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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#13051

Garrett Epps

#13062

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Garrett Epps is an American legal scholar, novelist, and journalist. He was professor of law at the University of Baltimore until his retirement in June 2020; previously he was the Orlando J. and Marian H. Hollis Professor of Law at the University of Oregon.

#13052

C. T. Hsia

#13063

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Hsia Chih-tsing 夏志清 or C. T. Hsia was a Chinese historian and literary theorist. He contributed to the introduction of modern Chinese literature to the Western world by promoting the works of once marginalized writers in the 1960s. Today, C. T. Hsia is considered one of the most important critics of Chinese literature.

#13053

Glen Gabbard

#13064

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Glen Owens Gabbard is an American psychiatrist known for authoring professional teaching texts for the field. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and is also training and supervising analyst at the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Houston.

#13054

Walter Berns

#13065

Overall Influence

1919 - 2015 (96 years)

Walter Berns was an American constitutional law and political philosophy professor. He was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor emeritus at Georgetown University. Early life and career Berns was raised in Chicago, where, as late as 1926, he was impressed by "Union soldiers in the [Memorial Day] parade feebly carrying the standard." He attended Reed College and the General Course at the London School of Economics and Political Science, "where [he] learned little, other than to love London," and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa. World...

#13055

George Furnas

#13066

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

George William Furnas is an American academic, Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Strategy at the School of Information of the University of Michigan, known for his work on semantic analysis and on human-system communication.

#13056

Rob Gronkowski

#13067

Overall Influence

1989 - Present (37 years)

Robert James Gronkowski is an American former football tight end who played in the National Football League for 11 seasons. Nicknamed "Gronk", Gronkowski played nine seasons for the New England Patriots, then played his final two seasons for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Regarded as one of the greatest tight ends of all time, he is a four-time Super Bowl champion , a five-time Pro Bowl selection, a four-time First Team All-Pro selection, and was selected in the NFL 2010s All-Decade Team and NFL 100th Anniversary All-Time Team.

#13057

Christopher Walken

Christopher Walken

#13068

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Christopher Walken is an American actor. Prolific in film, dance, television, and on stage, Walken is the recipient of numerous accolades. He has earned an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, as well as nominations for two Primetime Emmy Awards and two Tony Awards. His films have grossed more than $1.6 billion in the United States alone.

#13058

Tammo tom Dieck

Tammo tom Dieck

#13069

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Tammo tom Dieck is a German mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology. Tammo tom Dieck studied mathematics from 1957 at the University of Göttingen and at Saarland University, where he received his promotion in 1964 under Dieter Puppe with thesis Zur -Theorie und ihren Kohomologie-Operationen. In 1969 tom Dieck received his habilitation at Heidelberg University under Albrecht Dold. From 1970 to 1975 he was a professor at Saarland University. In 1975 he became a professor at the University of Göttingen.

#13059

Edgar L. Feige

#13070

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Edgar L. Feige is an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago he has taught at Yale University ; The University of Essex; Erasmus University and held the Cleveringa Chair, at the University of Leiden in 1981–82. He has published widely on such topics as underground and shadow economies; tax evasion; transition economics; financial transaction taxes the Automated Payment Transaction tax ; and monetary theory and policy. He has consulted with various US and international government agencies.

#13060

William Cheswick

#13071

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

William R. "Bill" Cheswick is a computer security and networking researcher. Education Cheswick graduated from Lawrenceville School in 1970 and received a B.S. in Fundamental Science in 1975 from Lehigh University. While at Lehigh, working with Doug Price and Steve Lidie, Cheswick co-authored the Senator line-oriented text editor.

#13061

Tomasz Witkowski

Tomasz Witkowski

#13072

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Tomasz Witkowski is a Polish psychologist, skeptic and science writer. He is known for his unconventional campaigns against pseudoscience. He specializes in debunking pseudoscience, particularly in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, and diagnostics. Witkowski also engages in debates on pseudoscience-related topics, emphasizing scientific skepticism.

#13062

Adam Muto

#13073

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Adam Muto is an American writer, storyboard artist, animator, and producer known for his work as the executive producer and showrunner of the animated television series Adventure Time. Career Muto was a classmate of Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward at CalArts. When Ward was first working on the Adventure Time pilot for the Frederator incubator series Random! Cartoons, Muto assisted him by drawing props. Eventually, Muto went on to work on the television series, serving as a storyboard artist. During the show's first season, he was partnered with Elizabeth Ito, but during the show's second and third seasons, he was partnered with Rebecca Sugar.

#13063

Graham Nelson

#13074

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Graham A. Nelson is a British mathematician, poet, and the creator of the Inform design system for creating interactive fiction games. He has authored several IF games, including Curses and Jigsaw .

#13064

Shinobu Kitayama

#13075

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Shinobu Kitayama is a Japanese social psychologist and the Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He is also the Social Psychology Area Chair and Director of the Culture & Cognition Program at the University of Michigan. He is the editor-in-chief of the Attitudes and Social Cognition section of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He received his bachelor's degree and master's degree from Kyoto University and his doctorate from the University of Michigan. Together with Mayumi Karasawa, he discovered the birthday-number effect, the subconscious tendency of people to prefer the numbers in the date of their birthday over other numbers.

#13065

Henry Reynolds

#13076

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

#13066

Graeme Snooks

#13077

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Graeme Donald Snooks is a systems theorist and stratologist who has developed a general dynamic theory to explain complex living systems. His resulting "dynamic-strategy theory" has been employed to analyse the fluctuating fortunes of life over the past 4,000 million years and of human society over the past 2 myrs; to analyse contemporary economic problems ; to explore socio-political issues ; to analyse the emergence, operation, and malfunction of the mind; and to make scientific predictions about the future. New discoveries emerging from Snooks' publications include: existential schizophre...

#13067

Andrew Majda

#13078

Overall Influence

1949 - 2021 (72 years)

Andrew Joseph Majda was an American mathematician and the Morse Professor of Arts and Sciences at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. He was known for his theoretical contributions to partial differential equations as well as his applied contributions to diverse areas including shock waves, combustion, incompressible flow, vortex dynamics, and atmospheric sciences. Majda was listed as an ISI highly cited researcher in mathematics.

#13068

Vernon Kay

#13079

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Vernon Charles Kay is an English broadcaster and former model. He presented Channel 4's T4 and has presented various television shows for ITV, including All Star Family Fortunes , Just the Two of Us , Beat the Star , The Whole 19 Yards , Splash! , and 1000 Heartbeats .

#13069

Bill Porter

#13080

Overall Influence

1931 - 2010 (79 years)

Bill Porter was an American audio engineer who helped shape the Nashville sound and recorded stars such as Chet Atkins, Louis Armstrong, the Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley, Gladys Knight, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Skeeter Davis, Ike & Tina Turner, Sammy Davis Jr., and Roy Orbison from the late 1950s through the 1980s. In one week of 1960, his recordings accounted for 15 of Billboard magazine's Top 100, a feat none has matched. Porter's engineering career included over 7,000 recording sessions, 300 chart records, 49 Top 10, 11 Number Ones, and 37 gold records.

#13070

Herbert Hovenkamp

#13081

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Herbert Hovenkamp is an American legal scholar serving as James G. Dinan University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that he held the Ben and Dorothy Willie Chair at the University of Iowa College of Law. Hovenkamp is a recognized expert and prolific author in the area of antitrust law.

#13071

Duncan B. Forrester

#13082

Overall Influence

1933 - 2016 (83 years)

Duncan Baillie Forrester was a Scottish theologian and the founder of the Centre for Theology and Public Issues at New College, University of Edinburgh. He was latterly honorary fellow and professor emeritus at New College.

#13072

Jacqueline Noonan

#13083

Overall Influence

1928 - 2020 (92 years)

Jacqueline Anne Noonan was an American pediatric cardiologist best known for her characterization of a genetic disorder now called Noonan syndrome. She was also the original describer of hypoplastic left heart syndrome.

#13073

Ian Gillan

#13084

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Ian Gillan is an English singer who is best known as the lead singer and lyricist for the rock band Deep Purple. He is known for his powerful and wide-ranging singing voice. Initially influenced by Elvis Presley, Gillan started and fronted several local bands in the mid-1960s, and eventually joined Episode Six when their original singer left. He first found widespread commercial success after joining Deep Purple in 1969. He resigned from the band in June 1973, having given a lengthy notice period to their managers. After a short time away from the music business, he resumed his music career w...

#13074

Julia Buckingham

#13085

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Julia Clare Buckingham is a British pharmacologist, academic and academic administrator. She is the former Vice Chancellor of Brunel University London, UK. Early life Buckingham was born on 18 October 1950. She attended St Mary's School, Calne from 1960 to 1968. She then studied zoology at the University of Sheffield from 1968 - 1971. She received her PhD degree in pharmacology at the University of London, Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine. In 1987, she received her DSc degree from the same university.

#13075

Boutros Boutros-Ghali

#13086

Overall Influence

1922 - 2016 (94 years)

Boutros Boutros-Ghali was an Egyptian politician and diplomat who served as the sixth Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1992 to 1996. Prior to his appointment as secretary-general, Boutros-Ghali was the acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Egypt between 1977 and 1979. He oversaw the United Nations over a period coinciding with several world crises, including the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide.

#13076

Peter Heather

#13087

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Peter John Heather is a British historian of late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Heather is Chair of the Medieval History Department and Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. He specialises in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Goths, on which he for decades has been considered the world's leading authority.

#13077

S. Anand

#13088

Overall Influence

S. Anand is an Indian author, publisher and journalist. He, along with D. Ravikumar, founded the publishing house Navayana in 2003, which is "India’s first and only publishing house to focus on the issue of caste from an anticaste perspective." Navayana won the British Council-London Book Fair International Young Publisher of the Year award in 2007. In Pali, the word "navayana" means "new vehicle". B. R. Ambedkar used the word in 1956 to describe the branch of Buddhism that wouldn't be mired in the Hinayana-Mahayana divide, but would help dalits gain equality in India.

#13078

Otto Königsberger

#13089

Overall Influence

1908 - 1999 (91 years)

Otto H. Königsberger was a German architect who worked mainly in urban development planning in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with the United Nations. He also proposed some plans for developing new cities like Bhubaneswar and Jamshedpur under the vision of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who wanted to build planned cities in India.

#13079

George Lipsitz

#13090

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

George Lipsitz is an American Studies scholar and professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of over half a dozen books, including The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. He is a leading scholar in social movements, urban culture, inequality, the politics of popular culture, and Whiteness Studies. In addition to The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, he has written Midnight at the Barrelhouse, Footsteps in the Dark, A Life in the Struggle, Time Passages, Dangerous Crossroads, American Studies in a Moment of Danger, Rainbow at Midnight, Sidewalks of St.

#13080

Martti Ahtisaari

#13091

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Martti Oiva Kalevi Ahtisaari was a Finnish politician, the 10th president of Finland, from 1994 to 2000, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and a United Nations diplomat and mediator noted for his international peace work.

#13081

Stephen Flowers

#13092

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Stephen Edred Flowers, commonly known as Stephen E. Flowers, and also by the pen-names Edred Thorsson, and Darban-i-Den, is an American runologist, university lecturer, and proponent of occultism, especially of Neo-Germanic paganism and Odinism. He helped establish the Germanic Neopagan movement in North America and has also been active in left-hand path occult organizations. He has over three dozen published books and hundreds of published papers and translations on a disparate range of subjects. Flowers is still an active representative of heathenry and Odinism, and has appeared online in s...

#13082

John Warrack

#13093

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

John Hamilton Warrack is an English music critic, writer on music, and oboist. Career Born in London, Warrack is the son of Scottish conductor and composer Guy Warrack. He was educated at Winchester College and the Royal College of Music . In the early 1950s he was a freelance oboist, playing mostly with the Boyd Neel Orchestra and Sadler's Wells Orchestra. From 1954 until 1961 he was music critic for The Daily Telegraph, and from 1961 until 1972 for The Sunday Telegraph. From 1978 until 1983 he served as the artistic director of the Leeds Festival. From 1984 until 1993 he taught on the musi...

#13083

Allen Bergin

#13094

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Allen Eric Bergin is a clinical psychologist known for his research on psychotherapy outcomes and on integrating psychotherapy and religion. His 1980 article on theistic values was groundbreaking in the field and elicited over 1,000 responses and requests for reprints, and including those from Carl Rogers and Albert Bandura. Bergin is also noted for his interchanges with probabilistic atheist Albert Ellis.

#13084

Steve Vai

#13095

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Steven Siro Vai is an American guitarist, songwriter, and producer. A three-time Grammy Award winner and fifteen-time nominee, Vai started his music career in 1978 at the age of eighteen as a transcriptionist for Frank Zappa, and played in Zappa's band from 1980 to 1983. He embarked on a solo career in 1983 and has released eight solo albums to date. He has recorded and toured with Alcatrazz, David Lee Roth, and Whitesnake, as well as recording with artists such as Public Image Ltd, Mary J. Blige, Spinal Tap, Alice Cooper, Motörhead, and Polyphia. Additionally, Vai has toured with live-only a...

#13085

Ornette Coleman

#13096

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman was an American jazz saxophonist, trumpeter, violinist, and composer. He was best known as a principal founder of the free jazz genre, a term derived from his 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. His pioneering works often abandoned the harmony-based composition, tonality, chord changes, and fixed rhythm found in earlier jazz idioms. Instead, Coleman emphasized an experimental approach to improvisation, rooted in ensemble playing and blues phrasing. AllMusic called him "one of the most beloved and polarizing figures in jazz history," noting that wh...

#13086

David Lametti

#13097

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

David T. Lametti is a Canadian politician who has been the Member of Parliament for LaSalle—Émard—Verdun since 2015. A member of the Liberal Party, Lametti served as minister of justice and attorney general of Canada from 2019 to 2023.

#13087

Rose Oldfield Hayes

#13098

Overall Influence

Rose Oldfield Hayes was an American anthropologist at the State University of New York, Buffalo. After doing fieldwork in Sudan in 1970 interviewing women who had been infibulated, Hayes wrote the first scholarly paper on female genital mutilation that used that term, and the first to incorporate information from the women themselves. Published in American Ethnologist in 1975, the paper represented an important step forward in understanding the practice.

#13088

Adolfo Suárez

#13099

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Adolfo Suárez González, 1st Duke of Suárez was a Spanish lawyer and politician. Suárez was Spain's first democratically elected prime minister since the Second Spanish Republic and a key figure in the country's transition to democracy after the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

#13089

Ryan Rohm

#13100

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Ryan Milton Rohm is an American string theorist. He is one of four physicists known as the Princeton string quartet, and is responsible for the development of heterotic string theory along with David Gross, Jeffrey A. Harvey and Emil Martinec, the other members of the Princeton String Quartet.

#13090

Philip Meyer

#13101

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Philip Meyer was an American journalist and scholar who was a professor and holder of the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He researched in the areas of journalism quality, precision journalism, civic journalism, polling, the newspaper industry, and communications technology. Meyer received his undergraduate degree in technical journalism from Kansas State University , a master's degree in political science from Chapel Hill and was a non-degree Nieman Fellow at Harvard University .

#13091

Fritz-Albert Popp

#13102

Overall Influence

1938 - 2018 (80 years)

Fritz-Albert Popp was a German researcher in biophysics, particularly in the study of biophotons. Biography Popp was born in 1938 in Frankfurt. He has a diploma in Experimental Physics , a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics , and a habilitation in Biophysics and Medicine . He was awarded Professorship by the Senate of Marburg University, and lectured at Marburg University from 1973 to 1980.

#13092

Mohammad Hassan Ganji

Mohammad Hassan Ganji

#13103

Overall Influence

1912 - 2012 (100 years)

Mohammad Hassan Ganji Ph.D , was an Iranian meteorologist and academic. He was born in Birjand. He is credited as being the father of modern geography in Iran. Education He completed his studies in Tehran and continued to study geography in England and the United States. He next began to teach at the University of Tehran and was the first who began to teach modern geography at universities. Ganji established the Iran Meteorological Organization in 1955 and ran the organization for several years. He is often acknowledged as the father of modern geography in Iran.

#13093

Seymour Chatman

#13104

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Seymour Chatman was an American film and literary critic and professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is one of the most significant figures of American narratology , regarded as a prominent representative of its Structuralist or "classic" branch.

#13094

Manuel Pellegrini

#13105

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Manuel Luis Pellegrini Ripamonti is a Chilean professional football manager and former player who is the manager of Real Betis. As a coach, he has managed teams in Spain, England, Argentina, Chile, China and Ecuador. Pellegrini has won national leagues in four countries.

#13095

Manuel Valls

#13106

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Manuel Carlos Valls Galfetti is a French-Spanish politician who has served as a Barcelona city councillor from 2019 to 2021. He served as Prime Minister of France from 2014 until 2016 under president François Hollande.

#13096

Robert Zemeckis

Robert Zemeckis

#13107

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Robert Lee Zemeckis is an American filmmaker. He first came to public attention as the director of the action-adventure romantic comedy Romancing the Stone , the science-fiction comedy Back to the Future film trilogy , and the live-action/animated comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit . He subsequently directed the satirical black comedy Death Becomes Her and then diversified into more dramatic fare, including Forrest Gump , for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director. The film also won the Best Picture. He has directed films across a wide variety of genres, for both adults and families.

#13097

Takashi Sugimura

#13108

Overall Influence

1926 - 2020 (94 years)

was a Japanese biochemist, famous for research on chemical carcinogens. He received the Japan Prize for the contribution to establishment of fundamental concept on causes of cancer. He was elected as President of the Japan Academy on October 15, 2013, serving till 2016 and was replaced with Hiroshi Shiono.

#13098

Marco Rubio

#13109

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Marco Antonio Rubio is an American politician and lawyer serving as the senior United States senator from Florida, a seat he has held since 2011. A member of the Republican Party, he served as Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives from 2006 to 2008. Rubio unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for President of the United States in 2016, winning presidential primaries in Minnesota, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

#13099

Robert Kearns

#13110

Overall Influence

1927 - 2005 (78 years)

Robert William Kearns was an American mechanical engineer, educator and inventor who invented the most common intermittent windshield wiper systems used on most automobiles from 1969 to the present. His first patent for the invention was filed on December 1, 1964, after a few previous designs by other inventors had failed to gain any traction in manufacturing.

#13100

Luiz Mott

#13111

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Luiz Roberto de Barros Mott or Luiz Mott in São Paulo, is an anthropologist and a gay rights activist in Brazil. Early life Luiz Mott graduated in Social Sciences from the University of São Paulo during the military regime, obtained a master's degree in Ethnography from the Sorbonne and a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Campinas in São Paulo.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions