Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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List of the most influential people

#11151

David Julius

#11162

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

David Jay Julius is an American physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate known for his work on molecular mechanisms of pain sensation and heat, including the characterization of the TRPV1 and TRPM8 receptors that detect capsaicin, menthol, and temperature. He is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

#11152

Lonnie D. Bentley

#11163

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Lonnie D. Bentley is an American computer scientist, and Professor and former Department Head of Computer and Information Technology at Purdue University, known with Kevin C. Dittman and Jeffrey L. Whitten as co-author of the textbook Systems Analysis and Design Methods, which is now in its 7th edition.

#11153

Jacques Friedel

Jacques Friedel

#11164

Overall Influence

1921 - 2014 (93 years)

Jacques Friedel ForMemRS was a French physicist and material scientist. Education Friedel attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school. He studied at the École Polytechnique from 1944 to 1946, and the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris from 1946 to 1948. He graduated from the University of Paris with a licence ès sciences degree in 1948, then studied at the Metallurgy Laboratory of the School of Mines with Charles Crussard. He graduated from the University of Bristol with a PhD in 1952, where he studied with Nevill Francis Mott, and a Doctorat d'Etat in Paris in 1954.

#11154

Marcella Nunez-Smith

#11165

Overall Influence

Marcella Nunez-Smith is an American physician-scientist. She is C.N.H Long Professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Yale School of Medicine, where she serves as the inaugural Associate Dean for Health Equity Research and founding director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center. She also holds joint appointments at the Yale School of Public Health and the Yale School of Management. After co-chairing the Biden-Harris transition’s COVID-19 Advisory Board from November 2020 to January 2021, she was selected by President Joe Biden to serve as Senior Advisor to the White House COVID-19 Re...

#11155

Karel Kosík

#11166

Overall Influence

1926 - 2003 (77 years)

Karel Kosík was a Czech Marxist philosopher. In his most famous philosophical work, Dialectics of the Concrete , Kosík presents an original reinterpretation of the ideas of Karl Marx in light of Martin Heidegger's phenomenology. His later essays can be called a sharp critique of the modern society from a leftist but not strictly Marxist position.

#11156

Susanne Albers

#11167

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Susanne Albers is a German theoretical computer scientist and professor of computer science at the Department of Informatics of the Technical University of Munich. She is a recipient of the Otto Hahn Medal and the Leibniz Prize.

#11157

Arnold Zellner

#11168

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

Arnold Zellner was an American economist and statistician specializing in the fields of Bayesian probability and econometrics. Zellner contributed pioneering work in the field of Bayesian analysis and econometric modeling.

#11158

Wu Ta-You

#11169

Overall Influence

1907 - 2000 (93 years)

Wu Ta-You was a Chinese physicist and writer who worked in the United States, Canada, mainland China and Taiwan. He has been called the Father of Chinese Physics. Early life and education Wu was born in Panyu, Guangzhou in the last years of the Qing dynasty. In 1929 he took his undergraduate degree at Nankai University in Tianjin . He moved to the United States for graduate schooling and obtained a Doctor of Philosophy Degree from the University of Michigan in 1933.

#11159

David Soskice

#11170

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

David William Soskice, FBA is a British political economist and academic. He is currently the LSE School Professor of Political Science and Economics at the London School of Economics. Early life and education Soskice was born as son of the British Labour Home Secretary Frank Soskice and his wife Susan Isabella Cloudsley Soskice in London. He shares his first name with his grandfather, the Russian revolutionary journalist , who had fled to England. His paternal grandmother was Juliet Catherine Emma Soskice , daughter of Francis Hueffer and Catherine Madox Brown, sister of Ford Madox Ford and...

#11160

Jan Camiel Willems

#11171

Overall Influence

1939 - 2013 (74 years)

Jan Camiel Willems was a Belgian mathematical system theorist who has done most of his scientific work while residing in the Netherlands and the United States. He is most noted for the introduction of the notion of a dissipative system and for the development of the behavioral approach to systems theory.

#11161

Paul Gebhard

#11172

Overall Influence

1917 - 2015 (98 years)

Paul Henry Gebhard. Jr. was an American anthropologist and sexologist. Born in Rocky Ford, Colorado, he earned a BS and a PhD from Harvard in 1940 and 1947, respectively. Between the years 1946 and 1956, Gebhard was a close colleague to sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. It was acknowledged in Gebhard's New York Times obituary that Kinsey was in fact his mentor and that Gebhard was fascinated when Kinsey first met him and revealed to him that the men's room at Grand Central Terminal in New York City was a frequent site for gay cruising.

#11162

Bryan Ferry

#11173

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Bryan Ferry is an English singer and songwriter who achieved fame with his band Roxy Music and as a solo artist. His distinctive voice has been described as an "elegant, seductive croon". He also established a distinctive image and sartorial style: according to The Independent, Ferry and his contemporary David Bowie influenced a generation with both their music and their appearances. Peter York described Ferry as "an art object" who "should hang in the Tate".

#11163

C. Peter Magrath

#11174

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Claude Peter Magrath is a higher education administrator who has served as provost or president at multiple American universities. Magrath was born on April 23, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York and received political science degrees as an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire and as a Ph.D. at Cornell University. He began his teaching and administrative career at Brown University during 1961–68 and later served as interim president at the University of Nebraska .

#11164

Bjarni Jónsson

#11175

Overall Influence

1920 - 2016 (96 years)

Bjarni Jónsson was an Icelandic mathematician and logician working in universal algebra, lattice theory, model theory and set theory. He was emeritus distinguished professor of mathematics at Vanderbilt University and the honorary editor in chief of Algebra Universalis. He received his PhD in 1946 at UC Berkeley under supervision of Alfred Tarski.

#11165

Mark P. McCahill

Mark P. McCahill

#11176

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Mark Perry McCahill is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He has developed and popularized a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s, including the Gopher protocol, Uniform Resource Locators , and POPmail.

#11166

Charles Duncan Michener

Charles Duncan Michener

#11177

Overall Influence

1918 - 2015 (97 years)

Charles Duncan Michener was an American entomologist born in Pasadena, California. He was a leading expert on bees, his magnum opus being The Bees of the World published in 2000. Biography Much of his career was devoted to the systematics and natural history of bees. His first peer-reviewed publication was in 1934, at the age of 16. He received his BS in 1939 and his PhD in entomology in 1941, from the University of California, Berkeley. He remained in California until 1942, when he became an assistant curator of Lepidoptera at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

#11167

Deborah Bräutigam

#11178

Overall Influence

Deborah Bräutigam is an American political scientist, currently the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University and the Director of the China Africa Research Initiative at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Bräutigam studies international development policies and foreign aid, focusing on Chinese projects in Africa.

#11168

Mark P. Taylor

#11179

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Mark P. Taylor is the Donald Danforth, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Finance at Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis. Previously, he was Dean of Olin Business School after holding the same role at Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick. Before that, a managing director of BlackRock.

#11169

Barry Black

#11180

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Barry Clayton Black is the 62nd chaplain of the United States Senate. He began serving as Senate chaplain on June 27, 2003, becoming the first African American and first Seventh-day Adventist to hold the office.

#11170

Saul Amarel

#11181

Overall Influence

1928 - 2002 (74 years)

Saul Amarel was a professor of computer science at Rutgers University, and best known for his pioneering work in artificial intelligence . He also had a career as a scientist, engineer, and teacher. He was a contributor to advanced computing and AI methodologies, both applied to scientific inquiry as well as engineering practice.

#11171

Sarah Cleveland

Sarah Cleveland

#11182

Overall Influence

Sarah Hull Cleveland is an American law professor and expert in international law and the constitutional law of U.S. foreign relations, with particular interests in the status of international law in U.S. domestic law, international and comparative human rights law, international humanitarian law, and national security. In August 2022, she was selected to run for election as a judge on the International Court of Justice in the 2023 ICJ election. Her nomination to the court has been supported by the National Groups of over 50 states.

#11172

James Sethian

#11183

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

James Albert Sethian is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley and the head of the Mathematics Group at the United States Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

#11173

Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky

#11184

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Michel Chossudovsky is a Canadian economist and author. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Ottawa and the president and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization , which runs the website globalresearch.ca, founded in 2001, which publishes falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Chossudovsky has promoted conspiracy theories about 9/11.

#11174

Patrick Moore

#11185

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Patrick Albert Moore is a Canadian industry consultant, former activist, an early member and past president of Greenpeace Canada. Since leaving Greenpeace in 1986, Moore has criticized the environmental movement for what he sees as scare tactics and disinformation, saying that the environmental movement "abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism". Greenpeace has criticized Moore, calling him "a paid spokesman for the nuclear industry, the logging industry, and genetic engineering industry" who "exploits long-gone ties with Greenpeace to sell himself as a speaker and p...

#11175

Stephen Schanuel

#11186

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Stephen H. Schanuel was an American mathematician working in the fields of abstract algebra and category theory, number theory, and measure theory. Life While he was a graduate student at University of Chicago, he discovered Schanuel's lemma, an essential lemma in homological algebra. Schanuel received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1963, under the supervision of Serge Lang.

#11176

James Duesenberry

#11187

Overall Influence

1918 - 2009 (91 years)

James Stemble Duesenberry was an American economist. He made a significant contribution to the Keynesian analysis of income and employment with his 1949 doctoral thesis Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior.

#11177

Timothy Sprigge

#11188

Overall Influence

1932 - 2007 (75 years)

Timothy Lauro Squire Sprigge , usually cited as T. L. S. Sprigge, was a British idealist philosopher who spent the latter portion of his career at the University of Edinburgh, where he was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, and latterly an Emeritus Fellow.

#11178

Vincent C. Müller

#11189

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Vincent C. Müller is a German philosopher. He is Alexander von Humboldt Professor for ethics and philosophy of AI at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, president of the European Association for Cognitive Systems, and chair of the euRobotics topics group on 'ethical, legal and socio-economic issues'. Müller studied at the universities of Marburg, Hamburg, London and Oxford. He was Stanley J. Seeger Fellow at Princeton University, James Martin Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, and Professor at the TU Eindhoven.

#11179

David Nasaw

#11190

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

David Nasaw is an American author, biographer and historian who specializes in the cultural, social and business history of early 20th Century America. Nasaw is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Professor of History.

#11180

Lionel Tiger

#11191

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Lionel Tiger is a Canadian-American anthropologist. He is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and co-Research Director of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Early life and education Born in 1937 in Montreal, Quebec, he is a graduate of McGill University, and the London School of Economics at the University of London, England. He is also a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense on the future of biotechnology. Lionel Tiger lives in New York City, and regularly contributes to mainstream media such as Psychology Today and The New York Times.

#11181

Satoshi Kanazawa

#11192

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Satoshi Kanazawa is an American-born British evolutionary psychologist and writer. He is currently Reader in Management at the London School of Economics. Kanazawa's comments and research on race and intelligence, health and intelligence, multiculturalism, and the relationship between physical attractiveness and intelligence have led to condemnation from observers and colleagues. Critics have described his claims as pseudoscientific and racist.

#11182

Carla Hayden

#11193

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Carla Diane Hayden is an American librarian who is serving as the 14th librarian of Congress. Since the creation of the office of the librarian of Congress in 1802, Hayden is both the first African American and the first woman to hold this post. Appointed in 2016, she is the first professional librarian to hold the post since 1974.

#11183

Olivier Messiaen

#11194

Overall Influence

1908 - 1992 (84 years)

Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex. Harmonically and melodically, he employed a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material his early compositions and improvisations generated. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, voice, solo organ, and piano, and experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.

#11184

Payam Akhavan

#11195

Overall Influence

Payam Akhavan is an Iranian-born lawyer. He is nominated as a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague by Bangladesh. He is a Senior Fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto and is a visiting adjunct at its Faculty of Law.

#11185

Sourav Ganguly

#11196

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Sourav Chandidas Ganguly , also known as Dada , is an Indian cricket commentator and former cricketer. He is popularly called the Maharaja of Indian Cricket. He was captain of the Indian national cricket team and is regarded as one of India's most successful cricket captains. As captain, he led Indian national team to win the 2002 ICC Champions Trophy and reach the final of the 2003 Cricket World Cup and the 2000 ICC Champions Trophy.

#11186

Lisa Duggan

#11197

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Duggan was president of the American Studies Association from 2014 to 2015, presiding over the annual conference on the theme of "The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain in the Post-American Century."

#11187

Diane Elson

#11198

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Diane Rosemary Elson is a British economist, sociologist and gender and development social scientist. She is Professor Emerita of sociology at the University of Essex and a former professor of development studies at the University of Manchester.

#11188

Roy Jenkins

#11199

Overall Influence

1920 - 2003 (83 years)

Roy Harris Jenkins, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead, was a British politician who served as the sixth president of the European Commission from 1977 to 1981. At various times a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party, Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Democrats, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary under the Wilson and Callaghan Governments.

#11189

Klaus Hentschel

Klaus Hentschel

#11200

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Klaus Hentschel is a German physicist, historian of science and professor. He is the head of the University of Stuttgart's History of Science and Technology section of its History department. Life and work Born in Bad Nauheim, Hentschel from 1979 to 1985 studied physics, philosophy, science, history and musicology at the University of Hamburg. He completed his studies in philosophy in 1985 with the master's examination, and a study in physics in 1987. After some studies in the United States, among others in Boston on a DAAD, he in 1989 received his PhD at the University of Hamburg. His thesis...

#11190

Subramanian Swamy

#11201

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Subramanian Swamy is an Indian politician, economist and statistician. Before joining politics, he was a professor of Mathematical Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He is known for his Hindu nationalist views. Swamy was a member of the Planning Commission of India and was a Cabinet Minister in the Chandra Shekhar government. Between 1994 and 1996, Swamy was Chairman of the Commission on Labour Standards and International Trade under former Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao. Swamy was a long-time member of the Janata Party, serving as its president until 2013 when he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party .

#11191

Donald Kagan

#11202

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Donald Kagan was a Lithuanian-born American historian and classicist at Yale University specializing in ancient Greece. He formerly taught in the Department of History at Cornell University. Kagan was considered among the foremost American scholars of Greek history and is notable for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War.

#11192

Ricardo Hausmann

Ricardo Hausmann

#11203

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Ricardo Hausmann is the former Director of the Center for International Development currently leading the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab and is a Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also a former Venezuelan Minister of Planning and former Head of the . He co-introduced several regularly used concepts in economics including original sin, growth diagnostics, self-discovery, dark matter, the product space, and economic complexity.

#11193

Anthony Parsons

Anthony Parsons

#11204

Overall Influence

1922 - 1996 (74 years)

Sir Anthony Derrick Parsons was a British diplomat, ambassador to Iran at the time of the Iranian Revolution and Permanent Representative to the UN at the time of the Falklands War. Career Anthony Parsons was educated at King's School, Canterbury. He served as an artillery officer during the Second World War and was awarded the Military Cross at the end of the war in August 1945. He was then given the opportunity to read Oriental Languages at Balliol College, Oxford as an apprenticeship to a career in the diplomatic service and achieved a First Class degree. He remained in the army to serve ...

#11194

Anthony Foxx

#11205

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Anthony Renard Foxx is an American lawyer and politician who served as the United States Secretary of Transportation from 2013 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Foxx had previously served as Mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina from 2009 to 2013. First elected to the Charlotte City Council in 2005, his 2009 mayoral victory made him the youngest person to serve as Charlotte's mayor, as well as the second African American to hold the role.

#11195

Daniel J. Sandin

#11206

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Daniel J. Sandin is an American video and computer graphics artist, designer and researcher. He is a Professor Emeritus of the School of Art & Design at University of Illinois at Chicago, and co-director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is an internationally recognized pioneer in computer graphics, electronic art and visualization.

#11196

J. Michael Kosterlitz

J. Michael Kosterlitz

#11207

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

John Michael Kosterlitz is a Scottish-American physicist. He is a professor of physics at Brown University and the son of biochemist Hans Kosterlitz. He was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics along with David Thouless and Duncan Haldane for work on condensed matter physics.

#11197

David H. Levy

#11208

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

David Howard Levy is a Canadian amateur astronomer, science writer and discoverer of comets and minor planets, who co-discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in 1993, which collided with the planet Jupiter in 1994.

#11198

Calvert Watkins

#11209

Overall Influence

1933 - 2013 (80 years)

Calvert Watkins was an American linguist and philologist, known for his book How to Kill a Dragon. He was a professor of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and after retirement went to serve as professor-in-residence at UCLA.

#11199

Alec Guinness

#11210

Overall Influence

1914 - 2000 (86 years)

Sir Alec Guinness was an English actor. After an early career on the stage, Guinness was featured in several of the Ealing comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets , in which he played eight different characters, The Lavender Hill Mob , for which he received his first Academy Award nomination, and The Ladykillers . He collaborated six times with director David Lean: Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations , Fagin in Oliver Twist , Col. Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai , for which he won both the Academy Award for Best Actor and the BAFTA Award for Best Actor, Prince Faisal in Lawre...

#11200

Chris Stringer

#11211

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Christopher Brian Stringer is a British physical anthropologist noted for his work on human evolution. Biography Growing up in a working-class family in the East End of London, Stringer first took an interest in anthropology during primary school, when he undertook a project on Neanderthals. Stringer studied anthropology at University College London, holds a PhD in Anatomical Science and a DSc in Anatomical Science .

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