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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#11551
Pancho Guedes
#11562
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Amâncio d'Alpoim Miranda "Pancho" Guedes was a Portuguese architect, sculptor and painter an educator. He is described as one of the earliest post-modernist architects in Africa and an archetype Eclectic Modernist.
Go to Profile#11552
Luciano Pavarotti
#11563
Overall Influence
1935 - 2007 (72 years)
Luciano Pavarotti was an Italian operatic tenor who during the late part of his career crossed over into popular music, eventually becoming one of the most acclaimed tenors of all time. He made numerous recordings of complete operas and individual arias, gaining worldwide fame for his tone, and gaining the nickname "King of the High Cs".
Go to Profile#11553
Aleksander Gieysztor
#11564
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Aleksander Gieysztor was a Polish medievalist historian. Life Aleksander Gieysztor was born to a Polish family in Moscow, Russia, where his father worked as a railwayman. In 1921, the family relocated to Poland and settled in Warsaw. He graduated in history from the University of Warsaw in 1937.
Go to Profile#11554
Stanislav Andreski
#11565
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Stanisław Andrzejewski was a Polish-British sociologist. He is known for his indictment of the "pretentious nebulous verbosity" endemic in the modern social sciences in his classic work Social Sciences as Sorcery .
Go to Profile#11555
Frank Stilwell
#11566
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Franklin "Frank" J.B. Stilwell is an Australian political economist and Professor Emeritus. He is known for establishing, with Evan Jones, Gavan Butler, Margaret Power, Debesh Bhattacharya, Geelum Simpson-Lee and Ted Wheelwright, an independent political economy department at the University of Sydney. His research interests include theories of political economy, inequality, urbanization, and regional development, Australian economic policy and the nature of work. His textbooks on the subject are standard teaching material for all university students in Australia studying the field of Political Economy.
Go to Profile#11556
Joel M. Podolny
#11567
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Joel Marc Podolny is an American sociologist. Formerly the dean of the Yale School of Management, he is currently an executive at Apple Inc., where he is the dean of Apple University and a vice president of the firm. Previously, he was vice president for human resources.
Go to Profile#11557
William Ouchi
#11568
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
William G. "Bill" Ouchi is an American professor and author in the field of business management. He is the Distinguished Professor of Management and Organizations, Sanford and Betty Sigoloff Chair in Corporate Renewal at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Go to Profile#11558
Kimishige Ishizaka
#11569
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Kimishige "Kimi" Ishizaka was a Japanese immunologist who, with his wife Teruko Ishizaka, discovered the antibody class Immunoglobulin E in 1966–1967. Their work was regarded as a major breakthrough in the understanding of allergy. He was awarded the 1973 Gairdner Foundation International Award and the 2000 Japan Prize for his work in immunology.
Go to Profile#11559
Eiiti Wada
#11570
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Eiiti Wada is a computer scientist and emeritus professor at the University of Tokyo and the Research Director of Internet Initiative Japan , a computer network technology company. He is one of the creators of the Happy Hacking Keyboard.
Go to Profile#11560
Daniela L. Rus
#11571
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Daniela L. Rus is a roboticist and computer scientist, Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#11561
Joseph J. Sandler
#11572
Overall Influence
1927 - 1998 (71 years)
Joseph J. Sandler was a British psychoanalyst within the Anna Freud Grouping – now the Contemporary Freudians – of the British Psychoanalytical Society; and is perhaps best known for what has been called his 'silent revolution' in re-aligning the concepts of the object relations school within the framework of ego psychology.
Go to Profile#11562
Andreas Acrivos
#11573
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Andreas Acrivos is the Albert Einstein Professor of Science and Engineering, emeritus at the City College of New York. He is also the director of the Benjamin Levich Institute for Physicochemical Hydrodynamics.
Go to Profile#11563
Marcos Moshinsky
#11574
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Marcos Moshinsky Borodiansky was a Mexican physicist of Ukrainian-Jewish origin whose work in the field of elementary particles won him the Prince of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Investigation in 1988 and the UNESCO Science Prize in 1997.
Go to Profile#11564
Yoav Benjamini
#11575
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Yoav Benjamini is an Israeli statistician best known for development of the “false discovery rate” criterion. He is currently The Nathan and Lily Silver Professor of Applied Statistics at Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#11565
Declan Kiberd
#11576
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Declan Kiberd is an Irish writer and scholar with an interest in modern Irish literature, both in the English and Irish languages, which he often approaches through the lens of postcolonial theory. He is also interested in the academic study of children's literature. He serves on the advisory board of the International Review of Irish Culture and is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and at its campus in Dublin. In recent years and with publications such as After Ireland , Kiberd has become a commentator on contemporary Irish social and political issues, particularly as such issues ...
Go to Profile#11566
Zelman Cowen
#11577
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Sir Zelman Cowen, was an Australian legal scholar and university administrator who served as the 19th Governor-General of Australia, in office from 1977 to 1982. Cowen was born in Melbourne, and attended Scotch College before going on to the University of Melbourne. His studies were interrupted by World War II, during which he served in the Royal Australian Navy. After the war's end, Cowen attended New College, Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship. He subsequently won the prestigious Vinerian Scholarship as the best student in the Bachelor of Civil Law degree. He remained at Oxford after graduati...
Go to Profile#11567
Aaron Brown
#11578
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Aaron Brown is an American broadcast journalist most recognized for his coverage of the September 11 attacks on CNN. He was a longtime reporter for ABC, the founding host of ABC's World News Now, weekend anchor of World News Tonight and the host of CNN's flagship evening program NewsNight with Aaron Brown. He was the anchor of the PBS documentary series Wide Angle from 2008 to 2009. He was a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University from 2007 to 2014.
Go to Profile#11568
Rom Harré
#11579
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Horace Romano "Rom" Harré was a New Zealand-British philosopher and psychologist. Biography Harré was born in Āpiti, in northern Manawatu, near Palmerston North, New Zealand, but held British citizenship. He studied chemical engineering and later graduated with a BSc in mathematics and a Master's in Philosophy , both at the University of New Zealand, now the University of Auckland.
Go to Profile#11569
Melvin J. Lerner
#11580
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Melvin J. Lerner, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Waterloo between 1970 and 1994 and now a visiting scholar at Florida Atlantic University, has been called "a pioneer in the psychological study of justice."
Go to Profile#11570
Claudio Bunster
#11581
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Claudio Bunster Weitzman is a Chilean theoretical physicist. Until 2005 his name was Claudio Teitelboim Weitzman. Biography Claudio Bunster attended at Instituto Nacional General José Miguel Carrera, a prestigious public high school of Santiago. Bunster was educated at the University of Chile and Princeton University, where he earned his doctorate in physics in 1973. Bunster has conducted frontier research and taught at Princeton University and at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also been "Long Term Member" of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
Go to Profile#11571
Ruslan Stratonovich
#11582
Overall Influence
1930 - 1997 (67 years)
Ruslan Leont'evich Stratonovich was a Russian physicist, engineer, and probabilist and one of the founders of the theory of stochastic differential equations. Biography Ruslan Stratonovich was born on 31 May 1930 in Moscow. He studied from 1947 at the Moscow State University, specializing in there under P. I. Kuznetsov on radio physics . In 1953 he graduated and came into contact with the mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov. In 1956 he received his doctorate on the application of the theory of correlated random points to the calculation of electronic noise. In 1969 he became professor of physics ...
Go to Profile#11572
Robert R. Sokal
#11583
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Robert Reuven Sokal was an Austrian–American biostatistician and entomologist. Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Stony Brook University, Sokal was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He promoted the use of statistics in biology and co-founded the field of numerical taxonomy, together with Peter H. A. Sneath.
Go to Profile#11573
Michael Omolewa
#11584
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Michael Abiola Omolewa is a Nigerian diplomat, scholar, education historian, and civil servant. From September 2003 to October 2005, he served as the 32nd president of the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization . While president, Omolewa led UNESCO to adopt the International Declaration on Human Genetic Data and the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. From January 2000 to August 2009, Omolewa served as permanent delegate and ambassador of Nigeria to UNESCO. At University of Lagos, on Wednesday 6 February 2019, Omo...
Go to Profile#11574
Len Rix
#11585
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Len Rix is a Zimbabwe-born translator of Hungarian literature into English, noted for his translations of Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight and The Pendragon Legend and of Magda Szabó's The Door and Katalin Street.
Go to Profile#11575
Agehananda Bharati
#11586
Overall Influence
1923 - 1991 (68 years)
Swami Agehananda Bharati was the monastic name of Leopold Fischer, professor of anthropology at Syracuse University for over 30 years. He was an academic Sanskritist, a writer on religious subjects, and a Hindu monk in the Dasanami Sannyasi order.
Go to Profile#11576
Gopinath Kallianpur
#11587
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Gopinath Kallianpur was an Indian American mathematician and statistician who became the first director of the Indian Statistical Institute under its new Memorandum of Association. During his tenure as the director the new centre of ISI at Bangalore, Karnataka was founded.
Go to Profile#11577
Christian Homburg
#11588
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Christian Homburg is a German marketing researcher, director of the IMU – Institute for Market-oriented Management and chaired professor for Marketing at the University of Mannheim. His special subjects are market-oriented management, customer relationship management and sales management. Furthermore, from 2006 until the 2010, Homburg was the exclusive managing director of the Mannheim Business School. In addition to his academic position, he is chairman of the scientific advisory committee of Homburg & Partner, an international management consultancy firm.
Go to Profile#11578
Mikhail Eskindarov
#11589
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Mikhail Abdurakhmanovich Eskindarov is a Russian economist. Early life In 1976, he graduated from the Credit and Economics Faculty of the Moscow Financial Institute. From 1976 to 1981 he attended graduate school at the university.
Go to Profile#11579
Ken Mogi
#11590
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Kenichirō "Ken" Mogi is a Japanese scientist. He is a senior researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories and a visiting professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. According to the profile posted at his personal blog, his mission is "to solve the so-called mind-brain problem."
Go to Profile#11580
Abdurrahman Wahid
#11591
Overall Influence
1940 - 2009 (69 years)
Abdurrahman Wahid , though more colloquially known as Gus Dur , was an Indonesian politician and Islamic religious leader who served as the 4th president of Indonesia, from his election in 1999 until his removal from power in 2001. A long time leader within the Nahdlatul Ulama organization, he was the founder of the National Awakening Party . He was the son of Minister of Religious Affairs Wahid Hasyim, and the grandson of Nahdatul Ulama founder Hasyim Asy'ari. He had a visual impairment caused by glaucoma; he was blind in the left eye and partially blind in his right eye. He was the first an...
Go to Profile#11581
Bernard Ramm
#11592
Overall Influence
1916 - 1992 (76 years)
Bernard L. Ramm was a Baptist theologian and apologist within the broad evangelical tradition. He wrote prolifically on topics concerned with biblical hermeneutics, religion and science, Christology, and apologetics. The hermeneutical principles presented in his 1956 book Protestant Biblical Interpretation influenced a wide spectrum of Baptist theologians. During the 1970s he was widely regarded as a leading evangelical theologian as well known as Carl F.H. Henry. His equally celebrated and criticized 1954 book The Christian View of Science and Scripture was the theme of a 1979 issue of th...
Go to Profile#11582
Imre Csiszár
#11593
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Imre Csiszár is a Hungarian mathematician with contributions to information theory and probability theory. In 1996 he won the Claude E. Shannon Award, the highest annual award given in the field of information theory.
Go to Profile#11583
Midge Decter
#11594
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Midge Decter was an American journalist and author. Originally a liberal, she was one of the pioneers of the neoconservative movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Early life Decter was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on July 25, 1927. She was the youngest of three daughters of Rose and Harry Rosenthal, a sporting goods merchant. Her family was Jewish. She attended the University of Minnesota for one year, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America from 1946 to 1948, and New York University, but did not graduate from any of them. She initially identified as a liberal on the political spectrum.
Go to Profile#11584
Norman Geras
#11595
Overall Influence
1943 - 2013 (70 years)
Norman Geras was a political theorist and Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Manchester. He contributed to an analysis of the works of Karl Marx in his book Marx and Human Nature and the article "The Controversy About Marx and Justice". His "Seven Types of Obloquy: Travesties of Marxism", appeared in the Socialist Register in 1990.
Go to Profile#11585
Fred Beckey
#11596
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Friedrich Wolfgang Beckey , known as Fred Beckey, was an American rock climber, mountaineer and book author, who in seven decades of climbing achieved hundreds of first ascents of some of the tallest peaks and most important routes throughout Alaska, the Canadian Rockies and the Pacific Northwest. Among the Fifty Classic Climbs of North America, seven were established by Beckey, often climbing with some of the best known climbers of each generation.
Go to Profile#11586
Carlos Santiago Nino
#11597
Overall Influence
1943 - 1993 (50 years)
Carlos Santiago Nino was an Argentine moral, legal and political philosopher. Biography Nino studied law at the University of Buenos Aires and at the University of Oxford, where he received his Ph.D. in 1977 with a thesis directed by John Finnis and Tony Honoré.
Go to Profile#11587
Vangelis
#11598
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou , known professionally as Vangelis , was a Greek keyboardist, composer, and producer of electronic, progressive, ambient, and classical orchestral music. He was best known for his Academy Award-winning score to Chariots of Fire , as well as for composing scores to the films Blade Runner , Missing , Antarctica , The Bounty , 1492: Conquest of Paradise , and Alexander , and for the use of his music in the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan.
Go to Profile#11588
Scott Sehon
#11599
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Scott Robert Sehon is an American philosopher and the Joseph E. Merrill Professor of philosophy at Bowdoin College. His primary work is in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of action, and the free will debate. He is the author of Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency and Explanation in which he takes a controversial, non-causalist view of action explanation and Free Will and Action Explanation: a Non-Causal, Compatibilist Account .
Go to Profile#11589
Manzoor Ahmad
#11600
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Manzoor Ahmed, DSc is a Pakistani scientist and philosopher of science. He is a professor of philosophy and is currently serving as rector of Usman Institute of Technology in Karachi, Sindh Province. He has international prestige for publishing articles, books, and leading edge research on the field of Philosophy of science, particularly the philosophy of space and time.
Go to Profile#11590
Masatoshi Takeichi
#11601
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
is a Japanese cell biologist known for his identification of the cadherin class of adhesion molecules, which plays important roles in the construction of tissues. He shared the 2005 Japan Prize with Erkki Ruoslahti for "fundamental contribution in elucidating the molecular mechanisms of cell adhesion".
Go to Profile#11591
Michael Buckland
#11602
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Michael Keeble Buckland is an emeritus professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and co-director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative. Buckland was born and grew up in England. He entered library work as a trainee at the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford after studying history at that university. After taking his professional qualification in librarianship from the University of Sheffield in 1965, he joined the staff at the Lancaster University Library in 1965, one year after it was founded. From 1967 to 1972 he was responsible on a day-to-day basis for the Univers...
Go to Profile#11592
Nancy McWilliams
#11603
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D., ABPP., is emerita visiting professor at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University. She has written on personality and psychotherapy. McWilliams is a psychoanalytic/dynamic author, teacher, supervisor, and therapist. She has a private practice in psychotherapy and supervision in Lambertville, New Jersey. She is a former president of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association .
Go to Profile#11593
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
#11604
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro is a Brazilian anthropologist and a professor at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He has published many books and articles which are considered important in anthropology and in Americanist ethnology, among them: Cannibal Metaphysics, From the enemy's point of view: humanity and divinity in an Amazonian society, Amazônia: etnologia e história indígena , and A inconstância da alma selvagem e outros ensaios de antropologia .
Go to Profile#11594
Richard Zare
#11605
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Richard Neil Zare is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and a Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. Throughout his career, Zare has made a considerable impact in physical chemistry and analytical chemistry, particularly through the development of laser-induced fluorescence and the study of chemical reactions at the molecular and nanoscale level. LIF is an extremely sensitive technique with applications ranging from analytical chemistry and molecular biology to astrophysics. One of its applications was the sequencing of the human genome.
Go to Profile#11595
Hans-Jürgen Papier
#11606
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Hans-Jürgen Papier is a German scholar of constitutional law who served as president of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany from 2002 to 2010. Early life and education Three years after graduating from law school in 1967 with the first law state examination, Papier completed his Ph.D. studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 1971 he received the second law state examination. In 1973 he received his Habilitation on the basis of a second dissertation on questions concerning German constitutional law.
Go to Profile#11596
Tracy McGrady
#11607
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Tracy Lamar McGrady Jr. , nicknamed T-Mac, is an American former professional basketball player, best known for his career in the National Basketball Association . McGrady is a seven-time NBA All-Star, seven-time All-NBA selection, two-time NBA scoring champion, and winner of the NBA Most Improved Player Award in 2001. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2017. McGrady is regarded as one of the greatest scorers and shooting guards in NBA history.
Go to Profile#11597
Cam Newton
#11608
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Cameron Jerrell Newton is an American football quarterback who is a free agent. He is the National Football League leader in career quarterback rushing touchdowns and second in career quarterback rushing yards. Following a stint with University of Florida, Newton played college football at Auburn University, where he won the Heisman Trophy and 2011 BCS National Championship Game as a junior. He was selected first overall by the Carolina Panthers in the 2011 NFL Draft.
Go to Profile#11598
Viral Acharya
#11609
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Viral V. Acharya is an Indian economist who was appointed as Deputy Governor of Reserve Bank of India . He also served as a member of the advisory council of the RBI Academy and was a member of the Academic Council of the National Institute of Securities Markets , Securities and Exchange Board of India since 2014. As of 23 January 2017, he was appointed to serve a three-year term as a Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. He resigned from the post in July 2019 with 6 months left for his completion of term.
Go to Profile#11599
Seymour Jonathan Singer
#11610
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Seymour Jonathan Singer was an American cell biologist and professor of biology, emeritus, at the University of California, San Diego. Biography Singer was born in New York City and attended Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. in 1943. He received his doctorate from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1947. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Linus Pauling at Caltech during 1947–1948, where he, along with Harvey Itano, co-discovered the basis of abnormal hemoglobin in sickle-cell anemia, reported in the famous paper "Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease". He worked for the U.S.
Go to Profile#11600
John McGinnis
#11611
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
John Oldham McGinnis is a professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and author of over 90 academic and popular articles and essays. His popular writings have been published in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Policy Review.
Go to Profile