Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#12751

Margie Holmes

#12762

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Margarita Go-Singco Holmes, popularly known as Dr. Margie Holmes, is a popular psychologist specializing in sex therapy in the Philippines. Education Holmes graduated with a degree in Bachelor of Arts in psychology from the University of the Philippines Diliman in 1973. She was one of only seven people to graduate magna cum laude among more than two thousand who graduated that year. Holmes was adjudged "most outstanding graduate" for 1973 by the University of the Philippines Alumni Association.

#12752

Faheem Hussain

#12763

Overall Influence

1942 - 2009 (67 years)

Faheem Hussain , was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and a professor of physics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences . A research scientist in the field of superstring theory at the National Center for Physics, Hussain made contributions to the fields of superstring and string theory. He was the first Pakistani physicist to publish a research paper in the field of superstring theory. A social activist and democratic activist, he authored various scientific research papers in peer-reviewed journals.

#12753

Sebastian Mallaby

#12764

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Sebastian Christopher Peter Mallaby is an English journalist and author, Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations , and contributing columnist at The Washington Post. Formerly, he was a contributing editor for the Financial Times and a columnist and editorial board member at The Washington Post.

#12754

Ronald Drever

#12765

Overall Influence

1931 - 2017 (86 years)

Ronald William Prest Drever was a Scottish experimental physicist. He was a professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, co-founded the LIGO project, and was a co-inventor of the Pound–Drever–Hall technique for laser stabilisation, as well as the Hughes–Drever experiment. This work was instrumental in the first detection of gravitational waves in September 2015.

#12755

Theodore Schick

#12766

Overall Influence

Theodore Schick is an American author in the field of philosophy. His articles have appeared in numerous publications and include topics such as functionalism and its effect on immortality, the logic behind the criteria of adequacy, and applying a scientific approach to the paranormal. In 1994, Schick published How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, which is designed to teach the reader how to think critically about extraordinary claims.

#12756

Marvin Krislov

#12767

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Marvin Krislov is the eighth and current president of Pace University in New York. Prior to President Krislov’s appointment at Pace, he served for 10 years as the president of Oberlin College and nine years as the vice president and general counsel of the University of Michigan.

#12757

Barry Trost

#12768

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Barry M. Trost is an American chemist who is the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor Emeritus in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. The Tsuji-Trost reaction and the Trost ligand are named after him. He is prominent for advancing the concept of atom economy.

#12758

Robbie Fowler

#12769

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Robert Bernard Fowler is an English football coach and former player. He most recently managed Saudi First Division League side Al-Qadsiah. As a player, he was a striker, and is the eighth-highest goalscorer in the history of the Premier League. He is best known for his time at Liverpool, initially from 1993 to 2001. He scored 183 goals in total for Liverpool, earning the nickname "God" from the Anfield fans, and he is Liverpool's second-top scorer in the Premier League. He subsequently played for Leeds United and Manchester City, before returning to Liverpool in January 2006. He moved to Cardiff City eighteen months later.

#12759

Ivan Klíma

#12770

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Ivan Klíma is a Czech novelist and playwright. He has received the Magnesia Litera award and the Franz Kafka Prize, among other honors. Biography Klíma's early childhood in Prague was happy and uneventful, but this all changed with the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, after the Munich Agreement. He had been unaware that both his parents had Jewish ancestry; neither were observant Jews, but this was immaterial to the Germans.

#12760

Vincent Price

#12771

Overall Influence

1911 - 1993 (82 years)

Vincent Leonard Price Jr. was an American actor, art historian, art collector, and gourmet cook. He appeared on stage, television, and radio, and in more than 100 films. Price has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for motion pictures and one for television.

#12761

Sherwood Washburn

Sherwood Washburn

#12772

Overall Influence

1911 - 2000 (89 years)

Sherwood Larned Washburn , nicknamed "Sherry", was an American physical anthropologist, and "a legend in the field." He was pioneer in the field of primatology, opening it to the study of primates in their natural habitats. His research and influence in the comparative analysis of primate behaviors to theories of human origins established a new course of study within the field of human evolution. He changed the field of anthropology with the publication of his paper The New Physical Anthropology, in 1951, in which he argued, convincingly, that human variation was continuous, and could not be b...

#12762

Jack Block

#12773

Overall Influence

1924 - 2010 (86 years)

Jacob "Jack" Block was a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. His main areas of research were personality theory, personality development, research methodology, personality assessment, longitudinal research, and cognition. He often collaborated with his wife Jeanne Block.

#12763

Stéphane Mallat

Stéphane Mallat

#12774

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Stéphane Georges Mallat is a French applied mathematician, concurrently appointed as Professor at Collège de France and École normale supérieure. He made fundamental contributions to the development of wavelet theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He has additionally done work in applied mathematics, signal processing, music synthesis and image segmentation.

#12764

Ghillean Prance

#12775

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Sir Ghillean Tolmie Prance is a prominent British botanist and ecologist who has published extensively on the taxonomy of families such as Chrysobalanaceae and Lecythidaceae, but drew particular attention in documenting the pollination ecology of Victoria amazonica. Prance is a former Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

#12765

Marilyn B. Young

Marilyn B. Young

#12776

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Marilyn B. Young was a historian of American foreign relations and professor of history at New York University. She graduated from Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn in 1953 and Vassar College in 1957. Her doctoral work at Harvard University was supported by an anonymous full scholarship to learn Chinese and to pursue research in the field of United States relations with East Asia. She did her doctoral work under the direction of Ernest R. May, a scholar of American foreign relations, and John King Fairbank, a historian of China. Her doctoral dissertation became her first book, The Rh...

#12766

Phil Simms

#12777

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Phillip Martin Simms is an American former professional football player who was a quarterback for 15 years, spending his entire career with the New York Giants of the National Football League . He is currently a television sportscaster for the CBS network. After playing college football for the Morehead State Eagles, Simms was selected in the first round by the New York Giants as the seventh overall pick in the 1979 NFL Draft. Simms was named Most Valuable Player of Super Bowl XXI, after he led the Giants to a 39–20 victory over the Denver Broncos and set the record for highest completion percentage in a Super Bowl, completing 22 of 25 passes , a record that still stands.

#12767

Edward Grant

#12778

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

Edward Grant was an American historian of medieval science. He was named a distinguished professor in 1983. Other honors include the 1992 George Sarton Medal, for "a lifetime scholarly achievement" as an historian of science.

#12768

Sujoy K. Guha

#12779

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Sujoy Kumar Guha is an Indian biomedical engineer. He was born in Patna, India, 20 June 1940. He did his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from IIT Kharagpur, followed by a master's degree in electrical engineering at IIT, and another master's degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Guha later received his Ph.D. in medical physiology from St. Louis University.

#12769

Jacob Fox

#12780

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Jacob Fox is an American mathematician. He is a professor at Stanford University. His research interests are in Hungarian-style combinatorics, particularly Ramsey theory, extremal graph theory, combinatorial number theory, and probabilistic methods in combinatorics.

#12770

Filaret

#12781

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Patriarch Filaret is a Ukrainian religious leader, currently serving as the primate and Patriarch of the unrecognized Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyiv Patriarchate. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine, that he left in 2019, views him as the Honorary Patriarch emeritus, while the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople recognises him as former Metropolitan of Kyiv. He was formerly the Metropolitan of Kiev and the Exarch of Ukraine in the Patriarchate of Moscow . After joining the Kyiv Patriarchate, he was defrocked and in 1997 excommunicated by the ROC.

#12771

Terence Irwin

#12782

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Terence Henry Irwin FBA , usually cited as T. H. Irwin, is a scholar and philosopher specializing in ancient Greek philosophy and the history of ethics . He was the Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, from 2007 until 2017.

#12772

Peter Bofinger

#12783

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Peter Bofinger is a German economist and a former member of the German Council of Economic Experts. Career Following his studies, Bofinger worked as staff member to the Council of Economic Experts between 1978 and 1981. From 1984 until 1990, he was an economist at the Bundesbank. Since 1992, Bofinger has been a professor at the University of Würzburg. Between 1997 and 1999, he served as Dean of the university’s Department of Economics. In 1997, he turned down an offer to move to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

#12773

Hugo Claus

#12784

Overall Influence

1929 - 2008 (79 years)

Hugo Maurice Julien Claus was a leading Belgian author who published under his own name as well as various pseudonyms. Claus' literary contributions spanned the genres of drama, the novel, and poetry; he also left a legacy as a painter and film director. He wrote primarily in Dutch, although he also wrote some poetry in English. He won the 2000 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

#12774

P. W. Botha

#12785

Overall Influence

1916 - 2006 (90 years)

Pieter Willem Botha, was a South African politician. He served as the last prime minister of South Africa from 1978 to 1984 and the first executive state president of South Africa from 1984 to 1989. He was voted in through undemocratic means, in elections where only the white electorate where allowed to vote.

#12775

Rex Nettleford

#12786

Overall Influence

1933 - 2010 (77 years)

Ralston Milton "Rex" Nettleford OM FIJ OCC was a Jamaican scholar, social critic, choreographer, and Vice-Chancellor Emeritus of the University of the West Indies , the leading research university in the Commonwealth Caribbean.

#12776

Giorgio Grassi

#12787

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Giorgio Grassi is one of Italy's most important modern architects, and part of the so-called Italian rationalist school, also known as La Tendenza, associated most famously with Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi that emerged in Italy in the 1960s. Much influenced by Ludwig Hilberseimer, Heinrich Tessenow and Adolf Loos, Grassi's architecture is the most severely rational of the group: his extremely formal work is predicated on absolute simplicity, clarity, and honesty without ingratiation, rhetoric, or spectacular shape-making; it refers to historical archetypes of form and space and has a strong concern with the making of urban space.

#12777

Tibor Scitovsky

Tibor Scitovsky

#12788

Overall Influence

1910 - 2002 (92 years)

Tibor de Scitovsky, also known as Tibor Scitovsky , was a Hungarian born, American economist who was best known for his writing on the nature of people's happiness in relation to consumption. He was associate professor and professor of economics at Stanford University from 1946 through 1958 and Eberle Professor of Economics from 1970 until his retirement in 1976, when he became Professor Emeritus. In honor of his deep contributions to economic analysis, he was elected Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, Fellow of the Royal Economic Society, member of the American Academy...

#12778

Luc Sels

#12789

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Luc Sels is a Belgian sociologist. From August 2017 on he is the rector of the KU Leuven. Sels won the elections for new rector in the first round on Tuesday 9 May 2017 by beating Rik Torfs with 51.12% to 48.88%. Before becoming rector, he was dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business from 2009 till 2017. On 11 May 2021 Sels got reelected as rector with 64% of the votes against 33% for his challenger, toxicologist Jan Tytgat.

#12779

David Krackhardt

#12790

Overall Influence

David Krackhardt is Professor of Organizations at Heinz College and the Tepper School of Business, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences and the Machine Learning Department , all at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, and he also serves a Fellow of CEDEP, the European Centre for Executive Education, in France. He is notable for being the author of KrackPlot, a network visualization software designed for social network analysis which is widely used in academic research. He is also the founder of the Journal of Social Structure.

#12780

Bruce Yandle

#12791

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Bruce Yandle is Dean Emeritus of Clemson University's College of Business and Behavioral Science and Alumni Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Clemson. He is a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Mercatus Center, a faculty member with George Mason University's Capitol Hill Campus, and a Senior Fellow with the Property and Environment Research Center . He has served as executive director of the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., and served as senior economist on the President's Council on Wage and Price Stability from 1976 to 1978.

#12781

Moshe Lewin

#12792

Overall Influence

1921 - 2010 (89 years)

Moshe "Misha" Lewin was a scholar of Russian and Soviet history. He was a major figure in the school of Soviet studies which emerged in the 1960s. Biography Moshe Lewin was born in 1921 in Wilno, Poland , the son of ethnic Jewish parents who were later murdered in the Holocaust. Lewin lived in Poland for the first 20 years of his life, fleeing to the Soviet Union in June 1941 just ahead of the invading Nazi army.

#12782

Andrew King

#12793

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Andrew King is a music manager, formerly for Blackhill Enterprises, where he co-managed Pink Floyd and others. King, Peter Jenner and the original four members of Pink Floyd were partners in Blackhill Enterprises. Under their guidance, Pink Floyd began performing on London's underground music scene, notably at a venue booked by the London Free School in Notting Hill, as well as the notorious "Games For May" concert at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall on 12 May 1967, an event set up by both Jenner and King. After Syd Barrett's departure from Pink Floyd in 1968 Jenner and King ended their relation...

#12783

John A. Agnew

#12794

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

John A. Agnew, FBA is a prominent British-American political geographer. Agnew was educated at the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool in England and Ohio State in the United States. Life and career From 1975 until 1995, he was a professor of geography at Syracuse University in New York. Agnew taught courses on political geography, the history of geography, European cities, and the Mediterranean World. He moved to University of California, Los Angeles in 1995 and he chaired the Department of Geography at UCLA from 1998 to 2002. Agnew is currently Distinguished Professor of Geography and Ita...

#12784

David Luckham

#12795

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

David Luckham is an emeritus professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he was one of the implementers of the first systems for the programming language Lisp.

#12785

Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee

#12796

Overall Influence

1940 - 2017 (77 years)

Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian American-Canadian writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the author of a number of novels and short story collections, as well as works of nonfiction.

#12786

Emanuel Margoliash

#12797

Overall Influence

1920 - 2008 (88 years)

Emanuel Margoliash was a biochemist who spent much of his career studying the protein cytochrome c. He is best known for his work on molecular evolution; with Walter Fitch, he devised the Fitch-Margoliash method for constructing evolutionary trees based on protein sequences.

#12787

Ivo Babuška

#12798

Overall Influence

1926 - 2023 (97 years)

Ivo M. Babuška was a Czech-American mathematician, noted for his studies of the finite element method and the proof of the Babuška–Lax–Milgram theorem in partial differential equations. One of the celebrated result in the finite elements is the so-called Ladyzenskaja–Babuška–Brezzi condition , which provides sufficient conditions for a stable mixed formulation. The LBB condition has guided mathematicians and engineers to develop state-of-the-art formulations for many technologically important problems like Darcy flow, Stokes flow, incompressible Navier–Stokes, nearly incompressible elasticit...

#12788

Paul Dourish

#12799

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Paul Dourish is a computer scientist best known for his work and research at the intersection of computer science and social science. Born in Scotland, he holds the Steckler Endowed Chair of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he joined the faculty in 2000, and where he directs the Steckler Center for Responsible, Ethical, and Accessible Technology. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, the ACM, and the BCS, and is a two-time winner of the ACM CSCW "Lasting Impact" award, in 2016 and 2021.

#12789

James A. Russell

#12800

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

James A. Russell is an American psychologist whose work focuses on emotion. In 2009, Russell was ranked 35th in terms of citation impact in social psychology. Selected publications Books Barrett, L. F., & Russell, J. A., Eds. . The psychological construction of emotion. New York: Guilford Press.Russell, J. A., Ed. . Pleasure. Andover, Hampshire U.K.: Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group.

#12790

Halim Barakat

#12801

Overall Influence

1933 - 2023 (90 years)

Halim Barakat was an Arab novelist and sociologist. He was born into a Greek-Orthodox Arab family in Kafroun, Syria, and raised in Beirut. Career Barakat received his bachelor's degree in sociology in 1955, and his master's degree in 1960 in the same field. He received both from the American University of Beirut. He received his PhD in social psychology in 1966 from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. From 1966 until 1972 he taught at the American University of Beirut. He then served as research fellow at Harvard University from 1972 to 1973, and taught at the University of Texas at Austin in 1975-1976.

#12791

Abraham Nitzan

#12802

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Abraham Nitzan is a professor of chemistry at the Tel Aviv University department of chemical physics and the University of Pennsylvania department of chemistry. Education Abraham Nitzan was born in Tel Aviv. He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1964, and his master's degree in physical chemistry from the same institute in 1966. His research towards the master's degree, on the radiation chemistry of aqueous solutions, was supervised by Gideon Czapski. During the period of 1966 to 1969, he served in the Israel Defense Forces and in 1972 completed his Ph.D.

#12792

Randall Kroszner

Randall Kroszner

#12803

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Randall S. Kroszner is an American economist who served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2006 to 2009. Kroszner chaired Fed's board Committee on Supervision and Regulation of Banking Institutions during the global financial crisis. He has been professor of economics at the University of Chicago since the 1990s, with various leaves, and named Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2009, and serves as a senior advisor for Patomak Partners.

#12793

Christopher Jencks

#12804

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Christopher Sandy Jencks is an American social scientist. Career Jencks is Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Emeritus. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1954 and was president of the school's newspaper, the Exonian, as a senior. After Exeter, he received an A.B. in English literature from Harvard in 1958, followed by a M.Ed. in Harvard Graduate School of Education. During the year 1960–1961 he studied sociology at the London School of Economics. He has previously held positions at Northwestern University, the Un...

#12794

Masahisa Fujita

#12805

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Masahisa Fujita is a Japanese economist who has studied regional science and Urban economics and International Trade, Spatial Economy . He is a professor at Konan University and an adjunct professor at Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University.

#12795

Christopher R. Hill

Christopher R. Hill

#12806

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Christopher Robert Hill is an American diplomat who is United States Ambassador to Serbia. Previously, he was George W. Ball Adjunct Professor at Columbia University in the City of New York, the Chief Advisor to the Chancellor for Global Engagement and Professor of the Practice in Diplomacy at the University of Denver. Prior to this position, he was the Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University, a position he held from September 2010 to December 2017.

#12796

Charlie Jane Anders

Charlie Jane Anders

#12807

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Charlie Jane Anders is an American writer. She has written several novels as well as shorter fiction, published magazines and websites, and hosted podcasts. In 2005, she received the Lambda Literary Award for work in the transgender category, and in 2009, the Emperor Norton Award. Her 2011 novelette Six Months, Three Days won the 2012 Hugo and was a finalist for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Her 2016 novel All the Birds in the Sky was listed No. 5 on Time magazine's "Top 10 Novels" of 2016, won the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 2017 Crawford Award, and the 2017 Locus Award ...

#12797

Yoshio Koide

#12808

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

is a Japanese theoretical physicist working in particle physics. Koide is known for his eponymous Koide formula, which some physicists think has great importance but which other physicists contend is merely a numerical coincidence.

#12798

Eric Owen Moss

#12809

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Eric Owen Moss practices architecture with his eponymously named LA-based firm founded in 1973. Education Moss was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1943. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1965, his Masters of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design in 1968 and a second Masters of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1972.

#12799

Charles F. Van Loan

#12810

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Charles Francis Van Loan is an emeritus professor of computer science and the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, He is known for his expertise in numerical analysis, especially matrix computations.

#12800

Rino Rappuoli

#12811

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Rino Rappuoli is an Italian immunologist. He is the head of vaccine research and development at GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines. Previously, he has served as visiting scientist at Rockefeller University and Harvard Medical School and held roles at Sclavo, Vaccine Research and CSO, Chiron Corporation, and Novartis Vaccines.

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