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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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School

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Ranking

List of the most influential people

#11801

Charles Baxter

#11812

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Charles Morley Baxter is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Biography Baxter was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to John and Mary Barber Baxter. He graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul in 1969. In 1974 he received his PhD in English from the University at Buffalo with a thesis on Djuna Barnes, Malcolm Lowry, and Nathanael West.

#11802

Rocky Gerung

#11813

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Rocky Gerung is an Indonesian political commentator, philosopher, academic and public intellectual. Early life Rocky began studying at the University of Indonesia in 1979. He first entered the department of political science, which at that time joined the Faculty of Social Sciences, before deciding to move to the department of philosophy and graduated in 1986. During college, Rocky was close to the socialist-leaning activists such as Marsillam Simanjuntak, Hariman Siregar, and others.

#11803

Steven Brams

#11814

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Steven J. Brams is an American game theorist and political scientist at the New York University Department of Politics. Brams is best known for using the techniques of game theory, public choice theory, and social choice theory to analyze voting systems and fair division. He is one of the independent discoverers of approval voting, as well as extensions of approval voting to multiple-winner elections to give proportional representation of different interests.

#11804

Edmund Muskie

#11815

Overall Influence

1914 - 1996 (82 years)

Edmund Sixtus Muskie was an American statesman and political leader who served as the 58th United States secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter from 1980 to 1981, a United States senator from Maine from 1959 to 1980, the 64th governor of Maine from 1955 to 1959, and a member of the Maine House of Representatives from 1946 to 1951. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for vice president in the 1968 presidential election.

#11805

Gonzalo Vial Correa

#11816

Overall Influence

1930 - 2009 (79 years)

Gonzalo Vial Correa was a Chilean historian, lawyer and journalist. He was a member of the State Defense Council and the Council on Ethics in Social Media. In addition he was president of the Barnechea Foundation for Education, which he founded with his wife, María Luisa Vial Cox.

#11806

Dickson Despommier

Dickson Despommier

#11817

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Dickson D. Despommier is an emeritus professor of microbiology and Public Health at Columbia University. From 1971 to 2009, he conducted research on intracellular parasitism and taught courses on parasitic diseases, medical ecology and ecology. Despommier has received media coverage for his ideas on vertical farming.

#11807

John W. Kingdon

#11818

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

John Wells Kingdon is Professor Emeritus and was Acting Chair of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was a Guggenheim fellow. He resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is also a fellow at the Center for Advanced Behavioral Studies at Stanford. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan and as President of the Midwest Political Science Association, and has often been a Guest Scholar at the Brookings...

#11808

Joan Rivers

#11819

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Joan Alexandra Molinsky , known professionally as Joan Rivers, was an American comedian, actress, producer, writer, and television host. She was noted for her blunt, often controversial comedic persona that was heavily self-deprecating and acerbic, especially towards celebrities and politicians, delivered in her signature New York accent. She is considered a pioneer of women in comedy. She received an Emmy Award and a Grammy Award, as well as nomination for a Tony Award.

#11809

David Sayre

#11820

Overall Influence

1924 - 2012 (88 years)

David Sayre was an American scientist, credited with the early development of direct methods for protein crystallography and of diffraction microscopy . While working at IBM he was part of the initial team of ten programmers who created FORTRAN, and later suggested the use of electron beam lithography for the fabrication of X-ray Fresnel zone plates.

#11810

Henry Diltz

#11821

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Henry Stanford Diltz is an American folk musician and photographer who has been active since the 1960s. Career Photography Among the bands Diltz played with was the Modern Folk Quartet. While a member of the Modern Folk Quartet, Diltz became interested in photography, met The Monkees, played on some of their recording sessions, and took numerous photographs of the band, many of which have been published.

#11811

Judith Miller

#11822

Overall Influence

1941 - 2017 (76 years)

Judith Miller was a French psychoanalyst, born in Antibes. She was the daughter of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Sylvia Bataille. Her spouse was Lacanian Jacques-Alain Miller. Work As a Maoist philosophy lecturer at Vincennes in Paris, Miller's radicalism was used as a reason for her philosophy department to be decertified. This occurred after she handed out course credit to someone she met on a bus, and subsequently publicly declared in a radio interview that the university is a capitalist institution, and that she would do everything she could to make it run as badly as possible. Afte...

#11812

Naomi Wallace

#11823

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Naomi Wallace is an American playwright, screenwriter and poet from Kentucky. She is widely known for her plays, and has received several distinguished awards for her work. Biography Naomi Wallace was born in Prospect, Kentucky, to Henry F. Wallace, a photo journalist and correspondent for Time and Life magazines, and Sonja de Vries, a Dutch justice and human rights worker.

#11813

Robert Irwin

#11824

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

Robert Walter Irwin was an American installation artist who explored perception and the conditional in art, often through site-specific, architectural interventions that alter the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space.

#11814

Rob Schnapf

#11825

Overall Influence

Rob Schnapf is an American record producer and musician. He was the co-producer of Elliott Smith's albums Either/Or, XO , Figure 8 and From a Basement on the Hill, for which he was recruited by Smith's family to complete after Smith's death.

#11815

Reynold Xin

#11826

Overall Influence

Reynold Xin is a computer scientist and engineer specializing in big data, distributed systems, and cloud computing. He is a co-founder and Chief Architect of Databricks. He is best known for his work on Apache Spark, a leading open-source Big Data project. He was designer and lead developer of the GraphX, Project Tungsten, and Structured Streaming components and he co-designed DataFrames, all of which are part of the core Apache Spark distribution; he also served as the release manager for Spark's 2.0 release.

#11816

Nikita Nekrasov

Nikita Nekrasov

#11827

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Nikita Alexandrovich Nekrasov is a mathematical and theoretical physicist at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and C.N.Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, and a Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

#11817

Peter Elias

#11828

Overall Influence

1923 - 2001 (78 years)

Peter Elias was a pioneer in the field of information theory. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he was a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty from 1953 to 1991. In 1955, Elias introduced convolutional codes as an alternative to block codes. He also established the binary erasure channel and proposed list decoding of error-correcting codes as an alternative to unique decoding.

#11818

Thomas L. Magnanti

#11829

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Thomas Lee Magnanti is an American engineer and Institute Professor and former Dean of the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Magnanti served as the founding president of the Singapore University of Technology and Design from 2009 to 2017.

#11819

Joseph S. B. Mitchell

Joseph S. B. Mitchell

#11830

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Joseph S. B. Mitchell is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is Distinguished Professor and Department Chair of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Research Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University.

#11820

Juan Pablo Montoya

Juan Pablo Montoya

#11831

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Juan Pablo Montoya Roldán , is a Colombian racing driver who has competed in open-wheel car, sports car and stock car racing events. He won the Championship Auto Racing Teams Drivers' Championship in 1999; the Indianapolis 500 in 2000 and 2015; the 24 Hours of Daytona in 2007, 2008 and 2013 and the IMSA SportsCar Championship in 2019.

#11821

Peretz Lavie

#11832

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Peretz Lavie was the 16th president of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, having taken the position on 1 October 2009 through September 2019. Lavie, an expert in the psychophysiology of sleep and sleep disorders, heads the Technion Sleep Laboratory and holds the André Ballard Chair in Biological Psychiatry. Between 1993 and 1999 he served as dean of the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, and between 2001 and 2008, as the Technion’s vice president for resource development and external relations.

#11822

Kevin Volpp

#11833

Overall Influence

Kevin G. Volpp is an American behavioral economist and Mark V. Pauly President's Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School. He is the Director of the Penn Center for Health Incentives & Behavioral Economics ..

#11823

Héctor García-Molina

#11834

Overall Influence

1954 - 2019 (65 years)

Héctor García-Molina was a Mexican-American computer scientist and Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was the advisor to Google co-founder Sergey Brin from 1993 to 1997 when Brin was a computer science student at Stanford.

#11824

Elie Kedourie

#11835

Overall Influence

1926 - 1992 (66 years)

Elie Kedourie was a British historian of the Middle East. He wrote from a liberal perspective, dissenting from many points of view taken as orthodox in the field. From 1953 to 1990, he taught at the London School of Economics, where he became Professor of Politics. Kedourie was famous for his rejection of what he called the "Chatham House version" of history, which viewed the story of the modern Middle East as one of continuous victimisation at the hands of the West, and instead castigated left-wing Western intellectuals for what he regarded as a naively romantic view of Islam.

#11825

Lisa D. Cook

#11836

Overall Influence

Lisa DeNell Cook is an American economist who has served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors since May 23, 2022. She is the first African American woman and first woman of color to sit on the Board. Before her appointment to the Federal Reserve, she was elected to the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

#11826

Ruth Landes

#11837

Overall Influence

1908 - 1991 (83 years)

Ruth Landes was an American cultural anthropologist best known for studies on the Brazilian religion of Candomblé and her published study on the topic, City of Women . Landes is recognized by some as a pioneer in the study of race and gender relations.

#11827

Lilian Katz

#11838

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Lilian Gonshaw Katz is a professor emerita of early childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where she is also principal investigator for the Illinois Early Learning Project, and a contributor to the Early Childhood and Parenting Collaborative. She founded two journals: Early Childhood Research Quarterly for which she served as editor-in-chief during its first six years, and Early Childhood Research & Practice the first on-line peer-reviewed early-childhood journal for which she remains editor-in-chief. Her scholarly work focused on the developmental stages of a...

#11828

Jack Rothman

#11839

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (99 years)

Jack Rothman is an American sociologist and social worker. He is best known for his work in community organizing within the field of social work. He has authored some 25 books and monographs and lectured extensively on social problems and social change. His core interests include poverty, inequality, racism and multicultural relations, mental health, and community participation.

#11829

David Levine

#11840

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

David Levine was an American artist and illustrator best known for his caricatures in The New York Review of Books. Jules Feiffer has called him "the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th Century".

#11830

Kalyanmoy Deb

#11841

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Kalyanmoy Deb is an Indian computer scientist. Deb is the Herman E. & Ruth J. Koenig Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computing Engineering at Michigan State University. Deb is also a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan State University.

#11831

Charles Rackoff

#11842

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Charles Weill Rackoff is an American cryptologist. Born and raised in New York City, he attended MIT as both an undergraduate and graduate student, and earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1974. He spent a year as a postdoctoral scholar at INRIA in France.

#11832

Henry Chadwick

#11843

Overall Influence

1920 - 2008 (88 years)

Henry Chadwick was a British academic, theologian and Church of England priest. A former dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford – and as such, head of Christ Church, Oxford – he also served as master of Peterhouse, Cambridge.

#11833

Ed Husain

#11844

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Ed Husain is a British author and a professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service in Georgetown University. As a political advisor he has worked with leaders and governments across the world. He is also a senior fellow and director of the Atlantic Council’s N7 Initiative which is focused on peace in the Middle East and broadening and strengthening relationships between Israel and its Arab and Muslim neighbours. He has held senior fellowships at think tanks in London and New York, including at the Council on Foreign Relations at the height of the Arab uprisings . While at CFR, his policy innovation memo led to the US-led creation of a Geneva-based global fund to help counter terrorism.

#11834

Stanley Deser

#11845

Overall Influence

1931 - 2023 (92 years)

Stanley Deser was an American physicist known for his contributions to general relativity. He was an emeritus Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and a senior research associate at California Institute of Technology.

#11835

M. S. Narasimhan

M. S. Narasimhan

#11846

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Mudumbai Seshachalu Narasimhan was an Indian mathematician. His focus areas included number theory, algebraic geometry, representation theory, and partial differential equations. He was a pioneer in the study of moduli spaces of holomorphic vector bundles on projective varieties. His work is considered the foundation for Kobayashi–Hitchin correspondence that links differential geometry and algebraic geometry of vector bundles over complex manifolds. He was also known for his collaboration with mathematician C. S. Seshadri, for their proof of the Narasimhan–Seshadri theorem which proved the n...

#11836

Toni Braxton

#11847

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Toni Michele Braxton is an American R&B singer, songwriter, actress and television personality. She has sold over 70 million records worldwide and is one of the best-selling female artists in history. Braxton has won seven Grammy Awards, nine Billboard Music Awards, seven American Music Awards, and numerous other accolades. In 2011, Braxton was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. In 2017 she was honored with the Legend Award at the Soul Train Music Awards.

#11837

Luís Roberto Barroso

Luís Roberto Barroso

#11848

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Luís Roberto Barroso is a Brazilian law professor, jurist, Justice and President of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil, having been nominated to the position by President Dilma Rousseff in 2013. Since 25 May 2020, Barroso has also served as President of the Superior Electoral Court.

#11838

John E. Laird

#11849

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

John E. Laird is a computer scientist who, with Paul Rosenbloom and Allen Newell, created the Soar cognitive architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. Laird is a Professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of Michigan.

#11839

Monty Newborn

#11850

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Monroe "Monty" Newborn , former chairman of the Computer Chess Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, is a professor emeritus of computer science at McGill University in Montreal . He briefly served as president of the International Computer Chess Association and co-wrote a computer chess program named Ostrich In the 1970's.

#11840

Dina Powell

#11851

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Dina Powell, also known as Dina Powell McCormick is an American financial executive, philanthropist, and political advisor, best known for having been the United States Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy to President Donald Trump.

#11841

Roger Brown

#11852

Overall Influence

1925 - 1997 (72 years)

Roger William Brown was an American psychologist. He was known for his work in social psychology and in children's language development. Brown taught at Harvard University from 1952 until 1957 and from 1962 until 1994, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1957 until 1962. His scholarly books include Words and Things: An Introduction to Language , Social Psychology , Psycholinguistics , A First Language: The Early Stages , and Social Psychology: The Second Edition . He authored numerous journal articles and book chapters.

#11842

Maw-Kuen Wu

#11853

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Maw-Kuen Wu is a Taiwanese physicist specializing in superconductivity, low-temperature physics, and high-pressure physics. He was a professor of physics at University of Alabama , Columbia University, and National Tsing Hua University, the Director of the Institute of Physics at Academia Sinica, the president of the National Dong Hwa University, and is currently a distinguished research fellow of the Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica.

#11843

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

#11854

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Hugh Christopher Edmund Fearnley-Whittingstall is an English celebrity chef, television personality, journalist, food writer, and campaigner on food and environmental issues. Fearnley-Whittingstall hosted the River Cottage series on the UK television channel Channel 4, in which audiences observe his efforts to become a self-reliant, downshifted farmer in rural England; Fearnley-Whittingstall feeds himself, his family and friends with locally produced and sourced fruits, vegetables, fish, eggs, and meat. He has also become a campaigner on issues related to food production and the environment, ...

#11844

Chris DiBona

#11855

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Chris DiBona was the director of open source at Google from August 2004 until January 2023. The open source team at Google oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects and patches on Google Code. In his former work on Google's public sector software, he looked after Google Moderator and the polling locations API and election results.

#11845

Ruth R. Benerito

Ruth R. Benerito

#11856

Overall Influence

1916 - 2013 (97 years)

Ruth Mary Rogan Benerito was an American chemist and inventor known for her work related to the textile industry, notably including the development of wash-and-wear cotton fabrics. She held 55 patents.

#11846

Hans Frauenfelder

Hans Frauenfelder

#11857

Overall Influence

1922 - 2022 (100 years)

Hans Frauenfelder was an American physicist and biophysicist notable for his discovery of perturbed angular correlation in 1951. In the modern day, PAC spectroscopy is widely used in the study of condensed matter physics. Within biophysics, he is known for his experimental and theoretical research on the dynamical behavior of protein tertiary structure.

#11847

Christian de Boissieu

Christian de Boissieu

#11858

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Christian de Boissieu is a French professor of economics at Pantheon-Sorbonne University, Paris. Biography Christian de Boissieu received a Ph.D. in economics in 1973 at the University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne. He was post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University and Northwestern University , and visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota and at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System .

#11848

Bill Maher

#11859

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

William Maher is an American comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television host. He is known for the HBO political talk show Real Time with Bill Maher and the similar late-night show called Politically Incorrect , originally on Comedy Central and later on ABC. In 2022, Maher started the podcast Club Random.

#11849

Stephen Kershnar

#11860

Overall Influence

Stephen Kershnar is an American philosopher, a philosophy professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia , and an attorney. In 2022, Kershnar discussed his views and a book which question the immorality of "adult-child sex." His comments and the subsequent backlash led to his barring from the campus and a currently pending investigation.

#11850

Kai Brodersen

#11861

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Kai Brodersen is a contemporary ancient historian and classicist on the faculty of the University of Erfurt. He has edited, and translated, both ancient works and modern classical studies. His research focuses on "Applied Sciences" in antiquity, geography, historiography, rhetoric and ancient jokes, mythography and paradoxography, Septuagint studies and Aristeas, inscriptions and curse tablets, early Greek and Hellenistic history, Roman provinces , women and men in the Ancient World, turning points of Ancient History, history of classical scholarship and reception, often with twist - plus a ...

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