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
#13551
Larry Thompson
#13562
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Larry Dean Thompson is an American lawyer and law professor, most notable for his service as deputy Attorney General of the United States under United States President George W. Bush until August 2003.
Go to Profile#13552
Graham Taylor
#13563
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Graham Taylor was an English football player, manager, pundit and chairman of Watford Football Club. He was the manager of the England national football team from 1990 to 1993, and also managed Lincoln City, Watford, Aston Villa and Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Go to Profile#13553
Larry Elmore
#13564
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Larry Elmore is an American fantasy artist whose work includes creating illustrations for video games, comics, magazines, and fantasy books. His list of work includes illustrations for Dungeons & Dragons, Dragonlance, and his own comic strip series SnarfQuest. He is author of the book Reflections of Myth.
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Jean-Paul Belmondo
#13565
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Jean-Paul Charles Belmondo was a French actor. Initially associated with the New Wave of the 1960s, he was a major French film star for several decades from the 1960s onward. His best known credits include Breathless , That Man from Rio , Pierrot le Fou , Borsalino , and The Professional . He was most notable for portraying police officers in action thriller films and became known for his unwillingness to appear in English-language films despite being heavily courted by Hollywood. An undisputed box-office champion like Louis de Funès and Alain Delon of the same period, Belmondo attracted nearly 160 million spectators in his 50-year career.
Go to Profile#13555
Michael Maschler
#13566
Overall Influence
1927 - 2008 (81 years)
Michael Bahir Maschler was an Israeli mathematician well known for his contributions to the field of game theory. He was a professor in the Einstein Institute of Mathematics and the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. In 2012, the Israeli Chapter of the Game Theory Society founded the Maschler Prize, an annual prize awarded to an outstanding research student in game theory and related topics in Israel.
Go to Profile#13556
Anita Brookner
#13567
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Anita Brookner was an English novelist and art historian. She was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge from 1967 to 1968 and was the first woman to hold this visiting professorship. She was awarded the 1984 Booker–McConnell Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac.
Go to Profile#13557
David Sanders
#13568
Overall Influence
David Sanders is an associate professor of biological sciences at Purdue University. He grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, and then attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Yale College in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. He conducted his Ph.D. research in Biochemistry with Daniel E. Koshland, Jr., who was then editor of the journal Science, at the University of California at Berkeley. Sanders demonstrated that the response regulators in the two-component regulatory systems were phosphorylated on an aspartate residue and that they were protein phosphatases with a covalent intermediate.
Go to Profile#13558
Meir Wilchek
#13569
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Meir Wilchek is an Israeli biochemist. He is a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Early life and education Meir Wilchek was born in Warsaw, Poland, scion of a rabbinical family. During the Holocaust, he escaped from the German-occupied territories to the territories occupied by Russia, and was transferred to Siberia, while his father, who served as a community rabbi in Warsaw, was killed in Flossenbürg concentration camp. He survived, and immigrated to Israel in 1949 with his mother and sister. He graduated with B.Sc. in chemistry from Bar Ilan university and Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Go to Profile#13559
Julie Powell
#13570
Overall Influence
1973 - 2022 (49 years)
Julie Anne Powell was an American author known for her 2005 book Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen which was based on her blog, the Julie/Julia Project. A film adaptation based on her book called Julie & Julia was released in 2009.
Go to Profile#13560
Barry M. McCoy
#13571
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Barry Malcolm McCoy is an American physicist, known for his contributions to classical statistical mechanics, integrable models and conformal field theories. He earned a B.Sc. from California Institute of Technology , and a Ph.D. from Harvard University , the thesis entitled Spin Correlations of the Two Dimensional Ising Model advised by Tai Tsun Wu. The two of them also wrote the book The Two Dimensional Ising Model .
Go to Profile#13561
Antonín Mrkos
#13572
Overall Influence
1918 - 1996 (78 years)
Antonín Mrkos was a Czech astronomer. Biography Mrkos entered the University in Brno in 1938. His studies were interrupted by the onset of World War II, and in 1945 he became a staff member at the Skalnaté Pleso Observatory in Slovakia. It was from here that he carried out his extremely active cometary programme and became the discoverer of several unusual comets, the most famous of them the bright Comet 1957d.
Go to Profile#13562
Max Lüscher
#13573
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Max Lüscher was a Swiss psychotherapist known for inventing the Lüscher color test, a tool for measuring an individual's psychophysical state based on their color preferences. Besides research, teaching and practicing psychotherapy in Basel, Lüscher worked for international companies, amongst other things giving color advice. His book The Lüscher Test has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Go to Profile#13563
Yousef Saad
#13574
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Yousef Saad in Algiers, Algeria from Boghni, Tizi Ouzou, Kabylia is an I.T. Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He holds the William Norris Chair for Large-Scale Computing since January 2006. He is known for his contributions to the matrix computations, including the iterative methods for solving large sparse linear algebraic systems, eigenvalue problems, and parallel computing. He is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher in mathematics, is the most cited author in the journal Numerical Linear Alg...
Go to Profile#13564
Jeffrey Lagarias
#13575
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jeffrey Clark Lagarias is a mathematician and professor at the University of Michigan. Education While in high school in 1966, Lagarias studied astronomy at the Summer Science Program. He completed an S.B. and S.M. in Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. The title of his thesis was "Evaluation of certain character sums". He was a Putnam Fellow at MIT in 1970. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT for his thesis "The 4-part of the class group of a quadratic field", in 1974. His advisor for both his masters and Ph.D was Harold Stark.
Go to Profile#13565
Dominick LaCapra
#13576
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Dominick LaCapra is an American-born historian of European intellectual history, best known for his work in intellectual history and trauma studies. He served as the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, where he is now a professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#13566
Adrian Newey
#13577
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Adrian Martin Newey, is a British Formula One engineer. He is the chief technical officer of the Red Bull Racing F1 team. Newey has worked in both Formula One and IndyCar racing as a race engineer, aerodynamicist, designer and technical director and enjoyed success in both categories.
Go to Profile#13567
Jon Gettman
#13578
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Jon B. Gettman is a marijuana rights activist, a leader of the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis, and a former head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He has a PhD in public policy and regional economic development from George Mason University and is a longtime contributor to High Times magazine. Gettman filed a petition in 1995 to remove cannabis from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act that was eventually denied. A second petition was filed in 2002, with the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis, that remains under review by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Go to Profile#13568
Per Bäckström
#13579
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Per Bäckström is a Swedish literary scholar and affiliated professor in comparative literature at the Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden. He has worked as professor in comparative Literature, Karlstad University 2010–2019, and as associate professor at the Department of Culture and Literature, University of Tromsø, Norway 1996–2010. He took part in the founding of European Network for Avant-garde and Modernism Studies in 2007, and was the leader of the Membership Commission 2007–2011. He has published studies on Bruno K. Öijer, Henri Michaux, Gunnar Ekelöf, Mikhail Bakhtin, intermediality, the grotesque, concrete poetry, performance, avant-garde and neo-avant-garde.
Go to Profile#13569
Robert Brustein
#13580
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Robert Sanford Brustein was an American theatrical critic, producer, playwright, writer, and educator. He founded the Yale Repertory Theatre while serving as dean of the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as the American Repertory Theater and Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was a creative consultant until his death, and was the theatre critic for The New Republic. He commented on politics for the HuffPost.
Go to Profile#13570
Gaetano Kanizsa
#13581
Overall Influence
1913 - 1993 (80 years)
Gaetano Kanizsa was an Italian psychologist and artist of Jewish and Slovenian Catholic descent who last served as a founder of the Institute of Psychology of Trieste. Biography Gaetano Kanizsa was born on 18 August 1913 in Trieste, Austria-Hungary to a Hungarian-Jewish father from Nagybecskerek and a Slovene Catholic mother from Bovec. His surname is analogous to the Hungarian town Kanizsa .
Go to Profile#13571
Mari Elka Pangestu
#13582
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mari Elka Pangestu , is an Indonesian economist who served as managing director of Development Policy and Partnerships in the World Bank from 2020 to 2023. The President of the World Bank, David Malpass, announced her appointment on 9 January 2020 saying that she would be responsible for development policy and partnerships in her role in the bank. Previously she served as Minister of Trade in Indonesia from October 2004 to October 2011.
Go to Profile#13572
Anantanand Rambachan
#13583
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Anantanand Rambachan is a professor of religion at St. Olaf College. Education Rambachan completed his undergraduate studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Leeds, in the United Kingdom, where he researched "classical Advaita epistemology and, in particular, the significance of the śruti as a source of valid knowledge in Śaṅkara."
Go to Profile#13573
Johnny Herbert
#13584
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
John Paul "Johnny" Herbert is a British former racing driver and former television pundit for Sky Sports F1. He raced in Formula One from 1989 to 2000, for seven different teams, winning three races and placing 4th in the 1995 World Drivers' Championship. He also raced sports cars, winning the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1991 driving a Mazda 787B.
Go to Profile#13574
Arthur W. Chickering
#13585
Overall Influence
2000 - 2020 (20 years)
Arthur Wright Chickering was an American educational researcher in the field of student affairs. He was known for his contribution to student development theories. In 1990 he was appointed Dean of the Graduate School of Education at George Mason University. He was succeeded in 1992 by Dr. Gustavo A. Mellander. Chickering also taught at George Mason University and Goddard College. He worked at Goddard College as a Special Assistant to Presidents Schulman and Vacarr from 2002 to 2012. Chickering died on August 15, 2020, in East Montpelier, VT.
Go to Profile#13575
Frank Miller
#13586
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Frank Miller is an American comic book artist, comic book writer, and screenwriter known for his comic book stories and graphic novels such as his run on Daredevil, for which he created the character Elektra, and subsequent Daredevil: Born Again, The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, Sin City, and 300.
Go to Profile#13576
Richard H. Price
#13587
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Richard H. Price is an American physicist specializing in general relativity. Price graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1960, and went on to earn a dual degree in physics and engineering from Cornell University in 1965. He earned his PhD in 1971 from Caltech under the supervision of Kip Thorne. He spent his career from 1971 to 2004 at the University of Utah, where he holds the title of emeritus professor. In 2004, he joined the Center for Gravitational Wave Astronomy at the University of Texas at Brownsville. As of 2015, he became senior lecturer in physics at MIT. He is also on the adju...
Go to Profile#13577
Amiya Kumar Bagchi
#13588
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Amiya Kumar Bagchi is an Indian political economist. Biography His academic career began when he started teaching in Presidency College, Kolkata. In the 1960s, he taught in the Faculty of Economics in Cambridge , but resigned his post in 1969, to resume his academic career in Presidency College, Kolkata.
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Al Franken
#13589
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Alan Stuart Franken is an American politician, comedian, writer, actor, and media personality who served as a United States senator from Minnesota from 2009 to 2018. Franken first gained fame as a writer and performer on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live, where he worked for three stints. He first served as a writer for the show from 1975 to 1980, and returned from 1985 to 1995 as a writer and, briefly, a cast member. After decades as an entertainer, he became a prominent liberal political activist, hosting The Al Franken Show on Air America Radio.
Go to Profile#13579
John Robbins
#13590
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
John Robbins is an American author, who popularized the links among nutrition, environmentalism, and animal rights. He is the author of the 1987 Diet for a New America, an exposé on connections between diet, physical health, animal cruelty, and environmentalism. Robbins founded the organization EarthSave in 1988.
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Peter Ustinov
#13591
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov was a British actor, filmmaker, and writer. An internationally known raconteur, he was a fixture on television talk shows and lecture circuits for much of his career. Ustinov received numerous accolades including two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, three Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award.
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Gordon Conway
#13592
Overall Influence
1938 - 2023 (85 years)
Sir Gordon Richard Conway was a British agricultural ecologist, who served as the president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Royal Geographical Society. He was latterly Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London and Director of Agriculture for Impact, a grant funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on European support of agricultural development in Africa.
Go to Profile#13582
Martin David Kruskal
#13593
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Martin David Kruskal was an American mathematician and physicist. He made fundamental contributions in many areas of mathematics and science, ranging from plasma physics to general relativity and from nonlinear analysis to asymptotic analysis. His most celebrated contribution was in the theory of solitons.
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Terrence Malick
#13594
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Terrence Frederick Malick is an American filmmaker. His films include Badlands , Days of Heaven , The Thin Red Line , for which he received Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award nominations, The New World , and The Tree of Life , which garnered him another Best Director Oscar nomination and the Palme d'Or at the 64th Cannes Film Festival.
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Stan Wagon
#13595
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Stanley Wagon is a Canadian-American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Macalester College in Minnesota. He is the author of multiple books on number theory, geometry, and computational mathematics, and is also known for his snow sculpture.
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Helmut Schoeck
#13596
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Helmut Schoeck was an Austrian-German sociologist and writer best known for his work Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior . Life Schoeck, born in Graz, spent his early years in Baden-Württemberg, finishing high school in Ludwigsburg. He then studied medicine, philosophy and psychology at the universities of Munich and Tübingen. With a dissertation on Karl Mannheim, Schoeck would obtain his doctorate under Eduard Spranger.
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Ali Erdemir
#13597
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Ali Erdemir, born on July 2, 1954, in Kadirli, Adana, Turkey, is a Turkish American materials scientist specializing in surface engineering and tribology. Education and career Erdemir graduated from the Metallurgy Department of the Istanbul Technical University in 1977. After working for two years at the İskenderun Iron and Steel Company in Turkey as an engineer, he went to the USA for doctoral studies. Erdemir received a master's degree in materials engineering and a doctorate in materials science and engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1982 and 1986, respectively. After c...
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George Barna
#13598
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
George Barna is the founder of The Barna Group, a market research firm specializing in studying the religious beliefs and behavior of Americans, and the intersection of faith and culture. From 2013 - 2018 he served as the executive director of the American Culture & Faith Institute, the research division of United in Purpose. In 2019 he became a professor at Arizona Christian University in Phoenix, Arizona, where he also started the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University. He is also the senior research fellow for Christian ethics and Biblical worldview at Family Research Cou...
Go to Profile#13588
Thomas C. Oden
#13599
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Thomas Clark Oden was an American Methodist theologian and religious author. He is often regarded as the father of the paleo-orthodox theological movement and is considered to be one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. He was Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology and Ethics at Drew University in New Jersey from 1980 until his retirement in 2004.
Go to Profile#13589
Colin Firth
#13600
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Colin Andrew Firth is an English actor and producer. He was identified in the mid-1980s with the "Brit Pack" of rising young British actors, undertaking a challenging series of roles, including leading roles in A Month in the Country , Tumbledown and Valmont . His portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the 1995 television adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice led to widespread attention, and to roles in more prominent films such as The English Patient , Shakespeare in Love , The Importance of Being Earnest , Girl with a Pearl Earring , and Love Actually , co-starring as Mark Darcy in the roman...
Go to Profile#13590
Robert Leuci
#13601
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Robert Leuci was a detective with the New York City Police Department , known for his work exposing corruption in the police department and the criminal justice system. After retiring from the NYPD, he wrote novels, short stories, TV episodes, and a memoir of his years on the force. He taught and had residencies at over 40 universities and law schools. And at many US police departments and the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, he lectured on morality and ethics erosion. Leuci knew Frank Serpico, known for being the first officer to expose corruption within the police department ranks.
Go to Profile#13591
Niels Ferguson
#13602
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Niels T. Ferguson is a Dutch cryptographer and consultant who currently works for Microsoft. He has worked with others, including Bruce Schneier, designing cryptographic algorithms, testing algorithms and protocols, and writing papers and books. Among the designs Ferguson has contributed to is the AES finalist block cipher algorithm Twofish as well as the stream cipher Helix and the Skein hash function.
Go to Profile#13592
David Slepian
#13603
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
David S. Slepian was an American mathematician. He is best known for his work with algebraic coding theory, probability theory, and distributed source coding. He was colleagues with Claude Shannon and Richard Hamming at Bell Labs.
Go to Profile#13593
Robert Parish
#13604
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Robert Lee Parish is an American former professional basketball player. A 7'1" center, Parish played for four teams in the National Basketball Association from 1976 to 1997. During his 14-year tenure with the Boston Celtics, Parish teamed with Hall-of-Fame forwards Larry Bird and Kevin McHale to form one of the greatest front lines in NBA history.
Go to Profile#13594
Tommy Docherty
#13605
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Thomas Henderson Docherty , commonly known as The Doc, was a Scottish football player and manager. Docherty played for several clubs, most notably Preston North End, and represented Scotland 25 times between 1951 and 1959. He then managed a total of 13 clubs between 1961 and 1988, as well as the Scotland national team. Docherty was manager of Manchester United between 1972 and 1977, during which time they were relegated to the Second Division, but promoted back to the First Division as champions at the first attempt.
Go to Profile#13595
Bimal Krishna Matilal
#13606
Overall Influence
1935 - 1991 (56 years)
Bimal Krishna Matilal was an eminent philosopher whose writings presented the Indian philosophical tradition as a comprehensive system of logic incorporating most issues addressed by themes in Western philosophy. Born in Calcutta, he lived and worked in Calcutta, Harvard, Toronto and Oxford, where, from 1977 to 1991, he was the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religion and Ethics at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#13596
Tressie McMillan Cottom
#13607
Overall Influence
Tressie McMillan Cottom is an American writer, sociologist, and professor. She is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science and an affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is also an opinion columnist at The New York Times.
Go to Profile#13597
Jeremy Gray
#13608
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jeremy John Gray is an English mathematician primarily interested in the history of mathematics. Biography Gray studied mathematics at the University of Oxford from 1966 to 1969, and then at Warwick University, obtaining his PhD in 1980 under the supervision of Ian Stewart and David Fowler. He has worked at the Open University since 1974, and became a lecturer there in 1978. He also lectured at the University of Warwick from 2002 to 2017, teaching a course on the history of mathematics.
Go to Profile#13598
Paula Gunn Allen
#13609
Overall Influence
1939 - 2008 (69 years)
Paula Gunn Allen was an American poet, literary critic, activist, professor, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American, Arab-American, and Native American descent, she identified with her mother's people, the Laguna Pueblo. Gunn Allen wrote numerous essays, stories and poetry with Native American and feminist themes, and two biographies of Native American women. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary writing.
Go to Profile#13599
Kenneth Mellanby
#13610
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
Major Kenneth Mellanby was an English ecologist and entomologist. He received the OBE for his work on the scabies mite. Life and work lMellanby was educated at Barnard Castle School and then at King's College, Cambridge in Biology. He gained his PhD at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on the ability of parasites to survive desiccation. He then worked as a Sorby Research Fellow of the Royal Society in Sheffield.
Go to Profile#13600
Jan Hendrik van den Berg
#13611
Overall Influence
1914 - 2012 (98 years)
Jan Hendrik van den Berg was a Dutch psychiatrist notable for his work in phenomenological psychotherapy and metabletics, or "psychology of historical change." He is the author of numerous articles and books, including A different existence and The changing nature of man.
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