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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#12301
Lawrence C. Evans
#12312
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Lawrence Craig Evans is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is in the field of nonlinear partial differential equations, primarily elliptic equations. In 2004, he shared the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research with Nicolai V. Krylov. Evans also made significant contributions to the development of the theory of viscosity solutions of nonlinear equations, to the understanding of the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation arising in stochastic optimal control theory, and to the theory of harmonic maps. He...
Go to Profile#12302
Walter Krämer
#12313
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Walter Krämer is a German economist. He is a professor for economic and social statistics at the Technical University of Dortmund. Biography Krämer studied mathematics and economics at the University of Mainz where he was conferred 1979 a doctorate. He qualified as a university lecturer in econometrics at the Vienna University of Technology. He has been a professor of economic and social statistics at the Technical University of Dortmund since 1988. In addition, he was active as a guest professor at the Management Institute of Fudan University in Shanghai.
Go to Profile#12303
Rayson Huang
#12314
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Rayson Lisung Huang, , was a Hong Kong chemist, who was an expert on radicals. He was the first Chinese Vice-Chancellor of The University of Hong Kong, a position in which he served from 1972 until 1986.
Go to Profile#12304
Chung Laung Liu
#12315
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Chung Laung Liu , also known as David Liu or C. L. Liu, was a Taiwanese computer scientist. Born in Guangzhou, he spent his childhood in Macau. He received his B.Sc. degree in Taiwan, master's degree and doctorate in United States.
Go to Profile#12305
Bohdan Paczyński
#12316
Overall Influence
1940 - 2007 (67 years)
Bohdan Paczyński or Bohdan Paczynski was a Polish astronomer notable for his theories and work in the fields of stellar evolution, accretion discs, and gamma ray bursts. He is the recipient of the Eddington Medal , the Henry Draper Medal , the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society , and the Order of Polonia Restituta .
Go to Profile#12306
Matthew Shepard
#12317
Overall Influence
1976 - 1998 (22 years)
Matthew Wayne Shepard was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998. He was taken by rescuers to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died six days later from severe head injuries received during the attack.
Go to Profile#12307
Nino Cocchiarella
#12318
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Nino Cocchiarella is an American philosopher who is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. He is best known for his work in formal logic and ontology. Among his important articles are:"Nominalism and Conceptualism as Predicative Second Order Theories of Predication", Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, vol. 21 "Richard Montague and the Logical Analysis of Language", in Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, vol. 2, Philosophy of Language/Philosophical Logic, G. Fløistad, ed., Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague "The Development of the Theory of Logical Types and the Notion of a Logical Subject in Russell's Early Philosophy", Synthese, vol.
Go to Profile#12308
Henriette Walter
#12319
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Henriette Walter is a French linguist, emeritus professor of French at the University of Rennes 2, and director of the Phonology Laboratory at the École pratique des hautes études at the Sorbonne. She is known for both her specialized academic work and her popular linguistics publications.
Go to Profile#12309
G. Wayne Clough
#12320
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
#12310
George Davey Smith
#12321
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
George Davey Smith is a British epidemiologist. He has been professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Bristol since 1994, honorary professor of public health at the University of Glasgow since 1996, and visiting professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine since 1999.
Go to Profile#12311
Jacques Distler
#12322
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jacques Distler is a Canadian-born American physicist working in string theory. He has been a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin since 1994. Early life and education Distler was born to a Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he attended Herzliah High School . He attended Harvard University for both his bachelors and doctorate in physics. His 1987 thesis Compactified String Theories was supervised by Sidney Coleman.
Go to Profile#12312
Arthur Whitney
#12323
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Arthur Whitney is a Canadian computer scientist most notable for developing three programming languages inspired by APL: A+, k, and q, and for co-founding the U.S. companies Kx Systems and Shakti Software.
Go to Profile#12313
Julian T. Jackson
#12324
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Julian Timothy Jackson is a British historian who is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society. He is a professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London, he is one of the leading authorities on twentieth-century France.
Go to Profile#12314
Gennady Onishchenko
#12325
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Gennadiy Grigoryevich Onishchenko is a Russian government official who was the Chief Sanitary Inspector of Russia from 1996 to 2013. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.
Go to Profile#12315
Daniel Sperber
#12326
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Daniel Sperber is a British-born Israeli academic and centrist orthodox rabbi. He is a professor of Talmud at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and an expert in classical philology, history of Jewish customs, Jewish art history, Jewish education, and Talmudic studies.
Go to Profile#12316
Shaj Mohan
#12327
Overall Influence
Shaj Mohan is an Indian philosopher. His philosophical works are in the areas of metaphysics, reason, philosophy of technology, philosophy of politics, and secrecy. Mohan's works are based on the principle of anastasis according to which philosophy is an ever-present possibility on the basis of a reinterpretation of reason.
Go to Profile#12317
Rey Chow
#12328
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Rey Chow is a cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory. Educated in Hong Kong and the United States, she has taught at several major American universities, including Brown University. Chow is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.
Go to Profile#12318
Russell Blaylock
#12329
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Russell L. Blaylock is an author and a retired U.S. neurosurgeon. Blaylock was a clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. In 2013 he was a visiting professor in the biology department at Belhaven College.
Go to Profile#12319
Bob Ryan
#12330
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert P. Ryan is an American sportswriter, formerly with The Boston Globe, and author. He has been described as "the quintessential American sportswriter" and a basketball guru, and is well known for his coverage of the sport including his famous stories covering the Boston Celtics in the 1970s. After graduating from Boston College, Ryan started as a sports intern for the Globe on the same day as Peter Gammons, and later worked with other notable Globe sportswriters Will McDonough and Leigh Montville. In early 2012, Ryan announced his retirement from sports writing after 44 years, effective at the conclusion of the 2012 Summer Olympics.
Go to Profile#12320
Suman Pokhrel
#12331
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Suman Pokhrel is a Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist. Universities in Nepal and India have included his poetry in their syllabus. Pokhrel is the sole writer to receive the SAARC Literary Award twice. He received this award in 2013 and 2015 for his own poetry and his contributions to poetry and art in general in the South Asian region.
Go to Profile#12321
Michael Fredman
#12332
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michael Lawrence Fredman is an emeritus professor at the Computer Science Department at Rutgers University, United States. He earned his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1972 under the supervision of Donald Knuth. He was a member of the mathematics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1974 to 1976. and of the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of California, San Diego until 1992. Among his contributions to computer science are the development of the Fibonacci heap in a joint work with Robert Tarjan, the transdichotomous model of intege...
Go to Profile#12322
George G. Robertson
#12333
Overall Influence
George G. Robertson is an American information visualization expert and senior researcher, Visualization and Interaction Research Group, Microsoft Research. With Stuart K. Card, Jock D. Mackinlay and others he invented a number of Information Visualization techniques.
Go to Profile#12323
Nahum Sonenberg
#12334
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Nahum Sonenberg, is an Israeli Canadian microbiologist and biochemist. He is a James McGill professor of biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He was an HHMI international research scholar from 1997 to 2011 and is now a senior international research scholar. He is best known for his seminal contributions to our understanding of translation, and notable for the discovery of the mRNA 5' cap-binding protein, eIF4E, the rate-limiting component of the eukaryotic translation apparatus.
Go to Profile#12324
Heydar Aliyev
#12335
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Heydar Alirza oghlu Aliyev was an Azerbaijani politician who served as the third president of Azerbaijan from October 1993 to October 2003. Originally a high-ranking official in the KGB of the Azerbaijan SSR, serving for 28 years in Soviet state security organs , he led Soviet Azerbaijan from 1969 to 1982 and held the post of First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1987.
Go to Profile#12325
Darick Robertson
#12336
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Darick W. Robertson is an American artist best known for his work as a comic book illustrator on series he co-created, notably Transmetropolitan and The Boys . Robertson has illustrated hundreds of comics in his twenty plus years in the industry. His body of work ranges from science fiction characters of his own creation to work on renowned classic characters from Marvel and DC Comics.
Go to Profile#12326
Claudio Procesi
#12337
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Claudio Procesi is an Italian mathematician, known for works in algebra and representation theory. Career Procesi studied at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he received his degree in 1963. In 1966 he graduated from the University of Chicago advised by Israel Herstein, with a thesis titled "On rings with polynomial identities". From 1966 he was assistant professor at the University of Rome, 1970 associate professor at the University of Lecce, and 1971 at the University of Pisa. From 1973 he was full professor in Pisa and in 1975 ordinary Professor at the Sapienza University of Rome. He...
Go to Profile#12327
Orrin Hatch
#12338
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Orrin Grant Hatch was an American attorney and politician who served as a United States senator from Utah from 1977 to 2019. Hatch's 42-year Senate tenure made him the longest-serving Republican U.S. senator in history, overtaking Ted Stevens, until Chuck Grassley surpassed him in 2023.
Go to Profile#12328
Peter Kruse
#12339
Overall Influence
1955 - 2015 (60 years)
Peter Kruse was honorary professor of organizational psychology at the University of Bremen and professional consultant for collective intelligence. His main field of research was processing of complexity and autonomous order formation in intelligent networks. His interdisciplinary work focused on the application of collective intelligence to economic and social developments.
Go to Profile#12329
Suzette Haden Elgin
#12340
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Suzette Haden Elgin was an American researcher in experimental linguistics, construction and evolution of languages and poetry and science fiction writer. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association and is considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Her best-known non-fiction includes her Verbal Self-Defense series.
Go to Profile#12330
Peter Li
#12341
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Peter Wai-Kwong Li is an American mathematician whose research interests include differential geometry and partial differential equations, in particular geometric analysis. After undergraduate work at California State University, Fresno, he received his Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley under Shiing-Shen Chern in 1979. Presently he is Professor Emeritus at University of California, Irvine, where he has been located since 1991.
Go to Profile#12331
Diane Keaton
#12342
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Diane Keaton is an American actress. She has received various accolades throughout her career spanning over five decades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for a Tony Award and two Emmy Awards. She was honored with the Film Society of Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 2007 and an AFI Life Achievement Award in 2017.
Go to Profile#12332
Michael E. O'Hanlon
#12343
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Michael Edward O'Hanlon is the director of research and senior fellow of the foreign policy program at The Brookings Institution. He began his career as a budget analyst in the defense field. Biography
Go to Profile#12333
Barrett Watten
#12344
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Barrett Watten is an American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where he has taught modernism and cultural studies. Other areas of research include postmodern culture and American literature; poetics; literary and cultural theory; visual studies; the avant-garde; and digital literature.
Go to Profile#12334
Walter Feit
#12345
Overall Influence
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
Walter Feit was an Austrian-born American mathematician who worked in finite group theory and representation theory. His contributions provided elementary infrastructure used in algebra, geometry, topology, number theory, and logic. His work helped the development and utilization of sectors like cryptography, chemistry, and physics.
Go to Profile#12335
Wolfgang Prinz
#12346
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Wolfgang Prinz is a German cognitive psychologist. He is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and an internationally recognized expert in experimental psychology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. He is the founder of the common coding theory between perception and action that has a significant impact in cognitive neuroscience and social cognition.
Go to Profile#12336
David W. Orr
#12347
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics Emeritus at Oberlin College, and presently Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. During his tenure at the Environmental Studies Center at Oberlin College, Orr demonstrated how institutions of higher learning can teach ecological literacy while practicing sustainable design and encouraging more eco-friendly lifestyles on campus. Orr's books, Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World and Earth in Mind , proposed ways in which education should evolve to emphasiz...
Go to Profile#12337
Manuel Trajtenberg
#12348
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg is an Israeli economist who was the chair of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education in Israel. He was appointed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in August 2011 to lead a committee for negotiations with the Israeli protesters and for recommending economic measures to overcome the crisis. He is currently the Executive Director of the Institute for National Security Studies .
Go to Profile#12338
Susan Buck-Morss
#12349
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Susan Buck-Morss is an American philosopher and intellectual historian. She is currently Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, and professor emeritus in the Government Department at Cornell University, where she taught from 1978 to 2012. Her interdisciplinary work involves but is not limited to the fields of Art History, Architecture, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, German studies, History, Philosophy, and Visual Studies. She has won a Getty Scholar Grant, a Fulbright Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work.
Go to Profile#12339
Russell Blackford
#12350
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Russell Blackford is an Australian writer, philosopher, and literary critic. Early life and education Blackford was born in Sydney, and grew up in the city of Lake Macquarie, near Newcastle, New South Wales. After graduating with first-class honours degrees in both arts and law from the University of Newcastle and University of Melbourne respectively, Blackford was awarded a PhD in English literature, also from Newcastle, on the return to myth in modern fictional narrative . He completed a Master of Bioethics at Monash University and was awarded a second PhD, in philosophy , for a thesis entitled "The philosophy of human enhancement".
Go to Profile#12340
Roger Lewin
#12351
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Roger Lewin is a British prize-winning science writer and author of 20 books. Career Lewin was a staff member of New Scientist in London for nine years. He went to Washington, D.C. to write for Science for ten years as News Editor. An example article was "Evolutionary Theory Under Fire", 21, November 1980, vol. 210, pp 883–887. Lewin wrote three books with Richard Leakey. He became a full-time freelance writer in 1989 and concentrated on writing books. In 1989 Roger Lewin won the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books for Bones of Contention.
Go to Profile#12341
David Shaffer
#12352
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
David Percy Shaffer was a South African-born British-American physician and pediatrician. He was the Irving Philips Professor of Child Psychiatry in the Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics, at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, now the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. Shaffer was also the chief of pediatric psychiatry at New York–Presbyterian Hospital and chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, New York State Psychiatric Institute. He was the former spouse of renowned British-American journalist Anna...
Go to Profile#12342
Hiroo Kanamori
#12353
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Hiroo Kanamori is a Japanese seismologist who has made fundamental contributions to understanding the physics of earthquakes and the tectonic processes that cause them. Career Kanamori and American seismologist Thomas C. Hanks developed the moment magnitude scale which replaced the Richter magnitude scale as a measurement of the relative strength of earthquakes.
Go to Profile#12343
M. Ram Murty
#12354
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Maruti Ram Pedaprolu Murty, FRSC is an Indo-Canadian mathematician at Queen's University, where he holds a Queen's Research Chair in mathematics. Biography M. Ram Murty is the brother of mathematician V. Kumar Murty.
Go to Profile#12344
Emma Alberici
#12355
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Emma Alberici is an Australian journalist and former foreign correspondent who was the chief economics correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's television network. Alberici was until 2017 the presenter of ABC TV's flagship current affairs program, Lateline. She has been a foreign correspondent for the ABC. She previously worked as a reporter for the ABC's The 7.30 Report and Lateline, and was also a reporter and producer with A Current Affair on Australia's Nine Network.
Go to Profile#12345
Anthony Thwaite
#12356
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Anthony Simon Thwaite was an English poet and critic, widely known as the editor of his friend Philip Larkin's collected poems and letters. Early years and education Born in Chester, England, to Yorkshire parents, Thwaite at the age of 10 crossed the Atlantic alone to spend the war years in and around Washington D.C., with an aunt and uncle. On D-Day in 1944 he was on his way home. At Kingswood School, Bath, a teacher, praising his Anglo-Saxon type riddles, encouraged him to think he was a poet. National Service near Leptis Magna in Libya, encouraged him further, both as a poet and as an amat...
Go to Profile#12346
Steve Young
#12357
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jon Steven Young is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 15 seasons, most notably with the San Francisco 49ers. He was drafted by and played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Prior to his NFL career, he was a member of the Los Angeles Express in the United States Football League for two seasons. Young played college football for the BYU Cougars, setting school and NCAA records en route to being runner-up for the 1983 Heisman Trophy.
Go to Profile#12347
Bob Baffert
#12358
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Robert A. Baffert is an American racehorse trainer who trained the 2015 Triple Crown winner American Pharoah and 2018 Triple Crown winner Justify. Baffert's horses have won a record six Kentucky Derbies, eight Preakness Stakes, three Belmont Stakes, and three Kentucky Oaks. He has been the subject of significant controversy regarding repeated incidents of his horses failing drug tests or dying under his care.
Go to Profile#12348
Milton J. Rosenberg
#12359
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Milton J. "Milt" Rosenberg was a prominent social psychologist who was professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and was the host of a long-running radio program in Chicago, Illinois. Rosenberg was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2008 by President George W. Bush, "for bringing the world of ideas to millions of listeners."
Go to Profile#12349
Luis Villoro
#12360
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Luis Villoro Toranzo was a Spanish–Mexican philosopher, researcher, university professor, diplomat, academic and writer. He published more than ten books between 1950 and 2007. Villoro was born in Barcelona on 3 November 1922 to a Spanish father and a Mexican mother. Between 1983 and 1987, he was a delegate for Mexico in UNESCO. He was named an honorary member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua in 2007.
Go to Profile#12350
Sylviane Agacinski
#12361
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sylviane Agacinski-Jospin is a French philosopher, feminist, author, professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales , and wife of Lionel Jospin, former Prime Minister of France. Her theoretical articulation of parity inspired the French law which requires every political party to fill 50 percent of all candidacies in every seat with women.
Go to Profile