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
#11501
Alan Musgrave
#11512
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Alan Musgrave is an English-born New Zealand philosopher. Biography Musgrave was educated at the London School of Economics with a BA Honours philosophy and economics 1961. Karl Popper supervised Musgrave's PhD which was completed in 1969. Musgrave worked as Popper's research assistant, initially then as a lecturer. Musgrave was appointed to the chair of the philosophy department at the University of Otago in 1970, and was head of department from 1970 to 2005. He was 30 years old at his appointment. Along with Imre Lakatos, a friend and colleague, they edited Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge .
Go to Profile#11502
Jordan Hubbard
#11513
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jordan K. Hubbard is an open source software developer, authoring software such as the Ardent Window Manager and various other open source tools and libraries before co-founding the FreeBSD project with Nate Williams and Rodney W. Grimes in 1993, for which he contributed the initial FreeBSD Ports collection, package management system and sysinstall. In July 2001 Hubbard joined Apple Computer in the role of manager of the BSD technology group, during which time he was one of the creators of MacPorts. In 2005, his title was "Director of UNIX Technology" and in October 2007, Hubbard was promote...
Go to Profile#11503
Tomáš Mikolov
#11514
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Tomáš Mikolov is a Czech computer scientist working in the field of machine learning. In March of 2020, Mikolov became a senior research scientist at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics.
Go to Profile#11504
Po-Shen Loh
#11515
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Po-Shen Loh is an American professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in combinatorics, and formerly served as the national coach of the United States' International Math Olympiad team. He is the founder of educational websites Expii and Live, and lead developer of contact-tracing app NOVID.
Go to Profile#11505
Robert MacPherson
#11516
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Robert Duncan MacPherson is an American mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University. He is best known for the invention of intersection homology with Mark Goresky, whose thesis he directed at Brown University, and who became his life partner. MacPherson previously taught at Brown University, the University of Paris, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1983 he gave a plenary address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Warsaw.
Go to Profile#11506
George Osborne
#11517
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
George Gideon Oliver Osborne is a former British politician and newspaper editor who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2016 and as First Secretary of State from 2015 to 2016 in the Cameron government. A member of the Conservative Party, he was Member of Parliament for Tatton from 2001 to 2017. He was editor of the Evening Standard from 2017 to 2020.
Go to Profile#11507
Archer Martin
#11518
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
Archer John Porter Martin was a British chemist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of partition chromatography with Richard Synge. Early life Martin's father was a GP. Martin was educated at Bedford School, and Peterhouse, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#11508
Christopher Monroe
#11519
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Christopher Roy Monroe is an American physicist and engineer in the areas of atomic, molecular, and optical physics and quantum information science, especially quantum computing. He directs one of the leading research and development efforts in ion trap quantum computing. Monroe is the Gilhuly Family Presidential Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Duke University and is College Park Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland and Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute and Joint Center for Quantum Computer Science. He is also co-founder and chie...
Go to Profile#11509
Vera Zvonareva
#11520
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Vera Igorevna Zvonareva is a Russian professional tennis player. She was introduced to tennis at the age of six and turned professional in 2000. Her career-high ranking by the Women's Tennis Association is world No. 2. Zvonareva has won twelve WTA Tour singles titles, including the 2009 Indian Wells Open, and reached the finals of the 2008 WTA Tour Championships, 2010 Wimbledon Championships, and 2010 US Open. She also was a bronze medalist at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.In doubles, Zvonareva has won five major titles. Three came in women's doubles, first at the 2006 US Open, partnering Nathalie Dechy, and the 2012 Australian Open, with Svetlana Kuznetsova.
Go to Profile#11510
Susan Neiman
#11521
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Susan Neiman is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She currently lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam.
Go to Profile#11511
Hélyette Geman
#11522
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Hélyette Geman is a French academic in the field of mathematical finance. Her career has spanned several sub-disciplines including insurance, probability theory and the finance of commodities. She is a Professor of Mathematical Finance at Birkbeck College, University of London where she is the Director of the Commodity Finance Centre and Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Go to Profile#11512
John Yen
#11523
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
John Yen is Professor of Data Science and Professor-in-Charge of Data Science in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. He currently leads the Laboratory of AI for Cyber Security at Penn State. He was the founder and a former Director of the Cancer Informatics Initiative there.
Go to Profile#11513
Ricardo Miledi
#11524
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Ricardo Miledi was a Mexican neuroscientist known for his work deciphering the role of calcium in neurotransmitter release. He also helped to develop a technique for studying native receptors in frog oocytes for drug development.
Go to Profile#11514
Alberto Burri
#11525
Overall Influence
1915 - 1995 (80 years)
Alberto Burri was an Italian visual artist, painter, sculptor, and physician based in Città di Castello. He is associated with the matterism of the European informal art movement and described his style as a polymaterialist. He had connections with Lucio Fontana's spatialism and, with Antoni Tàpies, an influence on the revival of the art of post-war assembly in America as in Europe.
Go to Profile#11515
Yoshiaki Arata
#11526
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Yoshiaki Arata was a Japanese physicist. Arata was one of the pioneering researchers into nuclear fusion in Japan and a former professor at Osaka University. He was reported to be a strong nationalist, speaking only Japanese in public. He received the Order of Culture in 2006.
Go to Profile#11516
Johannes Buchmann
#11527
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Johannes Alfred Buchmann is a German computer scientist, mathematician and professor emeritus at the department of computer science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. He is known for his research in algorithmic number theory, algebra, post-quantum cryptography and IT security. In 1993, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize together with Claus-Peter Schnorr for his work in algorithmic number theory and cryptography. Buchmann also developed the stateful hash-based signature scheme XMSS, the first future-proof secure and practical signature scheme with minimal security requirements, which was declared the first international standard for post-quantum signature schemes in 2018.
Go to Profile#11517
Daniel Handler
#11528
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Daniel Handler is an American author, musician, screenwriter, television writer, and television producer. He is best known for his children's book series A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions, published under the pen name Lemony Snicket. The former was adapted into a film in 2004 as well as a Netflix series from 2017 to 2019.
Go to Profile#11518
Leo Apostel
#11529
Overall Influence
1925 - 1995 (70 years)
Leo Apostel was a Belgian philosopher and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University. Apostel was an advocate of interdisciplinary research and the bridging of the gap between exact science and humanities.
Go to Profile#11519
James Harden
#11530
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
James Edward Harden Jr. is an American professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association . He is widely regarded as one of the greatest scorers and shooting guards in NBA history. In 2021, Harden was honored as one of the league's top 75 players by being named to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team.
Go to Profile#11520
Akira Ikegami
#11531
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Akira Ikegami is a Japanese journalist and author. Life and career Ikegami was born in Matsumoto, Japan. He attended and graduated Keio University in economics, and worked for NHK from 1973 to 2005, ultimately serving as the host of the network's news program for children, before resigning to work on a freelance basis.
Go to Profile#11521
Neal A. Maxwell
#11532
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Neal Ash Maxwell was an American scholar, educator, and religious leader who served as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1981 until his death.
Go to Profile#11522
Clifford Mayes
#11533
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
A Jungian scholar, Mayes has produced the first book-length studies in English on the pedagogical applications of Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, which is based on the work of Carl Gustav Jung . Jungian psychology is also called analytical psychology. Mayes' work, situated in the humanities and depth psychology, is thought to offer an alternative to the social sciences model.
Go to Profile#11523
Mohamed Hashish
#11534
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Mohamed Hashish is an Egyptian-born research scientist best known as the father of the abrasive water jet cutter. Youth and schooling Mohamed Hashish was born in Alexandria, Egypt to Ahmed Hashish and Zeinab Amin. Mohamed Hashish completed his elementary and high school education in Kafr El Dawwar. He subsequently attended the Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University where he obtained a B.Sc. in mechanical engineering with honors. After serving as a teaching assistant for three years in the same department, 25-year-old Mohamed Hashish accepted a scholarship offer from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Go to Profile#11524
Suzanne Corkin
#11535
Overall Influence
1937 - 2016 (79 years)
Suzanne Corkin was an American professor of neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. She was a leading scholar in neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience. She is best known for her research on human memory, which she studied in patients with Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and amnesia. She is also well known for studying H.M., a man with memory loss whom she met in 1962 and studied until his death in 2008.
Go to Profile#11525
Peter Quennell
#11536
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Sir Peter Courtney Quennell was an English biographer, literary historian, editor, essayist, poet, and critic. He wrote extensively on social history. Life Born in Bickley, Kent, the son of architect C. H. B. Quennell and Marjorie Quennell, he was educated at Berkhamsted School and at Balliol College, Oxford. While still at school some of his poems were selected by Richard Hughes for the anthology Public School Verse, which brought him to the attention of writers such as Edith Sitwell.
Go to Profile#11526
Luigi Ambrosio
#11537
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Luigi Ambrosio is a professor at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. His main fields of research are the calculus of variations and geometric measure theory. Biography Ambrosio entered the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 1981. He obtained his degree under the guidance of Ennio de Giorgi in 1985 at University of Pisa, and the Diploma at Scuola Normale. He obtained his PhD in 1988.
Go to Profile#11527
John Lane Bell
#11538
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John Lane Bell is an Anglo-Canadian philosopher, mathematician and logician. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. His research includes such topics as set theory, model theory, lattice theory, modal logic, quantum logic, constructive mathematics, type theory, topos theory, infinitesimal analysis, spacetime theory, and the philosophy of mathematics. He is the author of more than 70 articles and of 13 books. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Go to Profile#11528
Lucille Clifton
#11539
Overall Influence
1936 - 2010 (74 years)
Lucille Clifton was an American poet, writer, and educator from Buffalo, New York. From 1979 to 1985 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. Clifton was a finalist twice for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Go to Profile#11529
Carl Rowan
#11540
Overall Influence
1925 - 2000 (75 years)
Carl Thomas Rowan was a prominent American journalist, author and government official who published columns syndicated across the U.S. and was at one point the highest ranking African American in the United States government.
Go to Profile#11530
Sujatha Ramdorai
#11541
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Sujatha Ramdorai is an algebraic number theorist known for her work on Iwasawa theory. She is a professor of mathematics and Canada Research Chair at University of British Columbia, Canada. She was previously a professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
Go to Profile#11531
Robert Sugden
#11542
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Robert Sugden, FBA is an English author in the area of cognitive and behavioural economics. Professor Sugden's research combines game theory with moral and political philosophy. He is associated with the classical-liberal tradition of Hume, Mill, and Hayek.
Go to Profile#11532
Andrew Delbanco
#11543
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Andrew H. Delbanco is an American writer and professor. He is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University and the president of the Teagle Foundation. He is the author of many books, including The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War , which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for "books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity", and the Mark Lynton History Prize, sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, ...
Go to Profile#11533
Randy Moss
#11544
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Randy Gene Moss is an American former professional football wide receiver who played in the National Football League for 14 seasons with the Minnesota Vikings, Oakland Raiders, New England Patriots, Tennessee Titans and the San Francisco 49ers. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wide receivers of all time, he holds the NFL single-season touchdown reception record , as well as the NFL single-season touchdown reception record for a rookie . All-time, Moss ranks second in career touchdown receptions as well as fourth in career receiving yards. In addition to possessing extraordinary speed ...
Go to Profile#11534
Robert Farris Thompson
#11545
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Robert Farris Thompson was an American art historian and writer who specialized in Africa and the Afro-Atlantic world. He was a member of the faculty at Yale University from 1965 to his retirement more than fifty years later and served as the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art. Thompson coined the term "black Atlantic" in his 1983 book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy – the expanded subject of Paul Gilroy's book The Black Atlantic.
Go to Profile#11535
Dries Buytaert
#11546
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Dries Buytaert is a Belgian open-source software programmer. He is the founder and lead developer of the Drupal content management system. He also serves as the CTO of Acquia. Career Buytaert was born in Wilrijk, Antwerp, Belgium. He defended his PhD dissertation in computer science on 27 January 2008, at Ghent University in Belgium.
Go to Profile#11536
Jim Gray
#11547
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jim Gray is an American sportscaster. , he is with Showtime, Fox and SiriusXM as a reporter, commentator, and interviewer, having served in the same capacity at ESPN, NBC Sports and CBS Sports. Gray is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, reporter, producer, and executive producer of sports documentaries and features. He is the author of the best seller, "Talking to GOATs, The Moments You Remember and the Stories You Never Heard", and the host of the "Let's Go!" radio show and podcast on SiriusXM with Tom Brady and Larry Fitzgerald.
Go to Profile#11537
Joanne Kyger
#11548
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Joanne Kyger was an American poet. The author of over 30 books of poetry and prose, Kyger was associated with the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beat Generation, Black Mountain, and the New York School.
Go to Profile#11538
Jim Bohannon
#11549
Overall Influence
1944 - 2022 (78 years)
James Everett Bohannon was an American broadcaster who worked in both television and radio. He is best known for hosting the nationally syndicated late night radio talk show The Jim Bohannon Show originally broadcast on the Mutual Broadcasting System and later the Westwood One Network from 1985 to 2022. For 31 years, he also hosted America in The Morning, a nationally syndicated radio news show, stepping down in December 2015.
Go to Profile#11539
Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah
#11550
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah was a social anthropologist and Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University. He specialised in studies of Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Tamils, as well as the anthropology of religion and politics.
Go to Profile#11540
Friedhelm Waldhausen
#11551
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Friedhelm Waldhausen is a German mathematician known for his work in algebraic topology. He made fundamental contributions in the fields of 3-manifolds and K-theory. Career Waldhausen studied mathematics at the universities of Göttingen, Munich and Bonn. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of Bonn; his advisor was Friedrich Hirzebruch and his thesis was entitled "Eine Klasse von 3-dimensionalen Mannigfaltigkeiten" .
Go to Profile#11541
Tsuneari Fukuda
#11552
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
was a Japanese dramatist, translator, and literary critic. From 1969 until 1983, he was a professor at Kyoto Sangyo University. He became a member of the Japan Art Academy in 1981. His criticism of the pacifist Japanese establishment of the early post-Second World War era earned him early notoriety, though he is most well known for his translations of William Shakespeare's oeuvre into Japanese, starting with Hamlet in 1955. He was a frequent contributor to conservative magazines, such as Bungeishunjū, Shokun, and Jiyū. Called a "rhetorician", and a "conjuror of controversy", he frequently used...
Go to Profile#11542
Joan Mitchell
#11553
Overall Influence
1925 - 1992 (67 years)
Joan Mitchell was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career.
Go to Profile#11543
George Katsiaficas
#11554
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
George Katsiaficas is a Greek-American historian and social theorist. He is known for his many writings on social movements, including The Imagination of the New Left: The Global Analysis of 1968 and The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. He was a professor of humanities and sociology at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston from 1985 up to his retirement in 2015. He sits on the Editorial Board of New Political Science, published by the Caucus for a New Political Science.
Go to Profile#11544
M. C. Frank Chang
#11555
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Mau-Chung Frank Chang is Distinguished Professor and the Chairman of Electrical Engineering department at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he conducts research and teaching on RF CMOS design, high speed integrated circuit design, data converter, and mixed-signal circuit designs. He is the Director of the UCLA High Speed Electronics Laboratory.
Go to Profile#11545
Wietse Venema
#11556
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Wietse Zweitze Venema is a Dutch programmer and physicist best known for writing the Postfix email system. He also wrote TCP Wrapper and collaborated with Dan Farmer to produce the computer security tools SATAN and The Coroner's Toolkit.
Go to Profile#11546
Gilad Bracha
#11557
Overall Influence
Gilad Bracha is a software engineer at F5 Networks, and formerly at Google, where he was on the Dart programming language team. He is creator of the Newspeak language, and co-author of the second and third editions of the Java Language Specification, and a major contributor to the second edition of the Java Virtual Machine Specification.
Go to Profile#11547
Neil Trudinger
#11558
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Neil Sidney Trudinger is an Australian mathematician, known particularly for his work in the field of nonlinear elliptic partial differential equations. After completing his B.Sc at the University of New England in 1962, he continued his graduate studies at Stanford University. He was awarded a Ph.D in 1966 for his thesis "Quasilinear Elliptical Partial Differential Equations in n Variables". After the award of his doctorate from Stanford University, Trudinger became a Courant Instructor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University during the academic year 1966–67.
Go to Profile#11548
Domenico Losurdo
#11559
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Domenico Losurdo was an Italian historian, essayist, Marxist philosopher, and communist politician. Life and career Born in Sannicandro di Bari, Losurdo obtained his doctorate in 1963 from the University of Urbino under the guidance of Pasquale Salvucci with a thesis on Johann Karl Rodbertus. During the sixties, he was radicalized and belonged to a small group of Italian communists which sided with the People's Republic of China in the Sino-Soviet split. Losurdo was director of the Institute of Philosophical and Pedagogical Sciences at the University of Urbino, where he taught history of philosophy as dean at the Faculty of Educational Sciences.
Go to Profile#11549
Emmanuel Dongala
#11560
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Emmanuel Boundzéki Dongala is a Congolese chemist and novelist. He was born in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, in 1941. He was Richard B. Fisher Chair in Natural Sciences at Bard College at Simon's Rock until 2014.
Go to Profile#11550
Richard Lerner
#11561
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Richard Alan Lerner was an American research chemist. He was best known for his work on catalytic antibodies and combinatorial antibody libraries. Lerner served as President of The Scripps Research Institute from 1987 until January 1, 2012, and was a member of its Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, in La Jolla, California.
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