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
#13101
Gerald Goertzel
#13112
Overall Influence
1919 - 2002 (83 years)
Gerald Howard Goertzel was an American theoretical physicist. He worked on the Manhattan Project for the Nuclear Development Corporation of America and later for Sage Instruments. He was an employee of IBM's Research Division where he worked for 28 years in a variety of areas, including design automation, data compression and digital printing technology. He is best known for creating the Goertzel algorithm.
Go to Profile#13102
Margaret Geller
#13113
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Margaret J. Geller is an American astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. Her work has included pioneering maps of the nearby universe, studies of the relationship between galaxies and their environment, and the development and application of methods for measuring the distribution of matter in the universe.
Go to Profile#13103
Robert Tollison
#13114
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Robert D. Tollison was an American economist who specialized in public choice theory. Education A native of Spartanburg, South Carolina, Tollison attended local Wofford College where he earned an A.B. in business administration and economics in 1964. He completed an M.A. in economics at the University of Alabama a year later. After completing his master's in Tuscaloosa, Tollison moved to Virginia to begin teaching at Longwood University, then called "Longwood College." Shortly thereafter he commenced work on his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Virginia. He finished his doctoral degree...
Go to Profile#13104
Peter Enns
#13115
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Peter Eric Enns is an American Biblical scholar and theologian. He has written widely on hermeneutics, Christianity and science, historicity of the Bible, and Old Testament interpretation. Outside of his academic work Enns is a contributor to HuffPost and Patheos. He has also worked with Francis Collins' The BioLogos Foundation. His book Inspiration and Incarnation challenged conservative/mainstream Evangelical methods of biblical interpretation. His book The Evolution of Adam questions the belief that Adam was a historical figure. He also wrote The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture ...
Go to Profile#13105
Vladimir Orel
#13116
Overall Influence
1952 - 2007 (55 years)
Vladimir Emmanuilovich Orël was a Russian linguist and etymologist. Biography At the Moscow State University he studied theoretical linguistics and structural linguistics . He defended his Ph.D. in 1981 , on the comparative analysis of Slavic languages in the Balkans. Until 1990 he worked at the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies in Moscow, where he completed his second doctoral thesis in 1989 , on the historical grammar of Albanian.
Go to Profile#13106
M. George Craford
#13117
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
M. George Craford is an American electrical engineer known for his work in Light Emitting Diodes . Raised in an Iowa farming community, he studied physics at the University of Iowa, where he earned his BA in 1961. Craford received his MS and PhD degrees in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1967, began his professional career at the Monsanto Chemical Company, where he discovered the "Yellow light". When Monsanto sold its LED and compound semiconductor business in 1979, Craford went to Hewlett Packard, where in 1982 he became the research and development manager of the HP Optoelectronics Division.
Go to Profile#13107
Philip Emeagwali
#13118
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Philip Emeagwali is a computer scientist originally from Nigeria. He won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for price-performance in high-performance computing applications, in an oil reservoir modeling calculation using a novel mathematical formulation and implementation. He is known for making controversial claims about his achievements that are disputed by the scientific community.
Go to Profile#13108
Nina Simone
#13119
Overall Influence
1933 - 2003 (70 years)
Nina Simone was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, composer, arranger and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, folk, gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, and pop. The sixth of eight children born into a poor family in North Carolina, Simone initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a few supporters in her hometown, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She then applied for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where, despite a well received audition, she was denied admission, which she attributed to racism.
Go to Profile#13109
Toshiyuki Takamiya
#13120
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Toshiyuki Takamiya in Tokyo, Japan is a Japanese academic and author. Emeritus Professor at Keio University since 2009, he is an authority on medieval English literature and medieval English manuscript studies and a collector of antiquarian books.
Go to Profile#13110
Howard Cedar
#13121
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Howard Chaim Cedar is an Israeli American biochemist who works on DNA methylation, a mechanism that turns genes on and off. Biography Howard Chaim Cedar was born in the United States. He received a bachelor's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, in 1970, received an M.D. and a PhD from New York University. He is married to Zipora, a psychodramatist, and has six children, Joseph , Dahlia, Noa, Yoav, Yonatan and Daniel, and 24 grandchildren.
Go to Profile#13111
H. Richard Crane
#13122
Overall Influence
1907 - 2007 (100 years)
Horace Richard Crane was an American physicist, the inventor of the Race Track Synchrotron, a recipient of President Ronald Reagan's National Medal of Science "for the first measurement of the magnetic moment and spin of free electrons and positrons". He was also noted for proving the existence of neutrinos. The National Academy of Sciences called Crane "an extraordinary physicist". The University of Michigan called him "one of the most distinguished experimental physicists of the 20th century". Crane was a chairman of the department of physics and a professor of physics at the University of...
Go to Profile#13112
Akinyinka Omigbodun
#13123
Overall Influence
Akinyinka Omigbodun is a Nigerian professor of Gynecology, Obstetrics and former provost of the College of Medicine, University of Ibadan. He once served as president of the West African College of Surgeons and chair of the management board of the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa .
Go to Profile#13113
George F. Simmons
#13124
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
George Finlay Simmons was an American mathematician who worked in topology and classical analysis. He is known as the author of widely used textbooks on university mathematics. Life He was born on 3 March 1925 in Austin, Texas.
Go to Profile#13114
Raymond Stora
#13125
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Raymond Félix Stora was a French theoretical physicist. He was a researcher at Service de Physique Théorique at CEA Saclay, then a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research at CPT Marseille and at LAPP Annecy, as well as a member of CERN's theory group. His work focused on particle physics.
Go to Profile#13115
Pertev Naili Boratav
#13126
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Pertev Naili Boratav, born Mustafa Pertev was a Turkish folklorist and researcher of folk literature. He has been characterized as 'the founding father of Turkish folkloristics during the Republic'.
Go to Profile#13116
Peter Waddington
#13127
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
Peter Anthony James "Tank" Waddington , often credited as P. A. J. Waddington was a British police officer and later an academic at the University of Wolverhampton, in the United Kingdom. He is known for his research and works on policing and social policy; in particular he is credited for inventing the controversial police tactic of kettling.
Go to Profile#13117
Aubrey Trotman-Dickenson
#13128
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Sir Aubrey Fiennes Trotman-Dickenson was a British chemist and academic administrator. Biography Trotman-Dickenson was born in Wilmslow, Cheshire on 12 February 1926. His father, Edward Newton Trotman-Dickenson was a cotton merchant and his mother was Violet Murray, née Nicoll. He attended Winchester College and continued to study Chemistry with a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford in 1948.
Go to Profile#13118
Norman E. Brinker
#13129
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
Norman Eugene Brinker was an American restaurateur who was responsible for the creation of new business concepts within the restaurant field. He served as president of Jack in the Box, founded Steak and Ale, and helped establish Bennigan's and founded Brinker International.
Go to Profile#13119
Arthur M. Lesk
#13130
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Arthur Mallay Lesk, is a protein science researcher, who is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Education Lesk received a bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard University in 1961. He received his doctoral degree from Princeton University in 1966. He also received a master's degree from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 1999.
Go to Profile#13120
Rana Dajani
#13131
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Rana Dajani is a Palestinian-Jordanian molecular biologist and tenured professor of biology and biotechnology at Hashemite University. She earned her Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Iowa. Dajani is an expert on genetics of Circassian and Chechen populations in Jordan, also on conducting genome-wide association studies on diabetes and cancer on stem cells. Her work in stem cell research initiated the development of the Stem Cell Research Ethics Law and all regulations in Jordan. She is an advocate for the biological evolution theory in relation to the religion of Islam, and b...
Go to Profile#13121
Peter Cameron
#13132
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Peter Jephson Cameron FRSE is an Australian mathematician who works in group theory, combinatorics, coding theory, and model theory. He is currently half-time Professor of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, and Emeritus Professor at Queen Mary University of London.
Go to Profile#13122
Ted Kooser
#13133
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Theodore J. Kooser is an American poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2005. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 to 2006. Kooser was one of the first poets laureate selected from the Great Plains, and is known for his conversational style of poetry.
Go to Profile#13123
Diane Wood
#13134
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Diane Pamela Wood is an American attorney who serves as the director of the American Law Institute, a senior circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
Go to Profile#13124
Yves Rocard
#13135
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
Yves-André Rocard was a French physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb for France. Lifes Rocard was born in Vannes. After obtaining a double doctorate in mathematics and physics he was awarded a professorship in electronic physics at the École normale supérieure in Paris.
Go to Profile#13125
Byron Good
#13136
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Byron Joseph Good is an American medical anthropologist primarily studying mental illness. He is currently on the faculty of Harvard University, where he is Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology.
Go to Profile#13126
Attila Aşkar
#13137
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Attila Aşkar is a Turkish civil engineer, scientist and former president of the Koç University in Rumelifeneri, Istanbul, Turkey during 2001 and 2009. Life Attila Aşkar was born on September 4, 1943 in Bolvadin, Afyonkarahisar Province-Turkey. He is the son of Kemal and Nüzhet Aşkar, and was married to Elsie Vance, the daughter of former Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance on August 30, 1998.
Go to Profile#13127
Jean-Claude Van Damme
#13138
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varenberg , known professionally as Jean-Claude Van Damme , is a Belgian actor, martial artist, and conservationist. Born and raised in Brussels, his father enrolled him in martial arts classes at the age of ten, which led Van Damme to compete in several karate and kickboxing competitions. With the desire of becoming an actor, he moved to the United States in 1982, where he did odd jobs and worked on several films, until he got his break as the lead in the martial arts film Bloodsport .
Go to Profile#13128
Clara Ponsatí
#13139
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Clara Ponsatí i Obiols is a Catalan economist and politician from Spain. She was appointed Minister of Education of the Government of Catalonia by President Carles Puigdemont on 14 July 2017, and was dismissed by the Spanish Government pursuant to Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution on 27 October 2017, due to the organisation of the 2017 Catalan independence referendum and the subsequent declaration of independence. On 30 October 2017, she went into exile in Brussels together with Carles Puigdemont and three other members of his government, Lluís Puig, Antoni Comín and Meritxell Serret. In May 2018, she returned to the University of St Andrews as a Professor.
Go to Profile#13129
Tom Hull
#13140
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Tom Hull is an American music critic, web designer, and former software developer. Hull began writing criticism for The Village Voice in the mid 1970s under the mentorship of its music editor Robert Christgau, but left the field to pursue a career in software design and engineering during the 1980s and 1990s, which earned him the majority of his life's income. In the 2000s, he returned to music reviewing and wrote a jazz column for The Village Voice in the manner of Christgau's "Consumer Guide", alongside contributions to Seattle Weekly, The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, NPR Music, and the we...
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Georgy Golitsyn
#13141
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Georgy Sergeyevich Golitsyn is a prominent Russian scientist in the field of Atmospheric Physics, full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR since 1987, Editor-in-Chief of Izvestiya, Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics, , member of the Academia Europaea since 2000. 1990-2009 - Director of the A.M. Obukhov Institute of Atmospheric Physics, RAS, Moscow, Russia. He is a member of the princely house of Golitsyn. His father is the Russian writer Sergei Mikhailovich Golitsyn.
Go to Profile#13131
Mohammad Najibullah
#13142
Overall Influence
1947 - 1996 (49 years)
Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai , commonly known as Dr. Najib, was an Afghan politician who served as the General Secretary of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the leader of the one-party ruling Republic of Afghanistan from 1986 to 1992 and as well as the President of Afghanistan from 1987 until his resignation in April 1992, shortly after which the mujahideen took over Kabul. After a failed attempt to flee to India, Najibullah remained in Kabul. He lived in the United Nations headquarters until his assassination during the Taliban's capture of Kabul.
Go to Profile#13132
Jane Lubchenco
#13143
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
#13133
Lucian Bebchuk
#13144
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Lucian Arye Bebchuk is a professor at Harvard Law School focusing on economics and finance. Life and career Bebchuk has a B.A. in mathematics and economics from the University of Haifa , an LL.B. from the University of Tel Aviv , an LL.M. and S.J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics, also from Harvard . He was a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1983 to 1985. He joined the Harvard Law faculty in 1986. Bebchuck is the co-author, with Jesse Fried, of Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation.
Go to Profile#13134
Jonathan Coe
#13145
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jonathan Coe is an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name. It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources that was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s.
Go to Profile#13135
John Kingman
#13146
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Sir John Frank Charles Kingman is a British mathematician. He served as N. M. Rothschild and Sons Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge from 2001 until 2006, when he was succeeded by David Wallace. He is known for developing the mathematics of the coalescent theory, a theoretical model of inheritance that is fundamental to modern population genetics.
Go to Profile#13136
Helen Clark
#13147
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Helen Elizabeth Clark is a New Zealand politician who served as the 37th prime minister of New Zealand from 1999 to 2008, and was the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme from 2009 to 2017. She was New Zealand's fifth-longest-serving prime minister, and the second woman to hold that office.
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Luigi Dadda
#13148
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Luigi Dadda was an Italian computer engineer, best known for the design of the Dadda multiplier and as one of the first researchers on modern computers in Italy. He was rector at the Politecnico di Milano technical university from 1972 to 1984, collaborating on research at the same university until 2012. He was a Life Fellow of the IEEE.
Go to Profile#13138
Todor Zhivkov
#13149
Overall Influence
1911 - 1998 (87 years)
Todor Hristov Zhivkov was a Bulgarian communist statesman who served as the de facto leader of the People's Republic of Bulgaria from 1954 until 1989 as General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party. He was the second longest-serving leader in the Eastern Bloc, the longest-serving leader within the Warsaw Pact and the longest-serving non-royal ruler in Bulgarian history.
Go to Profile#13139
Hans Rosling
#13150
Overall Influence
1948 - 2017 (69 years)
Hans Rosling was a Swedish physician, academic and public speaker. He was a professor of international health at Karolinska Institute and was the co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system. He held presentations around the world, including several TED Talks in which he promoted the use of data to explore development issues. His posthumously published book Factfulness, coauthored with his daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund and son Ola Rosling, became an international bestseller.
Go to Profile#13140
Lauri Honko
#13151
Overall Influence
1932 - 2002 (70 years)
Lauri Olavi Honko was a Finnish professor of folklore studies and comparative religion. Life and work Honko was a disciple of Martti Haavio. His 1959 doctoral dissertation at the University of Helsinki was titled Krankheitsprojektile. Untersuchung über eine urtümliche Krankheitserklärung and developed a special typology for the analysis of ethnographic data in folk medicine. Here he put the Finnish folk tradition explanation of illness and healing into a global perspective and found distinct features and differences in geographical regions.
Go to Profile#13141
Elizabeth Diller
#13152
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Elizabeth Diller, also known as Liz Diller, is an American architect and partner in Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which she co-founded in 1979. She is also an architecture professor at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#13142
Antje Boetius
#13153
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Antje Boetius is a German marine biologist. She is a professor of geomicrobiology at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, University of Bremen. Boetius received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in March 2009 for her study of sea bed microorganisms that affect the global climate. She is also the director of Germany's polar research hub, the Alfred Wegener Institute.
Go to Profile#13143
Masazumi Harada
#13154
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Masazumi Harada was a Japanese doctor and medical researcher. His most famous work covered the effects of Minamata disease, a type of severe mercury poisoning that occurred in the city of Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture during the 1950s and 1960s. His publications included Minamata disease and Minamata Ga Utsusu Sekai . He died June 11, 2012, of acute myelocytic leukemia at his home in Kumamoto.
Go to Profile#13144
Tom Verducci
#13155
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Thomas Verducci is an American sportswriter who writes for Sports Illustrated and its online magazine SI.com. He writes primarily about baseball. He is also a reporter and commentator for Fox Major League Baseball and MLB Network.
Go to Profile#13145
Joan Massagué
#13156
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Joan Massagué , is a Spanish biologist and the current director of the Sloan Kettering Institute at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is also an internationally recognized leader in the study of both cancer metastasis and growth factors that regulate cell behavior, as well as a professor at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.
Go to Profile#13146
Norman Stillman
#13157
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Norman Arthur Stillman, also Noam , b. 1945, is an American academic, historian, and Orientalist, serving as the emeritus Schusterman-Josey Professor and emeritus Chair of Judaic History at the University of Oklahoma. He specializes in the intersection of Jewish and Islamic culture and history, and in Oriental and Sephardi Jewry, with special interest in the Jewish communities in North Africa. His major publications are The Jews of Arab Lands: a History And Source Book and Sephardi Religious Responses to Modernity. In the last few years, Stillman has been the executive editor of the "Encyclop...
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Elizabeth Eisenstein
#13158
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Elizabeth Lewisohn Eisenstein was an American historian of the French Revolution and early 19th-century France. She is well known for her work on the history of early printing, writing on the transition in media between the era of 'manuscript culture' and that of 'print culture', as well as the role of the printing press in effecting broad cultural change in Western civilization.
Go to Profile#13148
Moshe Many
#13159
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Moshe Many was an Israeli urologist who was President of Tel Aviv University from 1983 to 1991, and President of Ashkelon Academic College from 2002 to 2012. Biography Moshe was born in Hebron to Israel and Simcha Mani, of the well-established Mani family. His great-grandfather was Rabbi Eliyahu Mani, the renown scholar who led the Jewish community of Hebron for 40 years. His father was Dr. Israel Mani, who served as a judge. The family survived the 1929 Hebron massacre when he was a child.
Go to Profile#13149
Daniel C. Drucker
#13160
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Daniel Charles Drucker was American civil and mechanical engineer and academic, who served as president of the Society for Experimental Stress Analysis in 1960–1961, as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in the year 1973–74, and as president of the American Academy of Mechanics in 1981–82.
Go to Profile#13150
Hasrat Jaipuri
#13161
Overall Influence
1922 - 1999 (77 years)
Hasrat Jaipuri, born Iqbal Hussain was an Indian poet, who wrote in the Hindi and Urdu languages. He was also a renowned film lyricist in Hindi films, where he won the Filmfare Awards for Best Lyricist twice – in 1966 and then in 1972.
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