Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

#11701

Ned Kock

#11712

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Nereu Florencio "Ned" Kock is a Brazilian-American philosopher. He is a Texas A&M Regents Professor of Information Systems at Texas A&M International University. Background Kock holds a B.E.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Federal Technological University of Parana at Curitiba, Brazil, a M.Sc. in computer science from the Institute of Aeronautical Technology, Brazil, and a Ph.D. in management with a concentration in information systems from the School of Management Studies, University of Waikato, New Zealand.

#11702

Thomas Chang

#11713

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Thomas Ming Swi Chang, is a Chinese-born Canadian inventor, physician, and physiologist. While an undergraduate at McGill University in 1957, Chang invented the world's first artificial cell. Working with improvised materials like perfume atomizers inside his dorm room turned laboratory, Chang managed to create a permeable plastic sack that would effectively carry haemoglobin almost as effectively as a natural blood cell. He went on to complete his B.Sc. , M.D., C.M. , and Ph.D degrees at McGill. Chang's career continued as founder and Director of the Artificial Cells and Organs Research Ce...

#11703

Kevin Smith

#11714

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Kevin Patrick Smith is an American director, producer, screenwriter, actor and comic book writer. He came to prominence with the low-budget comedy buddy film Clerks , which he wrote, directed, co-produced, and acted in as the character Silent Bob of stoner duo Jay and Silent Bob, characters who also appeared in Smith's later films Mallrats , Chasing Amy , Dogma , Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back , Clerks II , Jay and Silent Bob Reboot , and Clerks III which are set primarily in his home state of New Jersey. While not strictly sequential, the films have crossover plot elements, character refere...

#11704

Margot Lee Shetterly

Margot Lee Shetterly

#11715

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Margot Lee Shetterly is an American nonfiction writer who has also worked in investment banking and media startups. Her first book, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race , is about African-American women mathematicians working at NASA who were instrumental to the success of the United States space program. She sold the movie rights while still working on the book, and it was adapted as a feature film of the same name, Hidden Figures . For several years Shetterly and her husband lived and worked in Mexico, where they founded an...

#11705

Donaldo Macedo

#11716

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Donaldo Pereira Macedo is a Cape Verdean-American critical theorist, linguist, and expert on literacy, critical pedagogy and multicultural education studies. Until 2019 he was Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He was also the founder of the Master of Arts Program in Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and chaired the program until approximately 2012.

#11706

Desmond Ford

#11717

Overall Influence

1929 - 2019 (90 years)

Desmond Ford was an Australian theologian who studied evangelicalism. Within the Seventh-day Adventist Church he was a controversial figure. He was dismissed from ministry in the Adventist church in 1980, following his critique of the church's investigative judgment teaching. He had since worked through the non-denominational evangelical ministry Good News Unlimited. Ford disagreed with some aspects of traditional Adventist end-time beliefs. However, he still defended a conservative view of scripture, the Seventh-day Sabbath, and a vegetarian lifestyle. He viewed the writings of Ellen G. Whit...

#11707

Peter D. Kramer

#11718

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Peter D. Kramer is an American psychiatrist and faculty member of Brown Medical School specializing in the area of clinical depression. Early life Peter D. Kramer was born on October 22, 1948, in New York City to Jewish Holocaust survivors. He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor of arts degree in 1970 and an MD in 1976. He was a Marshall Scholar in literature at University College London in 1970-72.

#11708

Mina Bissell

#11719

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Mina J. Bissell is an Iranian-American biologist known for her research on breast cancer. In particular, she has studied the effects of a cell's microenvironment, including its extracellular matrix, on tissue function.

#11709

Otto Piene

#11720

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

Otto Piene was a German-American artist specializing in kinetic and technology-based art, often working collaboratively. He lived and worked in Düsseldorf, Germany; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Groton, Massachusetts.

#11710

Jeff Easley

#11721

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Jeff Easley is an oil painter who creates fantasy artwork for role-playing games, comics, and magazines, as well as non-fantasy commercial art. Early life Easley was born in Nicholasville, Kentucky in 1954. He spent time drawing as a child, particularly creatures such as ghosts and monsters. "I watched lots of monster movies on the late show, and built every monster model kit I could get my hands on," he said. He attended high school in Nicholasville, and then earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Murray State University in Kentucky.

#11711

Tamar Ziegler

#11722

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Tamar Debora Ziegler is an Israeli mathematician known for her work in ergodic theory, combinatorics and number theory. She holds the Henry and Manya Noskwith Chair of Mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University.

#11712

Margo Seltzer

#11723

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Margo Ilene Seltzer is a professor and researcher in computer systems. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, Seltzer was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and director at the Center for Research on Computation and Society.

#11713

Akira Iriye

#11724

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

is a historian of diplomatic history, international, and transnational history. He taught at University of Chicago and Harvard University until his retirement in 2005. In 1988 he served as president of the American Historical Association, the only Japanese citizen to do so, and also served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. In 2005, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold and Silver Star, one of Japan's highest civilian honors. He was also awarded Japan's Yoshida Shigeru Prize for best book in public history. He has been a member of the Amer...

#11714

James Steinberg

#11725

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

James Braidy Steinberg is an American academic and political advisor, and former United States deputy secretary of state. He has served as the dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University since November 1, 2021. Prior to his deanship, he was a professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University

#11715

Rob Buckman

#11726

Overall Influence

1948 - 2011 (63 years)

Robert Alexander Amiel Buckman was a British doctor of medicine, comedian and author, and president of the Humanist Association of Canada. He first appeared in a Cambridge University Footlights Revue in 1968, and subsequently presented several television and radio programmes about medicine, as well as appearing on comedy programmes such as Just a Minute. He was also the author of many popular books on medicine.

#11716

Gene Grossman

#11727

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Gene Michael Grossman is an American economist who is the Jacob Viner Professor of International Economics at Princeton University. He is known for his research on international trade, in large part focusing on the relationship between economic growth and trade and the political economy of trade policy. He is also known for his work on the environmental Kuznets curve.

#11717

Sankar Chatterjee

#11728

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Sankar Chatterjee is a paleontologist, the Paul W. Horn Professor of Geosciences at Texas Tech University and Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of Texas Tech University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta in 1970 and was a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution from 1977-1978.

#11718

Mehmet Toner

#11729

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Mehmet Toner is a Turkish biomedical engineer. He is currently the Helen Andrus Benedict Professor of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, with a joint appointment as professor at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology .

#11719

Roger Crisp

#11730

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Roger Stephen Crisp is fellow and tutor in philosophy at St. Anne's College, Oxford. He holds the university posts of Professor of Moral Philosophy and Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy. His work falls principally within the field of ethics, in particular metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. In addition, he is chairman of the Management Committee of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.

#11720

Kate Warner

#11731

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Catherine Ann Warner is an Australian lawyer and legal academic who was the 28th Governor of Tasmania from 2014 to 2021. Early life and education Warner was born Catherine Ann Friend in Hobart, Tasmania, and attended St Michael's Collegiate School and the University of Tasmania, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Laws with Honours on 15 April 1970, and with a Master of Laws by research thesis on 7 December 1978. Her master's thesis focused on "Presentence Psychiatric Reports in Tasmania".

#11721

Timothy McVeigh

Timothy McVeigh

#11732

Overall Influence

1968 - 2001 (33 years)

Timothy James McVeigh was an American domestic terrorist who perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995. The bombing killed 168 people, 19 of whom were children, injured 680, and destroyed one-third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

#11722

David Zippel

#11733

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

David Joel Zippel is an American musical theatre lyricist, director, and producer. Early life and education Zippel was born and raised in Easton, Pennsylvania in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania. Falling in love with theater as a child, Zippel first articulated his life's ambition to become a lyricist and director in junior high school.

#11723

Eusébio

#11734

Overall Influence

1942 - 2014 (72 years)

Eusébio da Silva Ferreira , nicknamed the "Black Panther", the "Black Pearl" or "O Rei" , was a Portuguese footballer who played as a striker. He is considered one of the greatest players of all time as well as Benfica's best player ever. He was known for his speed, technique, athleticism and right-footed shot, making him a prolific goalscorer, accumulating 733 goals in 745 matches.

#11724

Danny Cohen

#11735

Overall Influence

1937 - 2019 (82 years)

Danny Cohen was an Israeli American computer scientist specializing in computer networking. He was involved in the ARPAnet project and helped develop various fundamental applications for the Internet. He was one of the key figures behind the separation of TCP and IP ; this allowed the later creation of UDP.

#11725

Leszek Borysiewicz

Leszek Borysiewicz

#11736

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Sir Leszek Krzysztof Borysiewicz is a British professor, immunologist and scientific administrator. He served as the 345th Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, his term of office started on 1 October 2010 and ended on 1 October 2017. Borysiewicz also served as chief executive of the Medical Research Council of the UK from 2007-2010 and has held the role of chairman at Cancer Research UK since 2016.

#11726

Gene V. Glass

#11737

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Gene V Glass is an American statistician and researcher working in educational psychology and the social sciences. According to the science writer Morton Hunt, he coined the term "meta-analysis" and illustrated its first use in his presidential address to the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco in April, 1976. The most extensive illustration of the technique was to the literature on psychotherapy outcome studies, published in 1980 by Johns Hopkins University Press under the title Benefits of Psychotherapy by Mary Lee Smith, Gene V Glass, and Thomas I. Miller. Gene V Gl...

#11727

Andrew Linklater

#11738

Overall Influence

1949 - 2023 (74 years)

Andrew Linklater FAcSS was a British international relations academic, and Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. In 2000, he was featured as one of the fifty thinkers in Martin Griffith's Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations.

#11728

Masayo Takahashi

#11739

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Masayo Takahashi is a Japanese medical physician, ophthalmologist and stem cell researcher. Takahashi serves as a project research leader at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe focusing on the clinical application of iPS Cell technology on macular degeneration. In 2014, Takahashi was named by British science journal Nature as one of "five to watch" global scientists for her groundbreaking work in regenerative medicine.

#11729

Antonio Tabucchi

Antonio Tabucchi

#11740

Overall Influence

1943 - 2012 (69 years)

Antonio Tabucchi was an Italian writer and academic who taught Portuguese language and literature at the University of Siena, Italy. Deeply in love with Portugal, he was an expert, critic and translator of the works of Fernando Pessoa from whom he drew the conceptions of saudade, of fiction and of the heteronyms. Tabucchi was first introduced to Pessoa's works in the 1960s when attending the Sorbonne. He was so charmed that when he returned to Italy, he took an introductory course in Portuguese for a better comprehension of the poet.

#11730

Revaz Gamkrelidze

#11741

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (99 years)

Revaz Valerianovic Gamkrelidze is a Georgian and Soviet mathematician known for his work in optimal control theory and related fields. Gamkrelidze is a member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the founding editor of Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences.

#11731

Betty Sue Flowers

Betty Sue Flowers

#11742

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Betty Sue Flowers is the former director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum and an Emerita Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Flowers is a native Texan and graduated from the University of Texas and the University of London . She is the author of a number of texts, particularly relating to Christina Rossetti. She also edited the book and acted as a consultant to the 1988 documentary, The Power of Myth, a series of interviews between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers.

#11732

Kenneth Kunen

#11743

Overall Influence

1943 - 2020 (77 years)

Herbert Kenneth Kunen was a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who worked in set theory and its applications to various areas of mathematics, such as set-theoretic topology and measure theory. He also worked on non-associative algebraic systems, such as loops, and used computer software, such as the Otter theorem prover, to derive theorems in these areas.

#11733

Naomi Lamoreaux

#11744

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Naomi Raboy Lamoreaux is an American economic historian, specializing in US business and technological history. She is the Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics and History of Economics and History at Yale University and an emeritus professor at UCLA and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has worked widely on business, economic, and financial history with perhaps her most noted works being her 1988 book The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 and her 1996 book Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections and her Economic Development in Industrial New England.

#11734

Alain Resnais

#11745

Overall Influence

1922 - 2014 (92 years)

Alain Resnais was a French film director and screenwriter whose career extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct short films including Night and Fog , an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. He proceeded to make feature films. His films frequently explore the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he was noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives. Throughout his career, he won many awards from international film festivals and academies.

#11735

Wilfried Schmid

Wilfried Schmid

#11746

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Wilfried Schmid is a German-American mathematician who works in Hodge theory, representation theory, and automorphic forms. After graduating as valedictorian of Princeton University's class of 1964, Schmid earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley in 1967 under the direction of Phillip Griffiths, and then taught at Berkeley and Columbia University, becoming a full professor at Columbia at age 27. In 1978, he moved to Harvard University, where he served as the Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics until his retirement in 2019.

#11736

E. Tory Higgins

E. Tory Higgins

#11747

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Edward Tory Higgins is the Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology and Business, and Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. Higgins' research areas include motivation and cognition, judgment and decision-making, and social cognition. Most of his works focus on priming, self-discrepancy theory, and regulatory focus theory. He is also the author of Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works, and Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing the World for Success and Influence .

#11737

Amadou Koné

#11748

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Amadou Koné is a writer from Cote d'Ivoire. Childhood He is the son of Soma Denbie and Kahou Sirima . Amadou Koné was born in May 1953 in the small village of Tangora in the circle of Banfora, today Burkina Faso. Grandson of Dan Kalmo whose big brother, the legendary warlord Fanhikroi, an opponent of colonial rule, was assassinated on the road leading from Banfora to Bobo Dioulasso, Amadou Kone learn very early sense of honor by his father who, exasperated by the abuses of the French settlers and the new leaders in their pay, chose to immigrate to the Ayamé region Basse, Côte d'Ivoire, where...

#11738

A. Raymond Randolph

A. Raymond Randolph

#11749

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Arthur Raymond Randolph is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was appointed to the Court in 1990 and assumed senior status on November 1, 2008.

#11739

Obaid Siddiqi

#11750

Overall Influence

1932 - 2013 (81 years)

Obaid Siddiqi FRS was an Indian National Research Professor and the Founder-Director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research National Center for Biological Sciences. He made seminal contributions to the field of behavioural neurogenetics using the genetics and neurobiology of Drosophila.

#11740

Rehman Sobhan

#11751

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Rehman Sobhan is a Bangladeshi economist. Regarded as one of the country's top public thinkers, he is the founder of the Centre for Policy Dialogue. Sobhan is an icon of the Bangladeshi independence movement due to his role as a spokesman of the Provisional Government of Bangladesh in the United States during the Bangladesh Liberation War. He was awarded the Independence Day Award, Bangladesh's highest civilian honour, in 2008.

#11741

Georges Vigarello

#11752

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Georges Vigarello is a French historian and sociologist. He is a Research Director at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales of Paris. His main research interests include the sociology of the body, the history of hygiene, representations of the body over the centuries, and the social dimensions of sport.

#11742

Suresh Tendulkar

#11753

Overall Influence

1939 - 2011 (72 years)

Suresh D. Tendulkar was an Indian economist and former chief of the National Statistical Commission. Tendulkar was a member of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Economic Advisory Council from 2004 to 2008 and then served as its chairman from 2008 to 2009 when C. Rangarajan vacated the post to enter the Rajya Sabha. He died on 21 June 2011, as a result of cardiac arrest at Prayag Hospital, Pune .

#11743

John R. Meyer

#11754

Overall Influence

1927 - 2009 (82 years)

John Robert Meyer was an American economist and educator. Meyer is credited with creating the field of transport economics and was one of the pioneers of cliometrics. Career Born in Pasco, Meyer attended Pacific University from 1945 to 1946, after which he served in the United States Naval Reserve from 1945 to 1948. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Washington in 1950, and a doctorate from Harvard University in 1955. His dissertation topic coincided with that of a Harvard classmate, Edwin Kuh, leading them to merge both papers and publish it as The Investment Decision: ...

#11744

Andrea Branzi

#11755

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Andrea Branzi was an Italian architect, designer, and academic. He was born and raised in Florence, though he lived and worked in Milan for much of his career. He was a professor and chairman of the School of Interior Design at the Polytechnic University of Milan until 2009.

#11745

Mladen Dolar

#11756

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Mladen Dolar is a Slovene philosopher, psychoanalyst, cultural theorist and film critic. Dolar was born in Maribor as the son of the literary critic Jaro Dolar. In 1978 he graduated in Philosophy and French language at the University of Ljubljana, under the supervision of the renowned philosopher Božidar Debenjak. He later studied at the University of Paris VII and the University of Westminster.

#11746

Ted Nugent

#11757

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Theodore Anthony Nugent is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, and political activist. He initially gained fame as the lead guitarist and occasional vocalist of The Amboy Dukes, a band formed in 1963 that played psychedelic rock and hard rock. After dissolving the band, he embarked on a successful solo career. His first three solo albums, Ted Nugent , Free-for-All and Cat Scratch Fever , were certified multi-platinum in the United States. His latest album, Detroit Muscle, was released in 2022.

#11747

Paul Kagame

#11758

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Paul Kagame is a Rwandan politician and former military officer who has been the fourth President of Rwanda since 2000. He was previously a commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front , a rebel armed force which invaded Rwanda in 1990. The RPF was one of the parties of the conflict during the Rwandan Civil War and the armed force which ended the Rwandan genocide. He was considered Rwanda's de facto leader when he was Vice President and Minister of Defence under President Pasteur Bizimungu from 1994 to 2000 after which the vice-presidential post was abolished.

#11748

Şevket Pamuk

#11759

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Şevket Pamuk is Professor of Economics and Economic History at Boğaziçi University. Between 2007 and 2013, Pamuk was chair of Contemporary Turkish Studies at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science.

#11749

Peter Birks

#11760

Overall Influence

1941 - 2004 (63 years)

Peter Brian Herrenden Birks was the Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford from 1989 until his death. He also became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989, and an honorary Queen's counsel in 1995. He was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is widely credited as having sparked academic enthusiasm for the English law of Restitution, and is often considered to have been one of the greatest English legal scholars of the 20th century.

#11750

Ernest Krausz

#11761

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Ernest Krausz was an Israeli professor of sociology who served as rector and Acting President of Bar Ilan University. He also taught at Netanya Academic College. Biography Ernest Krausz was born in Romania. His parents were Rabbi Moshe Eliezer Krausz and Beila , and he and his two sisters were raised in Alba Iulia, where his father was Chief Rabbi.

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