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

#11401

Boris Rauschenbach

#11412

Overall Influence

1915 - 2001 (86 years)

Boris Viktorovich Rauschenbach Russian physicist of German ethnicity who worked as an engineer in the former Soviet space program. Trained as an engineer, he found great success in designing rockets and who developed the theory and instruments for interplanetary flight control and navigation in 1955-1960s. He is also notable for his studies in Christian theology and theory of Art.

#11402

Jeff Eppinger

#11413

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Jeffrey Lee Eppinger is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur and Professor of the Practice at the Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science. Eppinger was a co-founder of Transarc Corporation, which was bought by IBM in 1994.

#11403

Elijah Anderson

#11414

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Elijah Anderson is an American sociologist. He is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University, where he teaches and directs the Urban Ethnography Project. Anderson is one of the nation’s leading urban ethnographers and cultural theorists. Anderson is known most notably for his book, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City .

#11404

Anthony Venables

Anthony Venables

#11415

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Anthony James Venables, CBE, , is a British economist and the BP Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, University of Oxford. Venables is known as one of the pioneers of New economic geography. He co-authored along with Paul Krugman and Masahisa Fujita the influential book The Spatial Economy - Cities, Regions and International Trade .

#11405

Michael Heizer

#11416

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Michael Heizer is an American land artist specializing in large-scale and site-specific sculptures. Working largely outside the confines of the traditional art spaces of galleries and museums, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. A pioneer of 20th-century land art or Earthworks movement, he is widely recognized for sculptures and environmental structures made with earth-moving equipment, which he began creating in the American West in 1967. He currently lives and works in Hiko, Nevada, and New York City.

#11406

Srinivas Aluru

#11417

Overall Influence

Srinivas Aluru is a professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, and co-Executive Director for the Georgia Tech Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Data Engineering and Science. His main areas of research are high performance computing, data science, bioinformatics and systems biology, combinatorial methods in scientific computing, and string algorithms. Aluru is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers . He is best known for his research contributi...

#11407

Hugh Leonard

#11418

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Hugh Leonard was an Irish dramatist, television writer, and essayist. In a career that spanned 50 years, Leonard wrote nearly 30 full-length plays, 10 one-act plays, three volumes of essay, two autobiographies, three novels, numerous screenplays and teleplays, and a regular newspaper column.

#11408

Arthur S. Link

#11419

Overall Influence

1920 - 1998 (78 years)

Arthur Stanley Link was an American historian and educator, known as the leading authority on U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Early life Born in New Market, Virginia, 50 miles from Wilson's birthplace, in Staunton, Virginia, to a Lutheran minister of German descent, Link graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, receiving a B.A. in 1941 and a Ph.D. in 1945. He got inspired to look into the career of Woodrow Wilson career by Fletcher Green, one of his professors.

#11409

John Van Maanen

#11420

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

John Eastin Van Maanen is an American organizational theorist, Professor of Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and best known for his contributions to qualitative studies in management and to organizational ethnography.

#11410

James Maas

#11421

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

James Beryl Maas is an American social psychologist and retired professor. He is best known for his work in the field of sleep research, specifically the relationship between sleep and performance. He is best known for coining the term "power nap". He holds a B.A. from Williams College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Maas has also produced numerous film specials on sleep research for PBS, BBC, and others.

#11411

Leana Wen

#11422

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Leana Sheryle Wen is an American physician, author, professor, speaker, consultant, newspaper columnist and television commentator. She is former health commissioner for the city of Baltimore and former president of Planned Parenthood. She has written two books based on her experiences as a medical professional.

#11412

John Mueller

#11423

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

John E. Mueller is an American political scientist in the field of international relations as well as a scholar of the history of dance. He is recognized for his ideas concerning "the banality of 'ethnic war'" and the theory that major world conflicts are quickly becoming obsolete.

#11413

Peter Howitt

#11424

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Peter Wilkinson Howitt is a Canadian economist. He is the Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences at Brown University. Howitt is a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 1994 and a Fellow of Royal Society of Canada since 1992. He served as president of the Canadian Economics Association in 1993–1994 and was the editor of the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking in the period 1997–2000. For 2019 he received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics.

#11414

Malcolm Longair

Malcolm Longair

#11425

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Malcolm Sim Longair is a British physicist. From 1991 to 2008 he was the Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Since 2016 he has been Editor-in-Chief of the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society.

#11415

Deborah Estrin

#11426

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech. She is co-founder of the non-profit Open mHealth and gave a TEDMED talk on small data in 2013. Estrin is known for her work on sensor networks, participatory sensing, mobile health, and small data. She is one of the most-referenced computer scientists of all time, with her work cited over 128,000 times according to Google Scholar.

#11416

Robert Shearman

Robert Shearman

#11427

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Robert Charles Shearman, sometimes credited as Rob Shearman, is an English television, radio, stage play and short story writer. He is known for his World Fantasy Award-winning short stories, as well as his work for Doctor Who, and his association with Jarvis & Ayres Productions which has resulted in six plays for BBC Radio 4, broadcast in the station's regular weekday Afternoon Play slot, and one classic serial.

#11417

Rainer Knopff

#11428

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Rainer Knopff is a writer, professor of political science at the University of Calgary, Canada, and member of a group known as the Calgary School. He especially well known for his views about the influence of judicial decisions on Canadian public policy. In 2010, Knopff was appointed by the then Prime Minister Stephen Harper to the Governor General Consultation Committee, a special committee to recommend a successor to Governor General of Canada Michaëlle Jean. The panel recommended David Johnston who was installed as viceroy on October 1, 2010.

#11418

Alain Prost

#11429

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Alain Marie Pascal Prost is a French retired racing driver and Formula One team owner. A four-time Formula One World Drivers' Champion, from 1987 until 2001 he held the record for most Grand Prix victories until Michael Schumacher surpassed Prost's total of 51 victories at the 2001 Belgian Grand Prix.

#11419

Joan Slonczewski

Joan Slonczewski

#11430

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Joan Lyn Slonczewski is an American microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Their books have twice earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel: A Door into Ocean and The Highest Frontier . With John W. Foster and Erik Zinser, they coauthor the textbook, Microbiology: An Evolving Science now in its fifth edition. They explore ideas of biology, politics, and artificial intelligence at their blog Ultraphyte.

#11420

Jack Charlton

#11431

Overall Influence

1935 - 2020 (85 years)

John Charlton was an English professional footballer and manager who played as a centre-back. He was part of the England national team that won the 1966 World Cup and managed the Republic of Ireland national team from 1986 to 1996 achieving two World Cup and one European Championship appearances. He spent his entire club career with Leeds United from 1950 to 1973, helping the club to the Second Division title , First Division title , FA Cup , League Cup , Charity Shield , Inter-Cities Fairs Cup , as well as one other promotion from the Second Division and five second-place finishes in the First Division, two FA Cup final defeats and one Inter-Cities Fairs Cup final defeat.

#11421

Robert Jaffe

#11432

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Robert Loren Jaffe is an American physicist and the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was formerly director of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.

#11422

Ryan Tedder

#11433

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Ryan Benjamin Tedder is an American singer, songwriter, and record producer. He is best known as the frontman and vocalist for the pop rock band OneRepublic, as well as a songwriter and producer for various artists since the mid-2000s, including U2, Beyoncé, Leona Lewis, Miley Cyrus, Ed Sheeran, Jonas Brothers, Jennifer Lopez, Camila Cabello, Lady Gaga, Maroon 5, MØ, One Direction, Sugababes, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, Adele, Logic, Paul McCartney, Blackpink, Twice, Bastille, Lil Nas X, Anitta and Tate McRae.

#11423

Dan Gillmor

#11434

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Dan Gillmor is an American technology writer and columnist. He is director of News Co/Lab, an initiative to elevate news literacy and awareness, at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Dan Gillmor is also in the board of directors of The Signals Network, a non-profit organization supporting whistleblowers.

#11424

Michael J. Fox

#11435

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Michael Andrew Fox , known professionally as Michael J. Fox, is a Canadian and American activist and retired actor. Beginning his career as a child actor in the 1970s, Fox rose to prominence portraying Alex P. Keaton on the NBC sitcom Family Ties and Marty McFly in the Back to the Future film trilogy . He went on to star in films such as Teen Wolf , The Secret of My Success , Casualties of War , Doc Hollywood , and The Frighteners . Fox returned to television on the ABC sitcom Spin City in the lead role of Mike Flaherty .

#11425

Philip Bobbitt

#11436

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Philip Chase Bobbitt, is an Americann author, academic, and lawyer. He is best known for work on U.S. constitutional law and theory, and on the relationship between law, strategy and history in creating and sustaining the State. He is the author of several books: Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution , The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History , and Terror and Consent: the Wars for the Twenty-first Century . He is currently the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia University School of Law and a distinguished senior lecturer at The University o...

#11426

Maksim Chmerkovskiy

Maksim Chmerkovskiy

#11437

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Maksim "Maks" Aleksandrovich Chmerkovskiy is a Ukrainian-American Latin–ballroom dance champion, choreographer, and instructor. He is widely known as one of the professional dancers on the American television series Dancing with the Stars, on which he first appeared in season two. In his 17 seasons as a competing pro on the show, Chmerkovskiy made it to the final round five times, with two runner-up and two third-place finishes. On May 20, 2014, Chmerkovskiy, paired with Olympic ice dancer Meryl Davis, won his first Dancing with the Stars title. Chmerkovskiy has also starred in the Broadway p...

#11427

Ségolène Royal

#11438

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Marie-Ségolène Royal is a French politician who was the Socialist Party candidate for the Presidency of France in the 2007 election. Royal was president of the Poitou-Charentes Regional Council from 2004 to 2014. She won the 2006 Socialist Party primary, becoming the first woman in France to be nominated as a presidential candidate by a major party. In the subsequent 2007 presidential election, she earned further distinction as the first woman to qualify for the second round of a presidential election, but ultimately lost to Nicolas Sarkozy.

#11428

Scott E. Page

#11439

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Scott E. Page is an American social scientist and John Seely Brown Distinguished University Professor of Complexity, Social Science, and Management at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he has been working since 2000. He has also been director of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute .

#11429

Terry Jones

#11440

Overall Influence

1942 - 2020 (78 years)

Terence Graham Parry Jones was a Welsh actor, comedian, director, historian, writer and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe. After graduating from Oxford University with a degree in English, Jones and writing partner Michael Palin wrote and performed for several high-profile British comedy programmes, including Do Not Adjust Your Set and The Frost Report, before creating Monty Python's Flying Circus with Cambridge graduates Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Eric Idle and American animator-filmmaker Terry Gilliam. Jones was largely responsible for the programme's innovative, surreal structure, in which sketches flowed from one to the next without the use of punch lines.

#11430

Helga Nowotny

#11441

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Helga Nowotny is Professor emeritus of Social Studies of Science, ETH Zurich. She has held numerous leadership roles on Academic boards and public policy councils, and she has authored many publications in the social studies of science and technology.

#11431

Gunnar Carlsson

Gunnar Carlsson

#11442

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Gunnar E. Carlsson is an American mathematician, working in algebraic topology. He is known for his work on the Segal conjecture, and for his work on applied algebraic topology, especially topological data analysis. He is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics at Stanford University. He is the founder and president of the predictive technology company Ayasdi.

#11432

Rudolf Wille

#11443

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Rudolf Wille was a German mathematician and was professor of General Algebra from 1970 to 2003 at Technische Universität Darmstadt . His most celebrated work is the invention of formal concept analysis, an unsupervised machine learning technique that applies mathematical lattice theory to organize data based on objects and their shared attributes.

#11433

Nicolas Lebourg

#11444

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Nicolas Lebourg is a French historian who specializes on far-right movements in Europe. Biography Born in 1974, Lebourg studied sociology at Aix-Marseille University and history at the University of Perpignan, from which he graduated with a PhD in contemporary history in 2005, after a thesis on French national revolutionaries during the period 1940–2002.

#11434

George L. Trager

#11445

Overall Influence

1906 - 1992 (86 years)

George Leonard Trager was an American linguist. He was the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1960. He was born in Newark, New Jersey. During his years at Yale in the 1930s and 1940s, he was a close associate of Edward Sapir, Morris Swadesh, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Charles Hockett, and after 1941, Leonard Bloomfield. From 1937, he collaborated with Whorf on historical-comparative Azteco-Tanoan languages, but further planned collaboration was cut short by Whorf's death in 1941. He wrote the entries on Language and Linguistics for the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Like...

#11435

Sergey Mergelyan

Sergey Mergelyan

#11446

Overall Influence

1928 - 2008 (80 years)

Sergey Mergelyan was a Soviet and Armenian mathematician, who made major contributions to the Approximation theory. The modern Complex Approximation Theory is based on Mergelyan's classical work. Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union , member of NAS ASSR .

#11436

T. V. Raman

#11447

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

T. V. Raman is a computer scientist who specializes in accessibility research. His research interests are primarily in the areas of auditory user interfaces and structured electronic documents. He has worked on speech interaction and markup technologies in the context of the World Wide Web at Digital's Cambridge Research Lab , Adobe Systems and IBM Research. He currently works at Google Research. Raman has himself been partially sighted since birth, and blind since the age of 14.

#11437

Vincent Gigante

Vincent Gigante

#11448

Overall Influence

1928 - 2005 (77 years)

Vincent Louis Gigante , also known as "The Chin", was an American mobster who was boss of the Genovese crime family in New York City from 1981 to 2005. Gigante started out as a professional boxer who fought in 25 matches between 1944 and 1947. He then started working as a Mafia enforcer for what was then the Luciano crime family, forerunner of the Genovese family. Gigante was one of five brothers; three of them, Mario, Pasquale, and Ralph, followed him into the Mafia. Only one brother, Louis, stayed out of the crime family, instead becoming a Catholic priest. Gigante was the shooter in the failed assassination of longtime Luciano boss Frank Costello in 1957.

#11438

Bruria Kaufman

#11449

Overall Influence

1918 - 2010 (92 years)

Bruria Kaufman was an American theoretical physicist. She contributed to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, to statistical physics, where she used applied spinor analysis to rederive the result of Lars Onsager on the partition function of the two-dimensional Ising model, and to the study of the Mössbauer effect, on which she collaborated with John von Neumann and Harry Lipkin.

#11439

Beatrice Mintz

#11450

Overall Influence

1921 - 2022 (101 years)

Beatrice Mintz was an American embryologist who contributed to the understanding of genetic modification, cellular differentiation, and cancer, particularly melanoma. Mintz was a pioneer of genetic engineering techniques and was among the first scientists to generate both chimeric and transgenic mammals.

#11440

Teruaki Mukaiyama

#11451

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Teruaki Mukaiyama was a Japanese organic chemist. One of the most prolific chemists of the 20th century in the field of organic synthesis, Mukaiyama helped establish the field of organic chemistry in Japan after World War II.

#11441

David Wallechinsky

#11452

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

David Wallechinsky is an American popular historian and television commentator, the president of the International Society of Olympic Historians and the founder and editor-in-chief of AllGov.com and worldfilmreviews.us.

#11442

Hugh Grant

#11453

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Hugh John Mungo Grant is an English actor. He established himself early in his career as a charming and vulnerable romantic leading man, and has since transitioned into a more dramatic character actor. Among his accolades, he has received a British Academy Film Award, a Golden Globe Award, and an Honorary César. , his films had grossed a total of nearly US$3 billion worldwide. In 2022, Time Out magazine listed Grant as one of Britain's 50 greatest actors of all time.

#11443

Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster

#11454

Overall Influence

1933 - 2013 (80 years)

Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster was a British-American information scientist. He immigrated to the USA in 1959 and worked as information specialist for the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland from 1965–68. He was a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana from 1972-92 and professor emeritus from 1992-2013. He continued as an honored scholar after retirement speaking on the evolution of librarianship in the 20th and 21st century. Lancaster made notable achievements with early online retrieval systems, including evaluation studies of MEDLARS. He published broadly in Library ...

#11444

Michael Fincke

#11455

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Edward Michael "Mike"/"Spanky" Fincke is an American astronaut who formerly held the American record for the most time in space . His record was broken by Scott Kelly on October 16, 2015. Mike Fincke was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but considers its suburb Emsworth to be his hometown. He is a retired United States Air Force officer and an active NASA astronaut. So far he served two tours aboard the International Space Station as a flight engineer and commander. He flew on one Space Shuttle mission, STS-134 as a mission specialist. Fincke is conversant in Japanese and Russian. He is marr...

#11445

George Ainslie

#11456

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

George W. Ainslie is an American psychiatrist, psychologist and behavioral economist. Unusual for a psychiatrist, Ainslie undertook experimental animal research in operant conditioning, under the guidance of Howard Rachlin. He investigated inter-temporal choice in pigeons, and was the first to demonstrate experimentally the phenomenon of preference reversal in favor of the more immediate outcomes as the choice point between two options, one delivered sooner than the other, is moved forward in time. He explained this in terms of hyperbolic discounting of future rewards, derived from ideas that Rachlin and others had developed from Richard Herrnstein's matching law.

#11446

Hans Kornberg

#11457

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Sir Hans Leo Kornberg, FRS was a British-American biochemist. He was Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry in the University of Cambridge from 1975 to 1995, and Master of Christ's College, Cambridge from 1982 to 1995.

#11447

Julio Caro Baroja

Julio Caro Baroja

#11458

Overall Influence

1914 - 1995 (81 years)

Julio Caro Baroja was a Spanish anthropologist, historian, linguist and essayist. He was known for his special interest in Basque culture, Basque history and Basque society. Of Basque ancestry, he was the nephew of the renowned writer Pio Baroja and his brother, painter, writer and engraver Ricardo Baroja. He is buried in the family plot of the cemetery of Bera, Navarre, near their home, Itzea.

#11448

Phil Ivey

#11459

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Phillip Dennis Ivey Jr. is an American professional poker player who has won ten World Series of Poker bracelets, one World Poker Tour title, and appeared at nine World Poker Tour final tables. Ivey is regarded by numerous poker observers and contemporaries as the best all-around player in the world. In 2017, he was elected to the Poker Hall of Fame.

#11449

Pakudha Kaccayana

#11460

Overall Influence

was an Indian teacher and philosopher who lived around the 6th century BCE, contemporaneous with Mahavira and the Buddha. He was an atomist who believed in atomism which believed that everything is made of seven eternal elements – earth, water, fire, air, happiness, pain and soul.

#11450

Spartak Belyaev

#11461

Overall Influence

1923 - 2017 (94 years)

Spartak Timofeyevich Belyaev was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist who was awarded a Lomonosov Gold Medal. Biography Belyaev was born on October 27, 1923, in Moscow, Russia. When World War II began, he graduated from high school and by August 1941 enlisted himself into the Army as a volunteer. During that time he participated in various battles in Caucasus and liberation of Poland in 1945. After long years of war, he declined the offer on keeping the career and instead decided to become a physicist by applying to the Moscow State University.

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