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
#11451
Dusa McDuff
#11462
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry. She was the first recipient of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, was a Noether Lecturer, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is currently the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College.
Go to Profile#11452
Chris Urmson
#11463
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Chris Urmson is a Canadian engineer, academic, and entrepreneur known for his work on self-driving car technology. He cofounded Aurora Innovation, a company developing self-driving technology, in 2017 and serves as its CEO. Urmson was instrumental in pioneering and advancing the development of self-driving vehicles since the early 2000s.
Go to Profile#11453
Elisabeth Vrba
#11464
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Elisabeth S. Vrba is a paleontologist at Yale University who developed the turnover-pulse hypothesis. Education Vrba earned her Ph.D. in Zoology and Palaeontology at the University of Cape Town, in 1974. Vrba studied zoology and mathematical statistics at the University of Cape Town to earn her undergraduate degree. She remained there for doctoral study in zoology and paleontology to earn her Ph.D. After receiving her doctorate, Vrba conducted her early research on African fossil records over the last several million years, tracking the sequence of fossils from analyzing the geological strata and analyzing the morphology of the fossils.
Go to Profile#11454
Edmund Hlawka
#11465
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Edmund Hlawka was an Austrian mathematician. He was a leading number theorist. Hlawka did most of his work at the Vienna University of Technology. He was also a visiting professor at Princeton University and the Sorbonne. Hlawka died on February 19, 2009, in Vienna.
Go to Profile#11455
Setha Low
#11466
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Setha M. Low is a former president of the American Anthropological Association, a professor in environmental psychology, and the director of the Public Space Research Group at the City University of New York. Low also served as a Conservation Guest Scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute.
Go to Profile#11456
Moses Abramovitz
#11467
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
Moses Abramovitz was a 20th-century American economist and professor. During his career, he made many contributions to the study of macroeconomic fluctuations and economic growth over time. Biography Born and raised in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, he completed his bachelor's degree in economics summa cum laude at Harvard University. He went to Harvard with the intention of becoming a lawyer and studied criminal justice as well as economics. However, he became more interested in economics because he was able to connect it to the world in which he was living. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1939.
Go to Profile#11457
Carlos Tevez
#11468
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Carlos Alberto Tevez is an Argentine professional football manager and former player. A quick, tenacious, powerful, hard-working and dynamic forward in his prime, Tevez was capable of playing as a striker, as a winger, as a supporting forward, or as an attacking midfielder. He is the current head coach of Primera División club Independiente.
Go to Profile#11458
Burhan Ghalioun
#11469
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Burhan Ghalioun is a French-Syrian professor of sociology at the Université de Paris III Sorbonne University in Paris, and the first chairman of the Syrian opposition Transitional National Council . He was named chairman on 29 August 2011. His chairmanship was criticized for his perceived closeness to the Muslim Brotherhood, his early reluctance to arm opposition forces, and what opponents called the autocratic nature of his leadership. On 17 May 2012, feeling he had become an increasingly divisive figure for the council, Ghalioun resigned.
Go to Profile#11459
Jon Miller
#11470
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jon Miller is an American sportscaster, known primarily for his broadcasts of Major League Baseball. Since 1997, he has been employed as a play-by-play announcer for the San Francisco Giants. He was also a baseball announcer for ESPN from 1990 to 2010. Miller received the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2010.
Go to Profile#11460
Matteo Renzi
#11471
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Matteo Renzi is an Italian politician who served as prime minister of Italy from 2014 to 2016. He has been a senator for Florence since 2018. Renzi has served as the leader of Italia Viva since 2019, having been the secretary of the Democratic Party from 2013 to 2018, with a brief interruption in 2017.
Go to Profile#11461
Ruslan Medzhitov
#11472
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Ruslan Maksutovich Medzhitov is a professor of immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine, a member of Yale Cancer Center, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. His research focuses on the analysis of the innate immune system, inflammatory response, innate control of the adaptive immunity, and host-pathogen interactions.
Go to Profile#11462
Amy Cuddy
#11473
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Amy Joy Casselberry Cuddy is an American social psychologist, author and speaker. She is a proponent of "power posing", a self-improvement technique whose scientific validity has been questioned. She has served as a faculty member at Rutgers University, Kellogg School of Management and Harvard Business School. Cuddy's most cited academic work involves using the stereotype content model that she helped develop to better understand the way people think about stereotyped people and groups. Though Cuddy left her tenure-track position at Harvard Business School in the spring of 2017, she continues...
Go to Profile#11463
Joseph J. Kohn
#11474
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Joseph John Kohn was a Czechoslovakian-born American academic and mathematician. He was professor of mathematics at Princeton University, where he researched partial differential operators and complex analysis.
Go to Profile#11464
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner
#11475
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner is a German metahumanist philosopher, a Nietzsche scholar, a philosopher of music and an authority in the field of ethics of emerging technologies. Life Sorgner was born on 15 October 1973 in Wetzlar . He studied philosophy at King's College London , the University of Durham , the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen and the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena . He taught philosophy and ethics at the Universities of Giessen, Jena, Erfurt and Erlangen. Currently, he teaches at a US Liberal Arts College, John Cabot University. Sorgner is a member of several editorial and adviso...
Go to Profile#11465
Yu-Chi Ho
#11476
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Yu-Chi "Larry" Ho is a Chinese-American mathematician, control theorist, and a professor at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University. He is the co-author of Applied Optimal Control, and an influential researcher in differential games, pattern recognition, and discrete event dynamic systems.
Go to Profile#11466
Mike Will Made It
#11477
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Michael Len Williams II , known professionally as Mike Will Made It or simply Mike Will, is an American record producer and rapper. He is best known for producing trap beats for several Southern hip hop and pop artists on various commercially successful singles, including "Black Beatles" and "Powerglide" by Rae Sremmurd, "Mercy" by Kanye West, "No Lie" by 2 Chainz, "Bandz a Make Her Dance" by Juicy J, "Pour It Up" by Rihanna, "Love Me" by Lil Wayne, "Body Party" by Ciara, "We Can't Stop" by Miley Cyrus, "Formation" by Beyoncé, and "Humble" by Kendrick Lamar. He embarked on a career as a non-p...
Go to Profile#11467
Yoshihiko Amino
#11478
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
Yoshihiko Amino was a Japanese Marxist historian and public intellectual, perhaps most singularly known for his novel examination of medieval Japanese history. Although little of Amino's work has been published in the West, Japanese writers and historians of Japan regard Amino as one of the most important Japanese historians of the twentieth century. Some of Amino's findings are now available in English, in a very lively and personal account of how he came to reverse many conventional ideas about Japanese history.
Go to Profile#11468
Joseph Heath
#11479
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Joseph Heath is a Canadian philosopher. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he was formerly the director of the Centre for Ethics. He also teaches at the School of Public Policy and Governance. Heath's webpage at the University of Toronto declares his work "is all related, in one way or another, to critical social theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt School." He has published both academic and popular writings, including the bestselling The Rebel Sell. His philosophical work includes papers and books in political philosophy, business ethics, rational choice...
Go to Profile#11469
Chris Schenkel
#11480
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Christopher Eugene Schenkel was an American sportscaster. Over the course of five decades he called play-by-play for numerous sports on television and radio, becoming known for his smooth delivery and baritone voice.
Go to Profile#11470
Roger Fisher
#11481
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Roger D. Fisher was Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and director of the Harvard Negotiation Project. Background Fisher specialized in negotiation and conflict management. He was the co-author of the book Getting to Yes, about "interest-based" negotiation, as well as numerous other publications. After serving in World War II as a weather reconnaissance pilot, Fisher worked on the Marshall Plan in Paris under W. Averell Harriman. After finishing his law degree at Harvard, he worked with the Washington, DC, law firm of Covington & Burling, arguing several cases before the US Supreme Court and advising on several international disputes.
Go to Profile#11471
David Samuels
#11482
Overall Influence
David Julian Samuels is an American political scientist who is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Samuels earned his BA from Swarthmore College in 1989 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1998. He joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota in 1998, and was named full professor in 2010. He was awarded a Distinguished McKnight University Professorship in 2012.
Go to Profile#11472
Donald A. Martin
#11483
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Donald Anthony Martin , also known as Tony Martin, is an American set theorist and philosopher of mathematics at UCLA, where he is an emeritus professor of mathematics and philosophy. Education and career Martin received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962 and was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1965–67. In 2014, he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#11473
Ajamu Baraka
#11484
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Ajamu Sibeko Baraka is an American political activist. In 2016, he was the Green Party nominee for Vice President of the United States on the ballot in 45 states and received 1,457,216 votes . Baraka currently serves as the national organizer and spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace.
Go to Profile#11474
Florian Zeller
#11485
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Florian Zeller is a French novelist, playwright, theatre director, screenwriter, and film director. He wrote a dozen of plays, that have been staged worldwide and have made him one of the most famous contemporary playwrights. He is, according to The Times, "the most exciting playwright of our time". He wrote and directed his first film, 2020's The Father, based on his play of the same name, starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. The film received six nominations at the 93rd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, with Zeller winning Best Adapted Screenplay and Hopkins winning Best Actor....
Go to Profile#11475
David Dinkins
#11486
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
David Norman Dinkins was an American politician, lawyer, and author who served as the 106th mayor of New York City from 1990 to 1993. Dinkins was among the more than 20,000 Montford Point Marines, the first African-American U.S. Marines, from 1945 to 1946. He graduated cum laude from Howard University and received his law degree from Brooklyn Law School in 1956. A longtime member of Harlem's Carver Democratic Club, Dinkins began his electoral career by serving in the New York State Assembly in 1966, eventually advancing to Manhattan borough president. He won the 1989 New York City mayoral election, becoming the first African American to hold the office.
Go to Profile#11476
Oleg Grabar
#11487
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Oleg Grabar was a French-born art historian and archeologist, who spent most of his career in the United States, as a leading figure in the field of Islamic art and architecture in the Western academe.
Go to Profile#11477
Charles Wyplosz
#11488
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Charles Wyplosz is a French economist. He is an editor of the International Centre for Economic Policy Research's VoxEU and is currently the director of the International Centre for Monetary and Banking Studies and Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. He was a founding managing editor of Economic Policy.
Go to Profile#11478
Nikki Keddie
#11489
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Nikki R. Keddie is an American scholar of Eastern, Iranian, and women's history. She is Professor Emerita of History at University of California, Los Angeles. Biography Keddie was born in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. at Radcliffe College, her M.A. from Stanford University and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught at University of Arizona and Scripps College in Claremont, California, before joining University of California, where she taught mainly Middle Eastern and Iranian history and eventually became full professor.
Go to Profile#11479
Friedrich Wetter
#11490
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Friedrich Wetter is a German cardinal of the Catholic Church. He was Archbishop of Munich and Freising, Germany, from 1982 to 2007. He was Bishop of Speyer from 1968 to 1982. He has been a cardinal since 1985.
Go to Profile#11480
Radford M. Neal
#11491
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Radford M. Neal is a professor emeritus at the Department of Statistics and Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he holds a research chair in statistics and machine learning.
Go to Profile#11481
Peter Doig
#11492
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Peter Doig is a Scottish painter. He has settled in Trinidad since 2002. In 2007, his painting White Canoe sold at Sotheby's for $11.3 million, then an auction record for a living European artist. In February 2013, his painting, The Architect's Home in the Ravine, sold for $12 million at a London auction. Art critic Jonathan Jones said about him: "Amid all the nonsense, impostors, rhetorical bullshit and sheer trash that pass for art in the 21st century, Doig is a jewel of genuine imagination, sincere work and humble creativity."
Go to Profile#11482
Yukio Ninagawa
#11493
Overall Influence
1935 - 2016 (81 years)
Yukio Ninagawa was a Japanese theatre director, actor and film director, particularly known for his Japanese language productions of Shakespeare plays and Greek tragedies. He directed eight distinct renditions of Hamlet. Ninagawa was also emeritus of the Toho Gakuen College of Drama and Music.
Go to Profile#11483
Hugh David Politzer
#11494
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Hugh David Politzer is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics.
Go to Profile#11484
Caspar Weinberger
#11495
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Caspar Willard Weinberger was an American politician and businessman. As a Republican, he served in a variety of state and federal positions for three decades, most notably as Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan from January 1981 to November 1987.
Go to Profile#11485
Clive Upton
#11496
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Clive Upton is an English linguist specializing in dialectology and sociolinguistics. He is also an authority on the pronunciation of English. He has been Emeritus Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Leeds since 2012.
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Nicola Lacey
#11497
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Nicola Mary Lacey, is a British legal scholar who specialises in criminal law. Her research interests include criminal justice, criminal responsibility, and the political economy of punishment. Since 2013, she has been Professor of Law, Gender and Social Policy at the London School of Economics . She was previously Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at LSE , and then Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford .
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Alberto Alemanno
#11498
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Alberto Alemanno is an academic, author, public interest lawyer, and civic entrepreneur. He is Jean Monnet Professor in EU Law at HEC Paris since 2009, permanent Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, School of Public Policy, and at the College of Europe in Bruges.
Go to Profile#11488
Richard Bauman
#11499
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Richard Bauman is a folklorist and anthropologist, now retired from Indiana University Bloomington. He is Distinguished Professor emeritus of Folklore, of Anthropology, and of Communication and Culture. Before coming to IU in 1985, he was the Director of the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas and a faculty member in the UT Department of Anthropology. Just before retiring from Indiana, he was chair of the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, as well as an important member of the Department of Anthropology and the Department of...
Go to Profile#11489
Marc Bossuyt
#11500
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Marc, Baron Bossuyt is a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague and a former judge at the Belgian Constitutional Court. Bossuyt obtained a Dr.iur at the University of Ghent in 1968, a Certificate of international relations at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna in 1969, and a PhD in political science from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in 1975. He is professor emeritus of international law at the University of Antwerp.
Go to Profile#11490
Peter Bearman
#11501
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#11491
Thomas Blass
#11502
Overall Influence
Thomas Blass was an American social psychologist, Holocaust survivor, and professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is known for his work regarding Stanley Milgram and the Milgram experiment.
Go to Profile#11492
Randolph L. Braham
#11503
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Randolph Lewis Braham was an American historian and political scientist, born in Romania, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the City College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. A specialist in comparative politics and the Holocaust, he was a founding board member of the academic committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , Washington, D.C., and founded The Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies at the Graduate Center in 1979.
Go to Profile#11493
Andy Hamilton
#11504
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Andrew Neil Hamilton is a British comedian, game show panellist, television director, comedy screenwriter, radio dramatist, novelist and actor. Early life and education Hamilton was born in Fulham, southwest London. He was educated at Westminster City School which was then a voluntary aided grammar school and later read English at Downing College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Cambridge University Light Entertainment Society .
Go to Profile#11494
Pierce Brosnan
#11505
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Pierce Brendan Brosnan is an Irish actor and film producer. He is best known as the fifth actor to play secret agent James Bond in the Bond film series, starring in four films from 1995 to 2002 and in multiple video games.
Go to Profile#11495
Jean-Claude Juncker
#11506
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jean-Claude Juncker is a Luxembourgish politician who served as the 21st prime minister of Luxembourg from 1995 to 2013 and 12th president of the European Commission from 2014 to 2019. He also served as Finance Minister from 1989 to 2009 and President of the Eurogroup from 2005 to 2013.
Go to Profile#11496
Philip Gulliver
#11507
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Philip Hugh Gulliver was a Canadian anthropologist specifically in Oriental and African Studies, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at York University and also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Go to Profile#11497
Salma Khadra Jayyusi
#11508
Overall Influence
1926 - 2023 (97 years)
Salma Khadra Jayyusi was a Palestinian poet, writer, translator and anthologist. She was the founder and director of the Project of Translation from Arabic , which aims to provide translation of Arabic literature into English.
Go to Profile#11498
Bernard Vonnegut
#11509
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Bernard Vonnegut was an American atmospheric scientist credited with discovering that silver iodide could be used effectively in cloud seeding to produce snow and rain. He was the older brother of American novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
Go to Profile#11499
Rachel Kranton
#11510
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Rachel E. Kranton is an American economist and James B. Duke Professor of Economics at Duke University. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts & Science, Fellow of the Econometric Society, and 2010 recipient of the Blaise Pascal Chair. She was elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association from 2015 to 2018. Kranton's research focuses on how social institutions affect economic outcomes, and has applications in a variety of fields within economics, such as economic development, international economics, and industrial...
Go to Profile#11500
Shahryar Khan
#11511
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Shahryar Mohammad Khan is a former career Pakistan diplomat who became Foreign Secretary of Pakistan in 1990, and remained so until his retirement from service in 1994. He later served as United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General to Rwanda , and wrote the book Shallow Graves of Rwanda on his experiences on what Rwanda went through. Since August 1999, he has intermittently served as the chairman of Pakistan Cricket Board, and also served as the president of Asian Cricket Council in 2016.
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