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

#11951

Bruce Cutler

#11962

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Bruce Cutler is an American criminal defense lawyer best known for having defended John Gotti, and for media appearances as a legal commentator. Life and career Cutler's father, Murray Cutler, was a New York City detective who later became a criminal defense attorney. While being interviewed on the radio program Conversations With Allan Wolper on WBGO 88.3 FM, Cutler said that he was inspired by his father's pro-labor, pro-union loyalties to an FDR-style Social Democratic position.

#11952

Byron Preiss

#11963

Overall Influence

1953 - 2005 (52 years)

Byron Preiss was an American writer, editor, and publisher. He founded and served as president of Byron Preiss Visual Publications, and later of ibooks Inc. Many of his projects were in the forms of graphic novels, comics, illustrated books, and children's books. Beyond traditional printed books, Preiss frequently embraced emerging technologies, and was recognized as a pioneer in digital publishing and as among the first to publish in such formats as CD-ROM books and ebooks.

#11953

Fernando de Szyszlo

Fernando de Szyszlo

#11964

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

Fernando de Szyszlo Valdelomar was a Peruvian painter, sculptor, printmaker, and teacher who was a key figure in advancing abstract art in Latin America since the mid-1950s, and one of the leading plastic artists in Peru.

#11954

Vincent Poor

#11965

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Harold Vincent Poor FRS FREng is the Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, where he is also the Interim Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is a specialist in wireless telecommunications, signal processing and information theory. He has received many honorary degrees and election to national academies. He was also President of IEEE Information Theory Society . He is on the board of directors of the IEEE Foundation.

#11955

Andrei Suslin

#11966

Overall Influence

1950 - 2018 (68 years)

Andrei Suslin was a Russian mathematician who contributed to algebraic K-theory and its connections with algebraic geometry. He was a Trustee Chair and Professor of mathematics at Northwestern University.

#11956

Ruth Shady

#11967

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Ruth Martha Shady Solís is a Peruvian anthropologist and archaeologist. She is the founder and director of the archaeological project at Caral. Career Throughout her career, she has directed many different projects of archeological investigation on the coast, the highlands and the rain forests of Peru, placing emphasis on the study of the development of the complex socio-political organizations. She was director of the Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Antropología del Perú , and director of the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology of National University of San Marcos. She has worked at the Ca...

#11957

Shunsuke Tsurumi

#11968

Overall Influence

1922 - 2015 (93 years)

Shunsuke Tsurumi was a Japanese philosopher, historian, and sociologist. Tsurumi Shunsuke was born in Tokyo in 1922. In 1937, his father sent him to study in the United States, where he enrolled at the Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts. At the age of 16, he applied to and was accepted into Harvard University, where he majored in philosophy, studying under Willard Van Orman Quine. Tsurumi had excellent grades, but in March 1942 he was arrested and had to complete his degree living in a detention center. In 1942, he succeeded in graduating with honors, but was thereafter deported on a p...

#11958

Akira Yamada

#11969

Overall Influence

1922 - 2008 (86 years)

Akira Yamada was a Japanese scholar and philosopher of the West European Medieval philosophy. Member of the Japan Academy since 1998. Yamada graduated from the Kyoto Imperial University, Philosophy section of the Department of Literature in 1944.1951, Instructor of the Osaka City University, Department of Literature1955, Assistant professor of the Osaka City University1965, Assistant professor of the Kyoto University, Department of Literature1968, Professor of the Kyoto University1976, Director of Department of Literature in the Kyoto University1985, Professor emeritus of the Kyoto University1...

#11959

Jesse Rothstein

#11970

Overall Influence

Jesse Rothstein is an economist, and currently professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, he was chief economist at the US Department of Labor. He is the founding director of the California Policy Lab, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and is a member of the editorial boards of Education Finance and Policy, The Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Review, and Industrial Relations.

#11960

Raymond Westbrook

#11971

Overall Influence

1946 - 2009 (63 years)

Raymond Westbrook was a scholar of the legal systems of the ancient Near East. He was born in England. Education Westbrook studied law at the University of Oxford, and earned a master's degree in law from the Hebrew University. He studied Assyriology at Yale, and then practised and taught law in England and Wales before finishing his dissertation in 1982 entitled Old Babylonian Marriage Law, for which Yale awarded him the Ph.D.

#11961

Michael Aizenman

Michael Aizenman

#11972

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Michael Aizenman is an American-Israeli mathematician and a physicist at Princeton University, working in the fields of mathematical physics, statistical mechanics, functional analysis and probability theory.

#11962

Harold Ridley

#11973

Overall Influence

1906 - 2001 (95 years)

Sir Nicholas Harold Lloyd Ridley was an English ophthalmologist who invented the intraocular lens and pioneered intraocular lens surgery for cataract patients. Early years Nicholas Harold Lloyd Ridley was born in Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire, the elder son of Nicholas Charles Ridley and his wife, Margaret . He had a younger brother. Known from childhood by his middle name , Ridley had a stammer which he was largely able to manage. As a child he met and sat on the lap of Florence Nightingale, a close friend of his mother.

#11963

Martha Beck

#11974

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Martha Nibley Beck is an American author, life coach, speaker, and sociologist who specializes in helping individuals and groups achieve greater levels of personal and professional success. She holds three degrees, a BA, MA and PhD from Harvard University. Beck is the daughter of deceased LDS Church scholar and apologist Hugh Nibley. She received national attention after publication in 2005 of her best-seller, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith in which she recounts her experiences of surviving sexual abuse. In addition to authoring several books, Beck is a columnis...

#11964

Dacher Keltner

#11975

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Dacher Joseph Keltner is a Mexican-born American professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who directs the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab. He is also the founder and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, host of the podcast The Science of Happiness, and chief scientific advisor of Hume AI.

#11965

Martin Kulldorff

#11976

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Martin Kulldorff is a Swedish biostatistician. He has been a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School since 2003, though on leave as of 2023. He is a member of the US Food and Drug Administration's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and a former member of the Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

#11966

Reba McEntire

#11977

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Reba Nell McEntire , or simply Reba, is an American country music singer and actress. Dubbed "the Queen of Country", she has sold more than 75 million records worldwide. Since the 1970s, McEntire has placed over 100 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, 25 of which reached the number one spot. She is an actress in films and television. She starred in the television series Reba, which aired for six seasons. She also owns several businesses, including a clothing line.

#11967

Don Francis

#11978

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Donald Pinkston Francis is an American epidemiologist who worked on the Ebola outbreak in Africa in the late 1970s, and as an HIV/AIDS researcher. He retired from the U.S. Public Health Service in 1992, after 21 years of service. He lives in San Francisco, California.

#11968

Martin Hollis

#11979

Overall Influence

1938 - 1998 (60 years)

James Martin Hollis was an English rationalist philosopher. Writing for The Independent, Tim O'Hagan, an Emeritus Professor at the University of East Anglia argued that central to Hollis's rationalism was "the epistemological unity of mankind", the view that "some beliefs are universal ... There are, because there have to be, percepts and concepts shared by all who can understand each other." This rationalism, of Hollis, was in its early formulations strongly influenced by Peter Strawson and applied to understanding and explaining the approach of the social sciences.

#11969

George Sadowsky

George Sadowsky

#11980

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

George Sadowsky is an American computer scientist who has worked in a number of entities related to promotion of the Internet worldwide. He is known through his decades of work with developing countries. In many of these countries, he was the one to actually bring the Internet, or make it affordable, or help change the legislation to make sure it minimized government control and regulation.

#11970

David Leebron

#11981

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

David W. Leebron is an American attorney and legal scholar who served as the 7th President of Rice University from 2004 to 2022. He was a professor and dean of Columbia Law School, until he was named president of Rice University on July 1, 2004.

#11971

Peter Baldwin

#11982

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Peter Baldwin is a research professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, and a philanthropist. Academic career He was educated at Harvard , and Yale . He has written several books on the comparative history of Europe and America.

#11972

RZA

#11983

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Robert Fitzgerald Diggs , better known by his stage name RZA , is an American rapper, actor, filmmaker, and record producer. He is the de facto leader of the hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan, having produced most albums for the group and its respective members. He is a cousin of two other original Wu-Tang Clan members: GZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard. He has also released solo albums under the alter-ego Bobby Digital, along with executive producing credits for side projects. After forming the Wu-Tang Clan, RZA was a founding member of the horrorcore group Gravediggaz, where he went by the name The RZArect...

#11973

Anthony O'Hear

#11984

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Anthony O'Hear is a British philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buckingham and Head of the Department of Education. He is Honorary Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and editor of its journal Philosophy and co-founder of the Journal of Applied Philosophy with Brenda Almond. He is also editor emeritus of The Fortnightly Reviews new series.

#11974

Irven DeVore

#11985

Overall Influence

1934 - 2014 (80 years)

Irven DeVore was an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, and Curator of Primatology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He headed Harvard's Department of Anthropology from 1987 to 1992. He taught generations of students at Harvard both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He mentored many young scientists who went on to prominence in anthropology and behavioral biology, including Richard Lee, Robert Trivers, Sarah Hrdy, Peter Ellison, Barbara Smuts, Henry Harpending, Marjorie Shostak, Robert Bailey, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Wrangham and T...

#11975

Morgan Carpenter

#11986

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Morgan Carpenter is a bioethicist, intersex activist and researcher. In 2013, he created an intersex flag, and became president of Intersex Human Rights Australia . He is now a co-executive director. In 2015, he cofounded a project to mark Intersex Awareness Day.

#11976

Jean Franco

#11987

Overall Influence

1924 - 2022 (98 years)

Jean Franco was a British-born American academic and literary critic known for her pioneering work on Latin American literature. Educated at Manchester and London, she taught at London, Essex , and Stanford, and was latterly professor emerita at Columbia University.

#11977

Wilfred Cantwell Smith

#11988

Overall Influence

1916 - 2000 (84 years)

Wilfred Cantwell Smith was a Canadian Islamicist, comparative religion scholar, and Presbyterian minister. He was the founder of the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Quebec and later the director of Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions. The Harvard University Gazette said he was one of the field's most influential figures of the past century. In his 1962 work The Meaning and End of Religion he notably questioned the modern sectarian concept of religion.

#11978

Shoma Chaudhury

Shoma Chaudhury

#11989

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Shoma Chaudhury is an Indian journalist, editor, and political commentator. She was managing editor and one of the founders of Tehelka, an investigative public interest newsmagazine. She also co-founded and was director of THiNK, an international conference of ideas, and Algebra, the Arts & Ideas Club, a platform for live conversations with prominent Indians. Chaudhury is the founder of Lucid Lines Productions, an intellectual properties company.

#11979

Brian J. Ford

#11990

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Brian J. Ford HonFLS HonFRMS is an independent research biologist, author, and lecturer, who publishes on scientific issues for the general public. He has also been a television personality for more than 40 years. Ford is an international authority on the microscope. Throughout his career, Ford has been associated with many academic bodies. He was elected a Fellow of Cardiff University in 1986, was appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Leicester, and has been awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Microscopical Society and of the Linnean Society of London. In America, he was awa...

#11980

Piergiorgio Odifreddi

Piergiorgio Odifreddi

#11991

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Piergiorgio Odifreddi is an Italian mathematician, logician, student of the history of science, and popular science writer and essayist, especially on philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics. He is philosophically and politically near to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky.

#11981

Johanna Drucker

Johanna Drucker

#11992

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Johanna Drucker is an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language: letterforms, typography, visual poetry, art, and lately, digital art aesthetics. She is currently the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

#11982

Stephen Porges

#11993

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Stephen W. Porges is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. He is the Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Porges is also currently Director of the Kinsey Institute Traumatic Stress Research Consortium at Indiana University Bloomington, which studies trauma.

#11983

George Bonanno

#11994

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

George A. Bonanno is a professor of clinical psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University, U.S. He is responsible for introducing the controversial idea of resilience to the study of loss and trauma. He is known as a pioneering researcher in the field of bereavement and trauma. The New York Times on February 15, 2011, stated that the current science of bereavement has been "driven primarily" by Bonanno. Scientific American summarized a main finding of his work, "The ability to rebound remains the norm throughout adult life." In 2019, Bonanno was honored with the James McKeen Cattell aw...

#11984

Gustavo Bueno

#11995

Overall Influence

1924 - 2016 (92 years)

Gustavo Bueno Martínez was a Spanish philosopher, founder of a philosophical doctrine dubbed by himself as "philosophical materialism". Pupil of the national-syndicalist Santiago Montero Díaz, Bueno's ideological path reached a blend of right-wing and left-wing autoritarianism during the years of the late francoism.

#11985

John Bohannon

#11996

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

John Bohannon is an American science journalist and scientist who is Director of Science at Primer, an artificial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco, California. He is known for his career prior to Primer as a science journalist and Harvard University biologist, most notably with his "Gonzo Scientist" online series at Science Magazine and his creation of the annual "Dance Your PhD" contest. His investigative journalism work includes:critiquing the Lancet surveys of Iraq War casualties uncovering serious problems with the peer review process at a large number of journals that c...

#11986

Jennifer Doleac

#11997

Overall Influence

Jennifer Doleac is an American economist and is the vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures. She was previously an associate professor at Texas A&M, where she directed the Justice Tech Lab, was a research affiliate of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and is on the board of editors of the Journal of Economic Literature. She also hosts the Probable Causation podcast. In October 2022, Vox named her to their "Future Perfect 50," a list of "scientists, thinkers, scholars, writers, and activists building a more perfect future," writing, "Doleac looks at criminal justice policy thro...

#11987

Alec Skempton

#11998

Overall Influence

1914 - 2001 (87 years)

Sir Alec Westley Skempton was an English civil engineer internationally recognised, along with Karl Terzaghi, as one of the founding fathers of the engineering discipline of soil mechanics. He established the soil mechanics course at Imperial College London, where the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department's building was renamed after him in 2004, and was knighted in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to engineering. He was also a notable contributor on the history of British civil engineering.

#11988

Louis Essen

#11999

Overall Influence

1908 - 1997 (89 years)

Louis Essen OBE FRS was an English physicist whose most notable achievements were in the precise measurement of time and the determination of the speed of light. He was a critic of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, particularly as it related to time dilation.

#11989

Lawrence D. Kritzman

#12000

Overall Influence

Lawrence D. Kritzman, an American scholar, is the Pat and John Rosenwald Research Professor in the Arts and Sciences, Edward Tuck Professor of French Language and Literature, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He has previously held the Willard Professorship of French, Comparative Literature, and Oratory and the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professorship in the Humanities. He has written works on, edited works on, or given lectures on Barthes, Foucault, Kristeva, Sartre, Camus, Malraux, Derrida, Montaigne, de Beauvoir, and others, focusing especially on twentieth- and twenty-first century French philosophy and intellectual history.

#11990

Antônio Augusto Cançado Trindade

Antônio Augusto Cançado Trindade

#12001

Overall Influence

1947 - 2022 (75 years)

Antônio Augusto Cançado Trindade was a Brazilian jurist and international judge. He was appointed as judge of the International Court of Justice from 6 February 2009. He was reelected to the Court in December 2017, and took office for his second term on 6 February 2018, serving until his death in 2022.

#11991

Gareth Jones

#12002

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Gareth Jones is an English music producer and engineer notable for working with Depeche Mode, Einstürzende Neubauten, Wire and Erasure. Background Jones was born in Warrington, Lancashire. He is married and currently living in North London. When he was young he played different instruments but became more interested in music technology. He owned a simple valve tape recorder and began experimenting with tape editing. He later trained at the BBC and began working in recording studios, such as Pathway. At Pathway he recorded and mixed John Foxx's Metamatic album in 1980 and the first Madness single, "The Prince", in 1979.

#11992

Michael Chang

#12003

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Michael Te-pei Chang is an American former professional tennis player and coach. He is the youngest man in history to win a singles major, winning the 1989 French Open at 17 years and 109 days old. Chang won a total of 34 top-level professional singles titles, was a three-time major runner-up, and reached a career-best ranking of world No. 2 in 1996. Since he was shorter than virtually all of his opponents, he played a dogged defensive style utilizing his quickness and speed.

#11993

Bradley Dowden

#12004

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Bradley Harris Dowden is an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the California State University, Sacramento. Work He is a general editor of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Dowden received his MS in physics from Ohio State University and his PhD in philosophy from Stanford University. His main interests are metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, logic, time, paradox and infinity.

#11994

Demi Moore

#12005

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Demi Gene Moore is an American actress. She made her film debut in 1981 and appeared on the soap opera General Hospital before coming to prominence as a member of the Brat Pack with roles in Blame It on Rio , St. Elmo's Fire , and About Last Night... . While the lattermost made Moore a star, she established herself as a bankable performer with Ghost, the highest-grossing film of 1990. Her performance was praised and earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination.

#11995

Taku Mayumura

#12006

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

Taku Mayumura was a Japanese novelist, science fiction writer and haiku poet. He won the Seiun Award for Novel twice. His novel Shiseikan , written in 1974, was translated into English by Daniel Jackson in 2004. Mayumura was also a young adult fiction writer whose works have been adapted into TV drama, film, and anime. Mayumura was an honorary member of the SFWJ .

#11996

Andreas Papandreou

#12007

Overall Influence

1919 - 1996 (77 years)

Andreas Georgiou Papandreou was a Greek economist, politician, and a dominant figure in Greek politics, known for founding the political party PASOK, which he led from 1974 to 1996. He served three terms as the 3rd and 8th prime minister of Greece.

#11997

Ernst Klee

#12008

Overall Influence

1942 - 2013 (71 years)

Ernst Klee was a German journalist and author. As a writer on Germany's history, he was best known for his exposure and documentation of medical crimes in Nazi Germany, much of which was concerned with the Action T4 or involuntary euthanasia program. He is the author of "The Good Old Days": The Holocaust Through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders first published in the English translation in 1991.

#11998

Joachim Cuntz

#12009

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Joachim Cuntz is a German mathematician, currently a professor at the University of Münster. Work Joachim Cuntz has made fundamental contributions to the area of C*-algebras and to the field of noncommutative geometry in the sense of Alain Connes. He initiated the analysis of the structure of simple C*-algebras and introduced new methods and examples, including the Cuntz algebras and the Cuntz semigroup. He was one of the first to apply K-theory to noncommutative operator algebras and contributed to the development of that theory. In collaboration with Daniel Quillen, he developed a new approach to cyclic cohomology and proved the excision property of periodic cyclic theory.

#11999

Amitava Kumar

#12010

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Amitava Kumar is an Indian writer and journalist who is Professor of English, holding the Helen D. Lockwood Chair at Vassar College. Early life Kumar was born in the city of Arrah in the Indian state of Bihar on 17 March 1963. He grew up close to his birthplace in Patna, also in Bihar. His Father, Ishwar Chandra was a Senior Bihar Bureaucrat from Jadopur, East Champaran Bihar He attended St Michael's High School. In India, Kumar earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Hindu College, Delhi University in 1984. He holds two master's degrees in Linguistics and Literature from Delhi University and Syracuse University respectively.

#12000

William Darrow

#12011

Overall Influence

William Darrow is a professor of public health at Florida International University. Before accepting a position at FIU in August 1994, Darrow served as Chief of the Behavioral and Prevention Research Branch, Division of STD/HIV Prevention, at the National Center for Prevention Services of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention . Darrow has published over 100 scientific papers in professional journals, books, and research monographs.

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