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
#13251
Madhavan Mukund
#13262
Overall Influence
Madhavan Mukund is the Director and a professor of computer science at Chennai Mathematical Institute, a research and education institute in Chennai, India. He has served as President of Indian Association for Research in Computing Science from 2011 to 2017 and President of Association for Computing Machinery from 2016 to 2018. He was elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2018. He has been the National Coordinator of the Indian Computing Olympiad since 2001.
Go to Profile#13252
Paul Robert Magocsi
#13263
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Paul Robert Magocsi is an American professor of history, political science, and Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto. He has been with the university since 1980, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1996. He currently acts as Honorary Chairman of the World Congress of Rusyns, and has authored many books on Rusyn history.
Go to Profile#13253
Clark Clifford
#13264
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Clark McAdams Clifford was an American lawyer who served as an important political adviser to Democratic presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. His official government positions were White House Counsel , Chairman of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board , and Secretary of Defense ; Clifford was also influential in his role as an unofficial, informal presidential adviser in various issues. A successful Washington, D.C., lawyer, he was known for his elite clientele, charming manners, and impeccable suits.
Go to Profile#13254
Lenora Fulani
#13265
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Lenora Branch Fulani is an American psychologist, psychotherapist, and political activist. She is best known for her presidential campaigns and development of youth programs serving minority communities in the New York City area. In the 1988 United States presidential election heading the New Alliance Party ticket, she became the first woman and the first African American to achieve ballot access in all fifty states. She received more votes for president in a U.S. general election than any other woman until Jill Stein of the Green Party of the United States in 2012. Fulani's political concern...
Go to Profile#13255
Marina Ratner
#13266
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
Marina Evseevna Ratner was a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who worked in ergodic theory. Around 1990, she proved a group of major theorems concerning unipotent flows on homogeneous spaces, known as Ratner's theorems. Ratner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, awarded the Ostrowski Prize in 1993 and elected to the National Academy of Sciences the same year. In 1994, she was awarded the John J. Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#13256
Gary Horowitz
#13267
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Gary T. Horowitz is an American theoretical physicist who works on string theory and quantum gravity. Biography Horowitz studied at Princeton University and obtained his Ph.D. in 1979 at the University of Chicago with Robert Geroch. Subsequently, he was a post-doc at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Oxford University . In 1981-1983 he worked as an Einstein Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He became an assistant professor in 1983, associate professor in 1986, and finally professor in 1990 at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Go to Profile#13257
Jochen Liedtke
#13268
Overall Influence
1953 - 2001 (48 years)
Jochen Liedtke was a German computer scientist, noted for his work on microkernel operating systems, especially in creating the L4 microkernel family. Career Education In the mid-1970s Liedtke studied for a diploma degree in mathematics at the Bielefeld University. His thesis project was to build a compiler for the programming language ELAN, which had been launched for teaching programming in German schools. The compiler was written in ELAN.
Go to Profile#13258
Alassane Ouattara
#13269
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Alasane Dramane Ouattara is an Ivorian politician who has been President of Ivory Coast since 2010. An economist by profession, Ouattara worked for the International Monetary Fund and the Central Bank of West African States , and he was the Prime Minister of Côte d'Ivoire from November 1990 to December 1993, appointed to that post by President Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Ouattara became the President of the Rally of the Republicans , an Ivorian political party, in 1999.
Go to Profile#13259
Christopher Bingham
#13270
Overall Influence
Christopher Bingham is an American statistician who introduced the Bingham distribution. In joint work with C. M. D. Godfrey and John Tukey he introduced complex demodulation into the analysis of time series. The Kent distribution, also known as the Fisher–Bingham distribution, is named after Bingham and the English biologist and statistician Ronald Fisher.
Go to Profile#13260
Dominic Thiem
#13271
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (33 years)
Dominic Thiem is an Austrian professional tennis player. He has been ranked as high as world No. 3 in singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals, which he first achieved in March 2020. Thiem has won 17 ATP Tour singles titles, including a Grand Slam title at the 2020 US Open where he came back from two sets down to defeat Alexander Zverev in the final. With the win, Thiem became the first male player born in the 1990s to claim a Major singles title, as well as the first Austrian to win the US Open singles title. He had previously reached three other Major finals, finishing runner-up a...
Go to Profile#13261
Xinwen Zhu
#13272
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Xinwen Zhu is a Chinese mathematician and professor at Stanford University. His work deals primarily with geometric representation theory and in particular the Langlands program, tying number theory to algebraic geometry and quantum physics.
Go to Profile#13262
Václav Klaus
#13273
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Václav Klaus is a Czech economist and politician who served as the second president of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013. From July 1992 until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in January 1993, he served as the second and last prime minister of the Czech Republic while it was a federal subject of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, and then as the first prime minister of the newly independent Czech Republic from 1993 to 1998.
Go to Profile#13263
Ayşe Soysal
#13274
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Ayşe Soysal is a Turkish mathematician. She was the president of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul during 2004 to 2008. Life and career Born in 1948, she received her high school diploma in 1967 from the American College for Girls in Istanbul. She received her bachelor's degrees with high honors in Mathematics and Physics from Boğaziçi University formerly in 1971.
Go to Profile#13264
David M. Brown
#13275
Overall Influence
1956 - 2003 (47 years)
David McDowell Brown was a United States Navy captain and NASA astronaut. He died on his first spaceflight, when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during orbital reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. Brown became an astronaut in 1996 but had not served on a space mission prior to the Columbia disaster. He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
Go to Profile#13265
Radek Štěpánek
#13276
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Radek Štěpánek is a Czech former professional tennis player. His career-high singles ranking was world No. 8 and best doubles ranking was world No. 4. Štěpánek's biggest achievements are reaching two Masters 1000 event finals and the quarterfinals of Wimbledon in 2006, as well as winning the deciding match for Czech Republic's Davis Cup winning team in 2012 and again in 2013. In doubles, he won his first Grand Slam title at the 2012 Australian Open, along with Indian partner Leander Paes, defeating the Bryan Brothers in the final. Paes and Štěpánek also won the men's doubles title at the 2013 US Open, defeating Bruno Soares and Alexander Peya in the final.
Go to Profile#13266
John Vickers
#13277
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Sir John Stuart Vickers is a British economist and the Warden of All Souls College, Oxford. Education Vickers studied at Aylesbury Grammar School and Oriel College, Oxford. He graduated with a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#13267
Hans-Lukas Kieser
#13278
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Hans-Lukas Kieser is a Swiss historian of the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey, Professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and president of the Research Foundation Switzerland-Turkey in Basel. He is an author of books and articles in several languages.
Go to Profile#13268
Stephan Hartmann
#13279
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Stephan Hartmann is a German philosopher and Professor of Philosophy of Science at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, known for his contributions to formal epistemology. Biography Hartmann received his PhD from Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany in 1995. He started his academic career at the University of Washington and the University of Pittsburgh. Back in Germany in 2002 at the University of Konstanz he headed the research group Philosophy, Probability and Modelling together with Luc Bovens.
Go to Profile#13269
Bonnie Tyler
#13280
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gaynor Sullivan , known professionally as Bonnie Tyler, is a Welsh singer who is known for her distinctive husky voice. Tyler came to prominence with the release of her 1977 album The World Starts Tonight and its singles "Lost in France" and "More Than a Lover". Her 1977 single "It's a Heartache" reached number four on the UK Singles Chart, and number three on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Go to Profile#13270
Israel Gohberg
#13281
Overall Influence
1928 - 2009 (81 years)
Israel Gohberg was a Bessarabian-born Soviet and Israeli mathematician, most known for his work in operator theory and functional analysis, in particular linear operators and integral equations. Biography Gohberg was born in Tarutyne to parents Tsudik and Haya Gohberg. His father owned a small typography shop and his mother was a midwife. The young Gohberg studied in a Hebrew school in Taurtyne and then a Romanian school in Orhei, where he was influenced by the tutelage of Modest Shumbarsky, a student of the renowned topologist Karol Borsuk.
Go to Profile#13271
Alexander Samarskii
#13282
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Alexander Andreevich Samarskii was a Soviet and Russian mathematician and academician , specializing in mathematical physics, applied mathematics, numerical analysis, mathematical modeling, finite difference methods.
Go to Profile#13272
Norman Manea
#13283
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Norman Manea is a Romanian writer and author of short fiction, novels, and essays about the Holocaust, daily life in a communist state, and exile. He lives in the United States, where he is a Professor and writer in residence at Bard College.
Go to Profile#13273
Jonathan Wells
#13284
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
John Corrigan "Jonathan" Wells is an American author, theologian, and advocate of the pseudoscientific argument of intelligent design. Wells joined the Unification Church in 1974, and subsequently wrote that the teachings of its founder Sun Myung Moon, his own studies at the Unification Theological Seminary and his prayers convinced him to devote his life to "destroying Darwinism." The term Darwinism is often used by intelligent design proponents and other creationists to refer to the scientific consensus on evolution. He gained a PhD in religious studies at Yale University in 1986, then became Director of the Unification Church's inter-religious outreach organization in New York City.
Go to Profile#13274
Philip R. Davies
#13285
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Philip R. Davies was a British biblical scholar. He was Professor Emeritus of biblical studies at the University of Sheffield, England. In the late 1990s, he was the Director for the Centre for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He was also the publisher and editorial director of Sheffield Academic Press. He was the author of books and articles on ancient Israelite history and religion, including Scribes and Schools in the Library of Ancient Israel. Davies promoted the theory of cultural memory. He and David Clines edited the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament and its Supplement Seri...
Go to Profile#13275
Dean H. Kenyon
#13286
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Dean H. Kenyon is Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Francisco State University, a young Earth creationist, and one of the instigators of the intelligent design movement. He is the author of Biochemical Predestination.
Go to Profile#13276
Gordon Baym
#13287
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Gordon Alan Baym is an American theoretical physicist. Biography Born in New York City, he graduated from the Brooklyn Technical High School, and received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University in 1956. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1960, studying under Julian Schwinger.
Go to Profile#13277
Ali Akansu
#13288
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Ali Naci Akansu is a Turkish-American Professor of electrical & computer engineering and scientist in applied mathematics. He is best known for his seminal contributions to the theory and applications of linear subspace methods including sub-band and wavelet transforms, particularly the binomial QMF and the multivariate framework to design statistically optimized filter bank .
Go to Profile#13278
Diego Simeone
#13289
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Diego Pablo Simeone González , nicknamed "El Cholo" , is an Argentine professional football manager and former player who played as a midfielder. He has been the manager of Atlético Madrid since December 2011.
Go to Profile#13279
Albert Fishlow
#13290
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Albert Fishlow is an economist, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a professor emeritus of international and public affairs at Columbia University. He is the former director of the Columbia Institute of Latin American Studies and Center for the Study of Brazil at Columbia. He was previously the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council of Foreign Relations.
Go to Profile#13280
George Q. Daley
#13291
Overall Influence
George Quentin Daley is the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Caroline Shields Walker Professor of Medicine, and Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. He was formerly the Robert A. Stranahan Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Stem Cell Transplantation Program at Boston Children's Hospital, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Associate Director of Children's Stem Cell Program, a member of the Executive Committee of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. He is a past president of the International...
Go to Profile#13281
Richard Weller
#13292
Overall Influence
Richard Weller is an Australian landscape architect and academic. He is Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, having succeeded James Corner in 2013. Weller also holds the Martin and Margy Meyerson Chair of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, is on the board of directors of the Landscape Architecture Foundation, Washington D.C., and is Creative Director of the award-winning LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture. He was formerly a Winthrop Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Western Australia, and director of the Australian Urban Design Research Centre .
Go to Profile#13282
A. Hunter Dupree
#13293
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Anderson Hunter Dupree was an American historian and one of the pioneer historians of the history of science and technology in the United States. He died in November 2019 at the age of 98. Early education The son of a lawyer, George W. Dupree, and his wife, Sarah Hunter, he attended Oberlin College, where he earned his bachelor of arts degree in 1942. Upon completion of his undergraduate work, he served the United States Navy from 1942 to 1946, and became a Lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve.
Go to Profile#13283
Beaumont Newhall
#13294
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
Beaumont Newhall was an American curator, art historian, writer, photographer, and the second director of the George Eastman Museum. His book The History of Photography remains one of the most significant accounts in the field and has become a classic photographic history textbook. Newhall was the recipient of numerous awards and accolades for his accomplishments in the study of photo history.
Go to Profile#13284
Keith Runcorn
#13295
Overall Influence
1922 - 1995 (73 years)
Keith Runcorn was a British physicist whose paleomagnetic reconstruction of the relative motions of Europe and America revived the theory of continental drift and was a major contribution to plate tectonics.
Go to Profile#13285
Jim Ross
#13296
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
James William Ross is an American professional wrestling commentator. He is currently signed with All Elite Wrestling as a color commentator on Collision, analyst, and senior advisor. Ross is best known for a long and distinguished career as a play-by-play commentator for the WWE. He is known affectionately as JR or Good Ol' JR. Ross has been labeled as the greatest wrestling commentator of all time.
Go to Profile#13286
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
#13297
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Hans Ulrich "Sepp" Gumbrecht is a literary theorist whose work spans philology, philosophy, semiotics, literary and cultural history, and epistemologies of the everyday. As of June 14, 2018, he is Albert Guérard Professor Emeritus in Literature at Stanford University. Since 1989, he held the Albert Guérard Chair as Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian in Stanford's Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures. By courtesy, he was also affiliated with the Departments of German Studies, Iberian and Latin American Cultures, and the Program in Modern Thought and Literature.
Go to Profile#13287
Pier Luigi Luisi
#13298
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Pier Luigi Luisi is an Italian chemist and academic. He received the "professor emeritus" title from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology . He worked there as a scientist from 1970 until 2003, and as a Professor of Chemistry from 1980 until he departed. Luisi then moved to the Roma Tre University as a Professor of Biochemistry, where he worked until 2015.
Go to Profile#13288
Akihito
#13299
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
is a member of the Imperial House of Japan who reigned as the 125th emperor of Japan from 1989 until his abdication in 2019. He presided over the era, Heisei being an expression of achieving peace worldwide.
Go to Profile#13289
Jon Bing
#13300
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
Jon Bing was a Norwegian writer and law professor at the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law , and the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo. Bing was considered a pioneer in international IT and information law. He held honorary doctorates from the University of Stockholm and the University of Copenhagen, and was a visiting professor at Kings College, University of London. Bing was part of The Protection of Privacy Committee. From 1979 to 1981 he was head of Norsk Filmråd. Between 1981 and 1982, he was the head of The Council of Europe Committee on Legal Data Processing. Betwe...
Go to Profile#13290
Vladimir Kramnik
#13301
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Vladimir Borisovich Kramnik is a Russian chess grandmaster. He was the Classical World Chess Champion from 2000 to 2006, and the undisputed World Chess Champion from 2006 to 2007. He has won three team gold medals and three individual medals at Chess Olympiads.
Go to Profile#13291
Renata Laxova
#13302
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Renata Laxova was a Czech American pediatric geneticist and a professor of genetics at the Departments of Pediatrics and Medical Genetics, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was the discoverer of the Neu-Laxová syndrome, a rare congenital abnormality involving multiple organs, with autosomal recessive inheritance.
Go to Profile#13292
Javier Marías
#13303
Overall Influence
1951 - 2022 (71 years)
Javier Marías Franco was a Spanish author, translator, and columnist. Marías published fifteen novels, including A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me . In addition to his novels, he also published three collections of short stories and various essays. As one of Spain's most celebrated novelists, his books have been translated into forty-six languages and were sold close to nine million times internationally. He received several awards for his work, such as the Rómulo Gallegos Prize , the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award , the International Nonino Prize , and the A...
Go to Profile#13293
Steven Nadler
#13304
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Steven M. Nadler is an American academic and philosopher specializing in early modern philosophy. He is Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy, and Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#13294
Jerre Noe
#13305
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Jerre Noe was an American computer scientist. In the 1950s, he led the technical team for the ERMA project, the Bank of America's first venture into computerized banking. In 1968 he became the first chair of the University of Washington's Computer Science Group, which later evolved into the Computer Science and Engineering Department.
Go to Profile#13295
Theodore Puck
#13306
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Theodore Thomas Puck was an American geneticist born in Chicago, Illinois. He attended Chicago public schools and obtained his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degree from the University of Chicago. His PhD work was on the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom and his doctoral adviser was James Franck. During WW II Puck stayed at the University of Chicago. There he worked in the laboratory of Oswald H. Robertson on the study of how bacteria and viruses can spread through the air and on dust particles. After a postdoc position in the laboratory of Renato Dulbecco, Puck was recr...
Go to Profile#13296
Adam Schaff
#13307
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Adam Schaff was a Polish Marxist philosopher. Life Of Jewish origin, Schaff was born in Lemberg into a lawyer's family. Schaff studied economics at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques et Economiques in Paris, and philosophy in Poland, specializing in epistemology. In 1945 he received a philosophy degree at Moscow University, and in 1948 he returned to Warsaw University. He was considered the official ideologue of the Polish United Workers' Party, especially during its Stalinist period.
Go to Profile#13297
Richard Bean
#13308
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Richard Anthony Bean is an English playwright. Early years Born in East Hull, Bean was educated at Hull Grammar School, and then studied social psychology at Loughborough University, graduating with a 2:1 BSc Hons. He then worked as an occupational psychologist, having previously worked in a bread plant for a year and a half after leaving school.
Go to Profile#13298
Ricardo Reis
#13309
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Ricardo A. M. R. Reis is a Portuguese economist and the A. W. Phillips professor of economics at the London School of Economics. He has published widely on macroeconomics, including both monetary and fiscal policy, inflation and business cycles, and for these he won the 2021 Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation medal awarded every two years by the European Economic Association for best economist under the age of 45. He writes a weekly op-ed for the Portuguese newspaper Expresso.
Go to Profile#13299
Peter Gill
#13310
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Peter Gill OBE, is a Welsh theatre director, playwright, and actor. He was born in Cardiff to George John and Margaret Mary Gill, and educated at St Illtyd's College, Cardiff. Career An actor from 1957–65, he directed his first production without décor, at the Royal Court Theatre in August 1965, A Collier's Friday Night by D. H. Lawrence. Having begun his career as an actor, he is now best known for his work as a director and playwright.
Go to Profile#13300
Arthur Golden
#13311
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Arthur Sulzberger Golden is an American writer. He is the author of the bestselling novel Memoirs of a Geisha . Early life Golden was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the son of Ruth and Ben Hale Golden. His mother was Jewish. His father was not. Through his mother he is a member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family. His mother was a daughter of long-time New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger and granddaughter of New York Times owner and publisher Adolph Ochs. His parents divorced when he was eight years old. His father died five years after. He was raised in Lookout Mountain, Georgia and ...
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