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
#12251
Gene Lyons
#12262
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Gene Lyons is an American political columnist who has defended President Bill Clinton. Writing He and Joe Conason co-authored The Hunting of the President: The 10 Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, a documentary book published in 2000, with a supporting film. The book outlines a purported right-wing campaign waged against President of the United States Bill Clinton leading eventually to the president's impeachment because he lied under oath about having extramarital sexual relations with a White House intern. It extends the discussion in Lyons' 1996 book Fools for Scandal: How...
Go to Profile#12252
Haile Debas
#12263
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Haile Debas is an Eritrean physician and academic administrator at the University of California, San Francisco. Life Haile T. Debas was born in Asmara, Eritrea, in 1937. Following undergraduate training at University College of Addis Ababa, he received his M.D. from McGill University in 1963, and completed his surgical training at the University of British Columbia. His postgraduate training included a year as a research fellow at the University of Glasgow/Western Infirmary in Scotland, and two years at UCLA as a Medical Research Council Scholar in gastrointestinal physiology.
Go to Profile#12253
Ella Shohat
#12264
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ella Shohat , is an American professor of cultural studies at New York University, where she teaches in the departments of Art & Public Policy and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies. She has written and lectured on the topics of Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Diasporic cultures.
Go to Profile#12254
Douglas Hague
#12265
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Sir Douglas Chalmers Hague was a British economist who was a close associate of Margaret Thatcher. Biography Hague was born in Bramley, Leeds, to Laurence Hague, a municipal clerk and Marion . The family moved to Birmingham when he was three years old. Hague was educated at Moseley Grammar School and King Edward's School, Birmingham, and took a bachelor of commerce degree at Birmingham University. He was assistant lecturer, then lecturer, then Reader in Political Economy at University College, London, 1947–57.
Go to Profile#12255
Alison Weir
#12266
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Alison Weir is a British author and public historian. She primarily writes about the history of English royal women and families, in the form of biographies that explore their historical setting. She has also written numerous works of historical fiction.
Go to Profile#12256
Saraju Mohanty
#12267
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Saraju Mohanty is an Indian-American professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the director of the Smart Electronic Systems Laboratory, at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. Mohanty received a Glorious India Award – Rich and Famous NRIs of America in 2017 for his contributions to the discipline. Mohanty is a researcher in the areas of "smart electronics for smart cities/villages", "smart healthcare", "application-Specific things for efficient edge computing", and "methodologies for digital and mixed-signal hardware". He has made significant research cont...
Go to Profile#12257
Xiao Qiang
#12268
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Xiao Qiang is the Director and Research Scientist of the Counter-Power Lab, an interdisciplinary faculty-student research group focusing on digital rights and internet freedom, based in the School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. He also serves as the director of the China Internet Project at Berkeley. Xiao is an adjunct professor at the School of Information and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of China Digital Times, a bilingual news website.
Go to Profile#12258
Shōichi Watanabe
#12269
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Shōichi Watanabe was a Japanese scholar of English and one of Japan’s cultural critics. He is known for ultranationalist historical negationism. He was born in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture. A graduate of Sophia University, where he obtained his Master’s degree, he completed his doctorate at University of Münster in 1958. Two volumes of autobiography on his years in Germany narrate his varied experiences during this period. Returning to his alma mater, he became successively lecturer, assistant professor and full professor, until his retirement. He served as emeritus professor at the same university until his death.
Go to Profile#12259
Hans Vermeer
#12270
Overall Influence
1930 - 2010 (80 years)
Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans Josef Vermeer , was a German linguist and translation scholar. Vermeer was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Mainz in Germersheim and held a chair in Translation Studies at Heidelberg University. After his retirement, he became a visiting professor at national and international universities. In his final years, he returned to the universities of Mainz and Heidelberg. On 17 January 2010, just before his death, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Mainz.
Go to Profile#12260
David Morgan
#12271
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
David Hopcraft John Morgan , known as David Morgan, was a British sociologist, who was President of the British Sociological Association and editor of the association's journal Sociology. His research focused on family sociology, gender studies and especially men's studies.
Go to Profile#12261
Henry Babcock Veatch
#12272
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Henry Babcock Veatch Jr. was an American philosopher. Life and career Veatch was born September 26, 1911, in Evansville, Indiana. He attended Harvard University, where he received his A.B. and M.A. degrees and obtained his PhD in 1937. Veatch came to the Philosophy Department at Indiana University as an instructor in 1937. He was named assistant professor in 1941 and full professor in 1952. While at Indiana University, Veatch received many awards and honors. In 1954, he became the first recipient of the Frederick Bachman Lieber Award for Distinguished Teaching. He was popular with his students and was awarded the Sigma Delta Chi "Brown Derby" Award for most popular professor.
Go to Profile#12262
Claes G. Ryn
#12273
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Claes Gösta Ryn is an American conservative academic and educator, who hails from Sweden. Background Ryn was born and raised in Norrköping in Sweden. He attended the Latin Gymnasium, Norrköpings Högre Allmänna Läroverk' . He did military service in the Royal Life Company at the I 4 Regiment in Linkoping and the Signal Corps at the S 1 Regiment in Uppsala. He was an undergraduate and a doctoral student at Uppsala University. He did further doctoral study at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, United States, .
Go to Profile#12263
Linda Argote
#12274
Overall Influence
Linda Argote is an American academic specializing in industrial and organizational psychology. She is Thomas Lord Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, where she directs the Center of Organizational Learning, Innovation and Knowledge.
Go to Profile#12264
George Volkoff
#12275
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
George Michael Volkoff, was a Russian-Canadian physicist and academic who helped, with J. Robert Oppenheimer, predict the existence of neutron stars before they were discovered. Early life He was born in Moscow. His father was a Russian engineer who emigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1924. Unable to find work, his father moved the family to Harbin, Manchuria in 1927 to teach at a technical school. His mother died soon after moving to Harbin. In 1936, Volkoff's father returned to Russia but was exiled to the arctic camps as part of the Great Purge where he would die.
Go to Profile#12265
Vladimir Lifschitz
#12276
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Vladimir Lifschitz is the Gottesman Family Centennial Professor in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a degree in mathematics from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Russia in 1971 and emigrated to the United States in 1976. Lifschitz's research interests are in the areas of computational logic and knowledge representation. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, and an Editorial Advisor of the journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.
Go to Profile#12266
Wes Anderson
#12277
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Wesley Wales Anderson is an American filmmaker. His films are known for their eccentricity, unique visual and narrative styles, and frequent use of ensemble casts. They often contain themes of grief, loss of innocence, and dysfunctional families. Some critics cite Anderson as a modern-day example of an auteur. Three of his films have appeared in BBC Culture's 2016 poll of the greatest films since 2000.
Go to Profile#12267
Michael Lapidge
#12278
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Michael Lapidge, FBA is a scholar in the field of Medieval Latin literature, particularly that composed in Anglo-Saxon England during the period 600–1100 AD; he is an emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and winner of the 2009 Sir Israel Gollancz Prize.
Go to Profile#12268
Herbert S. Terrace
#12279
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Herbert S. Terrace is a professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. His work covers a broad set of research interests that include behaviorism, animal cognition, ape language and the evolution of language. He is the author of Nim: A Chimpanzee Who Learned Sign Language and Why Chimpanzees Can't Learn Language and Only Humans Can . Terrace has made important contributions to comparative psychology, many of which have important implications for human psychology. These include discrimination learning, ape language, the evolution of language, and animal cognition.
Go to Profile#12269
Ashish Jha
#12280
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Ashish Kumar Jha is an Indian-American general internist physician and academic who served as the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator from 2022-2023. He has been Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health since 2020. Prior to Brown, he was the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, and a Senior Advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group. Jha is recognized as one of the leading health policy scholars in the nation. Jha's role at Brown University focuses on improving the quality and cos...
Go to Profile#12270
Jack Rosenthal
#12281
Overall Influence
1931 - 2004 (73 years)
Jack Morris Rosenthal was an English playwright. He wrote 129 early episodes of the ITV soap opera Coronation Street and over 150 screenplays, including original TV plays, feature films, and adaptations.
Go to Profile#12271
Carlos Moyá
#12282
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Carlos Moyá Llompart is a Spanish former world No. 1 tennis player. He is the 1998 French Open singles champion and the runner-up at the 1997 Australian Open. In 2004, he was part of his country's winning Davis Cup team. He has been Rafael Nadal's primary coach since 2016.
Go to Profile#12272
Robin Lakoff
#12283
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Robin Tolmach Lakoff is a professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her 1975 book Language and Woman's Place is often credited for making language and gender a major debate in linguistics and other disciplines.
Go to Profile#12273
John Hill
#12284
Overall Influence
John Graham Hill is an American record producer, songwriter, and musician. John Hill won a Grammy at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album for Social Cues by Cage The Elephant. Hill has also been nominated for "Producer of the Year" for the 57th and 62nd Annual Grammy Awards. Hill currently works out of Venice, California.
Go to Profile#12274
Peter Paret
#12285
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Peter Paret was a German-born American cultural and intellectual historian, whose two principal areas of research were war and the interaction of art and politics from 18th to 20th century Europe. He also wrote on related subjects.
Go to Profile#12275
Andrew Nelson Lytle
#12286
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Andrew Nelson Lytle was an American novelist, dramatist, essayist and professor of literature. Early life Andrew Nelson Lytle was born on December 26, 1902, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1925.
Go to Profile#12276
Katrin Suder
#12287
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Katrin Suder is a German physicist and management consultant who served as State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Defense in the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2014 to 2018. Early life and education Suder was born in Mainz on 29 September 1971. She studied physics at RWTH Aachen. In 2000, she received her doctorate in neuroinformatics at the Ruhr University Bochum. Suder also received a bachelor's degree in theater and linguistics there. She was a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation.
Go to Profile#12277
Sean McDonough
#12288
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Sean McDonough is an American sportscaster, currently employed by ESPN and the WEEI Boston Red Sox Radio Network. Early life The son of Boston Globe sportswriter Will McDonough, McDonough graduated from the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications of Syracuse University in 1984 with a degree in broadcast journalism. At Syracuse, he joined the WAER-FM sports department and provided play-by-play calls for Syracuse Chiefs baseball games. During college, he worked for Syracuse football coach Dick MacPherson.
Go to Profile#12278
Sheila Sherlock
#12289
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Dame Sheila Patricia Violet Sherlock DBE, FRCP FRCPE FRS HFRSE FMGA FCRGA was a British physician and medical educator who is considered the major 20th-century contributor to the field of hepatology .
Go to Profile#12279
Phillip Rogaway
#12290
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Phillip Rogaway is an American cryptographer who is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. He graduated from Beverly Hills High School, and later earned a BA in computer science from UC Berkeley and completed his PhD in cryptography at MIT, in the Theory of Computation group. He has taught at UC Davis since 1994. He was awarded the Paris Kanellakis Award in 2009 and the first Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography in 2016. Rogaway received an NSF CAREER award in 1996, which the NSA had attempted to prevent by influencing the NSF.
Go to Profile#12280
Jim Kent
#12291
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
William James Kent is an American research scientist and computer programmer. He has been a contributor to genome database projects and the 2003 winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award. Early life Kent was born in Hawaii and grew up in San Francisco, California, United States.
Go to Profile#12281
Drew R. McCoy
#12292
Overall Influence
Drew. R. McCoy is an American historian and specialist in American political and intellectual history. McCoy was educated at Cornell University and the University of Virginia . He has taught American history at the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard University, and, most recently, Clark University, where he is currently the Jacob and Frances Hiatt Professor of History. His focus is on early American history from the colonial era through the Civil War era of the mid-nineteenth century. His two books cover a general study of political economy in Revolutionary and Early National America, an...
Go to Profile#12282
Paul MacCready
#12293
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Paul B. MacCready Jr. was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could "do more with less".
Go to Profile#12283
Danny Boyle
#12294
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Daniel Francis Boyle is an English director and producer. He is known for his work on films including Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and its sequel T2 Trainspotting, The Beach, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, Steve Jobs, and Yesterday.
Go to Profile#12284
Anton Muscatelli
#12295
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Sir Vito Antonio Muscatelli is the Principal of the University of Glasgow and one of the United Kingdom's top economists. Early life Anton Muscatelli was born on 1 January 1962 in Bari, Italy to Ambrogio and Rosellina Muscatelli. He lived in Mola di Bari in his early years. His father, who was head of a shipping company, relocated the family to Glasgow from the Netherlands. Anton was educated at The High School of Glasgow and the University of Glasgow, where he graduated M.A. in Political Economy and took a PhD in Economics . He was a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Professor at the Universi...
Go to Profile#12285
Martin Kusch
#12296
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Martin Kusch is Professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. Until 2009, Kusch was Professor of Philosophy and Sociology of science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University. Prior to Cambridge, Kusch was lecturer in the Science Studies Unit of the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#12286
Matthew Hennessy
#12297
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Matthew Hennessy is an Irish computer scientist who has contributed especially to concurrency, process calculi and programming language semantics. Career During 1976–77, Matthew Hennessy was an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Then during 1977–78, he was a visiting professor at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil. Subsequently, he was a research associate and then lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. During 1985, he was a guest lecturer/researcher at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.
Go to Profile#12287
William T. Cavanaugh
#12298
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
William T. Cavanaugh is an American Roman Catholic theologian, known for his work in political theology and Christian ethics. Biography Cavanaugh received his Bachelor of Arts degree in theology from the University of Notre Dame in 1984, and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Cambridge in 1987. He later attended Duke University, where he received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in religion in 1996. His areas of specialization are in political theology, economic ethics, and ecclesiology.
Go to Profile#12288
Frederick Jelinek
#12299
Overall Influence
1932 - 2010 (78 years)
Frederick Jelinek was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing. He is well known for his oft-quoted statement, "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up".
Go to Profile#12289
Eleanor Maguire
#12300
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Eleanor Anne Maguire is an Irish neuroscientist. Since 2007, she has been Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London where she is also a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.
Go to Profile#12290
Loren Cordain
#12301
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Loren Cordain is an American scientist who specializes in the fields of nutrition and exercise physiology. He is notable as an advocate of the Paleolithic diet. Education Loren Cordain obtained a B.S. in Health Sciences from Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon in 1972. In 1978 he got his M.Sc. in Exercise Physiology at the University of Nevada-Reno. In 1981 he was awarded his Ph.D. in Exercise Physiology by the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
Go to Profile#12291
Taylor Marshall
#12302
Overall Influence
Taylor Reed Marshall is an American Catholic YouTube commentator, former Episcopal Church priest, former academic, and advocate of traditionalist Catholicism. He is the author of multiple books, including the 2019 book Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within.
Go to Profile#12292
Meena Alexander
#12303
Overall Influence
1951 - 2018 (67 years)
Meena Alexander was an Indian American poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander later lived and worked in New York City, where she was a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Go to Profile#12293
Jakob Segal
#12304
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Jakob Segal was a Russian-born German biology professor at Humboldt University of Berlin in the former East Germany. He was one of the advocates of the conspiracy theory that HIV was created by the United States government at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Go to Profile#12294
Isabel Wilkerson
#12305
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents . She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Go to Profile#12295
Paula Byrne
#12306
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Paula Jayne Byrne, Lady Bate , is a British biographer, novelist, and literary critic. Life Byrne has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Liverpool, where she also studied for her MA, having completed a BA in English and Theology at West Sussex Institute of Higher Education .
Go to Profile#12296
Jean-Bédel Bokassa
#12307
Overall Influence
1921 - 1996 (75 years)
Jean-Bédel Bokassa , also known as Bokassa I, was a Central African political and military leader who served as the second president of the Central African Republic and as the emperor of its successor state, the Central African Empire , from the Saint-Sylvestre coup d'état on 1 January 1966 until his overthrow in a subsequent coup in 1979.
Go to Profile#12297
Arantxa Sánchez Vicario
#12308
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Aránzazu Isabel María "Arantxa" Sánchez Vicario is a Spanish former world No. 1 tennis player in both singles and doubles. She won 14 Grand Slam titles: four in singles, six in women's doubles, and four in mixed doubles. She also won four Olympic medals and five Fed Cup titles representing Spain. In 1994, she was crowned the ITF World Champion for the year.
Go to Profile#12298
Jean Matter Mandler
#12309
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Jean Matter Mandler is Distinguished Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego and visiting professor at University College London. She was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1929 and attended Carleton College before transferring to Swarthmore College, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1951. She received her Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard University in 1956. After a series of research positions – common for women in the 1950–1960s – at Harvard, the University of Toronto, and at UCSD, she became an associate professor at UCSD in 1973 and professor in 1977; she retired as a research professor in 2000.
Go to Profile#12299
Gareth Matthews
#12310
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Gareth B. Matthews was an American philosopher who specialized in ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, philosophy of childhood and philosophy for children. Biography Gareth Matthews was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on July 8, 1929. He grew up near Memphis, Tennessee. As a Boy Scout, he earned the rank of Eagle Scout. Matthews moved with his family to Franklin, Indiana, in 1945. He was valedictorian of the Class of 1947, at Franklin High School. He went on to earn his A.B. at Franklin College , where his father was a professor. Matthews began his graduate work at Harvard University, where he earned an A.M.
Go to Profile#12300
António Castanheira Neves
#12311
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
António Castanheira Neves is a Portuguese legal philosopher and a professor emeritus at the law faculty of the University of Coimbra. According to Castanheira Neves, law can only be understood through legal problems , which have to be solved within the legal system . Law, he claims, is not something given or previous, but the solution to legal problems. Legal problems are the decisive starting point. His opposition to positivism, to natural law and to the several theories of legal syllogism would make him one of the first and most accomplished advocates of interpretivism.
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