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
#13401
Jean Paoli
#13412
Overall Influence
Jean Paoli is one of the inventors of XML. Along with Tim Bray and C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Paoli co-edited the XML 1.0 recommendation for the World Wide Web Consortium starting in 1997 and until at least 2008.
Go to Profile#13402
Chester Crocker
#13413
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Chester Arthur Crocker is an American diplomat and scholar who served as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from June 9, 1981, to April 21, 1989, in the Reagan administration. Crocker, architect of the U.S. policy of "constructive engagement" towards Southern Africa including apartheid-era South Africa, is credited with setting the terms of Namibian independence.
Go to Profile#13403
Tom Snijders
#13414
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Tom A. B. Snijders is professor of Statistics in the Social Sciences at Nuffield College, Oxford, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford . He is also professor of Methodology at the University of Groningen, a position he has held for more than twenty years.
Go to Profile#13404
Nicolai Reshetikhin
#13415
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Nicolai Yuryevich Reshetikhin is a mathematical physicist, currently a professor of mathematics at Tsinghua University, China and a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Amsterdam . He is also a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is in the fields of low-dimensional topology, representation theory, and quantum groups. His major contributions are in the theory of quantum integrable systems, in representation theory of quantum groups and in quantum topology. He and Vladimir Turaev constructed invariants of 3-manifolds which are expected t...
Go to Profile#13405
Keir Starmer
#13416
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Sir Keir Rodney Starmer is a British politician and barrister who has served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party since 2020. He has been Member of Parliament for Holborn and St Pancras since 2015. He was previously Director of Public Prosecutions from 2008 to 2013.
Go to Profile#13406
Imani Perry
#13417
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Imani Perry is an American interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African-American culture. She is currently the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a columnist for The Atlantic. Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. In October 2023, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#13407
Jerry Rawlings
#13418
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
Jerry John Rawlings was a Ghanaian military officer, aviator and politician who led the country for a brief period in 1979, and then from 1981 to 2001. He led a military junta until 1992, and then served two terms as the democratically elected president of Ghana.
Go to Profile#13408
Phelim Boyle
#13419
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Phelim P. Boyle , is an Irish economist and distinguished professor and actuary, and a pioneer of quantitative finance. He is best known for initiating the use of Monte Carlo methods in option pricing.
Go to Profile#13409
Steve Yzerman
#13420
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Stephen Gregory Yzerman is a Canadian-American former professional ice hockey player currently serving as executive vice president and general manager of the Detroit Red Wings, with whom he spent all 22 seasons of his NHL playing career. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, he is a Detroit sports icon and a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame. After his retirement as a player, he served in the front office of the Red Wings, and then as general manager of the Tampa Bay Lightning, while also being executive director for Team Canada in two Olympics.
Go to Profile#13410
Barbara Christian
#13421
Overall Influence
1943 - 2000 (57 years)
Barbara T. Christian was an American author and professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Among several books, and over 100 published articles, Christian was most well known for the 1980 study Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition.
Go to Profile#13411
Randal Bryant
#13422
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Randal E. Bryant is an American computer scientist and academic noted for his research on formally verifying digital hardware and software. Bryant has been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University since 1984. He served as the Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon from 2004 to 2014. Dr. Bryant retired and became a Founders University Professor Emeritus on June 30, 2020.
Go to Profile#13412
John Crowley
#13423
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
John Crowley is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and historical fiction. He has also written essays. Crowley studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer.
Go to Profile#13413
John Norman
#13424
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
John Frederick Lange Jr. is an American writer who, as John Norman, has authored the Gor series of science fantasy novels. Norman is also a philosophy professor. Early life and education Lange was born in Chicago, Illinois, to John Frederick Lange and Almyra D. Lange .
Go to Profile#13414
Stanley Matthews
#13425
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Sir Stanley Matthews was an English footballer who played as an outside right. Often regarded as one of the greatest players of the British game and one of the greatest players of all time, he is the only player to have been knighted while still playing football, as well as being the first winner of both the European Footballer of the Year and the Football Writers' Association Footballer of the Year awards. His nicknames included "The Wizard of the Dribble" and "The Magician".
Go to Profile#13415
Greg Abbott
#13426
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Gregory Wayne Abbott is an American politician, attorney, and jurist serving as the 48th governor of Texas since 2015. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the 50th attorney general of Texas from 2002 to 2015 and as a member of the Texas Supreme Court from 1996 to 2001.
Go to Profile#13416
Mary Anne Franks
#13427
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Mary Anne Franks is an American legal scholar, author, activist, and media commentator. She is a professor of law and the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at George Washington University Law School, where her areas of expertise and teaching include First Amendment law, Second Amendment law, criminal law, criminal procedure, family law, and law and technology. She also serves as President and Legislative and Technology Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington University Law School, Professor Franks was the Michael R.
Go to Profile#13417
Norman P. Barry
#13428
Overall Influence
1944 - 2008 (64 years)
Norman Patrick Barry was an English political philosopher best known as an exponent of classical liberalism. For much of his career he was a professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham.
Go to Profile#13418
Peter Bogdanovich
#13429
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Peter Bogdanovich was an American director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian. He started his career as a film critic for Film Culture and Esquire before becoming a prominent filmmaker as part of the New Hollywood movement. He received accolades including a BAFTA Award and Grammy Award, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.
Go to Profile#13419
Gunnar Fant
#13430
Overall Influence
1919 - 2009 (90 years)
Carl Gunnar Michael Fant was a leading researcher in speech science in general and speech synthesis in particular who spent most of his career as a professor at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He was a first cousin of the actors and directors George Fant and Kenne Fant.
Go to Profile#13420
Rachel Elior
#13431
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Rachel Elior is an Israeli professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jerusalem, Israel. Her principal subjects of research has been Hasidism and the history of early Jewish mysticism.
Go to Profile#13421
Floyd Patterson
#13432
Overall Influence
1935 - 2006 (71 years)
Floyd Patterson was an American professional boxer who competed from 1952 to 1972, and twice reigned as the world heavyweight champion between 1956 and 1962. At the age of 21, he became the youngest boxer in history to win the title, and was also the first heavyweight to regain the title after losing it. As an amateur, he won a gold medal in the middleweight division at the 1952 Summer Olympics. He is recognised as one of the best heavyweights of all time.
Go to Profile#13422
Wallace Fowlie
#13433
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Wallace Fowlie was an American writer and professor of literature. He was the James B. Duke Professor of French Literature at Duke University where he taught from 1964 to the end of his career. Although he published more than twenty books, he was devoted to teaching, particularly undergraduate courses in French, Italian, and modernist literature. He took his A.B. at Harvard College in 1930 followed by a Master's in 1933 and a Ph.D. in 1936, also at Harvard. Before coming to Duke in 1964, he taught at Bennington College, University of Chicago, and Yale University.
Go to Profile#13423
Tom Gilb
#13434
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Tom Gilb is an American systems engineer, consultant, and author, known for the development of software metrics, software inspection, and evolutionary processes. Biography Tom Gilb was born in 1940 in Pasadena, California, United States. He emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1956 and to Norway in 1958. He took his first job with IBM in 1958 and became a freelance consultant in 1960.
Go to Profile#13424
Tatu Vanhanen
#13435
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Tatu Vanhanen was a Finnish political scientist and sociologist. He was a professor of political science at the University of Tampere in Tampere, Finland. Vanhanen was a coauthor with Richard Lynn of IQ and the Wealth of Nations and IQ and Global Inequality , and author of Ethnic Conflicts Explained by Ethnic Nepotism .
Go to Profile#13425
Megawati Sukarnoputri
#13436
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Diah Permata Megawati Setiawati Sukarnoputri is an Indonesian politician who served as the fifth president of Indonesia from 2001 to 2004. She previously served as the eighth vice president from 1999 to 2001.
Go to Profile#13426
Kevin M. Kruse
#13437
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Kevin Michael Kruse is an American historian and a professor of history at Princeton University. His research interests include the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America, with a particular focus on the making of modern conservatism. Outside of academia, Kruse has attracted substantial attention and following for his Twitter threads where he provides historical context and applies historical research to current political events.
Go to Profile#13427
Mohammad Hajiaghayi
#13438
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi is a computer scientist known for his work in algorithms, game theory, social networks, network design, graph theory, and big data. He has over 200 publications with over 185 collaborators and 10 issued patents.
Go to Profile#13428
Mariano Rivera
#13439
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Mariano Rivera is a Panamanian-American former professional baseball pitcher who played 19 seasons in Major League Baseball for the New York Yankees, from 1995 to 2013. Nicknamed "Mo" and "Sandman", he spent most of his career as a relief pitcher and served as the Yankees' closer for 17 seasons. A thirteen-time All-Star and five-time World Series champion, he is MLB's career leader in saves and games finished . Rivera won five American League Rolaids Relief Man Awards and three Delivery Man of the Year Awards, and he finished in the top three in voting for the AL Cy Young Award four times....
Go to Profile#13429
William O. Stephens
#13440
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
William O. Stephens , is an American philosopher and scholar of Stoicism. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Creighton University after retiring from teaching at their Omaha Campus in 2020. Biography Stephens was born in Lafayette, Indiana and grew up in West Lafayette where he attended West Lafayette Senior High School and began his study of ancient civilizations and Latin. He studied Philosophy at the College of Wooster for two years before transferring to Earlham College, where he earned his undergraduate degree. Stephens completed his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, studying under Charles H.
Go to Profile#13430
Andrea Barrett
#13441
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Andrea Barrett is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel and Natural History were finalists for the Story Prize.
Go to Profile#13431
D. G. Champernowne
#13442
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
David Gawen Champernowne, was an English economist and mathematician. Champernowne was the only child of Francis Gawayne Champernowne , M.A. , a barrister and bursar of Keble College, Oxford, and his wife Isabel Mary, daughter of George Rashleigh, of Riseley, Horton Kirby, Kent. The Champernowne family were landed gentry, of Dartington, Devon; Francis Gawayne Champernowne was a grandson of Arthur Champernowne , M.P. for Saltash in 1806, who, born to Rev. Richard Harington, second son of Sir James Harington, 6th Baronet, had taken his maternal grandfather's name on inheriting his estates.
Go to Profile#13432
Lis Wiehl
#13443
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Lis Wiehl is a New York Times bestselling American author of fiction and nonfiction books, and a legal analyst. She is the author of twenty books, including, most recently, A Spy in Plain Sight: The Inside Story of the FBI and Robert Hanssen―America's Most Damaging Russian Spy, published by Pegasus Books.
Go to Profile#13433
David Lockwood
#13444
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
David Lockwood was a British sociologist. Early life Lockwood was born on 9 April 1929 in Holmfirth, England, and was the youngest child in his working-class family. His father, Herbert, was a dyer and then retrained as a cobbler after being wounded during the First World War and he died when Lockwood was 10. His mother, Edith, was a cleaner. He served in the Army Intelligence Corps from 1947 to 1949.
Go to Profile#13434
William Rarita
#13445
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
William Rarità was an American theoretical physicist who mainly worked on nuclear physics, particle physics and relativistic quantum mechanics. He is particularly famous for the formulation of Rarita–Schwinger equation. His famous formula is applicable to spin 3/2 particles as opposed to spin 1/2 particles. Rarita taught physics at Brooklyn College for 32 years before he became a visiting scientist in the theory group at LBNL. At the time of his retirement in 1996, he was doing research at LBNL. In addition to his work with Julian Schwinger, Rarita also collaborated with Herman Feshbach.
Go to Profile#13435
Theotônio dos Santos
#13446
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Theotônio dos Santos Junior was a Brazilian economist. He was one of the formulators of the Dependency Theory and supported the World-System theory. Dos Santos had a bachelor's degree in sociology and politics in public administration from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and a master's degree in political science from the University of Brasília. He received the title of notório saber in economics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the Fluminense Federal University, at the latter of which he was Professor Emeritus. He coordinated for both the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Polic...
Go to Profile#13436
Gerrit Olivier
#13447
Overall Influence
Professor Gerrit Olivier is a South African academic and diplomat. He joined the apartheid diplomatic corp in 1983 and became the director of the communication and planning division. In 1991, he became the first diplomatic representative of apartheid South Africa to the Soviet Union and in 1992 he was appointed as the first South African Ambassador to the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan. He is currently Extraordinary Professor in the Dept of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria.
Go to Profile#13437
Isabelle Guyon
#13448
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Isabelle Guyon is a French-born researcher in machine learning known for her work on support-vector machines, artificial neural networks and bioinformatics. She is a Chair Professor at the University of Paris-Saclay.
Go to Profile#13438
Gerhard Ebeling
#13449
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
Gerhard Ebeling was a German Lutheran theologian and with Ernst Fuchs a leading proponent of new hermeneutic theology in the 20th century. Life Ebeling was born on 6 July 1912 in Steglitz, Berlin, where he attended the gymnasium and began his university study. Ebeling was later a student of Rudolf Bultmann and Wilhelm Maurer in Marburg and of Emil Brunner at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. The years of his study in Berlin, Marburg, and Zürich fell in the period of Nazism in Germany, and his contact with Dietrich Bonhoeffer as well as his work in the Confessing Church had an enduring influence on his thought.
Go to Profile#13439
Chris Avellone
#13450
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Chris Avellone is an American video game designer and comic book writer. He worked for Interplay and Obsidian Entertainment before working as a freelancer. He is best known for his work on role-playing video games such as Planescape: Torment and the Fallout series.
Go to Profile#13440
Nevra Necipoğlu
#13451
Overall Influence
Nevra Necipoğlu is a Turkish historian of the Byzantine Empire who is a professor of history at Boğaziçi University. Early life and education She was educated and graduated from Robert College. She then graduated from Wellesley College with a double major in History and Economics in 1982. She received her Ph.D. in Byzantine History from Harvard University in 1990. She is the sister of Gülru Necipoğlu, who is the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and director of the Aga Khan Program of Islamic Architecture at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#13441
Gerald Sacks
#13452
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Gerald Enoch Sacks was a logician whose most important contributions were in recursion theory. Named after him is Sacks forcing, a forcing notion based on perfect sets and the Sacks Density Theorem, which asserts that the partial order of the recursively enumerable Turing degrees is dense. Sacks had a joint appointment as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University starting in 1972 and became emeritus at M.I.T. in 2006 and at Harvard in 2012.
Go to Profile#13442
Michael Marder
#13453
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. He works in the phenomenological tradition of Continental philosophy, environmental thought, and political philosophy.
Go to Profile#13443
Goodwin Liu
#13454
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Goodwin Hon Liu is an American lawyer, educator and an associate justice of the Supreme Court of California. Before his appointment by California Governor Jerry Brown, Liu was Associate Dean and Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law . Liu has been recognized for his writing on constitutional law, education policy, civil rights, and the Supreme Court.
Go to Profile#13444
Stefan Hofmann
#13455
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Stefan G. Hofmann is a German-born clinical psychologist. He is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor and recipient of the LOEWE Spitzenprofessur for Translational Clinical Psychology at the Philipps University of Marburg in Germany examining Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, especially for anxiety disorders. Since 2012, he has been editor in chief of the journal Cognitive Therapy and Research
Go to Profile#13445
Julian Cole
#13456
Overall Influence
1925 - 1999 (74 years)
Julian David Cole was an American mathematician. He is known for his groundbreaking work in mathematical applications to aerodynamics and transonic flow, and in non-linear equations more generally. He graduated 36 PhD students and won many of the most significant scientific honors over his career, including simultaneous election to the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering in 1976.
Go to Profile#13446
Manolis Andronikos
#13457
Overall Influence
1919 - 1992 (73 years)
Manolis Andronikos was a Greek archaeologist and a professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Biography Andronikos was born on October 23, 1919, at Bursa . His father originated from the island of Samos, while his mother was from Imbros. Later, his family moved to Thessaloniki.
Go to Profile#13447
Robert D. Richardson
#13458
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Robert Dale Richardson III was an American historian and biographer. Early life Richardson was born in Milwaukee, and brought up in Medford, Massachusetts, and Concord, Massachusetts. He graduated from Exeter, in 1952, and from Harvard University, with a PhD.
Go to Profile#13448
Alexander Dallin
#13459
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Alexander Davidovich Dallin was an American historian, political scientist, and international relations scholar at Columbia University, where he was the Adlai Stevenson Professor of International Relations and the director of the Russian Institute. Dallin was also the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University, and served as Director for the Center for Russian and East European Studies.
Go to Profile#13449
Sergei Konyagin
#13460
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Sergei Vladimirovich Konyagin is a Russian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the Moscow State University. Konyagin participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad for the Soviet Union, winning two consecutive gold medals with perfect scores in 1972 and 1973. At the age of 15, he became one of the youngest people to achieve a perfect score at the IMO.
Go to Profile#13450
Hannah Lux Davis
#13461
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Hannah Lux Davis is an American music video, commercial and film director. She's known for her work especially with female artists, such as Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, Demi Lovato, Nicki Minaj, Miley Cyrus, Avril Lavigne, Christina Aguilera, Hilary Duff and Fifth Harmony.
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