Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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Ranking

List of the most influential people

#13601

Janice Boddy

#13612

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Janice Boddy is a Canadian anthropologist. As Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Boddy specializes in medical anthropology, religion, gender issues, and colonialism in Sudan and the Middle East. She is the author or co-author of Wombs and Alien Spirits , Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl , and Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan .

#13602

Subhash Khot

#13613

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

#13603

Michael Burleigh

#13614

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Michael Burleigh is an English author and historian whose primary focus is on Nazi Germany and related subjects. He has also been active in bringing history to television. Early life Michael Burleigh was born on 3 April 1955. He was awarded a first class honours degree in medieval and modern history from University College London in 1977, winning the Pollard, Dolley and Sir William Mayer Prizes.

#13604

Thomas Sugrue

#13615

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Thomas J. Sugrue is an American historian of the 20th-century United States currently serving as a professor at New York University. From 1991 to 2015, he was the David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum. His areas of expertise include American urban history, American political history, housing and the history of race relations. He has published extensively on the history of liberalism and conservatism, on housing and real estate, on poverty and public policy, on civil rights, and on the ...

#13605

J. A. K. Tareen

J. A. K. Tareen

#13616

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Jalees Ahmed Khan Tareen, also known as J.A.K. Tareen, was born in Mysore, Karnataka, India in 1947. He was the vice-chancellor of B. S. Abdur Rahman University, in Chennai, India from 2013 to 31 March 2015. He was the recipient of the Padma Shri award 2009 for the Literature & Education given by the Government of India. He is one of the current advisory board member of South Asia Foundation from India.

#13606

Andrea Repetto

#13617

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Andrea Isabel Repetto Lisboa is a Chilean economist. She currently has a teaching position at the Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago. She holds a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master's degree in economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and an undergraduate degree in commercial engineering from the same university.

#13607

Jan Nattier

#13618

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Jan Nattier is an American scholar of Mahāyana Buddhism. Early life and education She earned her PhD in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies from Harvard University , and subsequently taught at the University of Hawaii , Stanford University , and Indiana University . She then worked as a research professor at the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University before retiring from her position there and beginning a series of visiting professorships at various universities in the U.S.

#13608

Nello Cristianini

#13619

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Nello Cristianini is a professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath. Education Cristianini holds a degree in physics from the University of Trieste, a Master in computational intelligence from the University of London and a PhD from the University of Bristol. Previously he has been a professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol, an associate professor at the University of California, Davis, and held visiting positions at other universities.

#13609

Maritza Montero

#13620

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Maritza Montero is a Venezuelan social psychologist and political scientist. She is a Professor and Program Director at the Central University of Venezuela. Her research focuses on community psychology, political psychology, and liberation psychology, with a particular focus on Latin America. She has been the President of the International Society of Political Psychology.

#13610

Bill Gates

#13621

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

William Henry Gates III is an American businessman, investor, philanthropist, and writer best known for co-founding the software giant Microsoft, along with his childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer , president, and chief software architect, while also being its largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He was a major entrepreneur of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

#13611

Martha E. Rogers

#13622

Overall Influence

1914 - 1994 (80 years)

Martha Elizabeth Rogers was an American nurse, researcher, theorist, and author. While professor of nursing at New York University, Rogers developed the "Science of Unitary Human Beings", a body of ideas that she described in her book An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing.

#13612

Frank Sesno

#13623

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Frank Sesno is an American journalist, former CNN correspondent, anchor, and Washington bureau chief. He is also author, and former director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University. Sesno is the creator and host of Planet Forward, a web-to-television show on PBS. Sesno is a Professor of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University. Sesno assumed the Director's role at the School of Media and Public Affairs in September 2009 and stepped down from the role in June 2020. In 2020, Sesno announced he would serve as the school’s director of strat...

#13613

Michael Hollingshead

#13624

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Michael Hollingshead was a British researcher who studied psychedelic drugs, including psilocybin and LSD, at Harvard University in the mid-20th century. He was the father of comedian Vanessa Hollingshead. He evangelized the use of LSD to many notable figures.

#13614

Simon Phipps

#13625

Overall Influence

Simon Phipps is a computer scientist and web and open source advocate. Phipps was instrumental in IBM's involvement in the Java programming language, founding IBM's Java Technology Center. He left IBM for Sun Microsystems in 2000, taking leadership of Sun's open source programme from Danese Cooper. Under Phipps, most of Sun's core software was released under open source licenses, including Solaris and Java.

#13615

Kanwal Ameen

#13626

Overall Influence

Kanwal Ameen is a Pakistani professor in information management. She has served as chairperson of the Department of Information Management , formerly the Department of Library and Information Science, and as director, directorate of external linkages. On 31 May 2019, Ameen was appointed to a four-year term as vice-chancellor of the University of Home Economics.

#13616

Gordon Rennie

#13627

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Gordon Rennie is a Scottish comics writer, responsible for White Trash: Moronic Inferno, as well as several comic strips for 2000 AD and novels for Warhammer Fantasy. In May 2008, he announced he was leaving comics to concentrate full-time on video games which "are more fun, pay better and have a brighter future". However, he has since written several new series for 2000 AD, Titan and others.

#13617

Gerald L. Neuman

#13628

Overall Influence

Gerald L. Neuman is J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School. He was previously Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence at Columbia Law School.

#13618

Adam Alter

#13629

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Adam Alter is a marketing author who also teaches at New York University Stern School of Business. Education and work Alter earned his Bachelor of Science from University of New South Wales and M.A. and Ph.D at Princeton University.

#13619

Richard Vedder

#13630

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Richard K. Vedder is an American economist, historian, author, and columnist. He is a professor emeritus of economics at Ohio University and senior fellow at The Independent Institute. Biography Vedder was born on November 5, 1940. He earned his bachelor's in economics in 1962 from Northwestern University in 1962 and his Ph.D in economics from the University of Illinois in 1965. He has since studied U.S. economic history, particularly as it relates to public policy. Some of his research has involved American immigration, economic issues in American education, and the interrelationship between...

#13620

David Der-wei Wang

#13631

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

David Der-wei Wang is a literary historian, critic, and the Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. He has written extensively on post-late Qing Chinese fiction, comparative literary theory, colonial and modern Taiwanese literature, diasporic literature, Chinese Malay literature, Sinophone literature, and Chinese intellectuals and artists in the 20th century. His notions such as "repressed modernities", "post-loyalism", and "modern lyrical tradition" are instrumental and widely discussed in the field of Chinese literary studies.

#13621

John Kihlstrom

#13632

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

John Frederick Kihlstrom is an American cognitive social psychologist. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he originally began teaching in 1997. In 2013, he was named the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science. He is known for his research on the unconscious mind. He was formerly the editor-in-chief of Psychological Science.

#13622

Paul Rodgers

#13633

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Paul Bernard Rodgers is an English-Canadian singer, songwriter and musician. He was the lead vocalist of numerous rock bands, including Free, Bad Company, the Firm and the Law. He has also performed as a solo artist, and collaborated with the remaining active members of Queen under the moniker Queen + Paul Rodgers, from 2004 until both parties parted ways in 2009. A poll in Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 55 on its list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time". In 2011 Rodgers received the British Academy's Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music.

#13623

Yu Lizhong

#13634

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Yu Lizhong was the first Chancellor of New York University Shanghai, having held this position from 2012 to 2020. Yu was awarded the title of Chancellor Emeritus of NYU Shanghai upon his retirement. Yu Lizhong joined NYU Shanghai from East China Normal University , where he served as president from 2006–2012. He also served as president of Shanghai Normal University prior to 2006.

#13624

Christopher Paolini

Christopher Paolini

#13635

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Christopher James Paolini is an American author and screenwriter. He is best known for The Inheritance Cycle, which consists of the books Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr, Inheritance, and the follow-up short story collection The Fork, the Witch and the Worm. His first science fiction novel, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, was published on September 15, 2020. He lives in Paradise Valley, Montana, where he wrote his first book.

#13625

Gavin Schmidt

#13636

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Gavin A. Schmidt is a British climatologist, climate modeler and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and co-founder of the award-winning climate science blog RealClimate.

#13626

Michael Devitt

#13637

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Michael Devitt is an Australian philosopher currently teaching at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in New York City. His primary interests include philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His current work involves the philosophy of linguistics, foundational issues in semantics, the semantics of definite descriptions and demonstratives, semantic externalism, and scientific realism.

#13627

Clemens Fuest

#13638

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Clemens Fuest is a German economist who has been President of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research and director of the Center for Economic Studies at the University of Munich since 2016. Career Between 2008 and 2013, Fuest was a professor of business taxation at the University of Oxford and Research Director of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, which is part of the Saïd Business School. In 2008, he served as a member of the Independent Expert Group to the Commission on Scottish Devolution. He was member and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors at the German Feder...

#13628

Risa L. Goluboff

#13639

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Risa Lauren Goluboff is an American lawyer and legal historian who serves as the 12th dean of the University of Virginia School of Law; she is the first woman to hold the position. She is also the Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law and a professor of history at the University of Virginia.

#13629

Ramzan Kadyrov

#13640

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov is a Russian politician and current Head of the Chechen Republic. He was formerly affiliated to the Chechen independence movement, through his father who was the separatist-appointed mufti of Chechnya. He is a colonel general in the Russian military.

#13630

Jack Wisdom

#13641

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Jack Wisdom is a Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. from Rice University in 1976 and his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1981. His research interests are the dynamics of the Solar System.

#13631

Guido Kroemer

#13642

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Guido Kroemer is a cell biologist who has made contributions to the understanding of the role of mitochondria in cell death. He is a member of multiple scientific academies in Europe and is one of the most highly cited authors in cell biology.

#13632

Ben van Berkel

#13643

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Ben van Berkel is a Dutch architect; founder and principal architect of the architectural practice UNStudio. With his studio he designed, among others, the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, the Moebius House in the Netherlands, the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, Arnhem Central Station, the Singapore University of Architecture and Design, Raffles City in Hangzhou and numerous other buildings.

#13633

Yohannes Haile-Selassie

Yohannes Haile-Selassie

#13644

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Yohannes Haile-Selassie Ambaye is an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist. An authority on pre-Homo sapiens hominids, he particularly focuses his attention on the East African Rift and Middle Awash valleys. He was curator of Physical Anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History from 2002 until 2021, and now is serving as the director of the Arizona State University Institute of Human Origins. Since founding the institute in 1981, he has been the third director after Donald Johanson and William Kimbel.

#13634

Mihir Rakshit

#13645

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Mihir Rakshit is an Indian economist, known for his work on fiscal, monetary and other policy, especially issues that concern developing economies. Originally from Chittagong, which is now in Bangladesh, he did his graduation from Presidency College, Calcutta and post-graduation from the University of Calcutta. He taught at the departments of Economics of The University of Calcutta, The University of Burdwan, Presidency College Calcutta, and Indian Statistical Institute Calcutta, as faculty. He also taught at Delhi School of Economics and Erasmus University Rotterdam, as visiting faculty. He served the Reserve Bank of India for two terms as a member of its central board of Directors.

#13635

Tim McGraw

#13646

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Samuel Timothy McGraw is an American country singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor. He has released 16 studio albums . 10 of those albums have reached number one on the Top Country Albums charts, with his 1994 breakthrough album Not a Moment Too Soon being the top country album of 1994. In total, McGraw's albums have produced 65 singles, 25 of which have reached number one on the Hot Country Songs or Country Airplay charts. Three of these singles – "It's Your Love", "Just to See You Smile", and "Live Like You Were Dying" – were respectively the top country songs of 1997, 1998, and 2004 according to Billboard Year-End.

#13636

David Makinson

#13647

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

David Clement Makinson , is an Australian mathematical logician living in London, England. Career Makinson began his studies at Sydney University in 1958 and was an associate of the Libertarian Society and Sydney Push. He is a Visiting Professor in the London School of Economics, University of London, and an associate member of the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée , École Polytechnique, Paris. He has held professorial rank positions in King's College London, University of London and in the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. From 1980 till 2001 he worked for UNESCO, Paris.

#13637

Peter Green

#13648

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (102 years)

Peter Morris Green is a British classical scholar and novelist noted for his works on the Greco-Persian Wars, Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age of ancient history, generally regarded as spanning the era from the death of Alexander in 323 BC up to either the date of the Battle of Actium or the death of Augustus in 14 AD. Green's most famous books are Alexander of Macedon, a historical biography first issued in 1970, then in a revised and expanded edition in 1974, which was first published in the United States in 1991; his Alexander to Actium, a general account of the Hellenistic Age, and other works.

#13638

Shana Poplack

#13649

Overall Influence

Shana Poplack, is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She is a leading proponent of variation theory, the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns, the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages, and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties, including African American vernacular English. She founded ...

#13639

Denis Sargan

#13650

Overall Influence

1924 - 1996 (72 years)

John Denis Sargan, FBA was a British econometrician who specialized in the analysis of economic time-series. Sargan was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire in 1924, and was educated at Doncaster Grammar School and St John's College, Cambridge. He made many contributions, notably in instrumental variables estimation, Edgeworth expansions for the distributions of econometric estimators, identification conditions in simultaneous equations models, asymptotic tests for overidentifying restrictions in homoskedastic equations and exact tests for unit roots in autoregressive and moving average models. At the LSE, Sargan was Professor of Econometrics from 1964–1984.

#13640

Sven Ivar Seldinger

#13651

Overall Influence

1921 - 1998 (77 years)

Sven Ivar Seldinger , was a radiologist from Mora Municipality, Sweden. In 1953, he introduced the Seldinger technique to obtain safe access to blood vessels and other hollow organss. Biography Sven Ivar Seldinger was born on 19 April 1921 in Dalarna, Sweden. He was born to a family who had long run the local Mora Mechanical Workshop. He first began his medical training in 1940 at the Karolinska Institute. After graduating medical school in 1948, he went on to specialize in radiology. While attending at the Karolinska Hospital he came up with an idea of how to administer a catheter that would be able to reach every human artery.

#13641

Stephen Jones

#13652

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Stephen Jones , is an American attorney who took on a series of high-profile civil rights cases beginning with his defense of a Vietnam War protester. Jones later represented Timothy McVeigh, and then the fraternity involved in the 2015 University of Oklahoma Sigma Alpha Epsilon racism incident.

#13642

Lynda Benglis

#13653

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Lynda Benglis is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India.

#13643

Holmes Rolston III

Holmes Rolston III

#13654

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Holmes Rolston III is a philosopher who is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. He is best known for his contributions to environmental ethics and the relationship between science and religion. Among other honors, Rolston won the 2003 Templeton Prize, awarded by Prince Philip in Buckingham Palace. He gave the Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, 1997–1998. He also serves on the Advisory Council of METI .

#13644

Mark Post

#13655

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Marcus Johannes "Mark" Post is a Dutch pharmacologist who is Professor of Vascular Physiology at Maastricht University and Professor of Angiogenesis in Tissue Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology. On 5 August 2013, he was the first in the world to present a proof of concept for cultured meat. In 2020, he was listed by Prospect as the ninth-greatest thinker for the COVID-19 era.

#13645

David Maybury-Lewis

#13656

Overall Influence

1929 - 2007 (78 years)

David Henry Peter Maybury-Lewis was a British anthropologist, ethnologist of lowland South America, activist for indigenous peoples' human rights, and professor emeritus of Harvard University. Born in Hyderabad, Sindh , Maybury-Lewis attended the University of Oxford, at which he earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree. In 1960, he joined the Harvard faculty, and was Edward C. Henderson Professor of Anthropology there from 1966 until he retired in 2004. His extensive ethnographic fieldwork was conducted primarily among indigenous peoples in central Brazil, which culminated in his ethnography among the Xavante, as well as post-modernist renditions.

#13646

Jon Bon Jovi

#13657

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

John Francis Bongiovi Jr. , known professionally as Jon Bon Jovi, is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist, and actor. He is best known as the founder and frontman of the rock band Bon Jovi, which was formed in 1983. He has released 15 studio albums with his band as well as two solo albums.

#13647

Robèrt Lafont

#13658

Overall Influence

1923 - 2009 (86 years)

Robèrt Lafont was a French intellectual from Provence. He was a linguist, an author, an historian, an expert in literature and a political theoretician. His name in French reads Robert Lafont. Biography Robèrt Lafont was professor emeritus at the Paul-Valéry University of Montpellier. A professional linguist, he was a polyglot, novelist, poet, playwright, essayist and a medievalist. A versatile writer, Lafont wrote nearly a hundred books in Occitan, French, Catalan and Italian. The wide scope of themes he explores includes the history of literature and of society, linguistics and sociolingui...

#13648

Robin Söderling

Robin Söderling

#13659

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Robin Bo Carl Söderling is a Swedish former professional tennis player. He reached a career-high Association of Tennis Professionals world No. 4 singles ranking on 15 November 2010. His career highlights include reaching two consecutive finals at the French Open in 2009 and 2010, and an ATP World Tour Masters 1000 title at the 2010 Paris Masters. He was the first player to defeat Rafael Nadal at the French Open. Söderling played his last professional match at only age 26 after contracting a lingering bout of mononucleosis.

#13649

Harold Cogger

#13660

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Harold George "Hal" Cogger is an Australian herpetologist. He was curator of reptiles and amphibians at the Australian Museum from 1960 to 1975, and Deputy Director of the museum from 1976 to 1995. He has written extensively on Australian herpetology, and was the first author to create a field guide for all Australian frogs and reptiles.

#13650

Albert Shanker

#13661

Overall Influence

1928 - 1997 (69 years)

Albert Shanker was president of the United Federation of Teachers from 1964 to 1985 and president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997. Early life Shanker was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side in New York City to a Russian Jewish immigrant family. As a toddler, his family moved to the Long Island City district in Queens.

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