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
#12501
David A. Moon
#12512
Overall Influence
David A. Moon is a programmer and computer scientist, known for his work on the Lisp programming language, as co-author of the Emacs text editor, as the inventor of ephemeral garbage collection, and as one of the designers of the Dylan programming language. Guy L. Steele Jr. and Richard P. Gabriel name him as a leader of the Common Lisp movement and describe him as "a seductively powerful thinker, quiet and often insulting, whose arguments are almost impossible to refute".
Go to Profile#12502
Robert Pindyck
#12513
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Robert Stephen Pindyck is an American economist, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance at Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Tel-Aviv University, Harvard University, and Columbia University.
Go to Profile#12503
Steven Pressman
#12514
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Steven Pressman is an American economist. He is a former Professor of Economics and Finance at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. He has taught at the University of New Hampshire and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Go to Profile#12504
Jeremy Kahn
#12515
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Jeremy Adam Kahn is an American mathematician. He works on hyperbolic geometry, Riemann surfaces and complex dynamics. Education Kahn grew up in New York City and attended Hunter College High School. He was a child prodigy who mastered quadratic equations at the age of 7, at the age of 8 designed an equation identical to the one Carl Gauss designed at the age of 9, and proved the Pythagorean Theorem at the age of 10. Kahn was part of the Johns Hopkins University Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth longitudinal cohort. At the age of 11, he scored a 780 out of a possible 800 on the math portion of the SAT-I exam.
Go to Profile#12505
Farinaz Koushanfar
#12516
Overall Influence
Farinaz Koushanfar is an Iranian-American computer scientist whose research concerns embedded systems, ad-hoc networks, and computer security. She is a professor and Henry Booker Faculty Scholar of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#12506
Max Abramovitz
#12517
Overall Influence
1908 - 2004 (96 years)
Max Abramovitz was an American architect. He was best known for his work with the New York City firm Harrison & Abramovitz. Life Abramovitz was the son of Romanian Jewish immigrant parents. He graduated in 1929 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Architecture. While at Illinois, Abramovitz was a member of the Tau Epsilon Phi fraternity. He later received an M.S. from Columbia University's architecture school in 1931. He also was the recipient of a two-year fellowship at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before returning to the US and becoming partners with Wallace Harrison from 1941 to 1976.
Go to Profile#12507
Alan Cottrell
#12518
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Sir Alan Howard Cottrell, FRS was an English metallurgist and physicist. He was also former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government and vice-chancellor of Cambridge University 1977–1979. Early life Cottrell was educated at Moseley Grammar School and the University of Birmingham, where he gained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1939 and a PhD for research on welding in 1942.
Go to Profile#12508
Hugh Collins
#12519
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Hugh Collins, is emeritus Vinerian Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford and a fellow of All Souls College. He retains the former title as emeritus after Timothy Endicott took up the professorship on 1 July 2020.
Go to Profile#12509
Rein Taagepera
#12520
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Rein Taagepera is an Estonian political scientist and former politician. Education Born in Tartu, Estonia, Taagepera fled from Soviet-occupied Estonia in 1944. Taagepera graduated from high school in Marrakech, Morocco, and then studied physics in Canada and the United States. He received a B.A. Sc in 1959 and a M.A. in 1961 from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware in 1965. Working in industry until 1970, he received another M.A. in international relations in 1969 and moved to academia as a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, where he stayed for his entire American career.
Go to Profile#12510
Tip O'Neill
#12521
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
Thomas Phillip "Tip" O'Neill Jr. was an American Democratic Party politician from Massachusetts who served as the 47th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 1987, the third-longest tenure in history and the longest uninterrupted tenure. He represented northern Boston in the House from 1953 to 1987.
Go to Profile#12511
Tremper Longman
#12522
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Tremper Longman III is an Old Testament scholar, theologian, professor and author of several books, including 2009 ECPA Christian Book Award winner Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings.
Go to Profile#12512
Ralph McInerny
#12523
Overall Influence
1929 - 2010 (81 years)
Ralph Matthew McInerny was an American author and philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame. McInerny's most popular mystery novels featured Father Dowling, and was later adapted into the Father Dowling Mysteries television show, which ran from 1987 to 1991.
Go to Profile#12513
Heiner Bielefeldt
#12524
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Heiner Bielefeldt is a German philosopher, historian and Catholic theologian. He is Professor of Human Rights and Human Rights Policy at the University of Erlangen. From 2010 to 2016, he served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief.
Go to Profile#12514
Mona Siddiqui
#12525
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Mona Siddiqui is a British academic. She is Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, a member of the Commission on Scottish Devolution and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. She is also a regular contributor to Thought for the Day, Sunday and The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, and to The Times, The Scotsman, The Guardian, Sunday Herald.
Go to Profile#12515
Pietro Perona
#12526
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Pietro Perona is an Italian-American educator and computer scientist. He is the Allan E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology and director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center in Neuromorphic Systems Engineering. He is known for his research in computer vision and is the director of the Caltech Computational Vision Group.
Go to Profile#12516
Anne Nivat
#12527
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Anne Nivat is a French journalist and war correspondent who has covered conflicts in Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. She is known for interviews and character portraits in print of civilians, especially women, and their experiences of war.
Go to Profile#12517
Kenneth H. Jackson
#12528
Overall Influence
1909 - 1991 (82 years)
Prof Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson CBE FRSE FSA DLitt was an English linguist and a translator who specialised in the Celtic languages. He demonstrated how the text of the Ulster Cycle of tales, written circa AD 1100, preserves an oral tradition originating some six centuries earlier and reflects Celtic Irish society of the third and fourth century AD. His Celtic Miscellany is a popular standard.
Go to Profile#12518
Richard Williams
#12529
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Richard Edmund Williams was a Canadian-British animator, voice actor, and painter. A three-time Academy Award winner, he is best known as the animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit -- for which he won two Academy Awards -- and as the director of his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler . His work on the short film A Christmas Carol earned him his first Academy Award. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator. Other works in this field include the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and title and link...
Go to Profile#12519
Robert Strichartz
#12530
Overall Influence
1943 - 2021 (78 years)
Robert "Bob" Stephen Strichartz was an American mathematician who specialized in mathematical analysis. He was born in New York City on October 14, 1943. Bob graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1961 and later earned his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1963. As an undergraduate, he was notably part of two successful Putnam campaigns for Dartmouth. The Dartmouth team finished fifth in 1961 and second in 1962. To date, no Dartmouth Putnam team has replicated a top five finish. Individually, Bob was also recognized as a Putnam fellow in 1962. He was one of the five highest-ranking indiv...
Go to Profile#12520
Robert A. Baker
#12531
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Robert Allen Baker Jr. was an American psychologist, professor of psychology emeritus of the University of Kentucky, skeptic, author, and investigator of ghosts, UFO abductions, lake monsters and other paranormal phenomena. He is the editor of Psychology in the Wry, a collection of satire, and was formerly the co-editor of Approaches, a quarterly journal of contemporary poetry. His satirical and humorous verses have appeared in Vogue, Saturday Review, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, Worm-Runners' Digest, and other journals. He wrote 15 books and is a past fellow of the Committee for Sk...
Go to Profile#12521
Hirotugu Akaike
#12532
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Hirotsugu Akaike was a Japanese statistician. In the early 1970s, he formulated the Akaike information criterion . AIC is now widely used for model selection, which is commonly the most difficult aspect of statistical inference; additionally, AIC is the basis of a paradigm for the foundations of statistics. Akaike also made major contributions to the study of time series. As well, he had a large role in the general development of statistics in Japan.
Go to Profile#12522
Mahmoud Mohieldin
#12533
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Mahmoud Mohieldin, is an economist with more than 30 years of experience in international finance and development. He is the UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for Egypt. He is an Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund. He has been the United Nations Special Envoy on Financing the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda since February 2020. He was the Minister of Investment of Egypt from 2004-2010, and most recently, served as the World Bank Group Senior Vice President for the 2030 Development Agenda, United Nations Relations and Partnerships. His roles at the World Bank also in...
Go to Profile#12523
Jerrold Levinson
#12534
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jerrold Levinson is distinguished university professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is particularly noted for his work on defining art, the aesthetics of music, ontology of art, philosophy of film, interpretation, aesthetics experience, and humour.
Go to Profile#12524
Takeo Okuno
#12535
Overall Influence
1926 - 1997 (71 years)
Takeo Okuno, was a Japanese chemist and a leading literary critic of the postwar era. A close friend of philosopher Takaaki Yoshimoto and writer Yukio Mishima, he helped draw attention to a new generation of postwar Japanese authors and push the Japanese literary world to break free from hegemonic ideologies and pursue more individualistic forms of expression.
Go to Profile#12525
Frank P. Incropera
#12536
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Frank P. Incropera is an American mechanical engineer and author on the subjects of mass and heat transfer. Incropera is the Clifford and Evelyn Brosey Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US. A Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Incropera is known for his contributions to the field of heat transfer, especially in the context of radiation transfer in scattering-absorbing media and double diffusive convection. He has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.
Go to Profile#12526
Shlomo Zilberstein
#12537
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Shlomo Zilberstein is an Israeli-American computer scientist. He is a Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Research and Engagement in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He graduated with a B.A. in Computer Science summa cum laude from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1982, and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley in 1993, advised by Stuart J. Russell. He is known for his contributions to artificial intelligence, anytime algorithms, multi-agent systems, and automated...
Go to Profile#12527
Dav Pilkey
#12538
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
David Murray "Dav" Pilkey Jr. is an American cartoonist, author, and illustrator of children's literature. He is best known as the author and illustrator of the children's book series, Captain Underpants, and its spin-off children's graphic novel series Dog Man, the latter published under the respective writer and illustrator pen names of George Beard and Harold Hutchins, which are also the names of the two protagonists of the Captain Underpants series.
Go to Profile#12528
Rob Kitchin
#12539
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Robert Michael Kitchin is an Irish geographer and academic. Since 2005, he has been Professor of Human Geography at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Education and career Kitchin graduated from Lancaster University in 1991 with a geography BSc. The following year, he completed an MSc in geographical information systems at the University of Leicester and in 1995 was awarded a PhD by the University of Wales, Swansea, for his thesis "Issues of validity and integrity in cognitive mapping research: investigating configurational knowledge". From 1995 to 1996, he was a lecturer at Swansea, and was then a lecturer at Queen's University Belfast .
Go to Profile#12529
Eikoh Hosoe
#12540
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Eikoh Hosoe is a Japanese photographer and filmmaker who emerged in the experimental arts movement of post-World War II Japan. Hosoe is best known for his dark, high contrast, black and white photographs of human bodies. His images are often psychologically charged, exploring subjects such as death, erotic obsession, and irrationality. Some of his photographs reference religion, philosophy and mythology, while others are nearly abstract, such as Man and Woman # 24, from 1960. He was professionally and personally affiliated with the writer Yukio Mishima and experimental artists of the 1960s such as the dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, though his work extends to a diversity of subjects.
Go to Profile#12530
Joan Halifax
#12541
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Joan Jiko Halifax is an American Zen Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, ecologist, civil rights activist, hospice caregiver, and the author of several books on Buddhism and spirituality. She currently serves as abbot and guiding teacher of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a Zen Peacemaker community which she founded in 1990. Halifax-roshi has received Dharma transmission from both Bernard Glassman and Thich Nhat Hanh, and previously studied with the Korean master Seung Sahn. In the 1970s she collaborated on LSD research projects with her ex-husband Stanislav Grof, in addition to other collaborative efforts with Joseph Campbell and Alan Lomax.
Go to Profile#12531
Joseph Wang
#12542
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Joseph Wang is an American biomedical engineer and inventor. He is a Distinguished Professor, SAIC Endowed Chair, and former Chair of the Department of Nanoengineering at the University of California, San Diego, who specialised in nanomachines, biosensors, nano-bioelectronics, wearable devices, and electrochemistry. He is also the Director of the UCSD Center of Wearable Sensors and co-director of the UCSD Center of Mobile Health Systems and Applications .
Go to Profile#12532
Thure von Uexküll
#12543
Overall Influence
1908 - 2004 (96 years)
Karl Kuno Thure Freiherr von Uexküll was a German scholar of psychosomatic medicine and biosemiotics. He developed the approach of his father, Jakob von Uexküll, in the study of living systems and applied it in medicine.
Go to Profile#12533
Jean-Philippe Bouchaud
#12544
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jean-Philippe Bouchaud is a French physicist. He is co-founder and chairman of Capital Fund Management , adjunct professor at École Normale Supérieure and co-director of the CFM-Imperial Institute of Quantitative Finance at Imperial College London. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and held the Bettencourt Innovation Chair at Collège de France in 2020.
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John Campbell
#12545
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
John Campbell is a British political writer and biographer. He was educated at Charterhouse and the University of Edinburgh from where he gained a Ph.D. in politics in 1975. His works include biographies of Lloyd George, F. E. Smith, Aneurin Bevan, Roy Jenkins, Edward Heath, and Margaret Thatcher, the last consisting of two volumes, The Grocer's Daughter and The Iron Lady . A one-volume abridgment prepared by David Freeman , entitled The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher, From Grocer's Daughter to Prime Minister, was published in 2009 and reissued in paperback in 2011. He was awarded the NCR Bo...
Go to Profile#12535
Ama Ata Aidoo
#12546
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings's PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.
Go to Profile#12536
Roger Masters
#12547
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Roger Davis Masters studied at Harvard , served in the U.S. Army , completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, and served on the faculty at Yale and then Dartmouth College, with a two-year leave to serve as Cultural Attaché at the American Embassy in Paris . From his retirement in 1998 he was the Nelson A. Rockefeller Professor of Government Emeritus in the Department of Government at Dartmouth.
Go to Profile#12537
Michael Horton
#12548
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Michael Scott Horton has been the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California since 1998, Editor-in-Chief of Modern Reformation magazine, and President and host of the nationally syndicated radio broadcast, The White Horse Inn. Both Modern Reformation magazine and The White Horse Inn radio broadcast are now entities under the umbrella of White Horse Media.
Go to Profile#12538
Chauncey Starr
#12549
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Chauncey Starr was an American electrical engineer and an expert in nuclear energy. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Starr received an electrical engineering degree in 1932 and a Ph.D. in physics in 1935 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Go to Profile#12539
H. Dieter Zeh
#12550
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Heinz-Dieter Zeh , usually referred to as H. Dieter Zeh, was a professor of the University of Heidelberg and theoretical physicist. Education and career Zeh was born in Braunschweig and studied physics at the Technical University of Braunschweig and nuclear physics at the University of Heidelberg under J. Hans D. Jensen. At Heidelberg, he also investigated alpha particle formation in nuclei with Hans-Jörg Mang and Zeh investigated the topic for his PhD thesis under Mang. Between 1964 and 1965, Zeh was a research assistant at California Institute of Technology and in 1965 and between 1967 and 1968 at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#12540
Robin van Persie
#12551
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Robin van Persie is a Dutch football coach and former professional footballer who played as a striker. Regarded as one of the best strikers of his generation, Van Persie was known for his excellent technique and ball control, intelligent positioning, and vision. He is the all-time top scorer for the Netherlands national team. He is currently an assistant manager at boyhood club Feyenoord in his first managerial role.
Go to Profile#12541
John Mellencamp
#12552
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
John J. Mellencamp , previously known as Johnny Cougar, John Cougar, and John Cougar Mellencamp, is an American singer-songwriter. He is known for his catchy brand of heartland rock, which emphasizes traditional instrumentation. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, followed by an induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2018.
Go to Profile#12542
Joan Collins
#12553
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Dame Joan Henrietta Collins is an English actress, author and columnist. Collins is the recipient of several accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, a People's Choice Award, two Soap Opera Digest Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. She is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.
Go to Profile#12543
Ubiratan D'Ambrosio
#12554
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Ubiratan D'Ambrosio was a Brazilian mathematics educator and historian of mathematics. Life D'Ambrosio was born in São Paulo, and earned his doctorate from the University of São Paulo in 1963. He retired as a professor of mathematics from the State University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil in 1993.
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Walter McCrone
#12555
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Walter Cox McCrone Jr. was an American chemist who worked extensively on applications of polarized light microscopy and is sometimes characterized as the "father of modern microscopy". He was also an expert in electron microscopy, crystallography, ultra-microanalysis, and particle identification. In 1960 he founded the McCrone Research Institute, a non-profit educational and research organization for microscopy based in Chicago.
Go to Profile#12545
George W. Gill
#12556
Overall Influence
George W. Gill is an American anthropologist, and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Wyoming who specializes in skeletal biology. Career In the late 1980s, partly in response to demands from American forensic anthropology organizations to scrutinize methods of racial identification in order to ensure accuracy in legal cases, Gill tested, supported, and developed craniofacial anthropometric and other means of estimating the racial origins of skeletal remains. He found that the employment of multiple criteria can yield very high rates of accuracy, and even that individual methods can be a...
Go to Profile#12546
Rob Reiner
#12557
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert Reiner is an American actor and filmmaker. As an actor, Reiner first came to national prominence with the role of Michael "Meathead" Stivic on the CBS sitcom All in the Family , a performance that earned him two Primetime Emmy Awards.
Go to Profile#12547
Paul H. Kocher
#12558
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Paul Harold Kocher was an American scholar, writer, and professor of English. He wrote extensively on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien as well as on Elizabethan English drama, philosophy, religion, and medicine. His numerous publications include studies of Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon. He also authored books on the Franciscan missions of 18th- and 19th-century California.
Go to Profile#12548
Natalia Shvedova
#12559
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Natalia Yulievna Shvedova was a Soviet lexicographer who authored several standard outlines of Russian grammar, for which she was awarded the USSR State Prize in 1982. Yuly Aikhenvald's daughter and Viktor Vinogradov's favourite disciple, Shvedova was elected into the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1997. After Sergei Ozhegov's death in 1964, Shvedova was responsible for updating and correcting his immensely popular explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. Among her later projects was the first semantic dictionary of the language .
Go to Profile#12549
John Braithwaite
#12560
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
#12550
Caroline Hoxby
#12561
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Caroline Minter Hoxby is an American economist whose research focuses on issues in education and public economics. She is currently the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor in Economics at Stanford University and program director of the Economics of Education Program for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Hoxby is a John and Lydia Pearce Mitchell University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. She is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
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