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
#11601
Clark Hoyt
#11612
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Clark Hoyt is an American journalist who was the public editor of The New York Times, serving as the "readers' representative." He was the newspaper's third public editor, or ombudsman, after Daniel Okrent and Byron Calame. His initial two-year term began on May 14, 2007, and was later extended for another year, expiring in June 2010.
Go to Profile#11602
Jagdish Mehra
#11613
Overall Influence
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Jagdish Mehra was an Indian-American historian of science. Academic career Mehra was educated at Allahabad University, the Max Planck Institut für Physik and the University of California at Los Angeles and obtained a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of Neuchatel.
Go to Profile#11603
David Schmidtz
#11614
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
David Schmidtz is a Canadian-American philosopher. He is Presidential Chair of Moral Science at West Virginia University's Chambers College of Business and Economics. He is also editor-in-chief of the journal Social Philosophy & Policy. Previously, he was Kendrick Professor of Philosophy and Eller Chair of Service-Dominant Logic at the University of Arizona. While at Arizona, he founded and served as inaugural head of the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science.
Go to Profile#11604
Thomas Bottomore
#11615
Overall Influence
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Thomas Burton Bottomore was a British Marxist sociologist. Bottomore was Secretary of the International Sociological Association from 1953 to 1959. He was the eighth president of ISA . He was a prolific editor and translator of Marxist works, notably his collections published in 1963: Marx's Early Writings and Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy.
Go to Profile#11605
Bob Weir
#11616
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert Hall Weir is an American musician and songwriter best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead. After the group disbanded in 1995, Weir performed with The Other Ones, later known as The Dead, together with other former members of the Grateful Dead. Weir also founded and played in several other bands during and after his career with the Grateful Dead, including Kingfish, the Bob Weir Band, Bobby and the Midnites, Scaring the Children, RatDog, and Furthur, which he co-led with former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. In 2015, Weir, along with former Grateful Dead members Mickey Har...
Go to Profile#11606
Jim Kelly
#11617
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
James Edward Kelly is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 11 seasons with the Buffalo Bills. He also spent two seasons with the Houston Gamblers of the United States Football League . Kelly played college football at the University of Miami, where he was the Offensive MVP of the 1981 Peach Bowl.
Go to Profile#11607
John Durham Peters
#11618
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
John Durham Peters is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University. A media historian and social theorist, he has authored a number of noted scholarly works. His first book, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, traces out broad historical, philosophical, religious, cultural, legal, and technological contexts for the study of communication. His second book Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition updates the philosophy of free expression with a history of liberal thought since Paul of Tarsus. His signal wo...
Go to Profile#11608
David Drake
#11619
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David A. Drake is an American author of science fiction and fantasy literature. A Vietnam War veteran who has worked as a lawyer, he is now a writer in the military science fiction genre. Biography Drake graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Iowa, majoring in history and Latin. His studies at Duke University School of Law were interrupted for two years when he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he served as an enlisted interrogator with the 11th Armored Cavalry in Vietnam and Cambodia. After the war, from 1972 to 1980 he worked as the Assistant Town Attorney in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Go to Profile#11609
Miguel Altieri
#11620
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Miguel Altieri is a Chilean born agronomist and entomologist. He is a Professor of Agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
Go to Profile#11610
Alphonso Lingis
#11621
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Alphonso Lingis is an American philosopher, writer and translator, with Lithuanian roots, currently Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization include phenomenology, existentialism, modern philosophy, and ethics. Lingis is also known as a photographer, and he complements the philosophical themes of many of his books with his own photography.
Go to Profile#11611
Alexander Bastrykin
#11622
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Alexander Ivanovich Bastrykin is a Russian official, former First Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia, and former Chairman of The Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General's Office. Since January 15, 2011, he is the head of the Investigative Committee of Russia.
Go to Profile#11612
Arthur Waskow
#11623
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Arthur Ocean Waskow is an American author, political activist, and rabbi associated with the Jewish Renewal movement. Education and early career Waskow was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He received a bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1954 and a Ph.D. in American history from University of Wisconsin–Madison. He worked from 1959 to 1961 as legislative assistant to Congressman Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin. He was a senior fellow at the Peace Research Institute from 1961 through 1963. He joined Richard Barnet and Marcus Raskin and helped to found the Institute for Policy Studie...
Go to Profile#11613
Rudolf Fleischmann
#11624
Overall Influence
1903 - 2002 (99 years)
Rudolf Fleischmann was a German experimental nuclear physicist from Erlangen, Bavaria. He worked for Walther Bothe at the Physics Institute of the University of Heidelberg and then at the Institute for Physics of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research. Through his association with Bothe, he became involved in the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; one of Fleischmann's areas of interest was isotope separation techniques. In 1941 he was appointed associate professor of experimental physics at the newly established Reichsuniversität Straßburg, in France. Late in 1944, he was arrested under the American Operation Alsos and sent to the United States.
Go to Profile#11614
Laurence Steinberg
#11625
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Laurence Steinberg is an American university professor of psychology, specializing in adolescent psychological development. Career Steinberg teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is a Distinguished University Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Additionally, he has been a faculty scholar of the William T. Grant Foundation and was director of the John D. and Catherine T.
Go to Profile#11615
Mahdi Elmandjra
#11626
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Mahdi Elmandjra was a Moroccan futurologist, economist and sociologist. He is one of the founders of the International Federation for Future Studies . He predicted a number of events, the most important of which was the clash of civilisations in his book "The first civilisation war" in 1992, that is, before Samuel Huntington, who used the same concept in his book "The clash of civilisations" issued in 1996. Mahdi Elmandjra also predicted the occurrence of the "Arab Spring", which he referred to in his writings under the name of "Intifada".
Go to Profile#11616
Winfried Denk
#11627
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Winfried Denk is a German physicist. He built the first two-photon microscope while he was a graduate student in Watt W. Webb's lab at Cornell University, in 1989. Early life and education Denk was born in Munich, Germany. As a child he spent most of his playtime learning to use the tools and building materials in his father's workshop. In school it became apparent that Denk’s ‘talents were unevenly spread across subjects, math and physics being favored’. Fixing and constructing electronic devices was his main hobby throughout high school.
Go to Profile#11617
Steve Hackett
#11628
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Stephen Richard Hackett is an English guitarist, songwriter, singer and record producer who gained prominence as the lead guitarist of the progressive rock band Genesis from 1971 to 1977. Hackett contributed to six Genesis studio albums, three live albums, seven singles and one EP before he left to pursue a solo career. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Genesis in 2010.
Go to Profile#11618
Gareth Stedman Jones
#11629
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Gareth Stedman Jones is an English academic and historian. As Professor of the History of Ideas at Queen Mary, University of London, he deals particularly with working-class history and Marxism. Career Educated at St Paul's School and Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated in history in 1964, Stedman Jones went on to Nuffield College, Oxford to take a DPhil in 1970.
Go to Profile#11619
Shirley Bassey
#11630
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Dame Shirley Veronica Bassey is a Welsh singer. Best known for her career longevity, powerful voice and recording the theme songs to three James Bond films, Bassey is widely regarded as one of the most popular vocalists in Britain. In 1999, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2023, Dame Shirley was awarded The Order of Saint Charles by Prince Albert II of Monaco.
Go to Profile#11620
Frank Moore Cross
#11631
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Frank Moore Cross Jr. was the Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Other Oriental Languages Emeritus at Harvard University, notable for his work in the interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, his 1973 magnum opus Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic, and his work in Northwest Semitic epigraphy. Many of his essays on the latter topic have since been collected in Leaves from an Epigrapher's Notebook.
Go to Profile#11621
Masood Ashraf Raja
#11632
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Masood Ashraf Raja is a Pakistani-born American writer. Previously, he was an associate professor of postcolonial literature and theory at the University of North Texas. He is also the editor of Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, an open access journal that he founded in 2009.
Go to Profile#11622
Jörg Guido Hülsmann
#11633
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Jörg Guido Hülsmann is a German-born economist who studies issues related to money, banking, monetary policy, macroeconomics, and financial markets. Hülsmann is professor of economics at the University of Angers’ School of Law, Economics, and Management.
Go to Profile#11623
Michael Phayer
#11634
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Michael Phayer is an American historian and professor emeritus at Marquette University in Milwaukee and has written on 19th- and 20th-century European history and the Holocaust. Phayer received his PhD from the University of Munich in 1968 and joined Marquette's Department of History in 1970. He attained the rank of Professor in 1990 and retired in 2002. He is the Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Holocaust Studies at Stockton University. He has published numerous research articles and books relating to Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and the Catholic Church, including his most recent, Pius XII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War .
Go to Profile#11624
The Weeknd
#11635
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye , known professionally as the Weeknd, is a Canadian singer, songwriter, and record producer. He is noted for his unconventional music production, artistic reinventions, and his signature use of the falsetto register. His accolades include 4 Grammy Awards, 20 Billboard Music Awards, 22 Juno Awards, 6 American Music Awards, 2 MTV Video Music Awards, a Latin Grammy Award, and nominations for an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award.
Go to Profile#11625
Elliot N. Dorff
#11636
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Elliot N. Dorff is an American Conservative rabbi. He is a Visiting Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and Distinguished Professor of Jewish theology at the American Jewish University in California , author and a bio-ethicist.
Go to Profile#11626
Preda Mihăilescu
#11637
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Preda V. Mihăilescu is a Romanian mathematician, best known for his proof of the 158-year-old Catalan's conjecture. Biography Born in Bucharest, he is the brother of Vintilă Mihăilescu. After leaving Romania in 1973, he settled in Switzerland. He studied mathematics and computer science in Zürich, receiving a PhD from ETH Zürich in 1997. His PhD thesis, titled Cyclotomy of rings and primality testing, was written under the direction of Erwin Engeler and Hendrik Lenstra.
Go to Profile#11627
George V. Chilingar
#11638
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
George V. Chilingarian is an American-Armenian Professor of Civil and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California . He is one of the best-known petroleum geologists in the world and the founder of several prestigious journals in the oil and gas industry.
Go to Profile#11628
Allan Blakeney
#11639
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Allan Emrys Blakeney was the tenth premier of Saskatchewan from 1971 to 1982, and leader of the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party . Early life and career Born in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Blakeney took his law degree at Dalhousie Law School, winning the gold medal. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Queen's College, Oxford, where he played for the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club. He earned a bachelor's degree, second class, in politics and economics.
Go to Profile#11629
Ghulam Murtaza
#11640
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Ghulam Murtaza , , is a Pakistani theoretical physicist with a specialization in the physics of ionized plasmas, and is an Emeritus Professor of physics at the Government College University in Lahore. Murtaza's work is recognizable in plasma physics and controlled nuclear fusion processes to provide a better understanding of energy propagated by the main-sequence star, the Sun.
Go to Profile#11630
Ursula Bellugi
#11641
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Ursula Bellugi was an American cognitive neuroscientist. She was a Distinguished Professor Emerita and director of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. She is known for research on the neurological bases of American Sign Language and language representation in people with Williams Syndrome.
Go to Profile#11631
Rafael Lapesa
#11642
Overall Influence
1908 - 2001 (93 years)
Rafael Lapesa Melgar was a Spanish philologist, a historian of language and of Spanish literature. Early life He was born in Valencia on February 8, 1908. is family moved to Madrid when he was eight. By 1930, he had earned his professorship for his work on the medieval dialect of the western Asturias.
Go to Profile#11632
Hagen Schulze
#11643
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Hagen Schulze was a German historian who held a position at the Free University of Berlin. He specialized in early modern and modern German and European history, particularly in comparative European nationalisms.
Go to Profile#11633
Thomas V. Morris
#11644
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Thomas V. Morris , is an American philosopher. He is a former professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is a founder of the Morris Institute for Human Values, and author of several books. He is also a business and motivational speaker, applying philosophical themes and concepts to business and professional life.
Go to Profile#11634
Urban Meyer
#11645
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Urban Frank Meyer III is a college football TV commentator and former American football coach. He spent most of his coaching career at the collegiate level, having served as the head coach of the Bowling Green Falcons from 2001 to 2002, the Utah Utes from 2003 to 2004, the Florida Gators from 2005 to 2010, and the Ohio State Buckeyes from 2012 to 2018. He retired from coaching in 2019 at the end of the Rose Bowl, and stayed at Ohio State as an assistant athletic director and was also an analyst for Fox Sports, appearing weekly on their Big Noon Kickoff pregame show. In 2021, Meyer came out of...
Go to Profile#11635
Suzanna Sherry
#11646
Overall Influence
Suzanna Sherry is an American legal scholar in the area of constitutional law with particular emphasis in the subject of federal courts. She is the Herman O. Loewenstein Chair Emerita at the Vanderbilt University Law School.
Go to Profile#11636
L. Neil Smith
#11647
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
Lester Neil Smith III , better known as L. Neil Smith, was an American libertarian science fiction author and political activist. His works include the trilogy of Lando Calrissian novels, all published in 1983: Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu, Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon, and Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka. He also wrote the novels Pallas, The Forge of the Elders, and The Probability Broach, each of which won the Libertarian Futurist Society's annual Prometheus Award for best libertarian science fiction novel. In 2016, Smith received a Special Award f...
Go to Profile#11637
Bo Jackson
#11648
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Vincent Edward "Bo" Jackson is an American former professional baseball and football player. He is the only professional athlete in history to be named an All-Star in two major North American sports. Jackson's elite achievements in multiple sports have given him the reputation as one of the greatest athletes of all time.
Go to Profile#11638
Cem Yıldırım
#11649
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Cem Yalçın Yıldırım is a Turkish mathematician who specializes in number theory. Education Yıldırım obtained his B.Sc from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey and his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1990. His advisor was John Friedlander. He is currently a faculty member at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey.
Go to Profile#11639
Steven Landsburg
#11650
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Steven E. Landsburg is an American professor of economics at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. From 1989 to 1995, he taught at Colorado State University. Landsburg is also an outspoken commentator on economic, legal, and political issues whose comments have sometimes been regarded as controversial.
Go to Profile#11640
Eric Fossum
#11651
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
#11641
Christian Graf von Krockow
#11652
Overall Influence
1927 - 2002 (75 years)
Count Christian von Krockow , writing in German as Christian Graf von Krockow, was a German writer and political scientist. Count Christian von Krockow was born in Rumbske near the city of Stolp , Poland, the scion of a historic Pomeranian noble family. In 1945, as the Red Army advanced into the Province of Pomerania, he became a refugee and fled to Hamburg.
Go to Profile#11642
Alan Schechter
#11653
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Alan Schechter is a political scientist. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. He was educated at Amherst College, where he received his AB, and at Columbia University, where he earned his PhD.
Go to Profile#11643
André Neves
#11654
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
André da Silva Graça Arroja Neves is a Portuguese mathematician and a professor at the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2016. In 2012, jointly with Fernando Codá Marques, he solved the Willmore conjecture.
Go to Profile#11644
Henry Lee
#11655
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
#11645
John Arlott
#11656
Overall Influence
1914 - 1991 (77 years)
Leslie Thomas John Arlott, was an English journalist, author and cricket commentator for the BBC's Test Match Special. He was also a poet and wine connoisseur. With his poetic phraseology, he became a cricket commentator noted for his "wonderful gift for evoking cricketing moments" by the BBC.
Go to Profile#11646
Stephen Hicks
#11657
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Stephen Ronald Craig Hicks is a Canadian-American philosopher. He teaches at Rockford University, where he also directs the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. Career Hicks earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Guelph, and his Doctor of Philosophy from Indiana University Bloomington. His doctoral thesis was a defense of foundationalism.
Go to Profile#11647
Margunn Bjørnholt
#11658
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Margunn Bjørnholt is a Norwegian sociologist and economist. She is a research professor at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies and a professor of sociology at the University of Bergen. Her research has focused on financial institutions, management and working life and later on gender equality, migration and violence. She has also worked as a consultant, a civil servant, served as an expert to the European Commission and been president of the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights.
Go to Profile#11648
J. B. Gunn
#11659
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
John Battiscombe "J. B." Gunn , known as Ian or Iain, was a British physicist, who spent most of his career in the United States. He discovered the Gunn effect, which led to the invention of the Gunn diode, the first inexpensive source of microwave power that did not require vacuum tubes. He was born John Battiscombe Gunn, but only used that name in legal documents.
Go to Profile#11649
Kashim Shettima
#11660
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Kashim Shettima Mustapha is a Nigerian politician who is the 15th and current vice president of Nigeria. He previously served as senator for Borno Central from 2019 to 2023, and as the governor of Borno State from 2011 to 2019.
Go to Profile#11650
Alex Hershaft
#11661
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Alex Hershaft is an American animal rights activist, Holocaust survivor, and co-founder and president of the Farm Animal Rights Movement , the nation's oldest organization devoted exclusively to promoting the rights of animals not to be raised for food. Previously, he has had a 30-year career in materials science and environmental consulting and a prominent role in movements for religious freedom and environmental quality.
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