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
#11901
Piers Morgan
#11912
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Piers Stefan Pughe-Morgan is an English broadcaster, journalist, writer, and television personality. He began his career in 1988 at the tabloid The Sun. In 1994, aged 29, he was appointed editor of the News of the World by Rupert Murdoch, which made him the youngest editor of a British national newspaper in more than half a century. From 1995, Morgan edited the Daily Mirror, but was fired in 2004. He was the editorial director of First News from 2006 to 2007. In 2014, Morgan became the first editor-at-large of the MailOnline website's US operation.
Go to Profile#11902
Michael Shackleford
#11913
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Michael Shackleford, , also known as "The Wizard of Odds" , is an American mathematician and an actuary. He is best known for his professional analysis of the mathematics of the casino games. He is also an adjunct professor of actuarial science and mathematics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He became interested in the mathematics of gambling at a young age after reading John Scarne's Guide to Casino Gambling.
Go to Profile#11903
Howard Nemerov
#11914
Overall Influence
1920 - 1991 (71 years)
Howard Nemerov was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov , he won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize.
Go to Profile#11904
Steven Gundry
#11915
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Steven R. Gundry is an American physician and low-carbohydrate diet author. He is a former cardiac surgeon and cardiac surgery researcher who runs an experimental clinic investigating the impact of diet on health. Gundry is the author of The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain, which promotes the controversial lectin-free diet.
Go to Profile#11905
Hiroaki Mitsuya
#11916
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Hiroaki Mitsuya is a Japanese virologist famous for his role in discovery of the anti-HIV drug zidovudine as well as other anti-AIDS drugs including didanosine and zalcitabine . Mitsuya was born in Sasebo, Nagasaki and received his M.D. and Ph.D. from Kumamoto University. He joined the American National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1982, working initially on Human T-lymphotropic virus 1 before switching his attention to HIV. His identification of AZT as an anti-HIV drug, as well as the anti-HIV properties of didanosine and zalcitabine, was made in 1985. He was appointed Profes...
Go to Profile#11906
Robert Galambos
#11917
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Robert Carl Galambos was an American neuroscientist whose pioneering research demonstrated how bats use echolocation for navigation purposes, as well as studies on how sound is processed in the brain.
Go to Profile#11907
Michael Witbrock
#11918
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Michael John Witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence. Witbrock is a native of New Zealand and is the former Vice President of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc project in an effort to produce a genuine Artificial Intelligence.
Go to Profile#11908
Dan Cruickshank
#11919
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Daniel Gordon Raffan Cruickshank is a British art historian and BBC television presenter, with a special interest in the history of architecture. Professional career Cruickshank holds a BA in Art, Design and Architecture and was formerly a visiting professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Sheffield and a member of the London faculty of the University of Delaware. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Artists, a member of the executive committee of the Georgian Group and on the Architectural Panel of the National Trust, and is an Honorary Fellow of ...
Go to Profile#11909
Peter Bergmann
#11920
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Peter Gabriel Bergmann was a German-American physicist best known for his work with Albert Einstein on a unified field theory encompassing all physical interactions. He also introduced primary and secondary constraints into mechanics.
Go to Profile#11910
Eduardo D. Sontag
#11921
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Eduardo Daniel Sontag is an Argentine-American mathematician, and distinguished university professor at Northeastern University, who works in the fields control theory, dynamical systems, systems molecular biology, cancer and immunology, theoretical computer science, neural networks, and computational biology.
Go to Profile#11911
Armand Mattelart
#11922
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Armand Mattelart is a Belgian sociologist, known as a leftist French scholar. His work deals with media, culture and communication, specially in their historical and international dimensions. Life, experience, and academic work After finishing his undergraduate studies Mattelart joined a community of secular monks in Brittany for one year, but went on to study Law and Political Science at the Catholic University of Louvain. Afterwards he studied demography at the Institute of Demographic Studies in Paris . Upon finishing his studies he was appointed as an expert on the politics of population by the Vatican, and in 1962 was sent to the Universidad Católica de Chile.
Go to Profile#11912
Carlos Chagas Filho
#11923
Overall Influence
1910 - 2000 (90 years)
Carlos Chagas Filho was a Brazilian physician, biologist and scientist active in the field of neuroscience. He was internationally renowned for his investigations on the neural mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of electrogenesis by the electroplaques of electric fishes. He was also an important scientific leader, being one of the founders of the Biophysics Institute of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and was also a president for 16 years of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences .
Go to Profile#11913
Rey Mysterio
#11924
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Óscar Gutiérrez Rubio , better known by his ring name Rey Mysterio, is an American professional wrestler. He is currently signed to WWE, where he performs on the SmackDown brand. The nephew of Rey Misterio, Mysterio began wrestling on the independent circuit in 1989 at the age of 14 before signing with Asistencia Asesoría y Administración in 1992. After brief stints with Extreme Championship Wrestling , the World Wrestling Association , and Wrestle Association R, Mysterio signed with World Championship Wrestling in 1996.
Go to Profile#11914
George Jones
#11925
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
George Glenn Jones was an American country musician, singer, and songwriter. He achieved international fame for his long list of hit records, including his best-known song "He Stopped Loving Her Today", as well as his distinctive voice and phrasing. For the last two decades of his life, Jones was frequently referred to as the greatest living country singer. Country music scholar Bill Malone writes, "For the two or three minutes consumed by a song, Jones immerses himself so completely in its lyrics, and in the mood it conveys, that the listener can scarcely avoid becoming similarly involved." The shape of his nose and facial features earned Jones the nickname "The Possum".
Go to Profile#11915
John Ronan
#11926
Overall Influence
John Ronan is an American architect, designer and educator based in Chicago, in the United States. John Ronan FAIA is founding principal of John Ronan Architects in Chicago, founded in 1999. Education Ronan holds a Master of Architecture degree with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#11916
Adrian Bowyer
#11927
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Adrian Bowyer is an English engineer and mathematician, formerly an academic at the University of Bath. Born in 1952 in London, Bowyer is the older child of the late Rosemary and John Bowyer; the latter was a writer, painter and one of the founders of Zisman, Bowyer and Partners, consulting engineers. Bowyer was educated at Woodroffe School, Lyme Regis and Imperial College London.
Go to Profile#11917
Andrew Browder
#11928
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Andrew Browder was an American mathematician at Brown University. Background Andrew Browder was born in Moscow, Russia, where his father Earl Browder, an American communist from Kansas, United States, was living and working for a period. His mother was Raissa Berkmann, a Russian Jewish woman from St. Petersburg. His brothers were Felix Browder , also born in Moscow, and William Browder . All three brothers had careers in mathematics. Their father returned to the United States in the early 1930s, bringing his family with him. The senior Browder became head of the Communist Party USA. He ran fo...
Go to Profile#11918
Nathan O. Hatch
#11929
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Nathan Orr Hatch is an American academic administrator. He most recently served as the President of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, having been officially installed on October 20, 2005. Before coming to Wake Forest, Hatch was a professor and later dean and provost at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to his career in academic administration, he was a historian who was a leading scholar on issues related to the history of religion in the United States.
Go to Profile#11919
Ben Stiller
#11930
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Benjamin Edward Meara Stiller is an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He is the son of the comedians and actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. Stiller was a member of a group of comedic actors colloquially known as the Frat Pack. His films have grossed more than $2.6 billion in Canada and the United States, with an average of $79 million per film. Throughout his career, he has received various awards and honors, including an Emmy Award, multiple MTV Movie Awards, a Britannia Award and a Teen Choice Award.
Go to Profile#11920
Radenka Maric
#11931
Overall Influence
Radenka Maric is an Bosnian-American engineer and academic who became the 17th president of the University of Connecticut on September 28, 2023. She was the first internal candidate to be named president since Harry J. Hartley in 1990 and is the institution’s second female president. She had served as interim president of the University of Connecticut since February 1, 2022 and previously served as UConn's vice president for research and innovation.
Go to Profile#11921
Stephen Blair Hedges
#11932
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Stephen Blair Hedges is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Science and director of the Center for Biodiversity at Temple University where he researches the tree of life and leads conservation efforts in Haiti and elsewhere. He co-founded Haiti National Trust.
Go to Profile#11922
William A. Bardeen
#11933
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
William Allan Bardeen is an American theoretical physicist who worked at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He is renowned for his foundational work on the chiral anomaly , the Yang-Mills and gravitational anomalies, the development of quantum chromodynamics scheme frequently used in perturbative analysis of experimentally observable processes such as deep inelastic scattering, high energy collisions and flavor changing processes.
Go to Profile#11923
Wim Crouwel
#11934
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Willem Hendrik "Wim" Crouwel was a Dutch graphic designer, type designer, and typographer. Early life and education Between 1947 and 1949, he studied Fine Arts at Academie Minerva in Groningen, the Netherlands. After graduating from a traditional art school, he served for two years in the military. Fresh out of the military, he was hired by an exhibition company in Amsterdam. During an interview in 2011, Crouwel said that his traditional art training hadn't taught him anything about typography, and that he eventually learned it by attending night classes in typography at what is now the Gerri...
Go to Profile#11924
Gray Davis
#11935
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Joseph Graham "Gray" Davis Jr. is an American attorney and former politician who served as the 37th governor of California from 1999 until he was recalled and removed from office in 2003. He is the second state governor in U.S. history to have been recalled, after Lynn Frazier.
Go to Profile#11925
Volkmar Gessner
#11936
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Volkmar Gessner was a German university professor and a socio-legal scholar. Career Gessner studied sociology and law at the University of Munich. He received a doctorate in law from the University of Münster and the habilitation from the faculty of sociology of the University of Bielefeld. After serving as a civil judge in Münster and Recklinghausen, he worked at the Max Planck Institut für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht in Hamburg, where he headed a social science working group after 1975. In 1980, Gessner was appointed professor of Sociology of Law, Comparative Law and European Legal Policy at the University of Bremen.
Go to Profile#11926
Mike Bozzi
#11937
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Mike Bozzi is an American mastering engineer at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Hollywood, California. He won a Grammy Award for Record of the Year for mastering Childish Gambino's "This Is America", and is a six-time nominee for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for his works with Kendrick Lamar and Marwan Pablo and also a six-time nominee for Record of the Year.
Go to Profile#11927
Francisco Tomás y Valiente
#11938
Overall Influence
1932 - 1996 (64 years)
Francisco Tomás y Valiente was a Spanish jurist, historian, and writer. He was professor of history of law in the Autonomous University of Madrid. He presided Spain's Constitutional Court from 1986 to 1992. He was assassinated by ETA in 1996.
Go to Profile#11928
Mickey Rooney
#11939
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Mickey Rooney was an American actor, producer, radio entertainer, and vaudevillian. In a career spanning nearly nine decades, he appeared in more than 300 films and was among the last surviving stars of the silent-film era. He was the top box-office attraction from 1939 to 1941, and one of the best-paid actors of that era. At the height of a career marked by declines and comebacks, Rooney performed the role of Andy Hardy in a series of 16 films in the 1930s and 1940s that epitomized mainstream United States self-image.
Go to Profile#11929
Walter Dean Burnham
#11940
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Walter Dean Burnham was an American political scientist who was an expert on elections and voting patterns. He was known for his quantitative analysis of national trends and patterns in voting behavior, the development of the "Party Systems" model, and the assembling of county election returns for the entire country. He was a professor in the political science department at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#11930
Sukumar Azhikode
#11941
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Koloth Thattarath Sukumaran, popularly known as Sukumar Azhikode was an Indian academic, orator, critic and writer of Malayalam literature, known for his contributions to Malayalam language and insights on Indian philosophy. He was a scholar in Sanskrit, Malayalam, and English languages and his work, Tatvamasi, published in 1984, is a notable work for its detailed interpretation of Indian philosophy, Vedas and Upanishads. He was a recipient of several honours including Sahitya Akademi Award, Kerala Sahithya Akademi Award, Vayalar Award, Vallathol Award and Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, the highest literary award of the Government of Kerala.
Go to Profile#11931
Catherine Clément
#11942
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Catherine Clément is a French philosopher, novelist, feminist, and literary critic, born in Boulogne-Billancourt. She received a degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, and studied under its faculty Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, working in the fields of anthropology and psychoanalysis. A member of the school of French feminism and écriture féminine, she has published books with Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva.
Go to Profile#11932
Roderick Floud
#11943
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Sir Roderick Castle Floud FBA is a British economic historian and a leader in the field of anthropometric history. He has been provost of the London Guildhall University, vice-chancellor and president of the London Metropolitan University, acting dean of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, and provost of Gresham College . He is the son of Bernard Floud MP.
Go to Profile#11933
Ken Loach
#11944
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Kenneth Charles Loach is a British film director and screenwriter. His socially critical directing style and socialism are evident in his film treatment of social issues such as poverty , homelessness , and labour rights .
Go to Profile#11934
Luboš Motl
#11945
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Luboš Motl is a Czech physicist and blogger. He was an assistant professor in physics at Harvard University from 2004 to 2007. His scientific publications were focused on string theory. He is currently a visiting scholar at Rutgers in high energy physics.
Go to Profile#11935
Khaleda Zia
#11946
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Khaleda Zia is a Bangladeshi politician who served as the prime minister of Bangladesh from March 1991 to March 1996, and again from June 2001 to October 2006. She was the first female prime minister of Bangladesh and second female prime minister in the Muslim world, after Benazir Bhutto. She is the widow of former president of Bangladesh Ziaur Rahman. She is the chairperson and leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party since 1984, which was founded by her late husband in 1978.
Go to Profile#11936
Victor Zalgaller
#11947
Overall Influence
1920 - 2020 (100 years)
Victor Abramovich Zalgaller was a Russian-Israeli mathematician in the fields of geometry and optimization. He is best known for the results he achieved on convex polyhedra, linear and dynamic programming, isoperimetry, and differential geometry.
Go to Profile#11937
James Gross
#11948
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
James J. Gross is a psychologist best known for his research in emotion and emotion regulation. He is a professor at Stanford University and the director of the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory.
Go to Profile#11938
Salvatore Pais
#11949
Overall Influence
Salvatore Cezar Pais is an American aerospace engineer and inventor, currently working for the United States Space Force. He formerly worked at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River. His patent applications for the US Navy attracted attention for their potential energy-producing applications, but also doubt about their feasibility, and speculation that they may be scams, pseudoscience, or disinformation intended to mislead the United States' adversaries.
Go to Profile#11939
Stuart Pearce
#11950
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Stuart Pearce is an English professional football manager and former player, who was most recently a first-team coach for Premier League club West Ham United. He was nicknamed "Psycho" for his unforgiving style of play.
Go to Profile#11940
David Canfield Smith
#11951
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David Canfield Smith is an American computer scientist best known for inventing computer icons and the programming technique known as programming by demonstration. His primary emphasis has been in the area of human–computer interaction design. His goal was to make computers easier for ordinary people to use. He is one of the pioneers of the modern graphical user interfaces for computers, having invented such techniques as the desktop metaphor, dialog boxes, and universal commands.
Go to Profile#11941
Bernhard Pörksen
#11952
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Bernhard Pörksen is a German media scholar. Life Bernhard Pörksen studied German language and literature, journalism and biology in Hamburg. At the invitation of Ivan Illich he spent several research periods at Pennsylvania State University. Between 1996 and 1997, he worked both as a freelance journalist and as a voluntary editorial staff member of a newspaper. He has published essays, commentaries and critical contributions to debates in numerous German daily and weekly newspapers, magazines and online media.
Go to Profile#11942
Norman Greenwood
#11953
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Norman Neill Greenwood FRS CChem FRSC was an Australian-British chemist and Emeritus Professor at the University of Leeds. Together with Alan Earnshaw, he wrote the textbook Chemistry of the Elements, first published in 1984.
Go to Profile#11943
Sally Floyd
#11954
Overall Influence
1950 - 2019 (69 years)
Sally Jean Floyd was an American computer scientist known for her work on computer networking. Formerly associated with the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, she retired in 2009 and died in August 2019. She is best known for her work on Internet congestion control, and was in 2007 one of the top-ten most cited researchers in computer science.
Go to Profile#11944
Roger Moore
#11955
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Roger D. Moore was the 1973 recipient of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery . It was given "for their work in the design and implementation of APL\360, setting new standards in simplicity, efficiency, reliability and response time for interactive systems."
Go to Profile#11945
Eugenio Derbez
#11956
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Eugenio González Derbez is a Mexican actor and comedian. He has appeared in many films and television series, including The Book of Life, The Angry Birds Movie 2, and CODA. In the 2010s, he appeared in many American films and television series, such as Jack and Jill, Girl in Progress, Rob!, and Miracles from Heaven. Derbez provided the Spanish dubs for many characters in the Spanish versions of American films, including Dr. Dolittle, Mulan, 102 Dalmatians, and the Shrek franchise.
Go to Profile#11946
Boyd K. Packer
#11957
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Boyd Kenneth Packer was an American religious leader and educator who served as president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 2008 until his death. He also served as the quorum's acting president from 1994 to 2008, and was an apostle and member of the Quorum of the Twelve from 1970 until his death. He served as a general authority of the church from 1961 until his death.
Go to Profile#11947
Reginald Ray
#11958
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Reginald Ray is an American Buddhist academic and teacher. Ray studied Tibetan Buddhism, traditional shamanic wisdom, and yogic-contemplative practices with the Tibetan refugee and recognized Vajrayana traditional-wisdom holder Chögyam Trungpa; and later studied under the tutelage of traditional Dagara teacher from Burkina Faso, Malidoma Somé.
Go to Profile#11948
Mario Draghi
#11959
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Mario Draghi is an Italian economist, academic, banker, and civil servant who served as prime minister of Italy from 13 February 2021 to 22 October 2022. Prior to his appointment as prime minister, he served as President of the European Central Bank between 2011 and 2019. Draghi was also Chair of the Financial Stability Board between 2009 and 2011, and Governor of the Bank of Italy between 2006 and 2011.
Go to Profile#11949
Nipsey Russell
#11960
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Julius "Nipsey" Russell was an American actor, comedian, poet, and dancer best known for his appearances as a panelist on game shows from the 1960s through the 1990s, including Match Game, Password, Hollywood Squares, To Tell the Truth, and Pyramid. His appearances were often distinguished by short, humorous poems he recited during the broadcast, which led to his nickname "the poet laureate of television". He had one of the leading roles in the film version of The Wiz as the Tin Man. He was a frequent guest on the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast series and often appeared on Late Night with Conan ...
Go to Profile#11950
Mica Endsley
#11961
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Mica Endsley is an engineer and a former Chief Scientist of the United States Air Force. Early life and education Endsley was born in California and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, and Houston, Texas, where she attended Spring Woods High School. In 1982, Endsley graduated cum laude from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas with Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering. In 1985, she earned a Master of Science degree in industrial engineering from Purdue University and earned a Doctor of Philosophy in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Southern California in 19...
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