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
#11301
Arthur H. Robinson
#11312
Overall Influence
1915 - 2004 (89 years)
Arthur H. Robinson was an American geographer and cartographer, who was professor in the Geography Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1947 until he retired in 1980. He was a prolific writer and influential philosopher on cartography, and one of his most notable accomplishments is the Robinson projection of 1961.
Go to Profile#11302
Annie Easley
#11313
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Annie Easley was an American computer scientist and accomplished mathemetician who made critical contributions to NASA’s rocket systems and energy technologies over her 34-year career. As a black female in America during the 1950s she faced heavy adversity throughout her career and was often underrepresented and disregarded. Despite these barriers Easley demonstrated perserverance and determination to make a name for herself in a line of work dominated by males. She demonstrated exceptional skills in mathematics, data analysis, and code development across projects focused on alternative energ...
Go to Profile#11303
Adam Falk
#11314
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Adam Frederick Falk is the president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Earlier in his career, Falk was the president of Williams College, a university administrator at Johns Hopkins University, and a theoretical physicist.
Go to Profile#11304
Kiran Kedlaya
#11315
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Kiran Sridhara Kedlaya is an Indian American mathematician. He currently is a Professor of Mathematics and the Stefan E. Warschawski Chair in Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. Biography Kiran Kedlaya was born into a Tulu Brahmin family. At age 16, Kedlaya won a gold medal at the International Mathematics Olympiad, and would later win a silver and another gold medal. While an undergraduate student at Harvard, he was a three-time Putnam Fellow in 1993, 1994, and 1995. A 1996 article by The Harvard Crimson described him as "the best college-age student in math in the United...
Go to Profile#11305
Kirk Schulz
#11316
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Kirk Herman Schulz is an American educator, currently serving as the 11th president of Washington State University, a position he began on June 13, 2016. Prior to serving at Washington State, Schulz was the 13th president of Kansas State University.
Go to Profile#11306
Larry Elliott
#11317
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Larry Elliott is an English journalist and author who focuses on economic issues. He is the economics editor at The Guardian, and has published seven books on related issues, six of them in partnership with Dan Atkinson.
Go to Profile#11307
Chung-ying Cheng
#11318
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Chung-Ying Cheng is a distinguished scholar of Chinese philosophy and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He is considered one of the pioneers who formalized the field of Chinese philosophy in the United States in the 1960s.
Go to Profile#11308
Jutta Allmendinger
#11319
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jutta Allmendinger is a German sociologist who has been serving as the president of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and a professor of educational sociology and labor market research at Humboldt University since 2007. She is also a senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#11309
Remo Ruffini
#11320
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Remo Ruffini . He is the Director of ICRANet, International Centre for Relativistic Astrophysics Network and one of the founders of the International Centre for Relativistic Astrophysics . Ruffini initiated the International Relativistic Astrophysics PhD , a common graduate school program of several universities and research institutes for the education of theoretical astrophysicists. He is the Director of the Erasmus Mundus IRAP PhD program . He has been Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome "Sapienza" from 1978 to 2012.
Go to Profile#11310
Len Jessup
#11321
Overall Influence
Leonard Michael Jessup is an American academic administrator. He served as the tenth president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas from 2015 to 2018, when he became the president of Claremont Graduate University.
Go to Profile#11311
Ronald Rivlin
#11322
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Ronald Samuel Rivlin was a British-American physicist, mathematician, rheologist and a noted expert on rubber. Life Rivlin was born in London in 1915. He studied physics and mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge, being awarded a BA in 1937 and a ScD in 1952. He worked for the General Electric Company, then the UK Ministry of Aircraft Production, then the British Rubber Producers Research Association, to which he was recruited to at the suggestion of L. R. G. Treloar by John Wilson, over a “lavish meal” and game of pool. This included one sabbatical year at the National Bureau of Standards, USA.
Go to Profile#11312
Richard Bulliet
#11323
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Richard W. Bulliet is a professor of history at Columbia University who specializes in the history of Islamic society and institutions, the history of technology, and the history of the role of animals in human society.
Go to Profile#11313
Michael Wood
#11324
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Michael David Wood, is an English historian and broadcaster. He has presented numerous well-known television documentary series from the late 1970s to the present day. Wood has also written a number of books on English history, including In Search of the Dark Ages, The Domesday Quest, The Story of England, and In Search of Shakespeare. He was appointed Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester in 2013.
Go to Profile#11314
Colin Murray
#11325
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Colin Murray is a Northern Irish radio and television presenter. In 2010, he became host of BBC Television's Match of the Day 2 on BBC Two, while still anchoring shows on BBC Radio 5 Live, including 5 Live Sport and Fighting Talk and was still presenting on BBC Radio Ulster. He has previously hosted regular Channel 5 television and BBC Radio 1 shows. In 2007, he was named 'Music Broadcaster of the Year' at the Sony Radio Academy Awards.
Go to Profile#11315
Frank Bass
#11326
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Frank M. Bass was an American academic in the field of marketing research and marketing science. He was the creator of the Bass diffusion model that describes the adoption of new products and technologies by first-time buyers. He died on December 1, 2006.
Go to Profile#11316
Thomas Philippon
#11327
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Thomas Philippon is a French economist and professor of finance at the New York University Stern School of Business. Career Philippon earned a MA in Physics in 1997 from École Polytechnique, a Master in Economics in 1998 from the Paris School of Economics, and a PhD in Economics in 2003 from MIT. In 2003 he was hired as an Assistant Professor of Finance at Stern, and he has been a Professor of Finance since 2014.
Go to Profile#11317
Patrick Bateson
#11328
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
Sir Paul Patrick Gordon Bateson, was an English biologist with interests in ethology and phenotypic plasticity. Bateson was a professor at the University of Cambridge and served as president of the Zoological Society of London from 2004 to 2014.
Go to Profile#11318
Yirmiyahu Yovel
#11329
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Yirmiyahu Yovel was an Israeli philosopher and public intellectual. He was Professor Emeritus of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the New School for Social Research in New York. Yovel had also been a political columnist in Israel, cultural and political critic and a frequent presence in the media. Yovel was a laureate of the Israel Prize in philosophy and officier of the French order of the Palme académique. His books were translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Hebrew, Korean and Japanese. Yovel was married to Shoshana Yovel, novelist an...
Go to Profile#11319
Mark Morris
#11330
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mark William Morris is an American dancer, choreographer and director whose work is acclaimed for its craftsmanship, ingenuity, humor, and at times eclectic musical accompaniments. Morris is popular among dance aficionados, the music world, as well as mainstream audiences.
Go to Profile#11320
Milton S. Plesset
#11331
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
Milton Spinoza Plesset was an American applied physicist who worked in the field of fluid mechanics and nuclear energy. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1979 for his fundamental contributions to multiphase flows, bubble dynamics, and safety of nuclear reactors. Plesset served as professor of engineering science at California Institute of Technology during 1951 to 1978. Notable scientists Andrea Prosperetti, Norman Zabusky, and Chris Whipple finished their doctoral work under Plesset's guidance. Milton Plesset, Andrea Prosperetti, and Chris Whipple were elected to the N...
Go to Profile#11321
Christopher Weeramantry
#11332
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Christopher Gregory Weeramantry, AM was a Sri Lankan lawyer who was a Judge of the International Court of Justice from 1991 to 2000, serving as its vice-president from 1997 to 2000. Weeramantry was a judge of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka from 1967 to 1972. He also served as an emeritus professor at Monash University and as the president of the International Association of Lawyers against Nuclear Arms.
Go to Profile#11322
Gerard E. Lynch
#11333
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gerard Edmund Lynch is an American lawyer who serves as a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He was confirmed to that seat on September 17, 2009, after previously having been appointed in 2000 by President Bill Clinton to serve on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Judge Lynch was the first appeals-court judge nominated by President Barack Obama to win confirmation from the United States Senate.
Go to Profile#11323
Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
#11334
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Mariano-Florentino "Tino" Cuéllar is an American scholar, academic leader, public official, jurist, and nonprofit executive currently serving as the 10th president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was previously a Justice of the Supreme Court of California, the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford University and director of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, co-chair of the U.S. Department of Education's Equity and Excellence Commission, and an executive branch official in the Clinton and Obama administrations. His publications address...
Go to Profile#11324
Keith Bostic
#11335
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Keith Bostic is an American software engineer and one of the key people in the history of Berkeley Software Distribution Unix and open-source software. In 1986, Bostic joined the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley. He was one of the principal architects of the Berkeley 2BSD, 4.4BSD and 4.4BSD-Lite releases. Among many other tasks, he led the effort at CSRG to create a free software version of BSD Unix, which helped allow the creation of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Go to Profile#11325
Naila Kabeer
#11336
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Naila Kabeer is an Indian-born British Bangladeshi social economist, research fellow , writer and Professor at the London School of Economics. She was also president of the International Association for Feminist Economics from 2018 to 2019. She is on the editorial committee of journals such as Feminist Economist, Development and Change, Gender and Development, Third World Quarterly and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. She works primarily on poverty, gender and social policy issues. Her research interests include gender, poverty, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihoods, s...
Go to Profile#11326
Misha Verbitsky
#11337
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Misha Verbitsky is a Russian mathematician. He works at the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro. He is primarily known to the general public as a controversial critic, political activist and independent music publisher.
Go to Profile#11327
Guenter Treitel
#11338
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Sir Guenter Heinz Treitel was a German-born English academic and Vinerian Professor of English Law. Treitel was born in Berlin into a Jewish family, the son of a prominent lawyer, Theodor Treitel, and his wife, Hannah Lilly Levy. In March 1939, he came to England on the Kindertransport together with his older brother, Kurt Max Treitel, and sister Celia. Treitel was once described by Lord Steyn as "one of the most distinguished academic writers on the law of contract in the English speaking world", and has often been described as the leading authority on English contract law. He was the autho...
Go to Profile#11328
Carl Bereiter
#11339
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Carl Edward Bereiter is an American education researcher, professor emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto known for his research into knowledge building. Biography He was born and raised in Wisconsin and entered Wisconsin University, where he was awarded B.A. in 1951, M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D in 1959.
Go to Profile#11329
David Sztybel
#11340
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
David Sztybel is a Canadian philosopher specializing in animal ethics. Education and career Sztybel was born in Toronto, Ontario. He obtained his BA in philosophy in 1991, his MA in 1994, and his PhD in 2000 – for a thesis entitled "Empathy and Rationality in Ethics" – from the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#11330
Bazon Brock
#11341
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Bazon Brock is a German art theorist and critic, multi-media generalist and artist. He is considered a member of Fluxus. He was a professor of aesthetics at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the University of Wuppertal.
Go to Profile#11331
Rakesh Khurana
#11342
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Rakesh Khurana is an Indian-American educator. He is a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, Professor of Leadership Development at Harvard Business School and the Dean of Harvard College. Early life and education Khurana was born in India and was raised in Queens, New York. He received his bachelor's degree in industrial relations from Cornell, his AM in sociology from Harvard, and his PhD in organizational behavior through a joint program between the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School in 1998.
Go to Profile#11332
Venki Ramakrishnan
#11343
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is president of the Royal Society, and a group leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology for the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Baroda and a Ph.D. in physics from Ohio University. He then studied biology at the University of California at San Diego, part of his journey from physics to biology. He went on to research as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, where he began his study of ribosomes. His work on ribosomes has provided structural insights into the atomic structure of the ribosome, using cryogenic electron microscopy to discover new structures.
Go to Profile#11333
Gilbert Levine
#11344
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sir Gilbert Levine, GCSG is an American conductor. He is considered an "outstanding personality in the world of international music television." He has led the PBS concert debuts of the Staatskapelle Dresden, Royal Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra, WDR Symphony Orchestra, and the Pittsburgh Symphony, and the PBS premieres of works including the Beethoven Missa Solemnis, Bach Magnificat in D, Haydn Creation, and Bruckner Symphony 9.
Go to Profile#11334
Alvin Liberman
#11345
Overall Influence
1917 - 2000 (83 years)
Alvin Meyer Liberman was born in St. Joseph, Missouri. Liberman was an American psychologist. His ideas set the agenda for fifty years of psychological research in speech perception. Biography Liberman received his B.A. degree from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri in 1938, his M.A. degree from the University of Missouri in 1939 and his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University in 1942. His ideas set the agenda for fifty years of research in the psychology of speech perception and laid the groundwork for modern computer speech synthesis and the understanding of critical issues in cognitive science.
Go to Profile#11335
Guy Debord
#11346
Overall Influence
1931 - 1994 (63 years)
Guy-Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International. He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
Go to Profile#11336
Parviz Tanavoli
#11347
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Parviz Tanavoli is an Iranian sculptor, painter, educator, and art historian. He is a pioneer within the Saqqakhaneh school, a neo-traditionalist art movement. Tanavoli has been one of the most expensive Iranian artists in sales. Tanavoli series of sculpture work are displayed in prestigious museums and public places, such as the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hamline University, Aga Khan Museum, and as public art in the city of Vancouver. Additionally Tanavoli has written extensively on this history of Persian art and Persian crafts. Since 1989, Tanavoli has held dual nationali...
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Charles Bronson
#11348
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Charles Arthur Salvador , better known as Charles Bronson, is a British criminal, with a violent and notorious life as a prisoner. He has spent periods detained in the Rampton, Broadmoor, and Ashworth high-security psychiatric hospitals.
Go to Profile#11338
Yoshiaki Yoshimi
#11349
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Yoshiaki Yoshimi is a professor of Japanese modern history at Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan. He is a founding member of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility. He was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture, and studied at the University of Tokyo.
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Adrian Mitchell
#11350
Overall Influence
1932 - 2008 (76 years)
Adrian Mitchell FRSL was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament movement. The critic Kenneth Tynan called him "the British Mayakovsky".
Go to Profile#11340
Moungi Bawendi
#11351
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Moungi Bawendi is an American–Tunisian–French chemist. He is currently the Lester Wolfe Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bawendi is known for his advances in the chemical production of high-quality quantum dots. In 2023 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Go to Profile#11341
Leo Buscaglia
#11352
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
Felice Leonardo Buscaglia , also known as "Dr. Love", was an American author, motivational speaker, and a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California. Life and career Felice Leonardo Buscaglia was born in Los Angeles, California, on March 31, 1924, into a family of Italian immigrants. He spent his early childhood in Aosta, Italy, before going back to the United States for education. He was a graduate of Theodore Roosevelt High School. Buscaglia served in the U.S. Navy during World War II; he did not see combat, but he saw its aftermath in his duties in the dental section of the military hospital, helping to reconstruct shattered faces.
Go to Profile#11342
Tsai Ing-wen
#11353
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Tsai Ing-wen is a Taiwanese politician who has been serving as the president of the Republic of China since 2016. A member of the Democratic Progressive Party , Tsai is the first female president of Taiwan. She served as chair of the DPP from 2020 to 2022, and also previously from 2008 to 2012 and 2014 to 2018.
Go to Profile#11343
Pardis Sabeti
#11354
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Pardis Christine Sabeti is an Iranian American computational biologist, medical geneticist, and evolutionary geneticist. She developed a bioinformatic statistical method which identifies sections of the genome that have been subject to natural selection and an algorithm which explains the effects of genetics on the evolution of disease.
Go to Profile#11344
Emma Thompson
#11355
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Dame Emma Thompson is a British actress and screenwriter. She has received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning more than four decades, including two Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award. In 2018, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to drama.
Go to Profile#11345
Keith Holyoak
#11356
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Keith James Holyoak is a Canadian–American researcher in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, working on human thinking and reasoning. Holyoak's work focuses on the role of analogy in thinking. His work showed how analogy can be used to enhance learning of new abstract concepts by both children and adults, as well as how reasoning breaks down in cases of brain damage.
Go to Profile#11346
Bogusław Wolniewicz
#11357
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Bogusław Wolniewicz was a Polish philosopher. He was a professor at University of Warsaw from 1963 to 1998. In scholarly circles, he is known as a translator and commentator of Ludwig Wittgenstein. From the 1990s, he became a publicist mostly affiliated with the Radio Maryja community. His controversial views were often regarded as anti-Semitic and Islamophobic.
Go to Profile#11347
Cordelia Fine
#11358
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British philosopher of science, psychologist, and writer. She is a full professor in the History and Philosophy of Science programme at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Fine has written three popular science books on the topics of social cognition, neuroscience, and the popular myths of sex differences. Her latest book, Testosterone Rex, won the Royal Society Science Book Prize, 2017. She has authored several academic book chapters and numerous academic publications. Fine is also noted for coining the term 'neurosexism'.
Go to Profile#11348
H. Bruce Franklin
#11359
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Howard Bruce Franklin is an American cultural historian and scholar. He is notable for receiving top awards for his lifetime scholarship in fields as diverse as American studies, science fiction, prison literature and marine ecology. He has written or edited twenty books and three hundred professional articles and participated in making four films. His main areas of academic focus are science fiction, prison literature, environmentalism, the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and American cultural history. He was instrumental in helping to debunk false public speculation that Vietnam was continuing to hold prisoners of war.
Go to Profile#11349
Richard Beckhard
#11360
Overall Influence
1918 - 1999 (81 years)
Richard Beckhard was an American organizational theorist, adjunct professor at MIT, and pioneer in the field of organization development. Beckhard co-launched the Addison-Wesley Organization Development Series and began the Organization Development Network in 1967. His classic work, Organization Development: Strategies and Models, was published in 1969. Beckhard was an adjunct professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management from 1963 to 1984. He died on December 28, 1999.
Go to Profile#11350
Andrei Codrescu
#11361
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He is the winner of the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar and the Ovid Prize for poetry. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.
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