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
#12201
Achille Castiglioni
#12212
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Achille Castiglioni was an Italian architect and designer of furniture, lighting, radiogramss and other objects. As a professor of design, he advised his students "If you are not curious, forget it. If you are not interested in others, what they do and how they act, then being a designer is not the right job for you."
Go to Profile#12202
David K. Jordan
#12213
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
David K. Jordan is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego since 2004. He received his Ph.D. from University of Chicago in 1969. Jordan is known for his various service posts to the university. These positions include the chair for the Department of Anthropology, the Director for the Program of Chinese Studies, Provost of Earl Warren College, Interim Provost of Sixth College, as well as one of the Founders of the UCSD Department of Anthropology with psychological anthropologist Melford Spiro. Jordan currently participates in the university Academic Senate committees i...
Go to Profile#12203
Patrick C. Fischer
#12214
Overall Influence
1935 - 2011 (76 years)
Patrick Carl Fischer was an American computer scientist, a noted researcher in computational complexity theory and database theory, and a target of the Unabomber. Biography Fischer was born December 3, 1935, in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Carl H. Fischer, became a professor of actuarial mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1941, and the family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he grew up. Fischer himself went to the University of Michigan, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1957 and an MBA in 1958. He went on to graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#12204
Bruno Simma
#12215
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Bruno Simma is a German jurist who served as a judge on the International Court of Justice from 2003 until 2012. He served as an affiliated overseas faculty member of the University of Michigan Law School, teaching classes in Ann Arbor until 2021, and as one of the three third-country arbitrators on the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal, to which he was appointed in 2013.
Go to Profile#12205
Kenneth Calman
#12216
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Sir Kenneth Charles Calman, HonFAcadMEd is a Scottish doctor and academic who formerly worked as a surgeon, oncologist and cancer researcher and held the position of Chief Medical Officer of Scotland, and then England. He was Warden and Vice-Chancellor of Durham University from 1998 to 2006 before becoming Chancellor of the University of Glasgow. He held the position of Chair of the National Cancer Research Institute from 2008 until 2011. From 2008 to 2009, he was convener of the Calman Commission on Scottish devolution.
Go to Profile#12206
Rahul Peter Das
#12217
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Rahul Peter Das was professor of South Asian studies at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he was also the dean of studies of the Faculty of Philosophy I. He retired in October 2020. Das was the President of the German Association for Asian Studies from 2016 to 2019, and received the Hind Rattan Award in 2006, the Nav Rattan Award in 2009.
Go to Profile#12207
W. P. Kinsella
#12218
Overall Influence
1935 - 2016 (81 years)
William Patrick "W. P." Kinsella was a Canadian novelist and short story writer, known for his novel Shoeless Joe , which was adapted into the movie Field of Dreams in 1989. His work often concerned baseball, First Nations people, and Canadian culture.
Go to Profile#12208
Darrell Schweitzer
#12219
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Darrell Charles Schweitzer is an American writer, editor, and critic in the field of speculative fiction. Much of his focus has been on dark fantasy and horror, although he does also work in science fiction and fantasy. Schweitzer is also a prolific writer of literary criticism and editor of collections of essays on various writers within his preferred genres.
Go to Profile#12209
Bertha Swirles
#12220
Overall Influence
1903 - 1999 (96 years)
Bertha Swirles, Lady Jeffreys was an English physicist, academic and scientific author who carried out research on quantum theory in its early days. She was associated with Girton College, University of Cambridge, as student and Fellow, for over 70 years.
Go to Profile#12210
Hisashi Yamamoto
#12221
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Hisashi Yamamoto is a prominent organic chemist and currently a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago and professor of Chubu University. Life Born in Kobe, Japan, Yamamoto earned a B.S. at Kyoto University in 1967 and a Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1971.
Go to Profile#12211
Judith Wright
#12222
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Judith Arundell Wright was an Australian poet, environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights. She was a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award. Biography Judith Wright was born in Armidale, New South Wales. The eldest child of Phillip Wright and his first wife, Ethel, she spent most of her formative years in Brisbane and Sydney. Wright was of Cornish ancestry. Following the early death of her mother, she lived with her aunt and then boarded at New England Girls' School after her father's remarriage in 1929. After graduating, Wright studied philosophy, English, psychology and history at the University of Sydney.
Go to Profile#12212
Shimon Ullman
#12223
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Shimon Ullman is a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Ullman's main research area is the study of vision processing by both humans and machines. Specifically, he focuses on object and facial recognition, and has made a number of key insights in this field, including with Christof Koch the idea of a visual saliency map in the mammalian visual system to regulate selective spatial attention.
Go to Profile#12213
Joaquin Fuster
#12224
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Joaquin M. Fuster is a Spanish neuroscientist whose research has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of the neural structures underlying cognition and behavior. His several books and hundreds of papers, particularly on memory and the prefrontal cortex, are widely cited.
Go to Profile#12214
Nick McKeown
#12225
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Nicholas William McKeown FREng, is a Senior Fellow at Intel, a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor at Oxford University. He has also started technology companies in Silicon Valley.
Go to Profile#12215
Cary Cooper
#12226
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sir Cary Lynn Cooper , is an American-born British psychologist and 50th Anniversary Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health at the Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. Before moving to Manchester he was Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University. Cooper was Head of the Manchester School of Management from the early 1980s. In 1995 he became Pro-Vice-Chancellor and then Deputy Vice-Chancellor of UMIST until 2002. From 1979 to 1980 he was chairman of the Management Education and Development Division of the Academy of Management and was elected as Founding President of the British Academy of Management.
Go to Profile#12216
Hidesaburo Hanafusa
#12227
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Hidesaburo Hanafusa was a Japanese virologist. He shared the 1982 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Harold E. Varmus and J. Michael Bishop for demonstrating how RNA tumor viruses cause cancer, and elucidating their role in combining, rescuing and maintaining oncogenes in the viral genome.
Go to Profile#12217
Bernard Knox
#12228
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox was an English classicist, author, and critic who became an American citizen. He was the first director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. In 1992 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Knox for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.
Go to Profile#12218
Calvin Harris
#12229
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Adam Richard Wiles , known professionally as Calvin Harris, is a Scottish DJ, record producer, singer, and songwriter. His debut studio album, I Created Disco, was released in June 2007. Its singles "Acceptable in the 80s" and "The Girls" both reached the top 10 in the UK. In 2009, he released second studio album, Ready for the Weekend, which debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and whose lead single, "I'm Not Alone", became his first song to top the UK Singles Chart.
Go to Profile#12219
Alan Alda
#12230
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Alan Alda is an American actor, author, screenwriter, podcast host and director. A six-time Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award winner and a three-time Tony Award nominee, he is best known for playing Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce in the CBS wartime sitcom M*A*S*H . He also wrote and directed numerous episodes of the series.
Go to Profile#12220
John Hawthorne
#12231
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
John Patrick Hawthorne is an English philosopher, currently serving as Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is recognized as a leading contemporary contributor to metaphysics and epistemology.
Go to Profile#12221
Denis McQuail
#12232
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Denis McQuail was a British communication theorist, Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam, considered one of the most influential scholars in the field of mass communication studies. Biography Denis McQuail was born in Wallington, London on 12 April 1935 to Irish immigrant parents Annie and Christopher McQuail. After schooling at St Anselm's college in Birkenhead, where he showed an aptitude for languages, he spent his national service in the Intelligence Corps learning Russian and studied history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. McQuail obtained his BA in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 1958, and the next year his MA in Public and Social Administration.
Go to Profile#12222
Wolfgang Drechsler
#12233
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Wolfgang Drechsler is a Public Administration and Management, Innovation Policy and Political Philosophy scholar. He is Professor of Governance, and one of the founders and directors of the Technology Governance program, at the Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia, where between 2010 and 2016 he also served as Vice Dean for International Relations at its Faculty of Social Sciences. Since 2017, he is also affiliated with Harvard University, as a Davis Center Associate and for six years a member of the center’s Advisory Board, and since 2019, with University College London, where ...
Go to Profile#12223
Ignazio Visco
#12234
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ignazio Visco is an Italian economist and central banker and Governor of the Bank of Italy fromn 2011 to 2023. Early life and education Visco was born in Naples on 21 November 1949. He obtained a summa cum laude degree in economics from the Sapienza University of Rome in 1971 with Federico Caffè as supervisor and continued his studies at the University of Pennsylvania , where he obtained an MA in 1974 and a PhD in Economics in 1981.
Go to Profile#12224
Laurie Thompson
#12235
Overall Influence
1938 - 2015 (77 years)
Laurie Thompson was a British academic and translator, noted for his translations of Swedish literature into English. Thompson was born in York, England, and lived in northern Sweden for a few years. He was the editor of Swedish Book Review between 1983 and 2002, and a lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the University of Wales, Lampeter.
Go to Profile#12225
Oliver Rackham
#12236
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Oliver Rackham was an academic at the University of Cambridge who studied the ecology, management and development of the British countryside, especially trees, woodlands and wood pasture. His books included Ancient Woodland and The History of the Countryside .
Go to Profile#12226
David Cournapeau
#12237
Overall Influence
David Cournapeau is a data scientist. He is the original author of the scikit-learn package, an open source machine learning library in the Python programming language. Early life and education Cournapeau graduated with a MSc in Electrical Engineering from Telecom Paristech, Paris in 2004, and obtained his PhD in Computer Science at Kyoto University, Japan, in the domain of speech recognition.
Go to Profile#12227
Francesco Alberoni
#12238
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Francesco Alberoni was an Italian journalist and a professor of sociology. He was a board member and senior board member of RAI, the Italian state television network, from 2002 to 2005. Alberoni was among the few regular front page writers of Corriere della Sera, Italy's most popular newspaper, which published his articles from 1973 to 2011. He wrote a four-column editorial titled "Public & Private" for the Monday edition. He was the widower of Rosa Giannetta.
Go to Profile#12228
Catherine Wessinger
#12239
Overall Influence
Catherine Wessinger is an American religion scholar. She is the Rev. H. James Yamauchi, S.J. Professor of the History of Religions at Loyola University New Orleans where she teaches religious studies with a main research focus on millennialism, new religions, women and religion, and religions of India. Wessinger is co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. She served as a consultant to federal law enforcement during the Montana Freemen standoff and has been cited for her expertise concerning the Branch Davidians and other apocalyptic groups. She is ...
Go to Profile#12229
Stephen Bayley
#12240
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Stephen Paul Bayley is a Welsh writer and critic, known particularly for his commentary on architecture and design. He was founding CEO of the Design Museum in London in 1989, and has been a regular architecture, art and design critic for newspapers such as The Listener, The Observer and The Spectator.
Go to Profile#12230
Helga Grebing
#12241
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Helga Grebing was a German historian and university professor . A focus of her work is on social history and, more specifically, on the history of the labour movement. Life Provenance and early years Grebing was born on 27 February 1930 in Pankow, Berlin, to a Roman Catholic father, who worked in the building trade, and a Protestant mother. She has referred to her paternal grandmother "without wishing to sound negative", as a "bigot catholic" . Her mother was a factory worker, who later switched jobs, moving into the food retailing sector. Grebing grew up in and around Berlin.
Go to Profile#12231
Peter Frampton
#12242
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Peter Kenneth Frampton is an English-American guitarist, singer and songwriter who rose to prominence as a member of the rock bands the Herd and Humble Pie. Later in his career Frampton found significant success as a solo artist. He has released several albums, including his breakthrough album, the live release Frampton Comes Alive! , which spawned several hit singles and has earned 8× Platinum by the RIAA in the United States. He has also worked with various acts such as Ringo Starr, the Who's John Entwistle, David Bowie, and both Matt Cameron and Mike McCready of Pearl Jam.
Go to Profile#12232
Anne Carson
#12243
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Anne Patricia Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor. Trained at the University of Toronto, Carson has taught classics, comparative literature, and creative writing at universities across the United States and Canada since 1979, including McGill, Michigan, NYU, and Princeton.
Go to Profile#12233
Celâl Şengör
#12244
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Ali Mehmet Celâl Şengör is a Turkish geologist. He is retired from the faculty at Istanbul Technical University, Department of Geological Engineering. Şengör is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Science. He is a recipient of Gustav-Steinmann-Medaille — the highest distinction of the Geologische Vereinigung e.V.
Go to Profile#12234
Emily Oster
#12245
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Emily Fair Oster is an American economist and author. She is currently the JJE Goldman Sachs University Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University, where she has taught since 2015. Her research interests span from development economics and health economics to research design and experimental methodology. Her research has received exposure among non-economists through The Wall Street Journal, the book SuperFreakonomics, and her 2007 TED Talk.
Go to Profile#12235
Alessandro Portelli
#12246
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Alessandro Portelli is an Italian scholar of American literature and culture, oral historian, writer for the daily newspaper il manifesto, and musicologist. He is a professor of Anglo-American literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza. In the United States he is best known for his oral history work, which has compared workers' accounts of industrial conflicts in Harlan County, Kentucky, and Terni, Italy. In 2014–15, he was a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, co-teaching a course on Bruce Springsteen's America.
Go to Profile#12236
Gerald C. Meyers
#12247
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Gerald Carl Meyers was an American industrialist, author, lecturer, and management consultant who was chairman and CEO of American Motors Corporation from 1977 to 1982. Early life and career Gerald Carl Meyers was born in 1928 to a Jewish family in Buffalo, New York. His father was a tailor who immigrated to the United States from Poland. His mother was an opera singer.
Go to Profile#12237
William Cheung
#12248
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
William Cheung or Cheung Cheuk-hing is a Hong Kong Wing Chun kung fu practitioner and currently the Grandmaster of his lineage of Wing Chun, entitled Traditional Wing Chun . He also heads the sanctioning body of TWC, the Global Traditional Wing Chun Kung Fu Association . He is the recipient of a Masters Award for lifetime achievement in Kung Fu from Martial Arts Australia.
Go to Profile#12238
Dennis S. Charney
#12249
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Dennis S. Charney is an American biological psychiatrist and researcher, with expertise in the neurobiology and treatment of mood and anxiety disorders. He is the author of Neurobiology of Mental Illness, The Physician's Guide to Depression and Bipolar Disorders and Molecular Biology for the Clinician, as well as the author of over 600 original papers and chapters. In 2022, he was listed #52 on Research.com's "Top Medicine Scientists in the United States," with an h-index of 194 with 146,109 citations across 651 publications. Charney is known for demonstrating that ketamine is effective for treating depression.
Go to Profile#12239
William S. Massey
#12250
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
William Schumacher Massey was an American mathematician, known for his work in algebraic topology. The Massey product is named for him. He worked also on the formulation of spectral sequences by means of exact couples, and wrote several textbooks, including A Basic Course in Algebraic Topology .
Go to Profile#12240
Valie Export
#12251
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Valie Export is an avant-garde Austrian artist. She is best known for provocative public performances and expanded cinema work. Her artistic work also includes video installations, computer animations, photography, sculpture and publications covering contemporary art.
Go to Profile#12241
Mike Huckabee
#12252
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Michael Dale Huckabee is an American Baptist minister, political commentator, and former politician who served as the 44th governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007. He was a candidate for the Republican Party presidential nomination in both 2008 and 2016.
Go to Profile#12242
Susan Hill
#12253
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Dame Susan Elizabeth Hill, Lady Wells is an English author of fiction and non-fiction works. Her novels include The Woman in Black, which has been adapted in multiple ways, The Mist in the Mirror, and I'm the King of the Castle, for which she received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1971. She also won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1972 for The Bird of Night, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Go to Profile#12243
Ernan McMullin
#12254
Overall Influence
1924 - 2011 (87 years)
Ernan McMullin was an Irish philosopher who last served as the O’Hara Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He was an internationally respected philosopher of science who has written and lectured extensively on subjects ranging from the relationship between cosmology and theology, to the role of values in understanding science, to the impact of Darwinism on Western religious thought. He is the only person to ever hold the presidency of four of the major US philosophical associations. He was an expert on the life of Galileo.
Go to Profile#12244
Martin Bojowald
#12255
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Martin Bojowald is a German physicist who now works on the faculty of the Penn State Physics Department, where he is a member of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos. Prior to joining Penn State he spent several years at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany. He works on loop quantum gravity and physical cosmology and is credited with establishing the sub-field of loop quantum cosmology.
Go to Profile#12245
Antonine Maillet
#12256
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Antonine Maillet, is an Acadian novelist, playwright, and scholar. She was born in Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Canada. Education Following high school, Maillet received her BA from the Collège Notre-Dame d'Acadie in 1950, followed by an MA from the Université de Moncton in 1959. She then received her PhD in literature in 1971 from the Université Laval. Her thesis is entitled Rabelais et les traditions populaires en Acadie.
Go to Profile#12246
Tadatsugu Taniguchi
#12257
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Tadatsugu Taniguchi is a Japanese immunologist known for his pioneer research on Interferons and Interferon regulatory factors. Contribution Taniguchi's work is mostly focused on immunity and oncogenesis, in particular on the mechanisms of signal transduction and gene expression. While working at the Cancer Institute in Tokyo, he conducted breakthrough research on sequencing the cDNA, and identified two cytokine genes, interferon-beta and interleukin-2. These advances helped characterize various cytokines and discover a new family of transcription factors, interferon regulatory factors, which ...
Go to Profile#12247
Julianne Moore
#12258
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Julie Anne Smith , known professionally as Julianne Moore, is an American actress. Prolific in film since the early 1990s, she is particularly known for her portrayals of emotionally troubled women in independent films, as well as for her roles in blockbusters. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and two Emmy Awards.
Go to Profile#12248
Errol Harris
#12259
Overall Influence
1908 - 2009 (101 years)
Errol Eustace Harris , sometimes cited as E. E. Harris, was a South African philosopher. His work focused on developing a systematic and coherent account of the logic, metaphysics, and epistemology implicit in contemporary understanding of the world. Harris held that, in conjunction with empirical science, the Western philosophical tradition, in its commitment to the ideal of reason, contains the resources necessary to accomplish this end. He celebrated his 100th birthday in 2008.
Go to Profile#12249
Fleur Adcock
#12260
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Fleur Adcock is a New Zealand poet and editor, of English and Northern Irish ancestry, who has lived much of her life in England. She is well-represented in New Zealand poetry anthologies, was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2008 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.
Go to Profile#12250
John Dryzek
#12261
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John S. Dryzek is a Centenary Professor at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra's Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis. Education Dryzek has a B.A. in Economics and Politics from the University of Lancaster , an M.Sc. in Politics from the University of Strathclyde and a Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland .
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