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

#12051

Dean Spade

#12062

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Dean Spade is an American lawyer, writer, trans activist, and associate professor of law at Seattle University School of Law. Background In 2002, he founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective in New York City that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. Spade was a staff attorney at SRLP from 2002 to 2006, during which time he presented testimony to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission and helped achieve a major victory for transgender youth in foster care in the Jean Doe v.

#12052

Richard North Patterson

#12063

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Richard North Patterson is an American fiction writer, attorney and political commentator. Education and law career Patterson graduated in 1968 from Ohio Wesleyan University and has been awarded that school's Distinguished Achievement Citation and his national fraternity's Alumni Achievement Award. He is a 1971 graduate of the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and a recipient of that University's President's Award for Distinguished Alumni and its President's Award for Excellence. He has served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Ohio; a trial attorney for the Securi...

#12053

Tony Downes

#12064

Overall Influence

Tony Downes is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Law of the University of Reading. Downes specialises in commercial law and was educated at the University of Oxford and Aix-Marseille University.

#12054

Ilvo Diamanti

#12065

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Ilvo Diamanti is an Italian political scientist. Biography Ilvo Diamanti graduated from the University of Padua with a degree in Political Science, and completed his Doctorate in Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento. He was an assistant professor in methodology of social research in the Faculty of Statistics at the University of Padua and associate professor of Political Sociology at the University of Urbino "Carlo Bo".

#12055

Gabriel Josipovici

#12066

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Gabriel David Josipovici is a British novelist, short story writer, critic, literary theorist, and playwright. He is an Emeritus professor, after having been Professor at the University of Sussex. Biography He was born in Nice, France in 1940, of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine Jewish parents. He lived out the war years in a village in the Massif Central and when the war ended in 1945 his mother returned with him to Egypt, where she was born. There he was educated at Victoria College, Cairo, until in 1956 he and his mother emigrated to England, where he finished his schooling at Cheltenham College, Gloucestershire.

#12056

Thomas De Koninck

#12067

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Thomas De Koninck is a philosopher from Québec. After studying at Oxford , Université Laval , and Freie Universität Berlin, he became professor at University of Notre Dame in the United States and at Université Laval in Québec. A well-known rumor posits that as a child he inspired Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's character The Little Prince when Saint-Exupéry was living in the house of his father, Charles De Koninck, in Québec City, in 1942.

#12057

Carl Ginet

#12068

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Carl Ginet is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at Cornell University. His work is primarily in action theory, moral responsibility, free will, and epistemology. Ginet received his BA from Occidental College in 1954, and his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1960 with a dissertation titled "Reasons, Causes, and Free Will". He joined the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell in 1971 and retired in 1999. Before Cornell, Ginet was a faculty member of various universities, including Ohio State University, University of Michigan, and University of Rochester.

#12058

Hans Wallach

#12069

Overall Influence

1904 - 1998 (94 years)

Hans Wallach was a German-American experimental psychologist whose research focused on perception and learning. Although he was trained in the Gestalt psychology tradition, much of his later work explored the adaptability of perceptual systems based on the perceiver's experience, whereas most Gestalt theorists emphasized inherent qualities of stimuli and downplayed the role of experience. Wallach's studies of achromatic surface color laid the groundwork for subsequent theories of lightness constancy, and his work on sound localization elucidated the perceptual processing that underlies stereophonic sound.

#12059

Kenneth E. Hagin

Kenneth E. Hagin

#12070

Overall Influence

1917 - 2003 (86 years)

Kenneth Erwin Hagin was an American preacher. He is known for pioneering the Word of Faith movement. Biography Personal life Kenneth E. Hagin was born August 20, 1917, in McKinney, Texas, the son of Lillie Viola Drake Hagin and Jess Hagin. According to Hagin's testimony, he was born with a deformed heart and what was believed to be an incurable blood disease. He was not expected to live and at age 15 he became paralyzed and bedridden. In April 1933 he converted to Christianity. During a dramatic conversion experience, he reported dying, due to the deformed heart, three times in 10 minutes, each time seeing the horrors of hell and then returning to life.

#12060

Jeff Hammerbacher

#12071

Overall Influence

Jeff Hammerbacher is a data scientist. He was chief scientist and cofounder at Cloudera and later served on the faculty of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Early life Hammerbacher grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His father worked at the General Motors plant and his mother was a nurse. From an early age he had an interest in numbers.

#12061

Jeremy Irons

#12072

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Jeremy John Irons is an English actor and activist. He is known for his roles on stage and screen having won numerous accolades including an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Tony Award. He is one of the few actors who have achieved the "Triple Crown of Acting" having won Oscar, Emmy, and Tony Awards for Film, Television and Theatre.

#12062

Yuri Osipyan

#12073

Overall Influence

1931 - 2008 (77 years)

Yuri Andreevich Osipyan was a Soviet, Russian-Armenian physicist who worked in the field of solid state physics. Osipyan was born in Moscow and graduated from Georgi Kurdyumov's class at Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys in 1955. His first scientific work pu. Later, he summarized his interest in science: In late 1950s and 1960s Osipyan worked on the extended effects of interaction of electrons with solid matter and discovered the effect of optical excitation of plastic properties in semiconductors. Also in 1960s Osipyan released his theory of dislocations in semiconductor crystal structure...

#12063

James Herriot

#12074

Overall Influence

1916 - 1995 (79 years)

James Alfred Wight , better known by his pen name James Herriot, was a British veterinary surgeon and author. Born in Sunderland, Wight graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College in 1939, returning to England to become a veterinary surgeon in Yorkshire, where he practised for almost 50 years. He is best known for writing a series of eight books set in the 1930s–1950s Yorkshire Dales about veterinary practice, animals, and their owners, which began with If Only They Could Talk, first published in 1970. Over the decades, the series of books has sold some 60 million copies.

#12064

Doug Lea

#12075

Overall Influence

Douglas S. Lea is a professor of computer science and current head of the computer science department at State University of New York at Oswego, where he specializes in concurrent programming and the design of concurrent data structures. He was on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process and chaired JSR 166, which added concurrency utilities to the Java programming language . On October 22, 2010, Doug Lea notified the Java Community Process Executive Committee he would not stand for reelection. Lea was re-elected as an at-large member for the 2012 OpenJDK governing board.

#12065

Imogene King

#12076

Overall Influence

1923 - 2007 (84 years)

Imogene King was a pioneer of nursing theory development. Her interacting systems theory of nursing and her theory of goal attainment have been included in every major nursing theory text. These theories are taught to thousands of nursing students, form the basis of nursing education programs, and are implemented in a variety of service settings.

#12066

Arthur Sze

#12077

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Arthur Sze is an American poet, translator, and professor. Since 1972, he has published ten collections of poetry. Sze's ninth collection Compass Rose was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sze's tenth collection Sight Lines won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.

#12067

Rosemary Sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff

#12078

Overall Influence

1920 - 1992 (72 years)

Rosemary Sutcliff was an English novelist best known for children's books, especially historical fiction and retellings of myths and legends. Although she was primarily a children's author, some of her novels were specifically written for adults. In a 1986 interview she said, "I would claim that my books are for children of all ages, from nine to ninety."

#12068

Tara Smith

#12079

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Tara A. Smith is an American philosopher. She is a professor of philosophy, the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism, and the Anthem Foundation Fellow for the Study of Objectivism at the University of Texas at Austin.

#12069

Andrew Dawson

#12080

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Andrew Dawson is an American music producer, engineer, mixer and songwriter based in Los Angeles, California. Dawson is a three-time Grammy award winner and six-time Grammy nominee, having won for his work as engineer and mixer on Kanye West's Late Registration , Graduation , and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - each winning the Best Rap Album category. Dawson is also credited with additional production on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Although Dawson made his initial breakthrough with hip hop artists including Kanye West, Jay-Z, Common, Tyler The Creator, and P.O.S, Dawson has also ...

#12070

Mehran Kardar

#12081

Overall Influence

Mehran Kardar is an Iranian born physicist and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute . He received his B.A. in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1979, and obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 1983. Kardar is particularly known for the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation in theoretical physics, which has been named after him and his two coauthors: the Nobel Prize laureate Giorgio Parisi, and Yi-Cheng Zhang. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001.

#12071

Norman K. Denzin

Norman K. Denzin

#12082

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Norman Kent Denzin was an American professor of sociology. He was an emeritus professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was research professor of communications, College of Communications scholar, professor of sociology, professor of cinema studies, professor in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Denzin's academic interests included interpretive theory, performance studies, qualitative research methodology, and the study of media, culture and society.

#12072

Jin Akiyama

#12083

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Jin Akiyama is a Japanese mathematician, known for his appearances on Japanese prime-time television presenting magic tricks with mathematical explanations. He is director of the Mathematical Education Research Center at the Tokyo University of Science, and professor emeritus at Tokai University.

#12073

Deepak Lal

#12084

Overall Influence

1940 - 2020 (80 years)

Deepak Kumar Lal was an Indian economist, writer, professor and consultant focused on the subject of liberal economics. Best known for his 1983 book, The Poverty of “Development Economics", Lal was also known for bucking conventional assumptions and for multidisciplinary approaches to thorny economic problems. His proposed solutions were typically in the vein of Hayek or the Austrian School of economic thinking.

#12074

Philipp Ther

#12085

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Philipp Ther is an Austrian and German historian. He is a tenured university professor at the University of Vienna who received the Wittgenstein Award in 2019. Ther is the founding director of the Research Center for the History of Transformations .

#12075

Charles Honorton

#12086

Overall Influence

1946 - 1992 (46 years)

Charles Henry Honorton was an American parapsychologist and was one of the leaders of a collegial group of researchers who were determined to apply established scientific research methods to the examination of what they called "anomalous information transfer" and other phenomena associated with the "mind/body problem"—the idea that mind might, at least in some respects, have a physical existence independent of the body.

#12076

Patricio Aylwin

#12087

Overall Influence

1918 - 2016 (98 years)

Patricio Aylwin Azócar was a Chilean politician from the Christian Democratic Party, lawyer, author, professor and former senator. He was the 30th president of Chile and the first president to be elected after the absolute rule of dictator Augusto Pinochet, and his election marked the Chilean transition to democracy in 1990.

#12077

Ramon Margalef

#12088

Overall Influence

1919 - 2004 (85 years)

Ramon Margalef i López was a Spanish biologist and ecologist. He was Emeritus Professor of Ecology at the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona. Margalef, one of the most prominent scientists that Spain has produced, worked at the Institute of Applied Biology , and at the Fisheries Research Institute, which he directed during 1966–1967. He created the Department of Ecology of the University of Barcelona, from where he trained a huge number of ecologists, limnologists and oceanographers. In 1967 he became Spain's first professor of ecology.

#12078

Kevin C. Dittman

#12089

Overall Influence

Kevin C. Dittman is an American computer scientist, IT consultant and Professor of Information Technology at the Purdue University, especially known for his textbook Systems analysis and design methods written with Lonnie D. Bentley and Jeffrey L. Whitten, which is in its 7th edition.

#12079

Renato Rosaldo

#12090

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Renato Rosaldo is an American cultural anthropologist. He has done field research among the Ilongots of northern Luzon, Philippines, and he is the author of Ilongot Headhunting: 1883–1974: A Study in Society and History and Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis .

#12080

Monica Vișan

#12091

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Monica Vișan is a Romanian mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles who specializes in partial differential equations and is well known for her work on the nonlinear Schrödinger equation.

#12081

Thongchai Winichakul

#12092

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Thongchai Winichakul , is a Thai historian and researcher of Southeast Asian studies. He is professor emeritus of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a chief senior researcher at the Japanese Institute of Developing Economies. He was the president for the Association for Asian Studies in 2013. He has had a major impact on the concept of Thai nationalism.

#12082

Fakhri A. Bazzaz

#12093

Overall Influence

1933 - 2008 (75 years)

Professor Fakhri Al-Bazzaz was an Iraqi-American plant ecologist specializing in the study of plant community ecological succession. A professor and prolific author, he was ranked amongst the top ten "Most Cited Scientists in Environment/Ecology, 1992–2002".

#12083

Harold E. Johns

#12094

Overall Influence

1915 - 1998 (83 years)

Harold Elford Johns was a Canadian medical physicist, noted for his extensive contributions to the use of ionizing radiation to treat cancer. Early life and education Johns was born to missionary parents in Sichuan, China. He lived in China until 1926, when political unrest there prompted his parents to return to North America. After spending time in Tacoma, Washington, and in Brandon, Manitoba, his family settled in Hamilton, Ontario.

#12084

Björn Ulvaeus

#12095

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Björn Kristian Ulvæus is a Swedish musician, singer, songwriter, and producer best known as a member of the musical group ABBA. He is also the co-composer of the musicals Chess, Kristina från Duvemåla, and Mamma Mia! He co-produced the films Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again with fellow ABBA member and close friend Benny Andersson. He is the oldest member of the group.

#12085

Paul Herrling

#12096

Overall Influence

Paul Herrling is the head of corporate research at Novartis and the chairman of board of the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases, Singapore since 2002. Prior to this, he was the head of Global Research of Novartis Pharma.

#12086

Louise Johnson

#12097

Overall Influence

1940 - 2012 (72 years)

Dame Louise Napier Johnson, , was a British biochemist and protein crystallographer. She was David Phillips Professor of Molecular Biophysics at the University of Oxford from 1990 to 2007, and later an emeritus professor.

#12087

Timothy Mitchell

#12098

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Timothy P. Mitchell is a British-born political theorist and student of the Arab world. He is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University. He was previously Professor of Politics at New York University.

#12088

Bob Hodge

#12099

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Robert Hodge is an Australian academic, author, theorist and critic. While best known as a semiotician and critical linguist, his work encompasses a wide, interdisciplinary range of fields including cultural theory, media studies, chaos theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, post-modernism and many other topics both within the humanities as well as science. He is currently a professor at the University of Western Sydney.

#12089

Victor Kiernan

#12100

Overall Influence

1913 - 2009 (96 years)

Edward Victor Gordon Kiernan was a British historian and a member of the Communist Party Historians Group. Kiernan's work was prominent in the field of Marxist historiography in Britain, analyzing historical events from a Marxist point of view. Belonging to a group of prominent British Marxist historians active in the 20th century, Kiernan was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1934 until 1959, when he left in protest over the party's response to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He was also involved in promoting Urdu poetry among Western audiences.

#12090

Lev Pitaevskii

#12101

Overall Influence

1933 - 2022 (89 years)

Lev Petrovich Pitaevskii was a Russian theoretical physicist, who made contributions to the theory of quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, low-temperature physics, plasma physics, and condensed matter physics. Together with his PhD supervisor Evgeny Lifshitz and with Vladimir Berestetskii, he was also the co-author of a few volumes of the influential Landau–Lifschitz Course of Theoretical Physics series. His academic status was professor.

#12091

Sanjiv Chopra

#12102

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Sanjiv Chopra, M.B.B.S, M.A.C.P, is an Indian-born American physician, Professor of Medicine and former Faculty Dean for Continuing Medical Education at Harvard Medical School. He currently serves as a Marshall Wolf Master Clinician Educator at Brigham and Women's Hospital and co-director of the CME Division in the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

#12092

Grigor Dimitrov

Grigor Dimitrov

#12103

Overall Influence

1991 - Present (35 years)

Grigor Dimitrov Dimitrov is a Bulgarian professional tennis player. He has been ranked as high as world No. 3 in singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals , which he first achieved on 20 November 2017, making him the highest-ranked Bulgarian player in history. Dimitrov achieved the ranking after winning the biggest title of his career at the season-ending ATP Finals. He has won eight ATP Tour singles titles to date.

#12093

Svetlana Gannushkina

Svetlana Gannushkina

#12104

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Svetlana Alekseevna Gannushkina is a mathematician and human rights activist in Russia who was reported to have been a serious contender for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Gannushkina became well-known in Russia as a human rights defender in 1990s when many conflicts broke in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Her human rights work dedicated especially to help refugees, internally displaced persons, victims of war.

#12094

Richard Elliott Friedman

#12105

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Richard Elliott Friedman is an American biblical scholar, theologian, and translator who currently serves as the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia. Friedman was born in Rochester, New York. He attended the University of Miami , the Jewish Theological Seminary , and Harvard University . He was the Katzin Professor of Jewish Civilization: Hebrew Bible; Near Eastern Languages and Literature at the University of California, San Diego, from 1994 until 2006, whereupon he joined the faculty of the University of Georgia's Religion Department, where he is currently the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies.

#12095

Diplo

#12106

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Thomas Wesley Pentz , known professionally as Diplo, is an American DJ, songwriter, and record producer. He is the co-creator and lead member of the electronic dancehall music project Major Lazer; a member of the supergroup LSD, with Sia and Labrinth; a member of electronic duo Jack Ü, with producer and DJ Skrillex; and a member of Silk City, with Mark Ronson. He founded and manages record company Mad Decent, as well as co-founding the non-profit organization Heaps Decent. His 2013 EP, Revolution, debuted at number 68 on the US Billboard 200. The EP's title track was later featured in a commer...

#12096

Peter Townsend

#12107

Overall Influence

1928 - 2009 (81 years)

Peter Brereton Townsend was a British sociologist. The last position he held was Professor of International Social Policy at the London School of Economics. He was also Emeritus Professor of Social Policy in the University of Bristol, and was one of the co-founders of the University of Essex. He wrote widely on the economics of poverty and was co-founder of the Child Poverty Action Group. The Peter Townsend Policy Press Prize was established by the British Academy in his memory.

#12097

Alfred Sommer

#12108

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Alfred Sommer is a prominent American ophthalmologist and epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research on vitamin A in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that dosing even mildly vitamin A deficient children with an inexpensive, large dose vitamin A capsule twice a year reduces child mortality by as much as 34 percent. The World Bank and the Copenhagen Consensus list vitamin A supplementation as one of the most cost-effective health interventions in the world.

#12098

Caryl Emerson

#12109

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Caryl Emerson is an American literary critic, slavist and translator. She is best known for her books and scholarly commentaries on the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. She has translated some of Bakhtin's most influential works, including Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Emerson was Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature at Princeton University from 1988 until her retirement in 2015. From 1980 to 1987 she was a professor of Russian Literature at Cornell.

#12099

Loretta Lynn

#12110

Overall Influence

1932 - 2022 (90 years)

Loretta Lynn was an American country music singer and songwriter. In a career spanning six decades, Lynn released multiple gold albums. She had numerous hits such as: "Hey Loretta", "The Pill", "Blue Kentucky Girl", "Love Is the Foundation", "You're Lookin' at Country", "You Ain't Woman Enough", "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl", "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' ", "One's on the Way", "Fist City", and "Coal Miner's Daughter". The 1980 musical film Coal Miner's Daughter was based on her life.

#12100

Roy Emerson

#12111

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Roy Stanley Emerson is an Australian former tennis player who won 12 Grand Slam singles titles and 16 Grand Slam doubles titles, for a total of 28 Grand Slam titles. All of his singles Grand Slam victories and 14 of his Grand Slam doubles victories were achieved before the open era began in 1968. He is the only male player to have completed a career Grand Slam in both singles and doubles, and the first of four male players to complete a double career Grand Slam in singles . His 28 major titles are the all-time record for a male player. He was ranked world No. 1 amateur in 1961 by Ned Potter...

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