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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Person Name

School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#13151

Achille Varzi

#13162

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Achille C. Varzi is an Italian-born philosopher who is John Dewey Professor of philosophy at Columbia University. He graduated from the University of Trento and received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto. Varzi is also Bruno Kessler Honorary Professor at the University of Trento and, since 2017, Visiting Professor at the University of Italian Switzerland.

#13152

Dominique Moïsi

Dominique Moïsi

#13163

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Dominique Moïsi is a French political scientist and writer. He was a co-founder and is a senior advisor of the Paris-based Institut Français des Relations Internationales , Pierre Keller Visiting Professor at Harvard University, and the chairholder for Geopolitics at the College of Europe, the oldest educational institution in European affairs, in Natolin. He is also a Fellow at CEDEP, the European Centre for Executive Development. Moïsi regularly contributes op-ed articles and essays to the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, the Project Syndicate as well as Die Welt and Der Standard.

#13153

Ivan A. Getting

#13164

Overall Influence

1912 - 2003 (91 years)

Ivan Alexander Getting was an American physicist and electrical engineer, credited with the development of the Global Positioning System . He was the co-leader of the research group which developed the SCR-584, an automatic microwave tracking fire-control system, which enabled M9 Gun Director directed anti-aircraft guns to destroy a significant percentage of the German V-1 flying bombs launched against London late in the Second World War.

#13154

James Rubin

#13165

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

James Phillip Rubin is an American former diplomat and journalist who served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in the Clinton Administration from 1997–2000. He wrote a regular column on foreign affairs for The Sunday Times of London, and is currently Diplomatic Counselor to the newly elected Secretary General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development .

#13155

Richard Tuttle

#13166

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Richard Dean Tuttle is an American postminimalist artist known for his small, casual, subtle, intimate works. His art makes use of scale and line. His works span a range of formats, from sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and artist’s books to installation and furniture. He lives and works in New York City, Abiquiú, New Mexico, and Mount Desert, Maine.

#13156

William Baude

#13167

Overall Influence

William Patrick Baude is an American legal scholar. He currently serves as a professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and is the director of its Constitutional Law Institute. He is a scholar of constitutional law and originalism.

#13157

Pierre Gabriel

#13168

Overall Influence

1933 - 2015 (82 years)

Pierre Gabriel , also known as Peter Gabriel, was a French mathematician at the University of Strasbourg , University of Bonn and University of Zürich who worked on category theory, algebraic groups, and representation theory of algebras. He was elected a correspondent member of the French Academy of Sciences in November 1986.

#13158

Don Yoder

#13169

Overall Influence

1921 - 2015 (94 years)

Don Yoder was an American folklorist specializing in the study of Pennsylvania Dutch, Quaker, and Amish and other Anabaptist folklife in Pennsylvania who wrote at least 15 books on these subjects. A professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, he specialized in religious folklife and the study of belief. He is known for his teaching, collecting, field trips, recording, lectures, and books. He also co-founded a folk festival in Pennsylvania, which is the USA's oldest continual annual folklife festival, and is credited with "bringing the idea of "folklife" to the United States".

#13159

Saba Mahmood

#13170

Overall Influence

1961 - 2018 (57 years)

Saba Mahmood was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Tal...

#13160

Dennis Cooper

#13171

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Dennis Cooper is an American novelist, poet, critic, editor and performance artist. He is best known for the George Miles Cycle, a series of five semi-autobiographical novels published between 1989 and 2000 and described by Tony O'Neill "as intense a dissection of human relationships and obsession that modern literature has ever attempted." Cooper is the founder and editor of Little Caesar Magazine, a punk zine, that ran between 1976 and 1982.

#13161

Keith H. Basso

#13172

Overall Influence

1940 - 2013 (73 years)

Keith Hamilton Basso was a cultural and linguistic anthropologist noted for his study of the Western Apaches, specifically those from the community of Cibecue, Arizona. Basso was professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of New Mexico and earlier taught at the University of Arizona and Yale University.

#13162

Gregory Winter

#13173

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Sir Gregory Paul Winter is a Nobel Prize-winning English molecular biologist best known for his work on the therapeutic use of monoclonal antibodies. His research career has been based almost entirely at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering, in Cambridge, England.

#13163

William D. Lutz

#13174

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

William D. Lutz is an American linguist who specializes in the use of plain language and the avoidance of doublespeak . He wrote a famous essay The World of Doublespeak on this subject as well as the book Doublespeak His original essay and the book described the four different types of doublespeak and the social dangers of doublespeak.

#13164

Gustavo Pérez Firmat

#13175

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Gustavo Pérez Firmat was born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in Miami, Florida. He attended Miami-Dade Community College, the University of Miami, and the University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. He taught at Duke University from 1979 to 1999 and at Columbia University until 2022. He is currently the David Feinson Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Columbia University.

#13165

Mustafa Akyol

#13176

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish writer and journalist. He is the author of Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, long-listed in 2012 for the Lionel Gelber Prize, a literary award for the world's best non-fiction book in English. He became a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times in 2013. He is mainly famous in the western world for his arguments that Islam is highly compatible with classical liberalism and Enlightenment values, and that Islamic practice and the governance of Muslim-majority countries should be reformed along those lines similar to what previo...

#13166

Lester Kinsolving

Lester Kinsolving

#13177

Overall Influence

1927 - 2018 (91 years)

Charles Lester Kinsolving was an American political talk radio host, previously heard on WCBM in Baltimore, Maryland. He is known for being the first White House correspondent to ask questions about the HIV/AIDS epidemic during the Reagan administration; he continued to ask questions about the disease even though press secretary Larry Speakes and some other correspondents made light of it; Speakes joked that Kinsolving had an "abiding interest in the disease" because he was "a ". Kinsolving first asked questions about AIDS in 1982; President Reagan would not acknowledge the epidemic until 198...

#13167

Sergio Mattarella

#13178

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Sergio Mattarella is an Italian politician, jurist, academic, and lawyer who became President of Italy in 2015. He is the longest-serving president in the history of the Italian Republic. Following Giorgio Napolitano's death in 2023, Mattarella became the only living Italian president.

#13168

Ivan Đikić

#13179

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Ivan Đikić is a Croatian-German molecular biologist who is the Director of the Institute of Biochemistry II at Goethe University Frankfurt. Scientific career In 1991, he earned his MD degree from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Zagreb. After finishing his medical studies, he continued to pursue his PhD thesis in molecular biology at the University of Zagreb and at the New York University School of Medicine until 1997. He continued to work as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Joseph Schlessinger in New York from 1995 to 1997 before starting his own group at the Ludwig Ins...

#13169

Robert D. Atkinson

Robert D. Atkinson

#13180

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Robert David Atkinson is a Canadian-American economist. He is president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation , a public policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., that promotes policies based on innovation economics. He was previously Vice President of the Progressive Policy Institute.

#13170

Howard Zimmerman

Howard Zimmerman

#13181

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Howard E. Zimmerman was a professor of chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980 and the recipient of the 1986 American Institute of Chemists Chemical Pioneer Award.

#13171

Joseph Renzulli

#13182

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Joseph Renzulli is an American educational psychologist. He is the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut's Neag School of Education. Early life Renzulli graduated with a bachelor's degree from Rowan University. He earned a master in education degree from Rutgers University, and a doctorate from the University of Virginia.

#13172

Jacques Lecoq

#13183

Overall Influence

1921 - 1999 (78 years)

Jacques Lecoq was a French stage actor and acting movement coach. He was best known for his teaching methods in physical theatre, movement, and mime which he taught at the school he founded in Paris known as École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq. He taught there from 1956 until his death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1999.

#13173

Albert Wendt

#13184

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Albert Tuaopepe Wendt is a Samoan poet and writer who lives in New Zealand. He is one of the most influential writers in Oceania. His notable works include Sons for the Return Home, published in 1973 , and Leaves of the Banyan Tree, published in 1979. As an academic he has taught at universities in Samoa, Fiji, Hawaii and New Zealand, and from 1988 to 2008 was the professor of New Zealand literature at the University of Auckland.

#13174

Gottfried Schatz

Gottfried Schatz

#13185

Overall Influence

1936 - 2015 (79 years)

Gottfried Schatz was a Swiss-Austrian biochemist. Life and career Schatz was born in Strem. Upon obtaining his PhD in chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Graz , he did postdoctoral work at the University of Vienna and at "The Public Health Institute" of the City of New York. In 1968, he emigrated to the US in order to assume a professorship Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Six years later, he returned to Europe in order to join the newly created Biozentrum at the University of Basel, which he chaired from 1983 to 1985, From 1984 to 1989 he was Secretary General of the European Molecular Biology Organization .

#13175

Aboubakr Jamaï

#13186

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Aboubakr Jamaï is a Moroccan journalist and banker, and was the publisher of the newspapers Le Journal Hebdomadaire and Assahifa al-Ousbouiya. In 2003, he was awarded the International Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

#13176

Jawad Salehi

#13187

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Jawad A. Salehi, IEEE Fellow & Optica Fellow, born in Kazemain , Iraq, on December 22, 1956, is an Iranian electrical and computer engineer, pioneer of optical code division multiple access and a highly cited researcher. He is also a board member of Academy of Sciences of Iran and a fellow of Islamic World Academy of Sciences. He was also elected as a member of Iranian Science and Culture Hall of Fame in Electrical Engineering, October 2010.

#13177

Brian Conrad

#13188

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Brian Conrad is an American mathematician and number theorist, working at Stanford University. Previously, he taught at the University of Michigan and at Columbia University. Conrad and others proved the modularity theorem, also known as the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture. He proved this in 1999 with Christophe Breuil, Fred Diamond and Richard Taylor, while holding a joint postdoctoral position at Harvard University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

#13178

Harry Levin

#13189

Overall Influence

1912 - 1994 (82 years)

Harry Tuchman Levin was an American literary critic and scholar of both modernism and comparative literature. Life and career Levin was born in Minneapolis, the son of Beatrice Hirshler and Isadore Henry Levin. His family was Jewish. Levin was educated at Harvard University . According to a biographical memoir by Walter Jackson Bate:

#13179

Martine Robbeets

#13190

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Martine Irma Robbeets is a Belgian comparative linguist and japanologist. She is known for the Transeurasian languages hypothesis, which groups the Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages together into a single language family.

#13180

Harvey Whitehouse

#13191

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Harvey Whitehouse is chair of social anthropology and professorial fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. Education and early career Whitehouse received his B.A. degree in social anthropology from the London School of Economics in 1985. He completed his PhD in anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 1990.

#13181

Teller

#13192

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Teller is an American magician. He is half of the comedy magic duo Penn & Teller, along with Penn Jillette, and usually does not speak during performances. Teller, along with Jillette, is an H.L. Mencken Fellow at the Cato Institute.

#13182

Thomas H. Jordan

Thomas H. Jordan

#13193

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Thomas H. Jordan is an American seismologist, and former director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at The University of Southern California. He was formerly the head of the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

#13183

Avram Davidson

#13194

Overall Influence

1923 - 1993 (70 years)

Avram Davidson was an American writer of fantasy fiction, science fiction, and crime fiction, as well as the author of many stories that do not fit into a genre niche. He won a Hugo Award and three World Fantasy Awards in the science fiction and fantasy genre, a World Fantasy Life Achievement award, and an Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine short story award and an Edgar Award in the mystery genre. Davidson edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1962 to 1964. His last novel The Boss in the Wall: A Treatise on the House Devil was completed by Grania Davis and was a Nebula Award finalist in 1998.

#13184

Ann Burgess

#13195

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Ann C. Wolbert Burgess is a researcher whose work has focused on developing ways to assess and treat trauma in rape victims. She is a professor at the William F. Connell School of Nursing at Boston College.

#13185

Iannis Xenakis

#13196

Overall Influence

1922 - 2001 (79 years)

Giannis Klearchou Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek-French communist avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and engineer. After 1947, he fled Greece, becoming a naturalised citizen of France eighteen years later. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific mus...

#13186

Robyn Fivush

#13197

Overall Influence

Robyn Fivush is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology and Director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University, College of Arts and Sciences in Atlanta, Georgia. She is well known for her research on parent-child narrative in relation to the development of autobiographical memory. Fivush is affiliated with the Departments of Psychology and Women's Studies at Emory.

#13187

Gilles Kahn

#13198

Overall Influence

1946 - 2006 (60 years)

Gilles Kahn was a French computer scientist. He notably introduced Kahn process networks as a model for parallel processing and natural semantics for describing the operational semantics of programming languages.

#13188

Sinclair Ferguson

#13199

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Sinclair Buchanan Ferguson is a Scottish theologian known in Reformed Christian circles for his teaching, writing, and editorial work. He has been Chancellor's Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary since 2017, commuting from Scotland, where he was an assistant minister at St. Peter's Free Church of Scotland, Dundee. He is currently a preaching associate at Trinity Church, Aberdeen

#13189

Mohan Munasinghe

#13200

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Mohan Munasinghe is a Sri Lankan physicist, engineer and economist with a focus on energy, water resources, sustainable development and climate change. He was the 2021 Blue Planet Prize Laureate, and Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice-President of the United States Al Gore. Munasinghe is the Founder Chairman of the Munasinghe Institute for Development. He has also served as an honorary senior advisor to the government of Sri Lanka since 1980.

#13190

Tapan Kumar Pradhan

#13201

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Tapan Kumar Pradhan is an Indian poet, writer and translator from Odisha. He is best known for his poem collection "Kalahandi" which was awarded second place in Sahitya Akademi's Golden Jubilee Indian Literature Translation Prize for Poetry in 2007. His other works include "Equation", "I, She and the Sea", "Wind in the Afternoon" and "Dance of Shiva".

#13191

George C. Schatz

George C. Schatz

#13202

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

George Chappell Schatz , the Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, is a theoretical chemist best known for his seminal contributions to the fields of reaction dynamics and nanotechnology.

#13192

Corine Pelluchon

Corine Pelluchon

#13203

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Corine Pelluchon is a French philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée . Education Corine Pelluchon received her agrégation in philosophy in 1997, then defended a thesis entitled at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University in 2003, and obtained a habilitation in philosophy entitled in 2010.

#13193

John Knoll

#13204

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

John Knoll is an American visual effects supervisor and chief creative officer at Industrial Light & Magic . One of the original creators of Adobe Photoshop , he has also worked as visual effects supervisor on the Star Wars prequels and the 1997 special editions of the original trilogy. He also served as ILM's visual effects supervisor for Star Trek Generations and Star Trek: First Contact, as well as the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Along with Hal Hickel, Charles Gibson and Allen Hall, Knoll and the trio's work on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest earned them the Academy Awa...

#13194

Askold Khovanskii

Askold Khovanskii

#13205

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Askold Georgievich Khovanskii is a Russian and Canadian mathematician currently a professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto, Canada. His areas of research are algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, singularity theory, differential geometry and differential equations. His research is in the development of the theory of toric varieties and Newton polyhedra in algebraic geometry. He is also the inventor of the theory of fewnomials, and the Bernstein–Khovanskii–Kushnirenko theorem is named after him.

#13195

Nathan Nunn

#13206

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Nathan Nunn is an economist and Professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia. He is best known for his research on the long-term effects of slave trade on Africa. His research interests include economic development, cultural economics, political economy and international trade.

#13196

Mark Haddon

#13207

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time . He won the Whitbread Award, the Dolly Gray Children's Literature Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.

#13197

Peter C. Fishburn

#13208

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

Peter Clingerman Fishburn was an American mathematician, known as a pioneer in the field of decision theory. In collaboration with Steven Brams, Fishburn published a paper about approval voting in 1978.

#13198

Benjamin K. Sovacool

Benjamin K. Sovacool

#13209

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Benjamin K. Sovacool is an American academic who is director of the Institute for Global Sustainability at Boston University as well as Professor of Earth and Environment at Boston University. He was formerly Director of the Danish Center for Energy Technology at the Department of Business Development and Technology and a professor of social sciences at Aarhus University. He is also professor of energy policy at the University of Sussex, where he formerly directed the Center on Innovation and Energy Demand and the Sussex Energy Group. He has written on energy policy, environmental issues, and science and technology policy.

#13199

Wm. Theodore de Bary

Wm. Theodore de Bary

#13210

Overall Influence

1919 - 2017 (98 years)

William Theodore de Bary was an American Sinologist and scholar of East Asian philosophy who was a professor and administrator at Columbia University for nearly 70 years. De Bary graduated from Columbia College in 1941, where he was a student in the first year of Columbia's famed Literature Humanities course. He then briefly took up graduate studies at Harvard University before leaving to serve in American military intelligence in the Pacific Theatre of World War Two. Upon his return, he resumed his studies at Columbia, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1953.

#13200

Annelise Riles

#13211

Overall Influence

Annelise Riles is an interdisciplinary anthropologist and legal scholar. She is the executive director of the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University, contributing to Northwestern's interdisciplinary programs and research on globally relevant topics. Riles is also the associate provost for global affairs and a professor of law and anthropology.

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