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
#12601
Christopher Langton
#12612
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Christopher Gale Langton is an American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life. He coined the term in the late 1980s when he organized the first "Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987. Following his time at Los Alamos, Langton joined the Santa Fe Institute , to continue his research on artificial life. He left SFI in the late 1990s, and abandoned his work on artificial life, publishing no research since that time.
Go to Profile#12602
Alan Dean Foster
#12613
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Alan Dean Foster is an American writer of fantasy and science fiction. He has written several book series, more than 20 standalone novels, and many novelizations of film scripts. Career Star Wars Foster was the ghostwriter of the original novelization of Star Wars, which was credited solely to George Lucas. When asked if it was difficult for him to see Lucas get all the credit for Star Wars, Foster said, "Not at all. It was George's story idea. I was merely expanding upon it. Not having my name on the cover didn't bother me in the least. It would be akin to a contractor demanding to have his...
Go to Profile#12603
Alfred O. C. Nier
#12614
Overall Influence
1911 - 1994 (83 years)
Alfred Otto Carl Nier was an American physicist who pioneered the development of mass spectrometry. He was the first to use mass spectrometry to isolate uranium-235 which was used to demonstrate that 235U could undergo fission and developed the sector mass spectrometer configuration now known as Nier-Johnson geometry.
Go to Profile#12604
Antony C. Sutton
#12615
Overall Influence
1925 - 2002 (77 years)
Antony Cyril Sutton was a British-American writer, researcher, economist, and professor. Early life and education Antony C. Sutton was born in London on February 14, 1925 to Edward Ceril Sutton and Marjorie Sutton, maiden name Burrett. The family relocated to California in 1957 with Antony and his two siblings, and he became a U.S. citizen in 1962.
Go to Profile#12605
Tom Phillips
#12616
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Trevor Thomas Phillips was an English visual artist. He worked as a painter, printmaker and collagist. Life Trevor Thomas Phillips was born on 25 May 1937 in Clapham, London to David and Margaret Phillips . He was the younger of two sons.
Go to Profile#12606
Sandra Magnus
#12617
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Sandra Hall Magnus is an American engineer and a former NASA astronaut. She returned to Earth with the crew of STS-119 Discovery on March 28, 2009, after having spent 134 days in orbit. She was assigned to the crew of STS-135, the final mission of the Space Shuttle. She is also a licensed amateur radio operator with the call sign KE5FYE. From 2012 until 2018 Magnus was the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Go to Profile#12607
Elizabeth Hardwick
#12618
Overall Influence
1916 - 2007 (91 years)
Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was an American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer. Early life and education Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was born as the eighth of eleven children in Lexington, Kentucky, on July 27, 1916, to strict Protestant parents, the daughter of Eugene Allen Hardwick, a plumbing and heating contractor, and Mary Hardwick.
Go to Profile#12608
Greg Lukianoff
#12619
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Gregory Christopher Lukianoff is an American lawyer, journalist, author and activist who serves as the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression . He previously served as FIRE's first director of legal and public advocacy until he was appointed president in 2006.
Go to Profile#12609
Mario Costa
#12620
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Mario Costa was an Italian philosopher. He was known for his studies of the consequences of new technology in art and aesthetics, which introduced a new theoretical perspective through concepts such as the "communication aesthetics", the "technological sublime", the "communication block", and the "aesthetics of flux".
Go to Profile#12610
Alex P. Schmid
#12621
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Alex Peter Schmid is a scholar in terrorism studies, who from 1999 to 2005 was Officer-in-Charge of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna. He is particularly known for his work on the definition of terrorism.
Go to Profile#12611
Matthew Cook
#12622
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Matthew Cook is a mathematician and computer scientist who is best known for having proved Stephen Wolfram's conjecture that the Rule 110 cellular automaton is Turing-complete. Biography Cook was born in Morgantown, West Virginia and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois and the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics program. In 1987, Cook qualified as a member of the six-person US team to the International Mathematical Olympiad and won a bronze medal. In 1990, Cook went to work for Wolfram Research, makers of the computer algebra system Mathematica.
Go to Profile#12612
Alan J. Hoffman
#12623
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Alan Jerome Hoffman was an American mathematician and IBM Fellow emeritus, T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM, in Yorktown Heights, New York. He was the founding editor of the journal Linear Algebra and its Applications, and held several patents. He contributed to combinatorial optimization and the eigenvalue theory of graphs. Hoffman and Robert Singleton constructed the Hoffman–Singleton graph, which is the unique Moore graph of degree 7 and diameter 2.
Go to Profile#12613
Ismail Serageldin
#12624
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Ismail Serageldin , Founding Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina , the new Library of Alexandria, inaugurated in 2002, is currently, Emeritus Librarian, and member of the Board of Trustees of the Library of Alexandria. He serves as Chair or Member of a number of advisory committees for academic, research, scientific and international institutions and civil society efforts, and serves on the Advisory Committee of the World Social Science Report for 2013 and 2016, as well as the UNESCO-supported World Water Scenarios and the executive council of the Encyclopedia of Life and Chairs the Executive Council of the World Digital Library .
Go to Profile#12614
George Kubler
#12625
Overall Influence
1912 - 1996 (84 years)
George Alexander Kubler was an American art historian and among the foremost scholars on the art of Pre-Columbian America and Ibero-American Art. Biography Kubler was born in Hollywood, California, but most of his early education was in Europe. He attended high school at Western Reserve Academy, a private, coeducational boarding school in Hudson, Ohio. He then went to Yale University, where he earned an A.B. , A.M. and Ph.D. degree , the latter two under guidance of Henri Focillon. From 1938 onwards, Kubler was a member of the Yale University faculty and was the first Robert Lehman Professor , Sterling Professor of the History of Art and after his retirement, a senior resident scholar.
Go to Profile#12615
Denise Dresser
#12626
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Denise Eugenia Dresser Guerra is a Mexican writer, and university professor. She is currently a faculty member of the Department of Political Science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, columnist in Proceso magazine, editorial writer for the newspaper Reforma, and participates in "La Hora De Opinar" TV Forum. She was awarded the Legion of Honor of the French Republic in the rank of Knight, the highest distinction awarded by the French government to citizens and foreigners, for her defense of freedom of expression and human rights. She has been named by Forbes magazine as one of t...
Go to Profile#12616
Chris Ferguson
#12627
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Christopher Philip Ferguson is an American professional poker player. He has won six World Series of Poker events, including the 2000 WSOP Main Event, and the 2008 NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Ferguson is a computer scientist by training and education.
Go to Profile#12617
Shane Greenstein
#12628
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Shane Greenstein is an American economist. He is the Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is the author of two books and the co-editor of three. He has published research about Wikipedia.
Go to Profile#12618
Eliane Karp
#12629
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Eliane Chantal Karp Fernenbug de Toledo is a Peruvian anthropologist, former First Lady of Peru, and the wife of the ex-president of Peru, Alejandro Toledo. She specializes in the study of Andean indigenous cultures.
Go to Profile#12619
Pusha T
#12630
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Terrence LeVarr Thornton , known professionally as Pusha T, is an American rapper and songwriter. He rose to prominence as one-half of the Virginia-based hip hop duo Clipse, which was mainly active from 1994 to 2010, alongside his older brother No Malice. As Clipse, the two released three studio albums upon signing to Pharrell's Star Trak Entertainment; they became best known for their 2002 debut single "Grindin'".
Go to Profile#12620
Shuvo Roy
#12631
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Shuvo Roy is an American scientist and engineer of Bangladeshi descent. Early life and education Roy received most of his education in Uganda, where his father worked as a public health physician. Roy later completed his education and earned his BS degree from University of Mount Union, Ohio in 1992. He then earned his MS degree in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics from Case Western Reserve University in 1995. He went on to earn his PhD degree from the same school in 2001.
Go to Profile#12621
Paul Forman
#12632
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Paul Forman may refer to:Paul Forman , French-English actor and modelPaul Forman , American historian of the history of physics
Go to Profile#12622
Richard Portes
#12633
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Richard David Portes CBE is a professor of Economics and an Academic Directior of the AQR Asset Management Institute at London Business School. He was President of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, which he founded. He also serves as Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Go to Profile#12623
János Pintz
#12634
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
János Pintz is a Hungarian mathematician working in analytic number theory. He is a fellow of the Rényi Mathematical Institute and is also a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2014, he received the Cole Prize.
Go to Profile#12624
Chelsea Manning
#12635
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning is an American activist and whistleblower. She is a former United States Army soldier who was convicted by court-martial in July 2013 of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses, after disclosing to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 classified, or unclassified but sensitive, military and diplomatic documents. She was imprisoned from 2010 until 2017 when her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama. A trans woman, Manning stated in 2013 that she had a female gender identity since childhood and wanted to be known as Chelsea Manning.
Go to Profile#12625
James Ingo Freed
#12636
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
James Ingo Freed was an American architect born in Essen, Germany during the Weimar Republic. After coming to the United States at age nine with his sister Betty, followed later by their parents, he studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he graduated with a degree in architecture.
Go to Profile#12626
James H. Stock
#12637
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
James Harold Stock is an American economist, professor of economics, and vice provost for climate and sustainability at Harvard University. He is co-author of Introduction to Econometrics, a leading undergraduate textbook, and co-editor of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Stock served as a Chair of the Harvard Economics Department from 2007 to 2009 and as a member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2014.
Go to Profile#12627
Adam Kirsch
#12638
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Adam Kirsch is an American poet and literary critic. He is on the seminar faculty of Columbia University's Center for American Studies, and has taught at YIVO. Life and career Kirsch was born in Los Angeles in 1976. He is the son of lawyer, author, and biblical scholar Jonathan Kirsch. He started writing poetry around the age of 14, after encountering the work of T.S. Eliot: "Eliot showed me the possibility of finding in poetry a source of complex intellectual and moral interest." He graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in English in 1997 and began his career as assistant literary editor for The New Republic.
Go to Profile#12628
Joe Morgan
#12639
Overall Influence
1943 - 2020 (77 years)
Joe Leonard Morgan was an American professional baseball second baseman who played 22 seasons in Major League Baseball for the Houston Colt .45s / Astros, Cincinnati Reds, San Francisco Giants, Philadelphia Phillies, and Oakland Athletics from 1963 to 1984. He won two World Series championships with the Reds in 1975 and 1976 and was also named the National League Most Valuable Player in each of those years. Considered one of the greatest second basemen of all time, Morgan was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1990.
Go to Profile#12629
Robert Pound
#12640
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Robert Vivian Pound was a Canadian-American physicist who helped discover nuclear magnetic resonance and who devised the famous Pound–Rebka experiment supporting general relativity. He became a tenured professor of physics at Harvard without ever having received a graduate degree.
Go to Profile#12630
Tim Winton
#12641
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Timothy John Winton is an Australian writer. He has written novels, children's books, non-fiction books, and short stories. In 1997, he was named a Living Treasure by the National Trust of Australia, and has won the Miles Franklin Award four times.
Go to Profile#12631
Mary Ann Horton
#12642
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Mary Ann Horton , is a Usenet and Internet pioneer. Horton contributed to Berkeley UNIX , including the vi editor and terminfo database, created the first email binary attachment tool uuencode, and led the growth of Usenet in the 1980s.
Go to Profile#12632
Evan Wolfson
#12643
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Evan Wolfson is an attorney and gay rights advocate. He is the founder of Freedom to Marry, a group favoring same-sex marriage in the United States, serving as president until its 2015 victory and subsequent wind-down. Wolfson authored the book Why Marriage Matters: America, Equality, and Gay People's Right to Marry, which Time Out New York magazine called, "Perhaps the most important gay-marriage primer ever written". He was listed as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. He has taught as an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, Rutgers Law School, and Whittier Law School and argued before the Supreme Court in Boy Scouts of America v.
Go to Profile#12633
Isaac Chuang
#12644
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Isaac L. Chuang is an American electrical engineer and physicist. He leads the quanta research group at the Center for Ultracold Atoms at Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He received his undergraduate degrees in physics and electrical engineering and master's in electrical engineering at MIT. In 1997 he received his PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Go to Profile#12634
Diane Ackerman
#12645
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Diane Ackerman is an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her wide-ranging curiosity and poetic explorations of the natural world. Education and career Ackerman received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Pennsylvania State University and a Master of Arts, Master of Fine Arts and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Among the members of her dissertation committee was Carl Sagan, an astronomer and the creator of the Cosmos television series. She has taught at a number of universities, including Columbia and Cornell.
Go to Profile#12635
Michael Billig
#12646
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Michael Billig is a British academic. He is Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, working principally in contemporary social psychology although much of his work crosses disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences.
Go to Profile#12636
John C. Norcross
#12647
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
John C. Norcross is an American professor, board-certified clinical psychologist, and author in psychotherapy, behavior change, and self-help. He is Distinguished Professor and chair of psychology at the University of Scranton and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University. He also maintains a part-time practice of clinical psychology in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#12637
Bob Gibson
#12648
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Robert Gibson , nicknamed "Gibby" and "Hoot", was an American right-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball who played his entire career for the St. Louis Cardinals from 1959 to 1975. Known for his fiercely competitive nature, Gibson tallied 251 wins, 3,117 strikeouts, and a 2.91 earned run average. A nine-time All-Star and two-time World Series Champion, he won two Cy Young Awards and the 1968 National League Most Valuable Player Award.
Go to Profile#12638
Odile Decq
#12649
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Odile Decq is a French architect, urban planner and academic. She is the founder of the Paris firm, Studio Odile Decq and the architecture school, Confluence Institute. Decq is known for her self-described goth appearance and style.
Go to Profile#12639
George Hockham
#12650
Overall Influence
1938 - 2013 (75 years)
George Alfred Hockham FREng FIET was a British engineer. He worked for over 40 years in theoretical analysis and design techniques applied to the solution of electromagnetic problems covering many different antenna types for radar, electronic warfare and communication systems. He coauthored the original paper on the application of cladded glass fibre as a transmission medium.
Go to Profile#12640
Cary Nelson
#12651
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Cary Nelson , is an American professor emeritus of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was president of the American Association of University Professors between 2006 and 2012.
Go to Profile#12641
Tommy Brown
#12652
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Thomas Lee Brown , also known as TBHits, is an American record producer, songwriter and rapper. Brown currently lives in LA and was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is an ASCAP award winner and a Grammy nominee. He has scored multiple chart topping albums while working with Ariana Grande on all six of her studio albums. Brown has also collected production credits for three songs on Grammy-award-winning artist Meghan Trainor's second album, Thank You .
Go to Profile#12642
Peter Rathjen
#12653
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Peter David Rathjen is an Australian scientist and medical researcher. He was the 22nd vice-chancellor of the University of Adelaide, from January 2018 through July 2020. He was previously the vice-chancellor of the University of Tasmania from 2011 to 2017.
Go to Profile#12643
Kurt Cobain
#12654
Overall Influence
1967 - 1994 (27 years)
Kurt Donald Cobain was an American musician, singer, and songwriter. He became known as the co-founder, lead vocalist, guitarist, and primary songwriter of the rock band Nirvana. Through his angst-fueled songwriting and anti-establishment persona, his compositions widened the thematic conventions of mainstream rock music. He was heralded as a spokesman of Generation X and is widely recognized as one of the most influential alternative rock musicians.
Go to Profile#12644
Neil Ferguson
#12655
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Neil Morris Ferguson is a British epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology, who specialises in the patterns of spread of infectious disease in humans and animals. He is the director of the Jameel Institute, and of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, and head of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Vice-Dean for Academic Development in the Faculty of Medicine, all at Imperial College London.
Go to Profile#12645
Lucia Zedner
#12656
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Lucia Zedner FBA is a British legal scholar. She is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Oxford and a senior fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Biography Zedner was born on 20 February 1961 in Kingston, Surrey, England. She studied at the University of York, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She studied for her doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford, between 1984 and 1989. Her doctoral thesis was titled "The criminality of women and its control in England 1850-1914".
Go to Profile#12646
Colin Pillinger
#12657
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Colin Trevor Pillinger, was an English planetary scientist. He was a founding member of the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute at Open University in Milton Keynes, he was also the principal investigator for the British Beagle 2 Mars lander project, and worked on a group of Martian meteorites.
Go to Profile#12647
Hugh Stubbins
#12658
Overall Influence
1912 - 2006 (94 years)
Hugh Asher Stubbins Jr. was an architect who designed several high-profile buildings around the world. Biography Hugh Stubbins was born in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, and attended Georgia Institute of Technology before getting his master's degree from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design where he studied with Walter Gropius, a founder in Germany of the Bauhaus movement. He was to remain on the faculty there until 1972.
Go to Profile#12648
Sandra Oh
#12659
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Sandra Miju Oh is a Canadian and American actress. She is known for her starring roles as Rita Wu in the HBO comedy series Arliss , Dr. Cristina Yang in the ABC medical drama series Grey's Anatomy , and Eve Polastri in the BBC America spy thriller series Killing Eve . She has received two Golden Globe Awards and four Screen Actors Guild Awards. In 2019, Time magazine named Oh one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Go to Profile#12649
Valery Tishkov
#12660
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Valery Aleksandrovich Tishkov Валерий Александрович Тишков is an ethnologist and former chairman of the State Committee of RSFSR on nationalities from February 27 to October 15, 1992 .
Go to Profile#12650
Ken Goodman
#12661
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
Kenneth Goodman was Professor Emeritus, Language Reading and Culture, at the University of Arizona. He is best known for developing the theory underlying the literacy philosophy of whole language. Biography Goodman began teaching at Wayne State University in 1962. His research focused on reading in public schools. While at Wayne State University, Goodman developed miscue analysis, a process of assessing students' reading comprehension based on samples of oral reading. One of his research assistants in miscue analysis was Rudine Sims Bishop. Goodman taught at Wayne State University for 15 ye...
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