They both later relocated to Boston, where they became members of Sex Execs, a new wave music band of the early 1980s. The duo had their formative experience as producers while they were in Sex Execs. Most of the group lived in a house in Dorchester, Boston that was wired up as a primitive studio.
Go to Profile#11006
J. I. M. Stewart
#11017
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
John Innes Mackintosh Stewart was a Scottish novelist and academic. He is equally well known for the works of literary criticism and contemporary novels published under his real name and for the crime fiction published under the pseudonym of Michael Innes.
Go to Profile#11007
Hoesung Lee
#11018
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Hoesung Lee is a South Korean economist who served as the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 2015 to 2023. He is professor in the economics of climate change, energy and sustainable development in the Graduate School of Energy, Environment, Policy & Technology at Korea University.
Go to Profile#11008
Michael Messner
#11019
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Michael Alan Messner is an American sociologist. His main areas of research are gender and the sociology of sports. He is the author of several books, he gives public speeches and teaches on issues of gender-based violence, the lives of men and boys, and gender and sports.
Go to Profile#11009
Susie Orbach
#11020
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Susie Orbach is a British psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic. Her first book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, analysed the psychology of dieting and over-eating in women, and she has campaigned against media pressure on girls to feel dissatisfied with their physical appearance. She was married to the author Jeanette Winterson. She is honoured in BBC'S 100 Women in 2013 and 2014. She was the therapist to Diana, Princess of Wales during the 1990s.
Go to Profile#11010
Lucy Sante
#11021
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Her books include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York . Biography Born in Verviers, Belgium, Sante migrated to the United States in the early 1960s. She attended school in New York City, first at Regis High School in Manhattan and later at Columbia University from 1972 to 1976; due to several incompletes and outstanding library fines, she did not take a degree. Since 1984 she has been a full-time writer. Sante worked in the mailroom and then as assistant to editor Barbara Epstein at The New York Review of Books.
Go to Profile#11011
Tom Van Vleck
#11022
Overall Influence
Tom Van Vleck is an American computer software engineer. Life and work Van Vleck graduated from MIT in 1965 with a BS in Mathematics. He worked on CTSS at MIT, and co-authored its first email program with Noel Morris. In 1965, he joined Project MAC, the predecessor of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He worked on the development of Multics for more than 16 years at MIT and at Honeywell Information Systems. He has also worked at Tandem Computers, Taligent, CyberCash, Sun Microsystems, Encirq , and SPARTA .
Go to Profile#11012
Geert Mak
#11023
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Geert Ludzer Mak is a Dutch journalist and non-fiction writer. Honors For his book In Europe: Travels through the Twentieth Century he received the Leipziger Buchpreis zur Europäische Verständigung and the Otto von der Gablentz Prize . The French government also awarded him the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur . In the Netherlands, his exceptional engagement with international history has earned him the Golden Goose’s Feather , the Comenius Prize and the Prince Bernhard Cultural Fund Prize for his entire oeuvre . In the statement that accompanied the honorary degree from Münster, Mak was du...
Go to Profile#11013
John Richardson
#11024
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Sir John Patrick Richardson, was a British art historian and biographer of Pablo Picasso. Richardson also worked as an industrial designer and as a reviewer for The New Observer. In 1952, he moved to Provence, where he became friends with Picasso, Fernand Léger and Nicolas de Staël. In 1960, he moved to New York and organized a nine-gallery Picasso retrospective. Christie's then appointed him to open their U.S. office, which he ran for the next nine years. In 1973 he joined New York gallery M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., as vice president in charge of 19th- and 20th-century painting, and later bec...
Go to Profile#11014
Korina Sanchez
#11025
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Korina Maria Baluyot Sanchez-Roxas , known professionally as Korina Sanchez, is a Filipino broadcast journalist, television news anchor, senior field reporter, magazine show host, radio anchor, and newspaper columnist. She served as Chief Reporter for the Integrated News and Current Affairs Division of ABS-CBN airing on TV Channel 2, AM Radio Station DZMM and cable TV ABS-CBN News Channel. She also has a regular column in The Philippine Star entitled That Does It, as well as a Tagalog column entitled K Ka Lang in its sister newspaper, Pilipino Star Ngayon.
Go to Profile#11015
Michael Mandelbaum
#11026
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Michael Mandelbaum is a professor and director of the American Foreign Policy program at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. He has written a number of books on American foreign policy and edited a dozen more.
Go to Profile#11016
Léon Degrelle
#11027
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
Léon Joseph Marie Ignace Degrelle was a Belgian Walloon politician and Nazi collaborator. He rose to prominence in Belgium in the 1930s as the leader of the Rexist Party . During the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, he enlisted in the German army and fought in the Walloon Legion on the Eastern Front. After the collapse of the Nazi regime, Degrelle escaped and went into exile in Francoist Spain, where he remained a prominent figure in neo-Nazi politics.
Go to Profile#11017
David Hammons
#11028
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
David Hammons is an American artist, best known for his works in and around New York City and Los Angeles during the 1970s and 1980s. Early life David Hammons was born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, the youngest of ten children being raised by a single mother. This dynamic caused great financial strain on his family during his childhood; he later stated that he is uncertain how they managed to 'get by' during this time. Although not inclined academically, Hammons showed an early talent for drawing and art; however the ease at which these practices came to him caused him to develop disdain for it.
Go to Profile#11018
Dương Văn Minh
#11029
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Dương Văn Minh , popularly known as Big Minh, was a South Vietnamese politician and a senior general in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and a politician during the presidency of Ngô Đình Diệm. In 1963, he became chief of a military junta after leading a coup in which Diệm was assassinated. Minh lasted only three months before being toppled by Nguyễn Khánh, but assumed power again as the fourth and last President of South Vietnam in April 1975, two days before surrendering to North Vietnamese forces. He earned his nickname "Big Minh", because at approximately 1.83 m tall and weighing 90 k...
Go to Profile#11019
Bruce Lipton
#11030
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Bruce Harold Lipton is an American writer and lecturer who advocates various pseudosciences, including vaccine misinformation. By his own admission, Lipton's ideas have not received attention from mainstream science.
Go to Profile#11020
Dhammika Dharmapala
#11031
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Dhammika Dharmapala is an economist who is the Paul H. and Theo Leffman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He is known for his research into corporate tax avoidance, corporate use of tax havens, and the corporate use of base erosion and profit shifting techniques.
Go to Profile#11021
Elizabeth Bates
#11032
Overall Influence
1947 - 2003 (56 years)
Elizabeth Ann Bates was a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. She was an internationally renowned expert and leading researcher in child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, aphasia, and the neurological bases of language, and she authored 10 books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. Bates was well known for her assertion that linguistic knowledge is distributed throughout the brain and is subserved by general cognitive and neurological processes.
Go to Profile#11022
Samir Das
#11033
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Samir R. Das is an Indian-American Stony Brook University professor who attended Jadavpur University and Indian Institute of Science. He was also associated with Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was former faculty in University of Texas at San Antonio and University of Cincinnati where he conducted research in computer science particularly in wireless networking. As of 2017 his work Ad hoc on-demand distance vector was cited over 26,000+ times. Many of his research works are highly cited, giving him an h-index of 54.
Go to Profile#11023
Mikel Dufrenne
#11034
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Mikel Dufrenne was a French philosopher and aesthetician. He is known as an author of existentialism and is particularly noted for the work The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience . He encountered the work of Karl Jaspers while being a prisoner of war in a camp with Paul Ricœur. Dufrenne and Ricœur later collaborated on a book on Jaspers.
Go to Profile#11024
Nick Saban
#11035
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Nicholas Lou Saban Jr. is an American football coach who has been the head football coach at the University of Alabama since 2007. Saban previously served as head coach of the National Football League 's Miami Dolphins and at three other universities: Louisiana State University , Michigan State University, and the University of Toledo. Saban is considered to be among the greatest coaches in college football history.
Go to Profile#11025
James Fearon
#11036
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
James D. Fearon is the Theodore and Francis Geballe Professor of Political Science at Stanford University; he is known for his work on the theory of civil wars, international bargaining, war's inefficiency puzzle, audience costs, and ethnic constructivism. According to a 2011 survey of International Relations scholars, Fearon is among the most influential International Relations scholars of the last twenty years. His 1995 article "Rationalist Explanations for War" is the most assigned journal article in International Relations graduate training at U.S. universities.
Go to Profile#11026
Ken Rosewall
#11037
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Kenneth Robert Rosewall is an Australian former world top-ranking professional tennis player. Rosewall won 147 singles titles, including a record 15 Pro Majors and 8 Grand Slam titles for a total 23 titles at pro and amateur majors. He also won 15 Pro Majors in doubles and 9 Grand Slam doubles titles. Rosewall achieved a Pro Slam in singles in 1963 by winning the three Pro Majors in one year and he completed the Career Grand Slam in doubles.
Go to Profile#11027
Alan V. Oppenheim
#11038
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Alan Victor Oppenheim is a professor of engineering at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is also a principal investigator in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics , at the Digital Signal Processing Group.
Go to Profile#11028
Walter A. Davis
#11039
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Walter A. "Mac" Davis is an American philosopher, critic, and playwright. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio State University and the author of eight books. Davis has also taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His theoretical work engages critically with psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, Hegelian dialectics and postmodernism. For a more general audience, he has written plays and two volumes of essays in cultural criticism.
Go to Profile#11029
Viet D. Dinh
#11040
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Viet D. Dinh is a Vietnamese-born American legal scholar who is on the board of Strategic Education. He is also the Chief Legal and Policy Officer of Fox Corporation where he leads all legal, government and regulatory and government affairs. He served as an Assistant Attorney General of the United States from 2001 to 2003, under the presidency of George W. Bush. Previously, Dinh was a partner at two leading law firms, Kirkland & Ellis LLP and Bancroft PLLC, the latter of which he founded. Born in Saigon, in former South Vietnam, he was the chief architect of the USA PATRIOT Act and is a for...
Go to Profile#11030
Paul Syverson
#11041
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Paul Syverson is a computer scientist best known for inventing onion routing, a feature of the Tor anonymity network. In 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named Syverson, and Tor's co-creators Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, among its Top 100 Global Thinkers "for making the web safe for whistleblowers".
Go to Profile#11031
Christian Boltanski
#11042
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Christian Liberté Boltanski was a French sculptor, photographer, painter, and film maker. He is best known for his photography installations and contemporary French conceptual style. Early life Boltanski was born in Paris on 6 September 1944. His father, Étienne Alexandre Boltanski, a physician, was Jewish and had come to France from Russia, while Marie-Elise Ilari-Guérin, his Roman Catholic mother originated from Corsica, descended from Ukrainian Jews. His Jewish heritage was a large influence in Boltanski's household. During World War II, while living in Paris, his father escaped deportation by hiding in a space under the floorboards of the family apartment for a year and a half.
Go to Profile#11032
Arnold J. Levine
#11043
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Arnold Jay Levine , is an American molecular biologist. He was awarded the 1998 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry and was the first recipient of the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research in 2001 for his discovery of the tumor suppressor protein p53.
Go to Profile#11033
Mario Firmenich
#11044
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Mario Eduardo Firmenich is a former Argentine urban guerrilla leader and politician. He was one of the commanders of Montoneros group and the most significant figure in the Argentine guerrillas in the 70s. In 1987, He was sentenced to life in prison for killing a businessman and attempting to murder multiple politicians in Argentina, but was pardoned by president Carlos Menem in 1990.
Go to Profile#11034
Markus Brunnermeier
#11045
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Markus Konrad Brunnermeier is an economist, who is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Brunnermeier is a faculty member of Princeton's department of economics and director of the Bendheim Center for Finance. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Brunnermeier is also the president of the American Finance Association in 2023.
Go to Profile#11035
John Mylopoulos
#11046
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
John Mylopoulos is a Greek-Canadian computer scientist, Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, and at the University of Trento, Italy. He is known for his work in the field of conceptual modeling, specifically the development an agent-oriented software development methodology. called TROPOS.
Go to Profile#11036
Carol Shields
#11047
Overall Influence
1935 - 2003 (68 years)
Carol Ann Shields, was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.
Go to Profile#11037
David Wengrow
#11048
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
David Wengrow is a British archaeologist and Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He co-authored the international bestseller The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity which was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in 2022. Wengrow has contributed essays on topics such as social inequality and climate change to The Guardian and The New York Times. In 2021 he was ranked No. 10 in ArtReview's Power 100 list of the most influential people in art.
Go to Profile#11038
Lily E. Kay
#11049
Overall Influence
1947 - 2000 (53 years)
Lily E. Kay was a historian of science noted for her studies of molecular biology. Education and early life Kay was born in Kraków, Poland, the daughter of concentration camp survivors. The family relocated to Israel and then, in 1960, to the United States. Kay graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969 and in 1986 earned her Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University in the history of science.
Go to Profile#11039
Meredith Small
#11050
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Meredith Francesca Small is a Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Cornell University and popular science author. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She has been widely published in academic journals, and her research is presented in her most popular book: Our Babies, Ourselves. She spent many years studying both people and primate behaviour. Her current area of interest is in the intersection of biology and culture, and how that has influenced parenting.
Go to Profile#11040
Sergio Rossetti Morosini
#11051
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Sergio Rossetti Morosini is a Brazilian-American Scholar, artist and author of Venetian extraction who served as Brazil's Cultural attaché in New Orleans and is dedicated to preserving the Atlantic Forest and restoring the art in stone of New York City Landmarks.
Go to Profile#11041
David Brown
#11052
Overall Influence
1916 - 2010 (94 years)
David Brown was an American film and theatre producer and writer who was best known for producing the 1975 film Jaws based on the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley. Early life He was born in New York City, the son of Lillian and Col. Edward Fisher Brown, and was the elder brother of Carolyn Brown, who married French aristocrat Emmanuel de Crussol d'Uzès, Duke of Uzès, then who remarried to Geoffrey Carpenter Doyle, a grandson of New York City architect James Edwin Ruthven Carpenter Jr.
Go to Profile#11042
Sue Townsend
#11053
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Susan Lillian Townsend was an English writer and humorist whose work encompasses novels, plays and works of journalism. She was best known for creating the character Adrian Mole. After writing in secret from the age of 14, Townsend first became known for her plays, her signature character first appearing in a radio drama, but her work soon expanded into other forms. She enjoyed great success in the 1980s, with her Adrian Mole books selling more copies than any other work of fiction in Britain during the decade. This series, which eventually encompassed nine books, takes the form of the character's diaries.
Go to Profile#11043
Eleanor J. Gibson
#11054
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Eleanor Jack Gibson was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932, publishing her first works on research conducted as an undergraduate student. Gibson was able to circumvent the many obstacles she faced due to the Great Depression and gender discrimination, by finding research opportunities that she could meld with her own interests. Gibson, with her husband James J. Gibson, created the Gibsonian ecological theory of development, which emphasized how important perception was because it allows humans to adapt to their environments.
Go to Profile#11044
Conrad Phillip Kottak
#11055
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Conrad Phillip Kottak is an American anthropologist. Kottak is currently a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Michigan, where he has been teaching since 1968. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and he did extensive research in Brazil and Madagascar, visiting societies there and writing books about them.
Go to Profile#11045
Rochelle Walensky
#11056
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Rochelle Paula Walensky is an American physician-scientist who served as the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2021 to 2023 and had also served as the administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in her capacity as the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2021 to 2023. On May 5, 2023, she announced her resignation, effective June 30, 2023. Prior to her appointment at the CDC, she had served as the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Go to Profile#11046
Carrie Mae Weems
#11057
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.
Go to Profile#11047
Murray Rosenblatt
#11058
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Murray Rosenblatt was a statistician specializing in time series analysis who was a professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He was also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1965, and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He wrote about 140 research articles, 4 books, and co-edited 6 books.
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Albert Jacquard
#11059
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Albert Jacquard was a French geneticist, popularizer of science and essayist. He was well known for defending ideas related to science, degrowth, needy persons and the environment. He was 10 years an active member of the French communist party .
Go to Profile#11049
Arnold S. Relman
#11060
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Arnold Seymour Relman — known as Bud Relman to intimates — was an American internist and professor of medicine and social medicine. He was editor of The New England Journal of Medicine from 1977 to 1991, where he instituted two important policies: one asking the popular press not to report on articles before publication and another requiring authors to disclose conflicts of interest. He wrote extensively on medical publishing and reform of the U.S. health care system, advocating non-profit delivery of single-payer health care. Relman ended his career as professor emeritus at Harvard Medical ...
Go to Profile#11050
Richard Holmes
#11061
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Richard Gordon Heath Holmes, OBE, FRSL, FBA is a British author and academic best known for his biographical studies of major figures of British and French Romanticism. Biography Richard Gordon Heath Holmes was born on 5 November 1945 in London. He was educated at Downside School, Somerset, and Churchill College, Cambridge. He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia from 2001 to 2007 and has honorary doctorates from the University of East London, University of Kingston, and the Tavistock Institute.
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