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
#13301
Robert H. Rines
#13312
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Robert Harvey Rines was an American lawyer, inventor, musician, and composer. He is perhaps best known for his efforts to find and identify the Loch Ness Monster. Biography Rines was born August 30, 1922, in Boston. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1943, a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University in 1946, and a Ph.D. from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan in 1972. During World War II Rines served as an Army Signal Corps officer and helped develop the Microwave Early Warning System.
Go to Profile#13302
Stuart Piggott
#13313
Overall Influence
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
Stuart Ernest Piggott, was a British archaeologist, best known for his work on prehistoric Wessex. Early life Piggott was born in Petersfield, Hampshire, the son of G. H. O. Piggott, and was educated there at Churcher's College.
Go to Profile#13303
Albert Pujols
#13314
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
José Alberto Pujols Alcántara is a Dominican-American former professional baseball first baseman and designated hitter. He played 22 seasons in Major League Baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals, Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim / Los Angeles Angels, and Los Angeles Dodgers. Nicknamed "the Machine" , Pujols is considered to be one of the greatest baseball players of all time.
Go to Profile#13304
Baruch Brody
#13315
Overall Influence
1943 - 2018 (75 years)
Baruch A. Brody was an American bioethicist. He was the Leon Jaworski Professor of biomedical ethics and former Director of the Center for Ethics, Medicine and Public Issues at The Baylor College of Medicine and Andrew Mellow professor of Humanities in the Department of Philosophy at Rice University.
Go to Profile#13305
Tudor Parfitt
#13316
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Tudor Parfitt is a British historian, writer, broadcaster, traveller and adventurer. He specialises in the study of Jewish communities and Judaising communities around the world, particularly in Africa, Asia and the Americas and the development of issues about the construction of race.
Go to Profile#13306
Marguerite Frank
#13317
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Marguerite Straus Frank is a French-American mathematician who is a pioneer in convex optimization theory and mathematical programming. Education After attending secondary schooling in Paris and Toronto, Frank contributed largely to the fields of transportation theory and Lie algebras, which later became the topic of her PhD thesis, New Simple Lie Algebras. She was one of the first female PhD students in mathematics at Harvard University, completing her dissertation in 1956, with Abraham Adrian Albert as her advisor.
Go to Profile#13307
Frank Moulaert
#13318
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Frank Moulaert is Professor of Spatial Planning at the Department of Architecture, Urban Design and Regional Planning at Catholic University of Leuven. He is Director of the Urban and Regional Planning Research Group and chairs the Leuven Space and Society Research Centre at the University. He is also a Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University.
Go to Profile#13308
Brian Henson
#13319
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Brian Henson is an American puppeteer, director, producer, voice actor and the chairman of The Jim Henson Company. He is the son of puppeteers Jim and Jane Henson. Early life Henson was born on November 3, 1963 in New York City, the third child of Jane Henson and Jim Henson . He has four siblings: Lisa , Cheryl , John and Heather Henson .
Go to Profile#13309
Anthony R. Hunter
#13320
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Anthony Rex Hunter is a British-American biologist who is a professor of biology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California San Diego. His research publications list his name as Tony Hunter.
Go to Profile#13310
Akira Hayami
#13321
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Akira Hayami was an emeritus professor of Keio University and the first to introduce historical demography in Japan. Professor Hayami is also famous for coining the concept called "Industrious Revolution",which points out the socio-economic change from capital-intensive to labor-intensive one.
Go to Profile#13311
Roman Inderst
#13322
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Roman Inderst is a German economist who holds the chair for finance and economics at the Goethe University Frankfurt. His research interests include corporate finance, banking, competition policy, and information economics. According to the Handelsblatt, Inderst is the most influential German-speaking economist.
Go to Profile#13312
Alexander S. Kechris
#13323
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Alexander Sotirios Kechris is a set theorist and logician at the California Institute of Technology. Contributions Kechris has made contributions to the theory of Borel equivalence relations and the theory of automorphism groups of uncountable structuress. His research interests cover foundations of mathematics, mathematical logic and set theory and their interactions with analysis and dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#13313
Jan Harold Brunvand
#13324
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Jan Harold Brunvand is an American retired folklorist, researcher, writer, public speaker, and professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah. Brunvand is best known for popularizing the concept of the urban legend, a form of modern folklore or story telling. Urban legends are "too good to be true" stories that travel by word of mouth, by print, or by the internet and are attributed to an FOAF: friend of a friend. "Urban legends," Brunvand says, "have a persistent hold on the imagination because they have an element of suspense or humor, they are plausible and they have a moral."
Go to Profile#13314
Shafey Kidwai
#13325
Overall Influence
Shafey Kidwai is an Indian academic, bilingual critic, translator, columnist, and author. He is the professor in the Department of Mass Communications at Aligarh Muslim University. He has written twelve books in English and Urdu. His seminal study, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Reason, Religion and Nation has got wide acclaim across the globe. He writes for The Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, The Hindu, The Frontline, The Outlook, Indian Literature, The Book Review, The Stateman, and Siyasat.com .Many reputed literary journals of the subcontinent carry his articles regularly and he ...
Go to Profile#13315
Alvan Feinstein
#13326
Overall Influence
1925 - 2001 (76 years)
Alvan R. Feinstein was an American clinician, researcher and an epidemiologist who made significant impact on clinical investigation, especially on the field of clinical epidemiology that he helped define. He is regarded as one of the fathers of modern clinical epidemiology. He died at the age of 75 in Toronto on 25 October 2001 and is survived by his wife and two children.
Go to Profile#13316
JoAnne Akalaitis
#13327
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
JoAnne Akalaitis is an avant-garde Lithuanian-American theatre director and writer. She won five Obie Awards for direction and was founder in 1970 of the critically acclaimed Mabou Mines in New York City.
Go to Profile#13317
René Zazzo
#13328
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
René Zazzo was a French psychologist and pedagogue. Zazzo's research focused on child psychology. He was one of the first people to study a group of problems relating to dyslexia and disability. Considering the development of children considered to be weak, Zazzo proposed the concept of "oligophrenic heterochrony" in order to show that this development, compared with that of normal children, occurred at various speeds, according to the particular psychobiological sector concerned. The majority of research which Zazzo produced between 1950 and 1980 centered on what he regarded as "the princi...
Go to Profile#13318
Tony Pulis
#13329
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Anthony Richard Pulis is a Welsh football manager and former footballer who last managed Sheffield Wednesday. Pulis obtained his FA coaching badge at age 19, followed by his UEFA 'A' licence aged 21 – making him one of the youngest professional players ever to have obtained the qualification. His son, Anthony, was a professional footballer and played at Stoke. Pulis had a 17-year career as a defender where he played for Bristol Rovers, Newport County, AFC Bournemouth and Gillingham. He also had a short spell in Hong Kong with Happy Valley.
Go to Profile#13319
Wafaa Bilal
#13330
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Dr. Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi American artist, a former professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently an art professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is a Creative Capital Award winner in 2021 for his project In a Grain of Wheat: Cultivating Hybrid Futures in Ancient Seed DNA and named one of Foreign Policy magazine's Leading 100 Global Thinkers in 2016 for his work as an advocate. Bilal's work, Canto III, was included as part of the Iranian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Bilal's current work 168:01 brings awareness to cultural destruction and promotes the collective healing process through education and audience participation.
Go to Profile#13320
Roger Temam
#13331
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Roger Meyer Temam is a French applied mathematician working in numerical analysis, nonlinear partial differential equations and fluid mechanics. He graduated from the University of Paris – the Sorbonne in 1967, completing a doctorate under the direction of Jacques-Louis Lions. He has published over 400 articles, as well as 12 books.
Go to Profile#13321
Harold Stark
#13332
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Harold Mead Stark is an American mathematician, specializing in number theory. He is best known for his solution of the Gauss class number 1 problem, in effect correcting and completing the earlier work of Kurt Heegner, and for Stark's conjecture. More recently, he collaborated with Audrey Terras to study zeta functions in graph theory. He is currently on the faculty of the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#13322
Steven C. Currall
#13333
Overall Influence
Steve C. Currall is an American psychological scientist and academic administrator, and served as the seventh president of the University of South Florida. He previously served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Southern Methodist University from January 1, 2016. From 2009 to 2014, Currall served as Dean of the UC Davis Graduate School of Management. He has also held leadership roles at University College London and Rice University. On March 22, 2019, Currall was named to succeed Judy Genshaft as president of the University of South Florida, and took office July 1, 2019. He ...
Go to Profile#13323
Edward Ullendorff
#13334
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Edward Ullendorff was a British scholar and historian. He was a prominent figure in Ethiopian Studies and also contributed work on the Semitic languages. Biography Born on 25 January 1920 in Zurich, Switzerland, Ullendorff was educated at the Graues Kloster in Berlin, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#13324
Bruce Reznick
#13335
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Bruce Reznick is an American mathematician long on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is a prolific researcher noted for his contributions to number theory and the combinatorial-algebraic-analytic investigations of polynomials. In July 2019, to mark his 66th birthday, a day long symposium "Bruce Reznick 66 fest: A mensch of Combinatorial-Algebraic Mathematics" was held at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#13325
Niels Provos
#13336
Overall Influence
Niels Provos is a German-American researcher in security engineering, malware, and cryptography. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan. From 2003 to 2018, he worked at Google as a Distinguished Engineer on security for Google. In 2018, he left Google to join Stripe as its new head of security. In 2022, Provos left Stripe and joined Lacework as head of Security Efficacy.
Go to Profile#13326
Alice Fulton
#13337
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Alice Fulton is an American author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Fulton is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English Emerita at Cornell University. Her awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Go to Profile#13327
Jello Biafra
#13338
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Eric Reed Boucher , known professionally as Jello Biafra, is an American singer, spoken word artist and political activist. He is the former lead singer and songwriter for the San Francisco punk rock band Dead Kennedys.
Go to Profile#13328
Joanna Moncrieff
#13339
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Joanna Moncrieff is a British psychiatrist and academic. She is Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at University College London and a leading figure in the Critical Psychiatry Network. She is a prominent critic of the modern 'psychopharmacological' model of mental disorder and drug treatment, and the role of the pharmaceutical industry. She has written papers, books and blogs on the use and over-use of drug treatment for mental health problems, the mechanism of action of psychiatric drugs, their subjective and psychoactive effects, the history of drug treatment, and the evidence for its benefits and harms.
Go to Profile#13329
Imre Z. Ruzsa
#13340
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Imre Z. Ruzsa is a Hungarian mathematician specializing in number theory. Life Ruzsa participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad for Hungary, winning a silver medal in 1969, and two consecutive gold medals with perfect scores in 1970 and 1971. He graduated from the Eötvös Loránd University in 1976. Since then he has been at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Rollo Davidson Prize in 1988. He was elected corresponding member and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was invited speaker at the European Congre...
Go to Profile#13330
Nancy Dupree
#13341
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Nancy Hatch Dupree was an American historian whose work primarily focused on the history of modern Afghanistan. She was the director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University and author of five books that she compiled while studying the history of Afghanistan from 1962 until the late 1970s, writing about tourism and history of Bamyan, Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif and so on. She was fondly called the "grandmother of Afghanistan", having spent more of her life there or with Afghans abroad.
Go to Profile#13331
Mustafa Emirbayer
#13342
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
#13332
Utkan Demirci
#13343
Overall Influence
Utkan Demirci is a tenured professor and a successful serial academic entrepreneur at Stanford University at the departments of Radiology and Electrical Engineering . He served as the Interim Division Chief and Director of the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection in the Department of Radiology.
Go to Profile#13333
Marc Nerlove
#13344
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Marc Leon Nerlove is an American agricultural economist and econometrician and a distinguished university professor emeritus in agricultural and resource economics at the University of Maryland. He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association in 1969 and held appointments at eight different universities from 1958–2016. The Clark Medal is awarded to an economist under the age of 40 who “is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge”, and when the AEA appointed him as a distinguished fellow in 2012, they cited his de...
Go to Profile#13334
Yoav Gelber
#13345
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Yoav Gelber is a professor of history at the University of Haifa, and was formerly a visiting professor at The University of Texas at Austin. He was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1943 and studied world and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is an expert on the history of the Israel Defense Forces. Gelber is also known to have been a vocal opponent of Ilan Pappé when the latter was employed by the University of Haifa, and a defender of the Alexandroni Brigade in the Tantura massacre case.
Go to Profile#13335
Rita Gunther McGrath
#13346
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Rita Gunther McGrath is an American strategic management scholar and professor of management at the Columbia Business School. She is known for her work on strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the development of discovery-driven planning.
Go to Profile#13336
V. Lane Rawlins
#13347
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
V. Lane Rawlins is an American academic who served as the President of the University of North Texas from May 2010 to February 2014. He is also the former President of Washington State University and of the University of Memphis.
Go to Profile#13337
Carlton M. Caves
#13348
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Carlton Morris Caves is an American theoretical physicist. He is currently professor emeritus and research professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Mexico. Caves works in the areas of physics of information; information, entropy, and complexity; quantum information theory; quantum chaos, quantum optics; the theory of non-classical light; the theory of quantum noise; and the quantum theory of measurement. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#13338
Martin Hengel
#13349
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Martin Hengel was a German historian of religion, focusing on the "Second Temple Period" or "Hellenistic Period" of early Judaism and Christianity. Biography Early life Hengel was born in Reutlingen, south of Stuttgart, in 1926 and grew up in nearby Aalen. In 1943 he was conscripted as a 17-year-old schoolboy into the Wehrmacht and served in an anti-aircraft battery on the Western Front. In 1945, after one of the final battles of World War II, he threw away his weapons and uniform and walked home from France, completing his schooling in 1946. In late 1947 Hengel began his theological studies in Tübingen, moving to the University of Heidelberg in 1949.
Go to Profile#13339
Ryuzo Yanagimachi
#13350
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Ryuzo Yanagimachi was a Japanese-born, American-based scientist. He made numerous key contributions to the study of mammalian fertilization, and he was also a pioneer in the cloning field. Accordingly, he assisted in fertilization technologies such as in vitro fertilization and direct sperm injection into the egg , which are widely used today in human infertility clinics throughout the world. In 1997, his laboratory at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa successfully cloned mice using the Honolulu technique.
Go to Profile#13340
Islam Karimov
#13351
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
Islam Abduganiyevich Karimov was an Uzbek politician who led Uzbekistan and its predecessor state, the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, from 1989 until his death in 2016. He was the last First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan from 1989 to 1991, when the party was reconstituted as the People's Democratic Party of Uzbekistan ; he led the O‘zXDP until 1996. He was the President of the Uzbek SSR from 24 March 1990 until he declared the independence of Uzbekistan on 1 September 1991.
Go to Profile#13341
Ross Bleckner
#13352
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ross Bleckner is an American artist. He currently lives and works in New York City. His artistic focus is on painting, and he held his first solo exhibition in 1975. Some of his art work reflected on the AIDS epidemic.
Go to Profile#13342
Christopher L. Eisgruber
#13353
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Christopher Ludwig Eisgruber is an American academic and legal scholar who is serving as the 20th President of Princeton University, where he is also the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Public Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values. He is also an expert on constitutional law, with an emphasis on law & religion and federal judicial appointments.
Go to Profile#13343
P. C. Sreeram
#13354
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
P. C. Sreeram ISC is an Indian cinematographer and film director who works in Indian films. He is also the president of Qube Cinemas, a digital cinema technology company. He is an alumnus of the Madras Film Institute. Apart from his work as a cinematographer, Sreeram was much appreciated for his directorial venture Kuruthipunal. The film was internationally acclaimed and was submitted by India as its official entry to the Oscars in 1996. Sreeram is known for his association with Bharathan, Mani Ratnam, R Balki, Vikram Kumar, and received critical acclaim for his work in films such as Thevar M...
Go to Profile#13344
Joaquín Balaguer
#13355
Overall Influence
1902 - 2002 (100 years)
Joaquín Antonio Balaguer Ricardo was a Dominican politician, scholar, writer, and lawyer. He was President of the Dominican Republic serving three non-consecutive terms for that office from 1960 to 1962, 1966 to 1978, and 1986 to 1996.
Go to Profile#13345
David Price
#13356
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Areas of Specialization: Cultural Anthropology David Price is a professor of anthropology at Saint Martin’s University. He was born in 1960 and earned his B.A. from The Evergreen State College, an AM from University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from University of Florida. Early in his career he studied in Egypt, Yemen, and Palestine, conducting research on the evolution of irrigation systems from modern to ancient times, before moving on to his current field. An expert in cultural anthropology and intellectual history, Price has written numerous books about the interactions between government/military/intelligence agencies and anthropologists.
Go to Profile#13346
Jaromír Jágr
#13357
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Jaromír Jágr is a Czech professional ice hockey right winger for and the owner of Rytíři Kladno of the Czech Extraliga . He previously played in the National Hockey League for the Pittsburgh Penguins, Washington Capitals, New York Rangers, Philadelphia Flyers, Dallas Stars, Boston Bruins, New Jersey Devils, Florida Panthers and Calgary Flames, serving as captain of the Penguins and the Rangers, between 1990 and 2008. After leaving the Rangers in 2008, he played three seasons in the Kontinental Hockey League with Avangard Omsk. He returned to the NHL in 2011 with the Flyers and remained in the league for seven more years before being assigned by the Flames in 2018 to HC Kladno.
Go to Profile#13347
Rand Paul
#13358
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Randal Howard Paul is an American politician serving as the junior United States senator from Kentucky since 2011. A member of the Republican Party, he is a son of former three-time presidential candidate and 12-term U.S. representative from Texas, Ron Paul. Paul describes himself as a constitutional conservative and supporter of the Tea Party movement.
Go to Profile#13348
Greg Kot
#13359
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Greg Kot is an American music journalist and author. From 1990 until 2020, Kot was the rock music critic at the Chicago Tribune, where he covered popular music and reported on music-related social, political and business issues. Kot co-hosts the radio program Sound Opinions, which introduces itself as "the world's only rock 'n' roll talk show", nationally syndicated through Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ.
Go to Profile#13349
John Little
#13360
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
John Dutton Conant Little is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology best known for his result in operations research, Little's law. Biography Born in Boston, he earned a S.B. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked at General Electric . His PhD on Use of Storage Water in a Hydroelectric System used dynamic programming, and advised by Philip M. Morse, was the first ever awarded in operations research . Next, he taught at the Case Institute of Technology from 1957 to 1962, before joining the faculty at MIT in 1962 where he since has worked.
Go to Profile#13350
Jenny Durkan
#13361
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Jenny Anne Durkan is an American attorney, former federal prosecutor, and politician served as the 56th mayor of Seattle, Washington. She is the daughter of Martin Durkan. Durkan is a member of the Democratic Party. After earning her Juris Doctor from University of Washington School of Law in 1985, Durkan began practicing law as a criminal defense lawyer and civil litigator. In October 2009, President Barack Obama appointed her United States Attorney for the Western District of Washington. She held that position until September 2014.
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