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).
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List of the most influential people
#1151
Robert Hilburn
#1151
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Hilburn is an American pop music critic, author, and radio host. As critic and music editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1970 to 2005, his reviews, essays and profiles appeared in publications around the world. Hilburn has since written a memoir and best-selling biographies of Johnny Cash and Paul Simon. He was a member of the nominating committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for more than twenty years, and lives in Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#1152
Bernard Cornwell
#1152
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Bernard Cornwell is an English-American author of historical novels and a history of the Waterloo Campaign. He is best known for his novels about Napoleonic Wars rifleman Richard Sharpe. He has also written The Saxon Stories, a series of 13 novels about the making of England.
Go to Profile#1153
G. A. Cohen
#1153
Overall Influence
1941 - 2009 (68 years)
Gerald Allan Cohen, was a Canadian political philosopher who held the positions of Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, University College London and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, All Souls College, Oxford. He was known for his work on Marxism, and later, egalitarianism and distributive justice in normative political philosophy.
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Howard S. Becker
#1154
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Howard Saul Becker was an American sociologist who taught at Northwestern University. Becker made contributions to the sociology of deviance, sociology of art, and sociology of music. Becker also wrote extensively on sociological writing styles and methodologies. Becker's 1963 book Outsiders provided the foundations for labeling theory. Becker was often called a symbolic interactionist or social constructionist, although he did not align himself with either method. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Becker was considered part of the second Chicago School of Sociology, which also inclu...
Go to Profile#1155
Ivar Jacobson
#1155
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Ivar Hjalmar Jacobson is a Swedish computer scientist and software engineer, known as major contributor to UML, Objectory, Rational Unified Process , aspect-oriented software development and Essence.
Go to Profile#1156
Bob Costas
#1156
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Robert Quinlan Costas is an American sportscaster who is known for his long tenure with NBC Sports, from 1980 through 2019. He has received 28 Emmy awards for his work and was the prime-time host of 12 Olympic Games from 1988 until 2016. He is currently employed by Warner Bros. Discovery Sports, where he does play-by-play and studio work for the MLB on TBS and commentary on CNN. He is also employed by MLB Network, where he does play-by-play and once hosted an interview show called Studio 42 with Bob Costas.
Go to Profile#1157
Shinya Yamanaka
#1157
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Shinya Yamanaka is the director of Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (iPS – induced Pluripotent Stem Cell), senior investigator for the J. David Gladstone Institutes, a professor for Kyoto University’s Institute for Frontier Medical Services, and a professor of anatomy for the University of California at San Francisco. He studied at Osaka Kyoiku University before earning his M.D. at Kobe University and his Ph.D. from Osaka City University Graduate School. He completed a residency in orthopedic surgery at National Osaka Hospital and a postdoctoral fellowship for the J. David Gladstone Institutes of Cardiovascular Disease.
Go to Profile#1158
James Carville
#1158
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Chester James Carville Jr. is an American political consultant, author, and occasional actor who has strategized for candidates for public office in the United States and in at least 23 nations abroad. A Democrat, he is an expert pundit in U.S. elections who appears frequently on cable news programs, podcasts, and public speeches.
Go to Profile#1159
Adolf Grünbaum
#1159
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Adolf Grünbaum was a German-American philosopher of science and a critic of psychoanalysis, as well as Karl Popper's philosophy of science. He was the first Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh from 1960 until his death, and also served as co-chairman of its Center for Philosophy of Science , research professor of psychiatry , and primary research professor in the department of history and philosophy of science . His works include Philosophical Problems of Space and Time , The Foundations of Psychoanalysis , and Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanal...
Go to Profile#1160
Max Bill
#1160
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
Max Bill was a Swiss architect, artist, painter, typeface designer, industrial designer and graphic designer. Early life and education Bill was born in Winterthur. After an apprenticeship as a silversmith during 1924–1927, Bill took up studies at the Bauhaus in Dessau under many teachers including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer from 1927 to 1929, after which he moved to Zurich.
Go to Profile#1161
Alexander Litvinenko
#1161
Overall Influence
1962 - 2006 (44 years)
Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko was a British-naturalised Russian defector and former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service who specialised in tackling organised crime. A prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he advised British intelligence and coined the term "mafia state".
Go to Profile#1162
Ted Koppel
#1162
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Edward James Martin Koppel is a British-born American broadcast journalist, best known as the anchor for Nightline, from the program's inception in 1980 until 2005. Before Nightline, he spent 20 years as a broadcast journalist and news anchor for ABC. After becoming host of Nightline, he was regarded as one of the outstanding serious-minded interviewers on American television. Five years after its 1980 debut, the show had a nightly audience of about 7.5 million viewers.
Go to Profile#1163
Ernest Mandel
#1163
Overall Influence
1923 - 1995 (72 years)
Ernest Ezra Mandel Life Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, the former a member of Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartacist League. The beginning of Mandel's period at university was interrupted when the German occupying forces closed the university.
Go to Profile#1164
Eric Wolf
#1164
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Eric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology. Early life Life in Vienna Wolf was born in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family. Wolf has described his family as nonreligious, and said that he had little experience of a Jewish community while growing up. His father worked for a corporation and was also a Freemason. Wolf described his mother, who had studied medicine in Russia, as a feminist—"not in terms of declarations, but in terms of her stand on human possibilities." In 1933, his...
Go to Profile#1165
Paul Theroux
#1165
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Paul Edward Theroux is an American novelist and travel writer who has written numerous books, including the travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar . Some of his works of fiction have been adapted as feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast, which was adapted for the 1986 movie of the same name and the 2021 television series of the same name.
Go to Profile#1166
George Stibitz
#1166
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
George Robert Stibitz was a Bell Labs researcher internationally recognized as one of the fathers of the modern digital computer. He was known for his work in the 1930s and 1940s on the realization of Boolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element.
Go to Profile#1167
John Searle
#1167
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked because he was found to have violated the university's sexual harassment policies.
Go to Profile#1168
Henri Ellenberger
#1169
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Henri Frédéric Ellenberger was a Canadian psychiatrist, medical historian, and criminologist, sometimes considered the founding historiographer of psychiatry. Ellenberger is chiefly remembered for The Discovery of the Unconscious, an encyclopedic study of the history of dynamic psychiatry published in 1970.
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Robert Fisk
#1170
Overall Influence
1946 - 2020 (74 years)
Robert Fisk was an English writer and journalist. He was critical of United States foreign policy in the Middle East, and the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians. As an international correspondent, he covered the civil wars in Lebanon, Algeria, and Syria, the Iran–Iraq conflict, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and the U.S. invasion, and occupation of Iraq. An Arabic speaker, he was among the few Western journalists to interview Osama bin Laden, which he did three times between 19...
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Thiruvalluvar
#1171
Overall Influence
Thiruvalluvar, commonly known as Valluvar, was an Indian poet and philosopher. He is best known as the author of the Tirukkuṟaḷ, a collection of couplets on ethics, political and economic matters, and love. The text is considered an exceptional and widely cherished work of Tamil literature.
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Frank Stella
#1172
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Frank Philip Stella is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York City. Biography Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts to first-generation Italian-American parents. His father was a gynecologist, and his mother was a housewife and artist who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting.
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John B. Goodenough
#1173
Overall Influence
1922 - 2023 (101 years)
John Bannister Goodenough was an American materials scientist, a solid-state physicist, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry. From 1996 he was a professor of Mechanical, Materials Science, and Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is credited with identifying the Goodenough–Kanamori rules of the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials, with developing materials for computer random-access memory and with inventing cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries.
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David Browne
#1174
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
David Browne is an American journalist and author. He is currently a senior writer at Rolling Stone, where he has been a contributor since 2008. He was the resident music critic at Entertainment Weekly between 1990 and 2006. He was an editor at Music & Sound Output magazine and a music critic at the New York Daily News before EW. He has written articles for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Spin, The New Republic and Time, as well as stories for NPR.
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William Bratton
#1175
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
William Joseph Bratton CBE is an American law enforcement officer and businessman who served two terms as the New York City Police Commissioner . He previously served as the Commissioner of the Boston Police Department and Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department . He is the only person to have led the police departments of the United States' two largest cities – New York and Los Angeles.
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Fei-Fei Li
#1176
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Fei-Fei Li is an American computer scientist, who was born in China and is known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s. She is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and former board director at Twitter. Li is a Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and a Co-Director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.
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Eric Clapton
#1177
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Eric Patrick Clapton is an English rock and blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He is regarded as one of the most successful and influential guitarists in rock music. He ranked second in Rolling Stones list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and fourth in Gibsons "Top 50 Guitarists of All Time". In 2023, Clapton was named the 35th best guitarist of all time. He was also named number five in Time magazine's list of "The 10 Best Electric Guitar Players" in 2009.
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Maurice Sendak
#1178
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Maurice Bernard Sendak was an American author and illustrator of children's books. He became most widely known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, first published in 1963. Born to Polish-Jewish parents, his childhood was affected by the death of many of his family members during the Holocaust. Sendak also wrote works such as In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and illustrated many works by other authors including the Little Bear books by Else Holmelund Minarik.
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Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
#1179
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is a German developmental biologist and a 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate. She is the only woman from Germany to have received a Nobel Prize in the sciences.
Go to Profile#1179
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
#1180
Overall Influence
1971 - 2019 (48 years)
Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri , commonly known by his nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , was an Iraqi militant who was the first caliph of the Islamic State from 2014 until his death. Baghdadi was born in Samarra and obtained graduate degrees in Islamic theology in the late 1990s and 2000s. Following the American invasion in March 2003, he joined Salafi jihadist groups in Iraq and was detained with al-Qaeda commanders at the American Camp Bucca in 2004. He joined al-Qaeda in Iraq there and rose through the ranks until he was appointed emir, the highest leader, in 2010. Al-Qaeda in Iraq reorganized and renamed itself into Islamic State of Iraq during this time.
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Rob Pike
#1181
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Robert Pike is a Canadian programmer and author. Life and works He is best known for his work on the Go programming language and, earlier, at Bell Labswhere he was a member of the Unix team and was involved in the creation of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno operating systems, as well as the Limbo programming language.
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Dani Rodrik
#1182
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#1182
Ian Kershaw
#1183
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sir Ian Kershaw is an English historian whose work has chiefly focused on the social history of 20th-century Germany. He is regarded by many as one of the world's experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and is particularly noted for his biographies of Hitler.
Go to Profile#1183
Sherry Turkle
#1184
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#1184
Sean M. Carroll
#1185
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Sean Michael Carroll is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and philosophy of science. Formerly a research professor at the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology department of physics, he is currently an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. He has been a contributor to the physics blog Cosmic Variance, and has published in scientific journals such as Nature as well as other publications, including The New York Times, Sky & Telescope and New Scientist.
Go to Profile#1185
Starhawk
#1186
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Starhawk is an American feminist and author. She is known as a theorist of feminist neopaganism and ecofeminism. In 2013, she was listed in Watkins' Mind Body Spirit magazine as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People.
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Pierre Bézier
#1187
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Pierre Étienne Bézier was a French engineer and one of the founders of the fields of solid, geometric and physical modelling as well as in the field of representing curves, especially in computer-aided design and manufacturing systems. As an engineer at Renault, he became a leader in the transformation of design and manufacturing, through mathematics and computing tools, into computer-aided design and three-dimensional modeling.
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James Meade
#1188
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
James Meade was a British economist. Along with Richard Kahn, James Meade helped develop the concept of the Keynesian multiplier while participating in the Cambridge circus. In the 1930s, he served as specialist adviser on behalf of the British government at the Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations.
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Scott Adams
#1189
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Scott Raymond Adams is an American author and cartoonist. He is the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, and the author of several nonfiction works of business, commentary, and satire. Adams worked in various clerical roles before he became a full-time cartoonist in 1995. While working at Pacific Bell in 1989, Adams created Dilbert; by the mid-1990s the strip had gained national prominence in America and began to reach a worldwide audience. Dilbert remained popular throughout the following decades, spawning several books written by Adams and becoming a cultural touchstone until it was dropped from syndication.
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Travis Hirschi
#1190
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Travis Warner Hirschi was an American sociologist and an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Arizona. He helped to develop the modern version of the social control theory of crime and later the self-control theory of crime.
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Lucian Freud
#1191
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths' College, London. He served at sea with the Briti...
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Frank Rich
#1192
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Frank Hart Rich Jr. is an American essayist and liberal op-ed columnist, who held various positions within The New York Times from 1980 to 2011. He has also produced television series and documentaries for HBO.
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Anna Politkovskaya
#1193
Overall Influence
1958 - 2006 (48 years)
Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist and human rights activist, who reported on political and social events in Russia, in particular, the Second Chechen War . It was her reporting from Chechnya that made Politkovskaya's national and international reputation. For seven years, she refused to give up reporting on the war despite numerous acts of intimidation and violence. Politkovskaya was arrested by Russian military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution. She was poisoned while flying from Moscow via Rostov-on-Don to help resolve the 2004 Beslan school hostage c...
Go to Profile#1193
Michael Silverstein
#1194
Overall Influence
1945 - 2020 (75 years)
Michael Silverstein was an American linguist. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture.
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Andrew Marr
#1195
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Andrew William Stevenson Marr is a Scottish journalist and broadcaster. Beginning his career as a political commentator, he subsequently edited The Independent newspaper from 1996 to 1998 and was political editor of BBC News from 2000 to 2005.
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Robert Kowalski
#1196
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert Anthony Kowalski is an American-British logician and computer scientist, whose research is concerned with developing both human-oriented models of computing and computational models of human thinking. He has spent most of his career in the United Kingdom.
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Robert Jay Lifton
#1197
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Robert Jay Lifton is an American psychiatrist and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence, and for his theory of thought reform. He was an early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory.
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Robert Woodrow Wilson
#1198
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Robert Woodrow Wilson is an American astronomer who, along with Arno Allan Penzias, discovered cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964. The pair won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery.
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Rafael Viñoly
#1199
Overall Influence
1944 - 2023 (79 years)
Rafael Viñoly Beceiro was an Uruguayan-born architect based in New York. He was the principal of Rafael Viñoly Architects, which he founded in 1983. The firm has offices in New York City, Palo Alto, London, Manchester, Abu Dhabi, and Buenos Aires. Viñoly designed landmark buildings internationally.
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Sally Ride
#1200
Overall Influence
1951 - 2012 (61 years)
Sally Kristen Ride was an American astronaut and physicist. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman and the third woman to fly in space, after cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. She was the youngest American astronaut to have flown in space, having done so at the age of 32.
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Bruce Springsteen
#1201
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen is an American rock singer, songwriter and guitarist. Nicknamed "The Boss", he has released 21 studio albums during a career spanning six decades, most of which feature his backing band, the E Street Band. Springsteen is an originator of heartland rock, a genre combining mainstream rock music with poetic and socially conscious lyrics that feature narratives primarily concerning working-class American life. He is known for his descriptive lyrics and energetic concerts, with performances that can last for more than four hours.
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