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
#12351
Vil Mirzayanov
#12362
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Vil Sultanovich Mirzayanov is a Russian chemist of ethnic Tatar origin who now lives in the United States, best known for revealing secret chemical weapons experimentation in Russia. Early life Vil Sultanovich Mirzayanov was born in a village in rural Bashkortostan, the son of the village school teacher. The Mirzayanov family is Tatar, a Turkic ethnic minority in Russia. His father, a staunch Communist, broke with a 200 year old family tradition in which the oldest sons entered the Muslim clergy. In 1953, he graduated from the Dyurtyuli Tatar School No. 1 with a silver medal.
Go to Profile#12352
Jean Comaroff
#12363
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jean Comaroff is Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard University. She is an expert on the effects of colonialism on people in Southern Africa. Until 2012, Jean was the Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.
Go to Profile#12353
Albert Overhauser
#12364
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Albert W. Overhauser was an American physicist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is best known for his theory of dynamic nuclear polarization known as the Overhauser effect in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
Go to Profile#12354
Victor Schnirelmann
#12365
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Victor Alexandrovich Schnirelmann is a Russian historian, ethnologist and a member of Academia Europaea . He is a senior researcher of N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Russian Academy of Sciences and an author of over 300 works, including over 20 monographies on archaeology. Schnirelmann's main fields include the ideologies of nationalism in Russia and CIS, ethnocentrism and irredentism.
Go to Profile#12355
Joseph B. Martin
#12366
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Joseph Boyd Martin is a Canadian physician who is the Edward R. and Anne G. Lefler Professor Emeritus of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Prior to that, he served as the Dean of Harvard Medical School from 1997 before stepping down on June 30, 2007.
Go to Profile#12356
Alan Pardew
#12367
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Alan Scott Pardew is an English football manager and former professional footballer, who most recently managed Greek Super League club Aris Thessaloniki. Pardew's highest achievements in the sport include reaching the FA Cup Final three times: as a player with Crystal Palace in 1990 and as a manager with West Ham United in 2006 and in 2016 when his Crystal Palace side lost to Manchester United. He has also achieved promotion three times in his career, as a player with Palace and as a manager with Reading and West Ham. He managed Newcastle United from 2010 to 2014.
Go to Profile#12357
Retta
#12368
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Marietta Sirleaf, known professionally as Retta, is an American stand-up comedian and actress. She is best known for her roles of Donna Meagle on NBC's Parks and Recreation and Ruby Hill on NBC's Good Girls. She has appeared in several films and television shows, and has performed stand-up on Comedy Central's Premium Blend.
Go to Profile#12358
Laurent Fabius
#12369
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Laurent Fabius is a French politician serving as President of the Constitutional Council since 8 March 2016. A member of the Socialist Party, he previously served as Prime Minister of France from 17 July 1984 to 20 March 1986. Fabius was 37 years old when he was appointed and is, so far, the youngest Prime Minister of the Fifth Republic.
Go to Profile#12359
Ray Oldenburg
#12370
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Ray Oldenburg was an American urban sociologist who is known for writing about the importance of informal public gathering places for a functioning civil society, democracy, and civic engagement. He coined the term "third place" and is the author of The Great Good Place and the 2001 Celebrating The Third Place.
Go to Profile#12360
Sherwin B. Nuland
#12371
Overall Influence
1930 - 2014 (84 years)
Sherwin Bernard Nuland was an American surgeon and writer who taught bioethics, history of medicine, and medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, and occasionally bioethics and history of medicine at Yale College. His 1994 book How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter was a New York Times Best Seller and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Go to Profile#12361
Jerry F. Hough
#12372
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Jerry Fincher Hough was an American political scientist. Hough was the James B. Duke Professor of Political Science at Duke University and his research focused on domestic American politics, the Soviet Union, the democratization of Russia, and American efforts at nation-building. Hough is a part of the "revisionist school" on Soviet history, maintaining that the level of terror was much exaggerated and that the Soviet Union was institutionally weak under Joseph Stalin, among other things. He saw the focus of his research and teaching as "the relationship of long term economic development and political institutions".
Go to Profile#12362
Rüdiger Safranski
#12373
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Rüdiger Safranski is a German philosopher and author. Life From 1965 to 1972, Safranski studied philosophy , German literature, history and history of art at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and as well at the Free University in Berlin . There, he worked as an assistant lecturer for German literature from 1972 to 1977. He earned a PhD from FU Berlin in 1976 for a dissertation by the title of "Studies on the Development of Working-Class Literature in the Federal Republic of Germany" . In the late 1970s, he worked as the co-publisher and editor of the Berliner Hefte, a journal on literary life.
Go to Profile#12363
Raymond Tallis
#12374
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Raymond C. Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist, cultural critic and a retired medical physician and clinical neuroscientist. Specialising in geriatrics, Tallis served on several UK commissions on medical care of the aged and was an editor or major contributor to two key textbooks in the field, The Clinical Neurology of Old Age and Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology.
Go to Profile#12364
Terry Christian
#12375
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Terence Christian is an English broadcaster, journalist and author. He has presented several national television series in the UK including Channel 4's late night entertainment show The Word and six series of ITV1 moral issues talk show It's My Life . He has also been a regular guest panelist on the topical Channel 5 series The Wright Stuff and Jeremy Vine.
Go to Profile#12365
Anthony Vidler
#12376
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Anthony Vidler was an English architectural historian and critic. He was Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union. Life and career Vidler was born in Mere, Wiltshire, in 1941, and grew up in Shenfield, Essex. His interest in architecture and its sociopolitical relevance began when he saw an air raid on a neighbouring town during World War II. He received a B.A. and Dipl.Arch. from Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Technical University Delft.
Go to Profile#12366
Andrew Young
#12377
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Andrew Jackson Young Jr. is an American politician, diplomat, and activist. Beginning his career as a pastor, Young was an early leader in the civil rights movement, serving as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a close confidant to Martin Luther King Jr. Young later became active in politics, serving as a U.S. Congressman from Georgia, United States Ambassador to the United Nations in the Carter Administration, and 55th Mayor of Atlanta. He was the first African American elected to Congress from Georgia since Reconstruction, as well as one of the first tw...
Go to Profile#12367
David E. Jeremiah
#12378
Overall Influence
1934 - 2013 (79 years)
David Elmer Jeremiah was a United States Navy admiral who served as the second vice chairman and also the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After his retirement from the Navy in February 1994, he worked in the field of investment banking. He served as partner and President, CEO and later Chairman of Technology Strategies & Alliances Corporation, a strategic advisory and investment banking firm engaged primarily in the aerospace, defense, telecommunications, and electronics industries. During his military career Jeremiah earned a reputation as an authority on strategic planning, ...
Go to Profile#12368
Thomas S. Ray
#12379
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Thomas S. Ray is an evolutionary biologist known for his research in tropical biology, digital evolution, and the human mind. Early life and education Ray earned his undergraduate degrees in biology and chemistry at Florida State University. He then proceeded to Harvard University, where he received his master's and Doctorate in Biology, specializing in plant behavior.
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Lisa Brennan-Jobs
#12380
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Lisa Nicole Brennan-Jobs is an American writer. She is the daughter of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Chrisann Brennan. Jobs initially denied paternity for several years, which led to a legal case and various media reports in the early days of Apple. Lisa and Steve Jobs eventually reconciled, and he accepted his paternity. Brennan-Jobs later worked as a journalist and magazine writer. An early Apple business computer, the Apple Lisa, is named after her, and she has been depicted in a number of biographies and films, including the biopics Pirates of Silicon Valley , Jobs , and Steve Jobs . A ...
Go to Profile#12370
Lewis Hyde
#12381
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Lewis Hyde is a scholar, essayist, translator, cultural critic and writer whose scholarly work focuses on the nature of imagination, creativity, and property. Profile Hyde was born in Cambridge, MA. He is the son of Elizabeth Sanford Hyde and Walter Lewis Hyde. He received an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Minnesota after which there were many years of freelance work and odd jobs, before teaching writing in the 80s.
Go to Profile#12371
Paul Streeten
#12382
Overall Influence
1917 - 2019 (102 years)
Paul Patrick Streeten was an Austrian-born British economics professor. He was a professor at Boston University, US until his retirement. He has been a distinguished academic working on development economics since the 1950s.
Go to Profile#12372
Donald Rayfield
#12383
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Patrick Donald Rayfield OBE is an English academic and Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgiann literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police. He is also a series editor for books about Russian writers and intelligentsia. He has translated Georgian, Russian and Uzbek poets and prose writers.
Go to Profile#12373
J. Tinsley Oden
#12384
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
John Tinsley Oden was an American engineer. He was the Associate Vice President for Research, the Cockrell Family Regents' Chair in Engineering #2, the Peter O'Donnell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Computing Systems, a Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, a Professor of Mathematics, and a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. Oden has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.
Go to Profile#12374
Thomas M. Humphrey
#12385
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Thomas MacGillivray Humphrey was an American economist. Until 2005 he was a research advisor and senior economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and editor of the bank's flagship publication, the Economic Quarterly. His publications cover macroeconomics, monetary economics, and the history of economic thought. Mark Blaug called him the "undisputed master" of British classical monetary thought.
Go to Profile#12375
Tito Boeri
#12386
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Tito Michele Boeri is an Italian economist, currently professor of economics at Bocconi University, Milan and acts as Scientific Director of the Fondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti. Biography Born in Milan, Boeri obtained his Ph.D. in economics from New York University in 1990. He was senior economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development from 1987 to 1996. He was also consultant to the European Commission, International Monetary Fund, the International Labour Organization, the World Bank and the Italian Government. Currently he is a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Institute for the Study of Labor and Igier-Bocconi.
Go to Profile#12376
Ian Mitroff
#12387
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Ian Irving Mitroff is an American organizational theorist, consultant and professor emeritus at the USC Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California He is noted for a wide range of contributions in the field of organizational theory from contributions on strategic planning assumptions and management information systems, to the subjective side of the workplace and spirituality, religion, and values.
Go to Profile#12377
Annie Dillard
#12388
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. From 1980, Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.
Go to Profile#12378
Christine Grady
#12389
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Christine Grady is an American nurse and bioethicist who serves as the head of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. Early life and education Grady was born and raised in Livingston, New Jersey. Her father, John H. Grady Jr., was a graduate of Yale University and a U.S. Navy veteran who served as the mayor of Livingston. Her mother, Barbara, was an assistant dean at Seton Hall University School of Law.
Go to Profile#12379
Willi Dansgaard
#12390
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Willi Dansgaard was a Danish paleoclimatologist. He was Professor Emeritus of Geophysics at the University of Copenhagen and a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Icelandic Academy of Sciences, and the Danish Geophysical Society.
Go to Profile#12380
Erik Trinkaus
#12391
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Erik Trinkaus is a paleoanthropologist specializing in Neandertal and early modern human biology and human evolution. Trinkaus researches the evolution of the species Homo sapiens and recent human diversity, focusing on the paleoanthropology and emergence of late archaic and early modern humans, and the subsequent evolution of anatomically modern humanity. Trinkaus is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor Emeritus of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a frequent contributor to publications such as Science, Proceedi...
Go to Profile#12381
André Aciman
#12392
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
André Aciman is an Italian-American writer. Born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, he is currently a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, where he teaches the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. Aciman previously taught creative writing at New York University and French literature at Princeton and Bard College.
Go to Profile#12382
Shoshichi Kobayashi
#12393
Overall Influence
1932 - 2012 (80 years)
was a Japanese mathematician. He was the eldest brother of electrical engineer and computer scientist Hisashi Kobayashi. His research interests were in Riemannian and complex manifolds, transformation groups of geometric structures, and Lie algebras.
Go to Profile#12383
Jean Mayer
#12394
Overall Influence
1920 - 1993 (73 years)
Jean Mayer was a French-American scientist best known for his research on the physiological bases of hunger and the metabolism of essential nutrients, and for his role in shaping policy on world hunger at both the national and international levels. As a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, Mayer directed a laboratory that did groundbreaking work on the hypothalamic regulation of obesity and various metabolic disorders. In 1968-69, having worked as an adviser to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, he was appointed principal organizer and chair of the first White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health.
Go to Profile#12384
Juliet Schor
#12395
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Juliet B. Schor is an American economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic inequality, and concerns about climate change in the environment. From 2010 to 2017, she studied the sharing economy under a large research project funded by the MacArthur Foundation. She is currently working on a project titled "The Algorithmic Workplace" with a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#12385
Christian Fuchs
#12396
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Christian Fuchs is an Austrian social scientist. From 2013 until 2022 he was Professor of Social Media and Professor of Media, Communication & Society at the University of Westminster, where he also was the Director of the Communication and Media Research Institute . Since 2022, he is Professor of Media Systems and Media Organisation at Paderborn University in Germany. He also known for being the editor of the open access journal tripleC: Communications, Capitalism & Critique. The journal's website offers a wide range of critical studies within the debate of capitalism and communication. This ...
Go to Profile#12386
John Houbolt
#12397
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
John Cornelius Houbolt was an aerospace engineer credited with leading the team behind the lunar orbit rendezvous mission mode, a concept that was used to successfully land humans on the Moon and return them to Earth. This flight path was chosen for the Apollo program in July 1962. The critical decision to use LOR was viewed as vital to ensuring that man reached the Moon by the end of the decade as proposed by President John F. Kennedy. In the process, LOR saved time and billions of dollars by efficiently using the rocket and spacecraft technologies.
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Arthur Peacocke
#12398
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
Arthur Robert Peacocke was an English Anglican theologian and biochemist. Biography Arthur Robert Peacocke was born in Watford, England, on 29 November 1924. He was educated at Watford Grammar School for Boys, Exeter College, Oxford , and the University of Birmingham .
Go to Profile#12388
Eswar Prasad
#12399
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Eswar Shanker Prasad is an Indian-American economist. He is the Tolani Senior Professor of International Trade Policy at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in Economics.
Go to Profile#12389
Tim Noakes
#12400
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Timothy David Noakes is a South African scientist, and an emeritus professor in the Division of Exercise Science and Sports Medicine at the University of Cape Town. He has run more than 70 marathons and ultramarathons, and is the author of several books on exercise and diet. He is known for his work in sports science and for his support of a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, as set out in his books The Real Meal Revolution and Lore of Nutrition: Challenging Conventional Dietary Beliefs.
Go to Profile#12390
Robert S. Dietz
#12401
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
Robert Sinclair Dietz was a scientist with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. Dietz, born in Westfield, New Jersey, was a marine geologist, geophysicist and oceanographer who conducted pioneering research along with Harry Hammond Hess concerning seafloor spreading, published as early as 1960–1961. While at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography he observed the nature of the Emperor chain of seamounts that extended from the northwest end of the Hawaiian Island–Midway chain and speculated over lunch with Robert Fisher in 1953 that something must be carrying these old volcanic mountai...
Go to Profile#12391
Anthony T. Kronman
#12402
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Anthony Townsend Kronman is an American legal scholar who serves as a Sterling Professor at Yale Law School specializing in contracts, bankruptcy, jurisprudence, social theory, and professional responsibility. He was the 14th dean of Yale Law School from 1994 to 2004.
Go to Profile#12392
Dmitry Sklyarov
#12403
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
#12393
Sebastian Barry
#12404
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Sebastian Barry is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet. He was named Laureate for Irish Fiction, 2019–2021. Barry has been twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novels A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture , the latter of which won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His 2011 novel, On Canaan's Side, was longlisted for the Booker. In January 2017, Barry was awarded the Costa Book of the Year prize for Days Without End, becoming the first novelist to win the prestigious prize twice.
Go to Profile#12394
Roy Baumeister
#12405
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
#12395
Michele Mosca
#12406
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Michele Mosca is co-founder and deputy director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, researcher and founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and professor of mathematics in the department of Combinatorics & Optimization at the University of Waterloo. He has held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Quantum Computation since January 2002, and has been a scholar for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research since September 2003. Mosca's principal research interests concern the design of quantum algorithms, but he is also known for his early work on NMR quantum computation together with Jonathan A.
Go to Profile#12396
Lars Johanson
#12407
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Lars Johanson is a Swedish Turcologist and linguist, an emeritus professor at the University of Mainz, and docent at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, University of Uppsala, Sweden. He has been instrumental in transforming the field of Turcology, which was traditionally more philologically oriented, into a linguistic discipline. Apart from his contributions to Turcology, Lars Johanson made a number of pioneering contributions to general linguistics and language typology, in particular to the typology of tense and aspect systems and the theory of language contact.
Go to Profile#12397
Philip Chan
#12408
Overall Influence
Philip C. H. Chan was the Deputy President and Provost of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University , who is currently Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Before joining PolyU on 1 March 2010 he had been Chair Professor of the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology since 1991, the year he entered the university as a founding member.
Go to Profile#12398
David E. H. Jones
#12409
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
David Edward Hugh Jones was a British chemist and writer, who under the pen name Daedalus was the fictional inventor for DREADCO. Jones' columns as Daedalus were published for 38 years, starting weekly in 1964 in New Scientist. He then moved to the journal Nature, and continued to publish until 2002. Columns from these magazines, along with additional comments and implementation sketches, were collected in two books: The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes and The Further Inventions of Daedalus .
Go to Profile#12399
Vlade Divac
#12410
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Vlade Divac is a Serbian professional basketball executive and former player who was most recently the vice president of basketball operations and general manager of the Sacramento Kings of the National Basketball Association .
Go to Profile#12400
Garlin Gilchrist
#12411
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Garlin Gilchrist II is an American politician and activist serving as the 64th lieutenant governor of Michigan since 2019. He is a member of the Democratic Party. Early life and education Gilchrist was born in Detroit. In 1982, his family moved to Farmington, Michigan. His mother worked at General Motors for 32 years and his father worked in defense contract management for the United States Department of Defense.
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