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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#11251
Mark Greif
#11262
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Mark Greif is an author, educator and cultural critic. His most recent book is Against Everything. One of the co-founders of n+1, he is a frequent contributor to the magazine and writes for numerous other publications. Greif currently teaches English at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#11252
Jerald Ericksen
#11263
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Jerald LaVerne Ericksen was an American mathematician specializing in continuum mechanics. Biography Ericksen was born in Portland, Oregon. His father Adolf worked at a Portland creamery and became adept at judging the quality of butter. Later his father acquired a small creamery in Vancouver, Washington where the family moved. Jerald's brother A. Erwin was born there, and Jerald helped out in the creamery.
Go to Profile#11253
Tim Rice
#11264
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Sir Timothy Miles Bindon Rice is an English lyricist and author. He is best known for his collaborations with Disney on Aladdin, the Lion King, the stage adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, and the original Broadway musical Aida; with Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson of ABBA, with whom he wrote Chess; and with Andrew Lloyd Webber, with whom he wrote, among other shows, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita. He also wrote lyrics for the Alan Menken musical King David, and for DreamWorks Animation's The Road to El Dorado.
Go to Profile#11254
Kathleen Higgins
#11265
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Kathleen Marie Higgins is an American Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin where she has been teaching for over thirty years. She specializes in aesthetics, philosophy of music, nineteenth and twentieth-century continental philosophy, and philosophy of emotion.
Go to Profile#11255
Adrian Henri
#11266
Overall Influence
1932 - 2000 (68 years)
Adrian Henri was a British poet and painter best remembered as the founder of poetry-rock group the Liverpool Scene and as one of three poets in the best-selling anthology The Mersey Sound, along with Brian Patten and Roger McGough. The trio of Liverpool poets came to prominence in that city's Merseybeat zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s. He was described by Edward Lucie-Smith in British Poetry since 1945 as the "theoretician" of the three. His characterisation of popular culture in verse helped to widen the audience for poetry among 1960s British youth. He was influenced by the French Symboli...
Go to Profile#11256
Richard Palais
#11267
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Richard Sheldon Palais is an American mathematician working in differential geometry. Education and career Palais studied at Harvard University, where he obtained a BA in 1952, a MA in 1954 and a Ph.D. in 1956. His PhD thesis, entitled A Global Formulation of the Lie Theory of Transformation Groups, was supervised by Andrew M. Gleason and George Mackey.
Go to Profile#11257
Souleymane Bachir Diagne
#11268
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a Senegalese philosopher. His work is focused on the history of logic and mathematics, epistemology, the tradition of philosophy in the Islamic world, identity formation, and African literatures and philosophies.
Go to Profile#11258
Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker
#11269
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker is a German scientist and politician . He was a member of the German Bundestag and served as co-president of the Club of Rome jointly with Anders Wijkman 2011 – 2019.
Go to Profile#11259
Michael Watts
#11270
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael J. Watts is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He retired in 2016. He is a leading critical intellectual figure of the academic left. His first book, Silent Violence:Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria , is considered a pioneering work in political ecology. Other published works include Reworking Modernity: Capitalisms and Symbolic Discontent , Liberation Ecologies , The Hettner Lectures: Geographies of Violence , Violent Environments and the Curse of the Black Gold . Watts has also been an assistant editor of the award-winning New...
Go to Profile#11260
Pamela S. Karlan
#11271
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Pamela Susan Karlan is an American legal scholar who was the principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice from February 8, 2021 until July 1, 2022. She is a professor at Stanford Law School. A leading legal scholar on voting rights and constitutional law, she previously served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Voting Rights in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2015.
Go to Profile#11261
Charles Yanofsky
#11272
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Charles Yanofsky was an American geneticist on the faculty of Stanford University who contributed to the establishment of the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis and discovered attenuation, a riboswitch mechanism in which messenger RNA changes shape in response to a small molecule and thus alters its binding ability for the regulatory region of a gene or operon.
Go to Profile#11262
Peter S. Kim
#11273
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Peter S. Kim is an American scientist. He was president of Merck Research Laboratories 2003–2013 and is currently Virginia & D.K. Ludwig Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University, Institute Scholar at Stanford ChEM-H, and Lead Investigator of the Infectious Disease Initiative at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
Go to Profile#11263
Xiaowei Zhuang
#11274
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Xiaowei Zhuang is a Chinese-American biophysicist who is the David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is best known for her work in the development of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy , a super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method, and the discoveries of novel cellular structures using STORM. She received a 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing super-resolution imaging techniques that get past the diffr...
Go to Profile#11264
Kirsten Powers
#11275
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Kirsten Anne Powers is an American author, liberal columnist, and political analyst. She currently writes for USA Today, and is an on-air political analyst at CNN, where she appears regularly on Anderson Cooper 360°, , and The Lead with Jake Tapper. The Washington Post called her "bright-eyed, sharp-tongued, [and] gamely combative". The New Republic noted Powers "held her own in any debate" at Fox News and quoted columnist Erik Wemple, who called her "a ferocious advocate for her points of view".
Go to Profile#11265
Tim Pat Coogan
#11276
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Timothy Patrick "Tim Pat" Coogan is an Irish writer, broadcaster and newspaper columnist. He served as editor of The Irish Press newspaper from 1968-87. He has been best-known for such books as The IRA, Ireland Since the Rising, On the Blanket, and biographies of Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera. His biography of de Valera proved controversial, taking issue with the former Irish president's reputation and achievements, in favour of those of Collins, whom he regards as indispensable to the creation of the new State.
Go to Profile#11266
Alvin Trivelpiece
#11277
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Alvin William Trivelpiece was an American physicist whose varied career included positions as director of the Office of Energy Research of the U.S. Department of Energy , executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , and director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory . He was also a professor of physics and a corporate executive. Trivelpiece's research focused on plasma physics, controlled thermonuclear research, and particle accelerators. He received several patents for accelerators and microwave devices. He died in Rancho Santa Margarita, California in August 2...
Go to Profile#11267
Tony Wrigley
#11278
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Sir Edward Anthony Wrigley was a British historical demographer. Wrigley and Peter Laslett co-founded the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure in 1964. Wrigley was born in Manchester on 17 August 1931. Wrigley's scholarly works focus on demographic history, and the long-term causes and effects of urbanization and industrialization. Among his many publications, Wrigley is known for the book Continuity, Chance and Change, published in 1988, in which he explained why Malthus was wrong about the law of diminishing returns slowing population growth. His most celebrat...
Go to Profile#11268
Manuel Cardona
#11279
Overall Influence
1934 - 2014 (80 years)
Manuel Cardona Castro was a condensed matter physicist. According to the ISI Citations web database, Cardona was one of the eight most cited physicists since 1970. He specialized in solid state physics. Cardona's main interests were in the fields of: Raman scattering as applied to semiconductor microstructures, materials with tailor-made isotopic compositions, and high Tc superconductors, particularly investigations of electronic and vibronic excitations in the normal and superconducting state.
Go to Profile#11269
Vladimir Markovic
#11280
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Vladimir Marković is a Professor of Mathematics at University of Oxford. He was previously the John D. MacArthur Professor at the California Institute of Technology and Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge .
Go to Profile#11270
Shizuteru Ueda
#11281
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Shizuteru Ueda was a Japanese philosopher specialized in philosophy of religion, especially in philosophy of Buddhism and Zen. He was a professor at Kyoto University and considered a third generation member of Kyoto School .
Go to Profile#11271
Gérard Bouchard
#11282
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Gérard Bouchard is a Canadian historian and sociologist affiliated with the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Born on 26 December 1943 in Jonquière, Quebec, he obtained his master's degree in sociology from Université Laval in 1968 and later obtained his PhD in history from the University of Paris in 1971. Bouchard had authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited 26 books, and published 230 papers in scientific journals as of 2005.
Go to Profile#11272
Colson Whitehead
#11283
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad , for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Go to Profile#11273
Alf Ramsey
#11284
Overall Influence
1920 - 1999 (79 years)
Sir Alfred Ernest Ramsey was an English football player and manager. As a player, he represented the England national team and captained the side, but he is best known for his time as England manager from 1963 to 1974, which included guiding them to victory in the 1966 FIFA World Cup. Knighted in 1967 in recognition of the World Cup win, Ramsey also managed his country to third place in the 1968 European Championship and the quarter-finals of the 1970 World Cup and the 1972 European Championship. As a player, Ramsey was a defender and a member of England's 1950 World Cup squad.
Go to Profile#11274
Moisey Markov
#11285
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
Moisey Alexandrovich Markov was a Soviet physicist-theorist who mostly worked in the area of quantum mechanics, nuclear physics and particle physics. He is particularly known for having proposed the idea of underwater neutrino telescopes in 1960 that was originally developed in the master thesis of his student Igor Mikhailovich Zheleznykh.
Go to Profile#11275
Elizabeth Catlett
#11286
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Elizabeth Catlett, born as Alice Elizabeth Catlett, also known as Elizabeth Catlett Mora was an African American sculptor and graphic artist best known for her depictions of the Black-American experience in the 20th century, which often focused on the female experience. She was born and raised in Washington, D.C., to parents working in education, and was the grandchild of formerly enslaved people. It was difficult for a black woman at this time to pursue a career as a working artist. Catlett devoted much of her career to teaching. However, a fellowship awarded to her in 1946 allowed her to t...
Go to Profile#11276
Jon Hall
#11287
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jon "maddog" Hall is the board chair for the Linux Professional Institute. Career The nickname "maddog" was given to him by his students at Hartford State Technical College, where he was the Department Head of Computer Science. He now prefers to be called by this name. According to Hall, his nickname "came from a time when I had less control over my temper".
Go to Profile#11277
Leonardo Polo
#11288
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Leonardo Polo was a renowned Spanish philosopher best known for his philosophical method called abandonment of the mental limit and the profound philosophical implications and results of the application of this method.
Go to Profile#11278
Colleen McCullough
#11289
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
Colleen Margaretta McCullough was an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being The Thorn Birds and The Ladies of Missalonghi. Life McCullough was born in 1937 in Wellington, in the Central West region of New South Wales, to James and Laurie McCullough. Her father was of Irish descent and her mother was a New Zealander of part-Māori descent. During her childhood, the family moved around a great deal and she was also "a voracious reader".
Go to Profile#11279
Paul Bairoch
#11290
Overall Influence
1930 - 1999 (69 years)
Paul Bairoch was a Swiss economic historian of Belgian descent who specialized in urban history and historical demography. He published or co-authored more than two dozen books and 120 scholarly articles. His most important works emphasize the agricultural preconditions necessary for industrialization and controversially claim, contrary to most scholars that colonization was not beneficial to colonial empires. He argued that tariffs and growth were positively correlated in the 19th century.
Go to Profile#11280
L.A. Reid
#11291
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Antonio Marquis "L.A." Reid is an American record executive, A&R representative, and record producer. He is the founder and served as co-chairman of Hitco Entertainment. He also previously served as the chairman and CEO of Epic Records and The Island Def Jam Music Group, as well as the president and CEO of Arista Records.
Go to Profile#11281
Darrell Huff
#11292
Overall Influence
1913 - 2001 (88 years)
Darrell Huff was an Americann writer, and is best known as the author of How to Lie with Statistics , the best-selling statistics book of the second half of the twentieth century. Career Huff was born in Gowrie, Iowa, and educated at the University of Iowa, . Before turning to full-time writing in 1946, Huff served as editor of Better Homes and Gardens and Liberty magazine. As a freelancer, Huff produced hundreds of "How to" feature articles and wrote at least sixteen books, most of which concerned household projects. One of his biggest projects was a prize-winning home in Carmel-by-the-Sea, ...
Go to Profile#11282
Israel Dostrovsky
#11293
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Israel Dostrovsky was a Ukrainian-born Israeli physical chemist, fifth president of the Weizmann Institute of Science, laureate of the 1995 Israel Prize in the exact sciences. Early years Israel Dostrovsky was born in Odessa, in 1918 and immigrated to Eretz-Israel as a baby with his parents in 1919, aboard the ship “Ruslan”. His father, world-renowned dermatologist Arieh Dostrovsky, became a founder of Hebrew University's medical school and of the Hadassah hospital. His first cousin, Yaacov Dori became the first IDF Chief of Staff.
Go to Profile#11283
Parag Khanna
#11294
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Parag Khanna is an Indian-American specialist in geopolitics and globalization. He is the managing partner of FutureMap, and former managing partner of Hybrid Reality as well as Co-Founder & CEO of Factotum.
Go to Profile#11284
Deborah S. Jin
#11295
Overall Influence
1968 - 2016 (48 years)
Deborah Shiu-lan Jin was an American physicist and fellow with the National Institute of Standards and Technology ; Professor Adjunct, Department of Physics at the University of Colorado; and a fellow of the JILA, a NIST joint laboratory with the University of Colorado.
Go to Profile#11285
Jennifer Hornsby
#11296
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jennifer Hornsby, FBA is a British philosopher with interests in the philosophies of mind, action, language, as well as feminist philosophy. She is currently a professor at the School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London. She is well known for her opposition to orthodoxy in current analytic philosophy of mind, and for her use of J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory to look at the effects of pornography.
Go to Profile#11286
Lisa Piccirillo
#11297
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Lisa Marie Piccirillo is an American mathematician who works on geometry and low-dimensional topology. In 2020, Piccirillo published a mathematical proof in the journal Annals of Mathematics determining that the Conway knot is not a slice knot, answering an unsolved problem in knot theory first proposed over fifty years prior by English mathematician John Horton Conway. In July 2020, she became an assistant professor of mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#11287
Bülent Ecevit
#11298
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Mustafa Bülent Ecevit was a Turkish politician, statesman, poet, writer, scholar, and journalist, who served as the Prime Minister of Turkey four times between 1974 and 2002. He served as prime minister in 1974, 1977, 1978–1979, and 1999–2002. Ecevit was chairman of the Republican People's Party between 1972 and 1980, and in 1987 he became chairman of the Democratic Left Party .
Go to Profile#11288
Buzz Bissinger
#11299
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Harry Gerard Bissinger III, also known as Buzz Bissinger and H. G. Bissinger is an American journalist and author, best known for his 1990 non-fiction book Friday Night Lights. He is a longtime contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine. In 2019, HBO released a documentary on Bissinger titled “Buzz”.
Go to Profile#11289
Dwight H. Perkins
#11300
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Dwight Heald Perkins II is an American academic, economist, Sinologist and professor at Harvard University. He is the son of Lawrence Bradford Perkins, architect, and Margery Blair Perkins and the grandson of Dwight Heald Perkins, the architect. He married Julie Rate Perkins in 1957 and they have three adult children.
Go to Profile#11290
Mary Archer
#11301
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Mary Doreen Archer, Baroness Archer of Weston-super-Mare, is a British scientist specialising in solar power conversion. She is married to Jeffrey Archer, a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. Archer is the current Chancellor of the University of Buckingham.
Go to Profile#11291
Vladimiro Montesinos
#11302
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Vladimiro Lenin Ilich Montesinos Torres is a Peruvian former intelligence officer who was the long-standing head of Peru's National Intelligence Service and was reportedly the de facto leader of Peru while President Alberto Fujimori served as a figurehead leader. Montesinos had strong connections with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for over 25 years and was said to have received $10 million from the agency for his government's anti-terrorist activities, with international bank accounts possessed by Montesinos reportedly holding at least $270 million. The United States reportedly suppo...
Go to Profile#11292
Charles Critchfield
#11303
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Charles Louis Critchfield was an American mathematical physicist. A graduate of George Washington University, where he earned his PhD in physics under the direction of Edward Teller in 1939, he conducted research in ballistics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, and received three patents for improved sabot designs.
Go to Profile#11293
Peter Hotez
#11304
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Peter Jay Hotez is an American scientist, pediatrician, and advocate in the fields of global health, vaccinology, and neglected tropical disease control. He serves as founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine, Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also Director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics, and University Professor of Biology at Baylor College of Medicine.
Go to Profile#11294
Johnjoe McFadden
#11305
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Johnjoe McFadden is an Anglo-Irish scientist, academic and writer. He is Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, United Kingdom. Life McFadden was born in Donegal, Ireland but raised in the UK. He holds joint British and Irish Nationality. He obtained his BSc in Biochemistry University of London in 1977 and his PhD at Imperial College London in 1982. He went on to work on human genetic diseases and then infectious diseases, at St Mary's Hospital Medical School, London and St George's Hospital Medical School, London and then at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.
Go to Profile#11295
Robert Mangold
#11306
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Robert Mangold is an American minimalist artist. He is also father of film director and screenwriter James Mangold. Early life and education Mangold was born in North Tonawanda, New York. His mother, Blanche, was a department store buyer, and his father, Aloysius Mangold, worked at an organ factory. He first trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1956 to 1959, and then at Yale University, New Haven, .
Go to Profile#11296
Jacqueline Wilson
#11307
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Dame Jacqueline Wilson is an English novelist known for her popular children's literature. Her novels have been notable for featuring realistic topics such as adoption and divorce without alienating her large readership. Since her debut novel in 1969, Wilson has written over 100 books.
Go to Profile#11297
Michael Ausiello
#11308
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Michael Ausiello is an American television industry journalist, author, and actor. He was a senior writer at TV Guide and its companion website, TVGuide.com, between 2000 and 2008. From 2008 to 2010, he wrote and reported for Entertainment Weekly before launching his own television news site, TVLine. Ausiello also published a memoir in 2017, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies.
Go to Profile#11298
Mary Gaitskill
#11309
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mary Gaitskill is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories , and The O. Henry Prize Stories . Her books include the short story collection Bad Behavior and Veronica , which was nominated for both the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
Go to Profile#11299
David Cronenberg
#11310
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
David Paul Cronenberg is a Canadian film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is a principal originator of the body horror genre, with his films exploring visceral bodily transformation, infectious diseases, and the intertwining of the psychological, physical, and technological. Cronenberg is best known for exploring these themes through sci-fi horror films such as Shivers , Scanners , Videodrome and The Fly , though he has also directed dramas, psychological thrillers and gangster films.
Go to Profile#11300
Donald Horne
#11311
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Donald Richmond Horne was an Australian journalist, writer, social critic, and academic who became one of Australia's best known public intellectuals, from the 1960s until his death. Horne was a prolific author who published four novels and more than twenty volumes of history, memoir and political and cultural analysis. He also edited The Bulletin, The Observer and Quadrant. His best known work was The Lucky Country , an evaluation of Australian society that questioned many traditional attitudes: "Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck."
Go to Profile