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).
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List of the most influential people
#1251
Joe Nickell
#1252
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Joe Nickell is an American skeptic and investigator of the paranormal. Nickell is senior research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and writes regularly for their journal, Skeptical Inquirer. He is also an associate dean of the Center for Inquiry Institute. He is the author or editor of over 30 books.
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Edward Mills Purcell
#1253
Overall Influence
1912 - 1997 (85 years)
Edward Mills Purcell was an American physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and in solids. Nuclear magnetic resonance has become widely used to study the molecular structure of pure materials and the composition of mixtures. Friends and colleagues knew him as Ed Purcell.
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Martin Karplus
#1254
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
#1254
David McClelland
#1255
Overall Influence
1917 - 1998 (81 years)
David Clarence McClelland was an American psychologist, noted for his work on motivation Need Theory. He published a number of works between the 1950s and the 1990s and developed new scoring systems for the Thematic Apperception Test and its descendants. McClelland is credited with developing Achievement Motivation Theory, commonly referred to as "need for achievement" or n-achievement theory. A Review of General Psychology survey published in 2002, ranked McClelland as the 15th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Leonard Peikoff
#1256
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Leonard Sylvan Peikoff is a Canadian American philosopher. He is an Objectivist and was a close associate of Ayn Rand, who designated him heir to her estate. He is a former professor of philosophy and host of a nationally syndicated radio talk show. He co-founded the Ayn Rand Institute in 1985 and is the author of several books on philosophy.
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Robert Audi
#1257
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert N. Audi is an American philosopher whose major work has focused on epistemology, ethics , rationality and the theory of action. He is O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and previously held a chair in the business school there. His 2005 book, The Good in the Right, updates and strengthens Rossian intuitionism and develops the epistemology of ethics. He has also written important works of political philosophy, particularly on the relationship between church and state. He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association and the Society of Christi...
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Randall Collins
#1258
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#1258
Ralph Merkle
#1259
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Ralph C. Merkle is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, and more recently a researcher and speaker on cryonics.
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Martin Evans
#1260
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Sir Martin John Evans FLSW is an English biologist who, with Matthew Kaufman, was the first to culture mice embryonic stem cells and cultivate them in a laboratory in 1981. He is also known, along with Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, for his work in the development of the knockout mouse and the related technology of gene targeting, a method of using embryonic stem cells to create specific gene modifications in mice. In 2007, the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition of their discovery and contribution to the efforts to develop new treatments for illnesses ...
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Mohammad Javad Zarif
#1261
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Mohammad Javad Zarif Khansari is an Iranian career diplomat and academic. He was the foreign minister of Iran from 2013 until 2021 in the government of Hassan Rouhani. During his tenure as foreign minister, he led the Iranian negotiation with P5+1 countries which produced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on 14 July 2015, lifting the economic sanctions against Iran on 16 January 2016. On 25 February 2019, Zarif resigned from his post as foreign minister. His resignation was rejected by Ali Khamenei and he continued as foreign minister.
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Albert Sabin
#1262
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Albert Bruce Sabin was a Polish-American medical researcher, best known for developing the oral polio vaccine, which has played a key role in nearly eradicating the disease. In 1969–72, he served as the president of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
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Jean-Claude Trichet
#1263
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jean-Claude Trichet is a French economist who served as President of the European Central Bank from 2003 to 2011. Previous to his assumption of the presidency he served as Governor of the Bank of France from 1993 to 2003.
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Thomas J. Sargent
#1264
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Thomas John Sargent is an American economist and the W.R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business at New York University. He specializes in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics, and time series econometrics. As of 2020, he ranks as the 29th most cited economist in the world. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2011 together with Christopher A. Sims for their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".
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Ernst von Glasersfeld
#1265
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Ernst von Glasersfeld was a philosopher, and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, research associate at the Scientific Reasoning Research Institute, and adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was a member of the board of trustees of the American Society for Cybernetics, from which he received the McCulloch Memorial Award in 1991. He was a member of the scientific board of the Instituto Piaget, Lisbon. Glasersfeld is known for the development of radical constructivism.
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James Bamford
#1266
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
James Bamford is an American author, journalist and documentary producer noted for his writing about United States intelligence agencies, especially the National Security Agency . The New York Times has called him "the nation's premier journalist on the subject of the National Security Agency" and The New Yorker named him "the NSA's chief chronicler."
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#1267
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. , also known by his initials as RFK Jr. and the nickname Bobby, is an American politician, environmental lawyer and activist who promotes anti-vaccine misinformation and public health conspiracy theories. He is the chairman and founder of Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine advocacy group, and an independent candidate in the 2024 presidential election.
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Martin Amis
#1268
Overall Influence
1949 - 2023 (74 years)
Sir Martin Louis Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels Money and London Fields . He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize . Amis served as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.
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Harry Blackmun
#1269
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Harry Andrew Blackmun was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1994. Appointed by Republican President Richard Nixon, Blackmun ultimately became one of the most liberal justices on the Court. He is best known as the author of the Court's opinion in Roe v. Wade.
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M. S. Swaminathan
#1270
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan was an Indian agronomist, agricultural scientist, plant geneticist, administrator, and humanitarian. Swaminathan was a global leader of the green revolution. He has been called the main architect of the green revolution in India for his leadership and role in introducing and further developing high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice. Swaminathan's collaborative scientific efforts with Norman Borlaug, spearheading a mass movement with farmers and other scientists and backed by public policies, saved India and Pakistan from certain famine-like conditions in the 1960s.
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William Alston
#1271
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
William Payne Alston was an American philosopher. He is widely considered to be one of the most important epistemologists and philosophers of religion of the twentieth century, and is also known for his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. His views on foundationalism, internalism and externalism, speech acts, and the epistemic value of mystical experience, among many other topics, have been very influential. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and taught at the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, University of Illinois, and Syracuse University.
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Tom DeMarco
#1272
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Tom DeMarco is an American software engineer, author, and consultant on software engineering topics. He was an early developer of structured analysis in the 1970s. Early life and education Tom DeMarco was born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. He received a BSEE degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, a M.S. from Columbia University, and a diplôme from the University of Paris.
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Vladimir Prelog
#1273
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Vladimir Prelog was a Croatian-Swiss organic chemist who received the 1975 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research into the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions. Prelog was born and grew up in Sarajevo. He lived and worked in Prague, Zagreb and Zürich during his lifetime.
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Elwyn Berlekamp
#1274
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Berlekamp was widely known for his work in computer science, coding theory and combinatorial game theory.
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Scott Fahlman
#1275
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Scott Elliott Fahlman is an American computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute and Computer Science Department. He is notable for early work on automated planning and scheduling in a blocks world, on semantic networks, on neural networks , on the programming languages Dylan, and Common Lisp , and he was one of the founders of Lucid Inc. During the period when it was standardized, he was recognized as "the leader of Common Lisp." From 2006 to 2015, Fahlman was engaged in developing a knowledge base named Scone, based in part on his thesis work on the NETL Semantic Network.
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Bertrand Delanoë
#1276
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bertrand Delanoë is a French retired politician who served as Mayor of Paris from 2001 to 2014. A member of the Socialist Party , he previously served in the National Assembly from 1981 to 1986 and Senate from 1995 until 2001.
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Ken Scott
#1277
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ken Scott is a British record producer and engineer known for being one of the five main engineers for the Beatles, as well as engineering Elton John, Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Duran Duran, the Jeff Beck Group, Supertramp and many more.
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J. G. Ballard
#1278
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
James Graham Ballard was an English novelist and short story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations among human psychology, technology, sex, and the mass media. Ballard became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels, such as The Drowned World , but also courted political controversy with the short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition , which includes the story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" , and the novel Crash , a story about car-crash fetishists.
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César Milstein
#1279
Overall Influence
1927 - 2002 (75 years)
César Milstein, CH, FRS was an Argentine biochemist in the field of antibody research. Milstein shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 with Niels Kaj Jerne and Georges J. F. Köhler for developing the hybridoma technique for the production of monoclonal antibodies.
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Lawrence Roberts
#1280
Overall Influence
1937 - 2018 (81 years)
Lawrence Gilman Roberts was an American engineer who received the Draper Prize in 2001 "for the development of the Internet", and the Principe de Asturias Award in 2002. As a program manager and later office director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Roberts and his team created the ARPANET using packet switching techniques invented by British computer scientist Donald Davies and Polish-American engineer Paul Baran. The ARPANET's principal designer was Bob Kahn who worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman . Roberts asked Leonard Kleinrock to apply mathematical methods to model and measure th...
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Albert O. Hirschman
#1281
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Albert Otto Hirschman was a German economist and the author of several books on political economy and political ideology. His first major contribution was in the area of development economics. Here he emphasized the need for unbalanced growth. He argued that disequilibria should be encouraged to stimulate growth and help mobilize resources, because developing countries are short of decision-making skills. Key to this was encouraging industries with many linkages to other firms.
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David Gale
#1282
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
David Gale was an American mathematician and economist. He was a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the departments of mathematics, economics, and industrial engineering and operations research. He has contributed to the fields of mathematical economics, game theory, and convex analysis.
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Gordon S. Wood
#1283
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Gordon Stewart Wood is an American historian and professor at Brown University. He is a recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution . His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 won the 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
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Russell Kirk
#1284
Overall Influence
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
Russell Amos Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, and literary critic, known for his influence on 20th-century American conservatism. His 1953 book The Conservative Mind gave shape to the postwar conservative movement in the U.S. It traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving special importance to the ideas of Edmund Burke. Kirk was considered the chief proponent of traditionalist conservatism. He was also an accomplished author of Gothic and ghost story fiction. He is often considered one of the most signific...
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Jacob Ziv
#1285
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Jacob Ziv was an Israeli electrical engineer and information theorist who developed the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms alongside Abraham Lempel. Biography Born in Tiberias, British mandate Palestine, on 27 November 1931, Ziv received his B.Sc., Dip. Eng. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and his D.Sc. degree, receiving the degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962. In 1970, Ziv joined the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and was the Herman Gross Professor of Electrical Engineering a...
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Amiri Baraka
#1286
Overall Influence
1934 - 2014 (80 years)
Amiri Baraka , previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone. Baraka's plays, poetry, and essays have been described by scholars as constituting defining texts for African-American culture.
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David Crystal
#1287
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
David Crystal, is a British linguist who works on the linguistics of English language. Crystal studied English at University College London and has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading. He was awarded an OBE in 1995 and a Fellowship of the British Academy in 2000. Crystal is a proponent of Internet linguistics and has also been involved in Shakespeare productions, providing guidance on original pronunciation.
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Gilbert Harman
#1288
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Gilbert Harman was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller co-directed the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory. Harman taught or co-taught courses in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and Linguistics.
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Cleanth Brooks
#1289
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
Cleanth Brooks was an American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education. His best-known works, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry and Modern Poetry and the Tradition , argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry. With his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing "the interior life of a poem" and codifying the principles of close reading.
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Merton Miller
#1290
Overall Influence
1923 - 2000 (77 years)
Merton Howard Miller was an American economist, and the co-author of the Modigliani–Miller theorem , which proposed the irrelevance of debt-equity structure. He shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1990, along with Harry Markowitz and William F. Sharpe. Miller spent most of his academic career at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
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David P. Chandler
#1291
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
David Porter Chandler is an American historian and academic who is regarded as one of the foremost western scholars of Cambodia's modern history. Chandler currently resides in Australia, where he is an emeritus professor at Monash University as well as an adjunct professor of Asian Studies at Georgetown University.
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Wendell Berry
#1292
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Wendell Erdman Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land and The Unsettling of America . His attention to the culture and economy of rural communities is also found in the novels and stories of Port William, such as A Place on Earth , Jayber Crow , and That Distant Land .
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Motoo Kimura
#1293
Overall Influence
1924 - 1994 (70 years)
Motoo Kimura was a Japanese biologist best known for introducing the neutral theory of molecular evolution in 1968. He became one of the most influential theoretical population geneticists. He is remembered in genetics for his innovative use of diffusion equations to calculate the probability of fixation of beneficial, deleterious, or neutral alleles. Combining theoretical population genetics with molecular evolution data, he also developed the neutral theory of molecular evolution in which genetic drift is the main force changing allele frequencies. James F. Crow, himself a renowned populati...
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Edward B. Lewis
#1294
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Edward Butts Lewis was an American geneticist, a corecipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He helped to found the field of evolutionary developmental biology. Early life Lewis was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the second son of Laura Mary Lewis and Edward Butts Lewis, a watchmaker-jeweler. His full name was supposed to be Edward Butts Lewis Jr., but his birth certificate was incorrectly filled out with "B." as his middle name.
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Tom Dowd
#1295
Overall Influence
1925 - 2002 (77 years)
Thomas John Dowd was an American recording engineer and producer for Atlantic Records. He was credited with innovating the multitrack recording method. Dowd worked on a veritable "who's who" of recordings that encompassed blues, jazz, pop, rock, and soul records.
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Andy Hertzfeld
#1296
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Andrew Jay Hertzfeld is an American software engineer and innovator who was a member of the original Apple Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for Apple Computer from August 1979 until March 1984, where he was a designer for the Macintosh system software. Since leaving Apple, he has co-founded three companies: Radius in 1986, General Magic in 1990, and Eazel in 1999. In 2002, he helped Mitch Kapor promote open source software with the Open Source Applications Foundation. Hertzfeld worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, where in 2...
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Phyllis Schlafly
#1297
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Phyllis Stewart Schlafly was an American attorney, conservative activist, author, and anti-feminist spokesperson for the national conservative movement. She held paleoconservative social and political views, opposed feminism, gay rights and abortion, and successfully campaigned against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
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Edmund Hillary
#1298
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Sir Edmund Percival Hillary was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt. From 1985 to 1988 he served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh and concurrently as Ambassador to Nepal.
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Adam Przeworski
#1299
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Adam Przeworski is a Polish-American professor of political science specializing in comparative politics. He is Carroll and Milton Professor Emeritus in the Department of Politics of New York University. He is a scholar of democratic societies, theory of democracy, social democracy and political economy, as well as an early proponent of rational choice theory in political science.
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V. S. Naipaul
#1300
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years.
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Ramachandra Guha
#1301
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Ramachandra "Ram" Guha is an Indian historian, environmentalist, writer and public intellectual whose research interests include social, political, contemporary, environmental and cricket history, and the field of economics. He is an important authority on the history of modern India.
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