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
#12901
George Clinton
#12912
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
George Edward Clinton is an American singer, bandleader, songwriter and record producer. His Parliament-Funkadelic collective developed an influential and eclectic form of funk music during the 1970s that drew on Afrofuturism, outlandish fashion, psychedelia, and surreal humor. He launched his solo career with the 1982 album Computer Games and would go on to influence 1990s hip-hop and G-funk.
Go to Profile#12902
Bienvenido Nebres
#12913
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Bienvenido F. Nebres is a Filipino scientist, mathematician, and a Jesuit priest who was the longest-serving university president of the Ateneo de Manila University. He succeeded Joaquin G. Bernas in 1993, and served as University President until 1 June 2011. He currently sits as a member of the board of trustees of Georgetown University, Regis University, St. Edward School Foundation, Inc., the Asian Institute of Management , and other colleges and universities in the Philippines. He is also a member of the board of directors of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company, and is currently chairman of the Synergeia Foundation.
Go to Profile#12903
John A. Williams
#12914
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
John Alfred Williams was an African American author, journalist, and academic. His novel The Man Who Cried I Am was a bestseller in 1967. Also a poet, he won an American Book Award for his 1998 collection Safari West.
Go to Profile#12904
Ana Cano
#12915
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ana María Cano González is a Spanish philologist. She was dean of the faculty of Philology of the University of Oviedo and chair of romance philology. She received her master's degree in primary education in 1967, after exerting this profession, a license in philosophy and letters from the University of Oviedo in 1972, and a doctorate at the same institution in 1975, cum laude, with a thesis on "The speech of Somiedo". Since 2001, she has been president of the Academy of the Asturian Language.
Go to Profile#12905
David Helfand
#12916
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David J. Helfand is a U.S. astronomer who served as president of Quest University Canada from 2008 to 2015. Prior to his presidency at Quest, he was a Visiting Tutor at Quest. He has also served as chair of the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University and co-director of the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory. He was also part of the university's Physics Department. His stated research interests include radio surveys, the origin and evolution of neutron stars and supernova remnants, and active galactic nuclei. Helfand has been instrumental in the creation of general education classes orie...
Go to Profile#12906
Trey Parker
#12917
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Randolph Severn "Trey" Parker III is an American actor, animator, filmmaker, and composer. He is best known for co-creating South Park and The Book of Mormon with his creative partner Matt Stone. Parker was interested in film and music as a child and at high school and attended the University of Colorado Boulder, where he met Stone. The two collaborated on various short films and co-starred in Parker’s feature-length musical Cannibal! The Musical .
Go to Profile#12907
Hilary Wainwright
#12918
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Hilary Wainwright is a British sociologist, political activist and socialist feminist, best known for being a co-editor of Red Pepper magazine. Early life and education Wainwright's father was the Liberal MP Richard Wainwright. Her brother, Martin, was formerly the Northern Editor of The Guardian, to which she has occasionally contributed.
Go to Profile#12908
Nicholas V. Riasanovsky
#12919
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
Nicholas Valentine Riasanovsky was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of numerous books on Russian history and European intellectual history. Biography Nicolai Valentinovitch Riasanovskiy was born in China on 21 December 1923 in Harbin , the son of lawyer Valentin A. Riasanovsky and Antonina Riasanovsky, a novelist. His father, Valentin, was a Russian professor, who had taught at Moscow University, Yaroslavl, Tomsk and Irkutsk and from 1922 to 1934 was teaching at Harbin Normal University . His mother, Antonia, was a teacher and novelist who wrote under the pen name Nina Fedorova.
Go to Profile#12909
Lee Adams
#12920
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (102 years)
Lee Richard Adams is an American lyricist best known for his musical theatre collaboration with Charles Strouse. Biography Born in Mansfield, Ohio, Adams is the son of Dr. Leopold Adams, originally of Stamford, Connecticut, and Florence Ellis Adams, originally of Racine, Wisconsin. His family is Jewish. He is a graduate of Mansfield Senior High School. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Ohio State University and a Master's from Columbia University. While attending Ohio State University he was a brother of the Nu chapter of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. He worked as a journalist for newspaper and magazines.
Go to Profile#12910
Jearl Walker
#12921
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jearl Dalton Walker is a physicist noted for his book The Flying Circus of Physics, first published in 1975; the second edition was published in June 2006. He teaches physics at Cleveland State University.
Go to Profile#12911
Shigekazu Nagata
#12922
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Shigekazu Nagata is a Japanese biochemist, best known for research on apoptosis, the process of programmed cell death occurring in multi-cellular organisms. Contribution Nagata identified Interferon in 1980 and Granulocyte colony-stimulating factor in 1986. He also identified a death factor in 1991 and its ligand in 1993, and elucidated their physiological and pathological roles in apoptosis.
Go to Profile#12912
John Holloway
#12923
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
John Holloway is a Marxist-oriented lawyer, sociologist and philosopher, whose work is closely associated with the Zapatista movement in Mexico, his home since 1991. It has also been taken up by some intellectuals associated with the piqueteros in Argentina; the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement in South Africa and the Anti-Globalization Movement in Europe and North America. He is currently a professor at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Puebla.
Go to Profile#12914
Ira Nadel
#12925
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ira Bruce Nadel is an American-Canadian biographer, literary critic and James Joyce scholar, and a distinguished professor at the University of British Columbia. He has written books on the twentieth-century Modernists, especially Ezra Pound and Joyce, biographies of Leonard Cohen and Leon Uris, and on Jewish-American authors. He has won Canadian literary awards, and has edited and written the introduction to a number of scholarly books and period pieces. He is a critic of the Olympic torch relay as a legacy of the Nazis.
Go to Profile#12915
Steven Mithen
#12926
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Steven Mithen, is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading. He has written a number of books, including The Singing Neanderthals and The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science.
Go to Profile#12916
Mads Tofte
#12927
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mads Tofte is a Danish computer scientist who has contributed in particular to functional programming and the Standard ML programming language. Education Tofte was born in Lyngby, Denmark and grew up in Holbæk, Denmark. He studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Copenhagen where he obtained an MSc degree in 1984; then at University of Edinburgh where he obtained a PhD degree in 1988 . He is doctor honoris causa 2007 from Kingston University.
Go to Profile#12917
Victor Pasmore
#12928
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Edwin John Victor Pasmore, CH, CBE was a British artist. He pioneered the development of abstract art in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Early life Pasmore was born in Chelsham, Surrey, on 3 December 1908. He studied at Summer Fields School in Oxford and Harrow in west London, but with the death of his father in 1927 he was forced to take an administrative job at the London County Council. He studied painting part-time at the Central School of Art and was associated with the formation of the Euston Road School. After experimenting with abstraction, Pasmore worked for a time in a lyrical figur...
Go to Profile#12918
George Nemhauser
#12929
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
George Lann Nemhauser is an American operations researcher, the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the former president of the Operations Research Society of America.
Go to Profile#12919
Alon Harel
#12930
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Alon Harel is a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he holds the Phillip P. Mizock & Estelle Mizock Chair in Administrative and Criminal Law. He was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Yale University, and Balliol College, Oxford . He has been a visiting professor at Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#12920
Jimmy Greaves
#12931
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
James Peter Greaves was an English professional footballer who played as a forward. Regarded as one of the greatest strikers of all time and one of England's best ever players, he is England's fifth-highest international goalscorer with 44 goals, which includes an English record of six hat-tricks, and is Tottenham Hotspur's second-highest all-time top goalscorer. Greaves is the highest goalscorer in the history of English top-flight football with 357 goals. He finished as the First Division's top scorer in six seasons, more times than any other player and came third in the 1963 Ballon d'Or rankings.
Go to Profile#12921
Martin Aigner
#12932
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Martin Aigner was an Austrian mathematician and professor at Freie Universität Berlin from 1974 with interests in combinatorial mathematics and graph theory. Biography Martin Aigner was born on 28 February 1942. He received his Ph.D from the University of Vienna. His book Proofs from THE BOOK has been translated into 12 languages.
Go to Profile#12922
Ryszard S. Michalski
#12933
Overall Influence
1937 - 2007 (70 years)
Ryszard S. Michalski was a Polish-American computer scientist. Michalski was Professor at George Mason University and a pioneer in the field of machine learning. Biography Michalski was born in Kalusz near Lvov on 7 May 1937.
Go to Profile#12923
Ren Xinmin
#12934
Overall Influence
1915 - 2017 (102 years)
Ren Xinmin was a Chinese aerospace engineer and a specialist in astronautics and liquid rocket engine technology. He was the technical director of the Long March 1 rocket, which launched the Dong Fang Hong I, China's first satellite, and the chief designer of Chinese storable propellant rocket engine. He was also the chief designer for the Long March 3 launch vehicle, Fengyun, and SJ series satellites.
Go to Profile#12924
Bjorn Poonen
#12935
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Bjorn Mikhail Poonen is a mathematician, four-time Putnam Competition winner, and a Distinguished Professor in Science in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research is primarily in arithmetic geometry, but he has occasionally published in other subjects such as probability and computer science. He has edited two books.
Go to Profile#12925
Mary Ellen Mark
#12936
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Mary Ellen Mark was an American photographer known for her photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture, and advertising photography. She photographed people who were "away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes".
Go to Profile#12926
Edward Reingold
#12937
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Edward M. Reingold is a computer scientist active in the fields of algorithms, data structures, graph drawing, and calendrical calculations. In 1996 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Go to Profile#12927
Erykah Badu
#12938
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Erica Abi Wright , known professionally as Erykah Badu , is an American singer and songwriter. Influenced by R&B, soul, and hip hop, Badu rose to prominence in the late 1990s when her debut album Baduizm , placed her at the forefront of the neo soul movement, earning her the nickname "Queen of Neo Soul" by music critics.
Go to Profile#12928
Zygmunt Ziembiński
#12939
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
Zygmunt Ziembiński OPR , usually cited as Z. Ziembinski, was a Polish legal philosopher, logician, and one of the most prominent theoreticians of law in Poland in the second half of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#12929
Daniel Reynaud
#12940
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Daniel Reynaud is an Australian historian whose work on Australian war cinema and on Australian World War I soldiers and religion has challenged aspects of the Anzac legend, Australia’s most important national mythology built around the role of Australian servicemen, popularly known as Anzacs
Go to Profile#12930
Kyle Mooney
#12941
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Kyle James Kozub Mooney is an American comedian. Mooney was a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 2013 to 2022. He co-wrote and starred in the 2017 film Brigsby Bear, in addition to co-creating, co-writing, producing, and starring in the adult cartoon comedy Saturday Morning All Star Hits!
Go to Profile#12931
Poul-Henning Kamp
#12942
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Poul-Henning Kamp is a Danish computer software developer known for work on various projects including FreeBSD and Varnish. He currently resides in Slagelse, Denmark. Involvement in the FreeBSD project Poul-Henning Kamp has been committing to the FreeBSD project for most of its duration. He is responsible for the widely used MD5crypt implementation of the MD5 password hash algorithm, a vast quantity of systems code including the FreeBSD GEOM storage layer, GBDE cryptographic storage transform, part of the UFS2 file system implementation, FreeBSD Jails, malloc library, and the FreeBSD and NTP...
Go to Profile#12932
Leander Paes
#12943
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Leander Adrian Paes is an Indian former professional tennis player. He is regarded as one of the greatest doubles tennis players of all-time and holds the record for the most doubles wins in the Davis Cup. Paes won eight men's doubles and ten mixed doubles Grand Slam titles.He made a total of 34 Grand Slam finals across men's and mixed doubles in his career which is the joint 2nd highest of all-time among men. He holds a career Grand Slam in men's doubles and mixed doubles making him one of only three men in the Open era to achieve this distinction and won the rare men's/mixed double at the 1999 Wimbledon Championships.
Go to Profile#12933
Alberto Mantovani
#12944
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Alberto Mantovani is an Italian physician and immunologist. He is Scientific Director of Istituto Clinico Humanitas , President and Founder of the Fondazione Humanitas per la Ricerca, and Professor of Pathology at the State University of Milan. He is known for his works in the roles of the immune system in the development of cancer. His research on tumor-associated macrophages established inflammation as one of the causes of cancer. He was the first to identify monocyte chemotactic protein - 1 / CCL2 in 1983, and PTX3 in 1997. His works revealed the existence of decoy receptors in cell-signalling.
Go to Profile#12934
Gerhard Ringel
#12945
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Gerhard Ringel was a German mathematician. He was one of the pioneers in graph theory and contributed significantly to the proof of the Heawood conjecture , a mathematical problem closely linked with the four color theorem.
Go to Profile#12935
Rita Charon
#12946
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Rita Charon , is a physician, literary scholar and the founder and executive director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. She currently practices as a general internist at the Associates in Internal Medicine at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and is a professor of clinical medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University.
Go to Profile#12936
Alireza Rahai
#12947
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Alireza Rahai is an Iranian engineer, academic, scholar and professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Amirkabir University of Technology. He is also a member of the Iranian Science and Culture Hall of Fame and Vice President for Academic and Post Graduate Affairs of Islamic Azad University. He has been the Chancellor of the Amirkabir University of Technology in three terms: from 1996 to 1997, from 2005 to 2014 and from 2023 until now .
Go to Profile#12937
Lyn Hejinian
#12948
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Lyn Hejinian is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is known for her landmark work My Life , as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry .
Go to Profile#12938
Nikolai Chernykh
#12949
Overall Influence
1931 - 2004 (73 years)
Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh was a Russian-born Ukrainian-Soviet astronomer and discoverer of minor planets and comets at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Nauchnyi, Crimea. Biography and work Chernykh was born in the Russian city of Usman in Voronezh Oblast, in present-day Lipetsk Oblast. He specialized in astrometry and the dynamics of small bodies in the Solar System and worked at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory from 1963.
Go to Profile#12939
Alex Toth
#12950
Overall Influence
1928 - 2006 (78 years)
Alexander Toth was an American cartoonist active from the 1940s through the 1980s. Toth's work began in the American comic book industry, but he is also known for his animation designs for Hanna-Barbera throughout the 1960s and 1970s. His work included Super Friends, Fantastic Four, Space Ghost, Sealab 2020, The Herculoids and Birdman. Toth's work has been resurrected in the late-night, adult-themed spin-offs on Cartoon Network’s late night sister channel Adult Swim: Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Sealab 2021 and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.
Go to Profile#12940
Donald Shoup
#12951
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Donald Curran Shoup is an American engineer and professor in urban planning. He is a research professor of urban planning at University of California, Los Angeles and a noted Georgist economist. His 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking identifies the negative repercussions of off-street parking requirements and relies heavily on 'Georgist' insights about optimal land use and rent distribution. In 2015, the American Planning Association awarded Shoup the "National Planning Excellence Award for a Planning Pioneer."
Go to Profile#12941
Eric Dunning
#12952
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Eric Dunning was a British sociologist who was Emeritus Professor of sociology at the University of Leicester. Career Eric Dunning was a pioneer in the sociology of sport and the founder, with Patrick Murphy and John Williams, of the Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research. He was the author of a number of books and articles on sport and the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias. Although officially retired, Dunning remained an Emeritus Professor of the University of Leicester as well as a Visiting Professor at the Chester Centre for Research into Sport and Society. Dunning was also...
Go to Profile#12942
Stewart Levine
#12953
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Stewart Levine is an American record producer. He has worked with such artists as The Crusaders, Minnie Riperton, Lionel Richie, Simply Red, Hugh Masekela, Dr. John, Randy Crawford, B.B. King, Jonatha Brooke, Huey Lewis and the News, Patti LaBelle, Sly Stone, Boy George, Peter Blakeley, Joe Cocker, Oleta Adams, Killing Joke, Jon Anderson, Boz Scaggs, Womack and Womack, David Sanborn, Brenda Russell, Lamont Dozier, Curiosity Killed the Cat, Aaron Neville, Everyday People, Jamie Cullum and The Marshall Tucker Band.
Go to Profile#12943
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
#12954
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
Madalyn Murray O'Hair was an American activist supporting atheism and separation of church and state. In 1963, she founded American Atheists and served as its president until 1986, after which her son Jon Garth Murray succeeded her. She created the first issues of American Atheist Magazine and identified as a "militant feminist".
Go to Profile#12944
Derek Wall
#12955
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Derek Norman Wall is a British politician. He was the joint International Coordinator for the Green Party of England and Wales and stood against Prime Minister Theresa May as the Green candidate for Maidenhead at the 2017 general election. Formerly the party's Principal Speaker, he is known as a prominent eco-socialist, campaigning both for environmentalism and socialism. Alongside his political role, Wall is an academic and a writer, having published on the subject of ecosocialism and the wider Green politics movement. He is a contributor to the Morning Star newspaper and a blogger.
Go to Profile#12945
Shaun L. Gabbidon
#12956
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
#12946
Barun De
#12957
Overall Influence
1932 - 2013 (81 years)
Barun De was an Indian historian. He served as the first professor of social and economic history of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, founder-director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata and as the honorary state editor for the West Bengal District Gazetteers. He was chairman of the West Bengal Heritage Commission.
Go to Profile#12947
Morrie Schwartz
#12958
Overall Influence
1916 - 1995 (79 years)
Morris S. Schwartz was an American professor of sociology at Brandeis University and an author. He was the subject of the best-selling book Tuesdays with Morrie, written by Mitch Albom, a former student of Schwartz. He was portrayed by Jack Lemmon in the 1999 television film adaptation of the book.
Go to Profile#12948
Chris Woodhead
#12959
Overall Influence
1946 - 2015 (69 years)
Sir Christopher Anthony Woodhead was a British educationalist. He was Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools in England from 1994 to 2000, and was one of the most controversial figures in debates on the direction of English education policy. He was Chairman of Cognita, a company dedicated to fostering private education, from 2004 to 2013.
Go to Profile#12949
Issa G. Shivji
#12960
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Issa Gulamhussein Shivji is a Tanzanian author and academic, and an experts on law and development issues. He has taught and worked in universities all over the world. He is a writer and researcher, producing books, monographs and articles, as well as a weekly column printed in national newspapers.
Go to Profile#12950
Eric Barendt
#12961
Overall Influence
Eric M. Barendt is the Goodman Professor of Media Law at University College London. After graduating with a BCL and an MA degree at Oxford, Barendt was called to the Bar at Gray's Inn. He began lecturing in law as a fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford in 1971. In 1990 he left Oxford to take up a position as Goodman Professor of Media Law at University College London, the first media law professorship in the United Kingdom. He also teaches jurisprudence at the undergraduate level. He has been a visiting professor at Sapienza University of Rome, the University of Siena, the University of Me...
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