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
#13501
Jon Gruden
#13512
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jon David Gruden is an American professional football coach who is a consultant for the New Orleans Saints of the National Football League . He held his first head coaching position with the Raiders franchise during their Oakland tenure from 1998 to 2001, where he won two consecutive division titles and made an AFC Championship Game appearance. Gruden was traded to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2002, which he led to their first Super Bowl title in Super Bowl XXXVII the same season. At age 39, he was the then-youngest head coach to win the Super Bowl. He served as Tampa Bay's head coach through 2008, setting the franchise record for wins, but made only two further playoff runs.
Go to Profile#13502
Lucien Sève
#13513
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Lucien Sève was a French philosopher, communist and political activist. He was an active member of the French Communist Party from 1950 to 2010. His 1969 work Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité has been translated into 25 different languages. Sève died on 23 March 2020 of Coronavirus disease 2019
Go to Profile#13503
Lonnie Bunch
#13514
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Lonnie G. Bunch III is an American educator and historian. Bunch is the 14th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the first African American and first historian to serve as head of the Smithsonian. He has spent most of his career as a history museum curator and administrator.
Go to Profile#13504
Tom Seaver
#13515
Overall Influence
1944 - 2020 (76 years)
George Thomas Seaver , nicknamed "Tom Terrific" and "the Franchise", was an American professional baseball pitcher who played 20 seasons in Major League Baseball . He played for the New York Mets, Cincinnati Reds, Chicago White Sox, and Boston Red Sox from to . Commonly described as the most iconic player in Mets history, Seaver played a significant role in their victory in the 1969 World Series over the Baltimore Orioles.
Go to Profile#13505
Samuel Reshevsky
#13516
Overall Influence
1911 - 1992 (81 years)
Samuel Herman Reshevsky was a Polish chess prodigy and later a leading American chess grandmaster. He was a contender for the World Chess Championship from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s: he tied for third place in the 1948 World Chess Championship tournament, and tied for second in the 1953 Candidates tournament. He was an eight-time winner of the US Chess Championship, tying him with Bobby Fischer for the all-time record.
Go to Profile#13506
Robert Boyd
#13517
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Robert Turner Boyd is an American anthropologist. He is professor of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University . His research interests include evolutionary psychology and in particular the evolutionary roots of culture. Together with his primatologist wife, Joan B. Silk , he wrote the textbook How Humans Evolved.
Go to Profile#13507
Paul Kelly
#13518
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Paul John Kelly is an Australian political journalist, author and television and radio commentator from Sydney. He has worked in a variety of roles, principally for The Australian newspaper and is currently its editor-at-large. Kelly also appears as a commentator on Sky News Australia and has written seven books on political events in Australia since the 1970s including on the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. Recent works include The March of Patriots, which chronicles the creation of a modern Australia during the 1991–2007 era of prime ministers, Paul Keating and John Howard, and Trium...
Go to Profile#13508
Adam Kuper
#13519
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Adam Jonathan Kuper is a South African anthropologist most closely linked to the school of social anthropology. In his works, he often treats the notion of "culture" skeptically, focusing as much on how it is used as on what it means.
Go to Profile#13509
Gerardo L. Munck
#13520
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Gerardo L. Munck is a political scientist specializing in comparative politics. He is professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California. Career Munck earned his undergraduate degree in political science from the University of New Hampshire, a master's in Latin American studies at Stanford University, and his PhD in political science from the University of California, San Diego . Munck was a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign between 1990 and 2002, before moving to the University of Southern California .
Go to Profile#13510
Ákos Császár
#13521
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Ákos Császár was a Hungarian mathematician, specializing in general topology and real analysis. He discovered the Császár polyhedron, a nonconvex polyhedron without diagonals. He introduced the notion of syntopogeneous spaces, a generalization of topological spaces.
Go to Profile#13511
Chris Benoit
#13522
Overall Influence
1967 - 2007 (40 years)
Christopher Michael Benoit was a Canadian professional wrestler. He worked for various pro-wrestling promotions during his 22-year career including most notably the World Wrestling Federation/World Wrestling Entertainment , World Championship Wrestling and Extreme Championship Wrestling in the United States, New Japan Pro-Wrestling in Japan and Stampede Wrestling in Canada.
Go to Profile#13512
Gerald M. Steinberg
#13523
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Gerald M. Steinberg. a professor of politics at Bar Ilan University, is an Israeli academic, political scientist, and political activist. He is founder and president of NGO Monitor, a policy analysis think tank focusing on non-governmental organizations.
Go to Profile#13513
Shigetada Nakanishi
#13524
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Shigetada Nakanishi is a Japanese biochemist and neuroscientist. Both a medical doctor and biomedical researcher by training, Nakanishi is the director of the Osaka Bioscience Institute and professor emeritus at Kyoto University. He has received several scientific awards for his research in neuroscience, having characterized the molecular structure or function of several protein receptors.
Go to Profile#13514
Flavia Pennetta
#13525
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Flavia Pennetta is an Italian former professional tennis player. She became Italy's first top-ten female singles player on 17 August 2009 and the first Italian to be ranked world No. 1 in doubles, on 28 February 2011. She is a major champion, having won the 2011 Australian Open women's doubles title with Gisela Dulko, and the 2015 US Open singles title over childhood friend Roberta Vinci in the first all-Italian major final.
Go to Profile#13515
Andy Williams
#13526
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Howard Andrew Williams was an American singer. He recorded 43 albums in his career, of which 15 have been gold certified and three platinum certified. He was also nominated for six Grammy Awards. He hosted The Andy Williams Show, a television variety show, from 1962 to 1971, along with numerous TV specials. The Andy Williams Show won three Emmy Awards. He sold more than 45 million records worldwide, including more than 10 million certified units in the United States.
Go to Profile#13516
Marques Brownlee
#13527
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (33 years)
Marques Keith Brownlee , also known professionally as MKBHD, is an American YouTuber and professional ultimate frisbee player, best known for his technology-focused videos as well as his podcast Waveform. , he has more than 20 million subscribers across all channels and 3.83 billion total video views. Vic Gundotra, a former senior vice president of Google, called Brownlee "the best technology reviewer on the planet right now". At the 10th Shorty Awards in 2019, he was named "Creator of the Decade" The former name of his YouTube channel is a concatenation of MKB and HD . With New York PoNY, he...
Go to Profile#13517
Rob Halford
#13528
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert John Arthur Halford is an English heavy metal singer. He is best known as the lead vocalist of Judas Priest, which was formed in 1969 and has received accolades such as the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance. He has been noted for his powerful and wide ranging operatic vocal style and trademark leather-and-studs image, both of which have become iconic in heavy metal. He has also been involved with several side projects, including Fight, Two, and Halford.
Go to Profile#13518
Niko Paech
#13529
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Niko Paech is a German economist. Since 2018, he has worked as a supernumerary professor at the University of Siegen. From 2010 to 2018, he was substitute professor at the chair of production and environment at the University of Oldenburg. His research focuses on the fields of environmental economics, ecological economics and sustainability.
Go to Profile#13519
Özalp Babaoğlu
#13530
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Özalp Babaoğlu , is a Turkish computer scientist. He is currently professor of computer science at the University of Bologna, Italy. He received a Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the recipient of 1982 Sakrison Memorial Award, 1989 UNIX International Recognition Award and 1993 USENIX Association Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the UNIX system community and to Open Industry Standards. Before moving to Bologna in 1988, Babaoğlu was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He has participated in several European research projects in distributed computing and complex systems.
Go to Profile#13520
Steven T. Katz
#13531
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Steven Theodore Katz is an American philosopher and scholar. He is the founding director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University in Massachusetts, United States, where he holds the Alvin J. and Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish and Holocaust Studies.
Go to Profile#13521
Subir Sachdev
#13532
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University specializing in condensed matter. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014, and received the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society and the Dirac Medal from the ICTP in 2018. He was a co-editor of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics from 2017–2019.
Go to Profile#13522
Boyce Watkins
#13533
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Boyce D. Watkins is an American author, political analyst, social influencer and ex-academic. In addition to publishing scholarly articles on finance and investing, Watkins is an advocate for education, economic empowerment, and social justice, and has made regular appearances in various national media outlets, including CNN, Good Morning America, MSNBC, Fox News, BET, NPR, Essence, USA Today, Today, ESPN, The Tom Joyner Morning Show, and CBS Sports. He was also a frequent guest on The Wendy Williams Experience radio program, and remains a frequent contributor to the Grio.
Go to Profile#13523
Paul Wolfowitz
#13534
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Paul Dundes Wolfowitz is an American political scientist and diplomat who served as the 10th President of the World Bank, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, and dean of Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Go to Profile#13524
John Milton Yinger
#13535
Overall Influence
1916 - 2011 (95 years)
John Milton Yinger was an American sociologist who was president of the American Sociological Association 1976–1977. Yinger received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1942, and was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Oberlin College.
Go to Profile#13525
Gillian E. Metzger
#13536
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Gillian E. Metzger is a United States constitutional law scholar and a professor of law at Columbia Law School. Early life and education The daughter of Columbia University history professor Walter P. Metzger, Gillian grew up on campus in faculty housing. She earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Yale University in 1987, and then worked as a legislative aide for District Council 37, a local union in New York City. Metzger then earned a master's degree in philosophy at the University of Oxford. After several years as a staff analyst for New York City government, Metzger enrolled in Columbia Law School, earning her J.D.
Go to Profile#13526
Don Michael Randel
#13537
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Don Michael Randel is an American musicologist, specializing in the music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Spain and France. He is currently the chair of the board of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation, and a member of the Encyclopædia Britannica editorial board, and has previously served as the fifth president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, twelfth president of the University of Chicago, Provost of Cornell University, and Dean of Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences. He has served as editor of the third and fourth editions of the Harv...
Go to Profile#13527
Denys Turner
#13538
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Denys Alan Turner is an English philosopher and theologian. He is Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology emeritus at Yale University having been appointed in 2005, previously having been Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in philosophy from the University of Oxford. He has written widely on political theory and social theory in relation to Christian theology, as well as on medieval thought, in particular, mystical theology and Christian mysticism.
Go to Profile#13528
Ana María Barrenechea
#13539
Overall Influence
1913 - 2010 (97 years)
Ana María Barrenechea was an Argentine writer, linguist, and literary critic. Biography Barrenechea completed her studies in philology at the Higher Institute of Teachers of Buenos Aires, being taught by Amado Alonso and Pedro Henríquez Ureña, both of whom pushed Barrenechea towards research and literary criticism. In 1953, she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship by El Colegio de México to study abroad in the United States at the Bryn Mawr College, where she completed her doctorate three years later. She returned to Buenos Aires and began to study Spanish grammar in Argentina and abroad in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the United States, at one point teaching at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#13529
Czesław Ryll-Nardzewski
#13540
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Czesław Ryll-Nardzewski was a Polish mathematician. Born in Wilno, Second Polish Republic , he was a student of Hugo Steinhaus. At the age of 26 he became professor at Warsaw University. In 1959, he became a professor at the Wrocław University of Technology. He was the advisor of 18 PhD theses. His main research areas were measure theory, functional analysis, foundations of mathematics and probability theory. Several theorems bear his name: the Ryll-Nardzewski fixed point theorem, the Ryll-Nardzewski theorem in model theory, and the Kuratowski and Ryll-Nardzewski measurable selection theorem.
Go to Profile#13530
Ron Tutt
#13541
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Ronald Ellis Tutt was an American drummer who played concerts and recording sessions for Elvis Presley, the Carpenters, Roy Orbison, Neil Diamond, and Jerry Garcia. Early life Born in Dallas, Texas, United States, Tutt was a native Texan and was involved with music and performing arts for most of his childhood. He played the guitar, violin and trumpet, and didn't take up the drums until he was seventeen.
Go to Profile#13531
Phillip Lopate
#13542
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Phillip Lopate is an American film critic, essayist, fiction writer, poet, and teacher. Early life Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated with a BA degree from Columbia University in 1964 and received his doctorate from Union Institute & University in 1979. Lopate is the younger brother of radio host Leonard Lopate.
Go to Profile#13532
Drew Westen
#13543
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Drew Westen is professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia; the founder of Westen Strategies, LLC, a strategic messaging consulting firm to nonprofits and political organizations; and a writer. He is also co-founder, with Joel Weinberger, of Implicit Strategies, a market research firm that measures consumers' unconscious responses to advertising and brands.
Go to Profile#13533
Siegfried Engelmann
#13544
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Siegfried "Zig" Engelmann was an American educationalist who co-developed the approach to instruction termed "Direct Instruction" . Engelmann was Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Oregon and Director of the National Institute for Direct Instruction. He wrote more than 100 curricula using DI principles and numerous other books and articles.
Go to Profile#13534
Joel Roth
#13545
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Joel Roth is a prominent American rabbi in the Rabbinical Assembly, which is the rabbinical body of Conservative Judaism. He is a former member and chair of the assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards which deals with questions of Jewish law and tradition, and serves as the Louis Finkelstein Professor of Talmud and Jewish Law at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City, where he formerly served as dean of the Rabbinical School. He is also Rosh Yeshiva of the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem, Israel, an institution founded and maintained by the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism and under the academic auspices of JTS.
Go to Profile#13535
Frank Glaw
#13546
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Frank Rainer Glaw is a German herpetologist working at the Zoologische Staatssammlung München. Glaw studied biology in Cologne from 1987, where he completed his diploma. Thereafter, he attended the University of Bonn, from which he graduated in 1999, after completing his Ph.D. thesis titled Untersuchungen zur Bioakustik, Systematik, Artenvielfalt und Biogeographie madagassischer Anuren about the frogs of Madagascar, supervised by Professor Wolfgang Böhme.
Go to Profile#13536
Lindsey Buckingham
#13547
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Lindsey Adams Buckingham is an American musician and record producer, best known as the lead guitarist and co-lead vocalist of the band Fleetwood Mac from 1975 to 1987 and 1997 to 2018. In addition to his tenure with Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham has released seven solo studio albums and three live albums. As a member of Fleetwood Mac, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998. Buckingham was ranked 100th in Rolling Stones 2011 list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". Buckingham is known for his fingerpicking guitar style.
Go to Profile#13537
Cormac O'Raifeartaigh
#13548
Overall Influence
Cormac O'Raifeartaigh is an Irish physicist based at Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland. A solid-state physicist by training, he is best known for several contributions to the study of the history and philosophy of 20th century science, including the discovery that Albert Einstein once attempted a steady-state model of the expanding universe, many years before Fred Hoyle.
Go to Profile#13538
Mario Salvadori
#13549
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Mario G. Salvadori was an American structural engineer and professor of both civil engineering and architecture at Columbia University. Early life Salvadori was born in Rome, Italy in 1907. His father, Riccardo, an engineer who worked for the telephone company, became the chief engineer of the city of Genoa when the phone company merged with their French counterpart. Salvadori's father later became the head of the gas and electric company in Spain. His mother, Ermelinda Alatri, belonged to a rich Jewish family. Following his father's activities, Salvadori spent many years of his youth in Madrid and only returned to Italy in 1923.
Go to Profile#13539
E. Digby Baltzell
#13550
Overall Influence
1915 - 1996 (81 years)
Edward Digby Baltzell Jr. was an American sociologist, academic and author. He studied the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment and is credited with popularizing the acronym WASP. He was also a best-selling author whose books were popular with both scholars and the general public.
Go to Profile#13540
Graham Joyce
#13551
Overall Influence
1954 - 2014 (60 years)
Graham William Joyce was a British writer of speculative fiction and the recipient of numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award and the World Fantasy Award, for both his novels and short stories.
Go to Profile#13541
Alastair Reynolds
#13552
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Alastair Preston Reynolds is a British science fiction author. He specialises in hard science fiction and space opera. He spent his early years in Cornwall, moved back to Wales before going to Newcastle University, where he studied physics and astronomy. Afterwards, he earned a PhD in astrophysics from the University of St Andrews. In 1991, he moved to Noordwijk in the Netherlands where he met his wife Josette . There, he worked for the European Space Research and Technology Centre until 2004 when he left to pursue writing full-time. He returned to Wales in 2008 and lives near Cardiff.
Go to Profile#13542
Jenny Preece
#13553
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jenny Preece is an American academic who is the Dean Emerita of the College of Information Studies, a Professor at the University of Maryland, and a member of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. She researches online communities and is known for her work on what makes such a community successful, and how usability factors interact with sociability in online communities.
Go to Profile#13543
Abbas Amanat
#13554
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Abbas Amanat is an Iranian-born American historian, scholar, author, editor, and professor. He serves as the William Graham Sumner Professor of History at Yale University and Director of the Yale Program in Iranian Studies.
Go to Profile#13544
Joy Johnson
#13555
Overall Influence
Joy Louise Johnson is the 10th President and Vice-Chancellor of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. A health scientist and researcher in gender and health, she became the first woman to be appointed Vice-President Research at Simon Fraser in 2014.
Go to Profile#13545
Michael Eisen
#13556
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Michael Bruce Eisen is an American computational biologist and the former editor-in-chief of the journal eLife. He is a professor of genetics, genomics and development at University of California, Berkeley. He is a leading advocate of open access scientific publishing and is co-founder of Public Library of Science . In 2018, Eisen announced his candidacy U.S. Senate from California as an Independent, though he failed to qualify for the ballot.
Go to Profile#13546
Miranda Seymour
#13557
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Miranda Jane Seymour is an English literary critic, novelist and biographer. The lives she has described have included those of Robert Graves and Mary Shelley. Seymour, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has in recent years been a visiting Professor of English Studies at Nottingham Trent University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Go to Profile#13547
Paul E. Gray
#13558
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Paul Edward Gray was the 14th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his accomplishments in promoting engineering education, practice, and leadership at MIT and in the world at large.
Go to Profile#13548
George V. Higgins
#13559
Overall Influence
1939 - 1999 (60 years)
George V. Higgins was an American author, lawyer, newspaper columnist, raconteur and college professor. He authored more than thirty books, including Bomber's Law, Trust, and Kennedy for the Defense, and is best known for his bestselling crime novels, including The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which established the Boston noir genre of gangster tales that spawned several popular films by followers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Go to Profile#13549
Lucie Šafářová
#13560
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Lucie Šafářová is a Czech former professional tennis player who was ranked world No. 1 in doubles, and No. 5 in singles. She is a five-time Grand Slam champion in doubles, having won the 2015 Australian Open, 2015 French Open, 2016 US Open, 2017 Australian Open and 2017 French Open, all alongside Bethanie Mattek-Sands. Šafářová won 15 doubles titles on the WTA Tour, including five at Premier Mandatory/Premier 5-level, and also finished runner-up at the 2016 WTA Finals with Mattek-Sands. She became world No. 1 for the first time in August 2017, holding the top ranking for the next six weeks.
Go to Profile#13550
Lewis Sargentich
#13561
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Lewis Daniel "Lew" Sargentich , frequently referred to simply as "Sarge", has been a professor at Harvard Law School since 1973 where he teaches courses tort law and jurisprudence. Sargentich is well known for his record as a student at Harvard Law School, where he both named and first analyzed the First Amendment "overbreadth doctrine" in a student note. He graduated summa cum laude.
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