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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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Ranking

List of the most influential people

#13751

James Tully

#13762

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

James Hamilton Tully is a Canadian philosopher who is the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Law, Indigenous Governance and Philosophy at the University of Victoria, Canada. Tully is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Emeritus Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation.

#13752

Winfried Nöth

#13763

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Winfried Nöth is a German linguist and semiotician. After graduating from high school in 1963 in Brunswick, from 1965 to 1969 Nöth studied English, French and Portuguese in Münster, Geneva, Lisbon and Bochum, and in 1971 acquired his doctoral degrees at the Ruhr University Bochum. In Bochum he also habilitated in 1976 and became assistant to Walter A. Koch. After teaching in Bochum and Aachen, in 1978 he was appointed full professor in English Linguistics at the University of Kassel.

#13753

Helmut Hofer

#13764

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Helmut Hermann W. Hofer is a German-American mathematician, one of the founders of the area of symplectic topology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the recipient of the 1999 Ostrowski Prize and the 2013 Heinz Hopf Prize. Since 2009, he is a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He currently works on symplectic geometry, dynamical systems, and partial differential equations. His contributions to the field include Hofer geometry. Hofer was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

#13754

David Villa

#13765

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

David Villa Sánchez is a Spanish former professional footballer who played as a striker. Villa is regarded as one of the best strikers of his generation, and one of the greatest Spanish players of all time. He is currently working as the Technical Advisor and Head of Global Football Operations for Indian Super League club Odisha FC. He is the all-time top goalscorer for Spain.

#13755

Ben Kingsley

#13766

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Sir Ben Kingsley is an English actor. He has received various accolades throughout his career spanning five decades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, a Grammy Award, and two Golden Globe Awards. Kingsley was appointed Knight Bachelor in 2002 for services to the British film industry. In 2010, he was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2013, he received the Britannia Award for Worldwide Contribution to Filmed Entertainment.

#13756

Leonard Mandel

#13767

Overall Influence

1927 - 2001 (74 years)

Leonard Mandel was an American physicist who contributed to the development of theoretical and experimental modern optics and is widely considered one of the founding fathers of the field of quantum optics. With Emil Wolf he published the highly regarded book Optical Coherence and Quantum Optics.

#13757

Jonathan Koomey

#13768

Overall Influence

Jonathan Koomey is a researcher who identified a long-term trend in energy-efficiency of computing that has come to be known as Koomey's law. From 1984 to 2003, Dr. Koomey was at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he founded and led the End-Use Forecasting group, and has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Yale University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also been a lecturer and a consulting professor at Stanford and a lecturer at UC Berkeley. He is a graduate of Harvard University and University of California at Berkeley . His research focuses on...

#13758

Colin Pittendrigh

#13769

Overall Influence

1918 - 1996 (78 years)

Colin Stephenson Pittendrigh was a British-born biologist who spent most of his adult life in the United States. Pittendrigh is regarded as the "father of the biological clock," and founded the modern field of chronobiology alongside Jürgen Aschoff and Erwin Bünning. He is known for his careful descriptions of the properties of the circadian clock in Drosophila and other species, and providing the first formal models of how circadian rhythms entrain to local light-dark cycles.

#13759

Whitney K. Newey

#13770

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Whitney Kent Newey is the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a well-known econometrician. He is best known for developing, with Kenneth D. West, the Newey–West estimator, which robustly estimates the covariance matrix of a regression model when errors are heteroskedastic and autocorrelated.

#13760

Patrick Roy

#13771

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Patrick Jacques Roy is a Canadian professional ice hockey coach and former goaltender and executive, who previously served as the head coach for the Quebec Remparts of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League . In 2017, Roy was named one of the 100 Greatest NHL Players in history and was hailed in sports media as "king of goaltenders".

#13761

Malcolm W. Klein

#13772

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Malcolm Klein is a criminologist, researcher, theorist, retired professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, and the author of his book The American Street Gang. In addition, he continued to publish eighteen other books and more than fifty articles that are based on his research on gangs.

#13762

Anthony Quinton

#13773

Overall Influence

1925 - 2010 (85 years)

Anthony Meredith Quinton, Baron Quinton, FBA was a British political and moral philosopher, metaphysician, and materialist philosopher of mind. He served as President of Trinity College, Oxford from 1978 to 1987; and as chairman of the board of the British Library from 1985 to 1990. He is also remembered as a presenter of the BBC Radio programme, Round Britain Quiz.

#13763

Philip J. Landrigan

Philip J. Landrigan

#13774

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Philip John Landrigan , is an American epidemiologist and pediatrician and one of the world's leading advocates of children's health. His work has been recognized by national non-profit organization Healthy Child Healthy World and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency , and he is included in New York Magazine's list of "Best Doctors 2008."

#13764

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari

#13775

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (38 years)

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is a Pakistani politician who served as the 37th Minister of Foreign Affairs, in office from 27 April 2022 to 10 August 2023. He became the chairman of Pakistan People's Party in 2007, following his mother's assassination. Bilawal belongs to the Bhutto family, a prominent political family of Pakistan and is the son of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and former President Asif Ali Zardari, and the grandson of former President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. When questioned about nepotism and dynastic politics in Pakistan in an interview with CNN, Bilawal famously stated "I didn't chose this life, it chose me".

#13765

Cansu Canca

#13776

Overall Influence

Cansu Canca is a moral and political philosopher, with a Ph.D. specializing in applied ethics, and founder and director of AI Ethics Lab. Formerly, she was a bioethicist at the University of Hong Kong, and an ethics researcher at Harvard Law School, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, National University of Singapore, Osaka University, and the World Health Organization.

#13766

Frank Ackerman

#13777

Overall Influence

1946 - 2019 (73 years)

Francis Hopkirk Ackerman was an American economist known for his work in environmental economics, particularly in the areas of climate change and development. He is also known as a founder of the magazine Dollars & Sense.

#13767

Ken Griffey Jr.

#13778

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

George Kenneth Griffey Jr. , nicknamed "Junior" and "the Kid", is an American former professional baseball outfielder who played 22 years in Major League Baseball . He spent most of his career with the Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds, along with a short stint with the Chicago White Sox. A member of the Baseball Hall of Fame and a 13-time All-Star, Griffey is one of the most prolific home run hitters in baseball history; his 630 home runs rank as the seventh-most in MLB history. Griffey was also an exceptional defender and won 10 Gold Glove Awards in center field. He is tied for the record...

#13768

Hans-Dietrich Genscher

#13779

Overall Influence

1927 - 2016 (89 years)

Hans-Dietrich Genscher was a German statesman and a member of the liberal Free Democratic Party , who served as Federal Minister of the Interior from 1969 to 1974, and as Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs and Vice Chancellor of Germany from 1974 to 1992 , making him the longest-serving occupant of either post and the only person to have held one of these positions under two different Chancellorss of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1991 he was chairman of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe .

#13769

Steve Nathan

#13780

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Steven Jay Nathan is an American keyboardist. He is known for his session work in Muscle Shoals and Nashville studios. Biography Nathan was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. In 1977, Nathan moved to Muscle Shoals, Alabama. After touring with LeBlanc and Carr, he participated in the recording of Lenny LeBlanc’s first solo record. For the next 14 years, Steve played on records produced by Rick Hall at FAME Studios, often teaming with Roger Hawkins on drums and David Hood on bass.

#13770

Irshad Hussain

#13781

Overall Influence

Irshad Hussain is a Pakistani Scientist in the field of chemistry and among the few pioneers to initiate nanomaterials research in Pakistan. He is among the founding faculty members of SBA School of Science & Engineering and played a key role to lead the development of Chemistry Department at Lahore University of Management Sciences . He is a Tenured Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, SBA School of Science & Engineering, Lahore University of Management Sciences, and has previously also served as a Professor of Renewable Energy Engineering at the US–Pakistan Cen...

#13771

Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff

#13782

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Michael Grant Ignatieff is a Canadian author, academic and former politician who served as the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011. Known for his work as a historian, Ignatieff has held senior academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Toronto. Most recently, he was rector and President of Central European University; he held this position from 2016 until July 2021.

#13772

D. J. Finney

#13783

Overall Influence

1917 - 2018 (101 years)

David John Finney , was a British statistician and Professor Emeritus of Statistics at the University of Edinburgh. He was Director of the Agricultural Research Council's Unit of Statistics from 1954 to 1984 and a former President of the Royal Statistical Society and of the Biometric Society. He was a pioneer in the development of systematic monitoring of drugs for detection of adverse reactions. He turned 100 in January 2017 and died on 12 November 2018 at the age of 101 following a short illness.

#13773

James W. Carey

#13784

Overall Influence

1934 - 2006 (72 years)

James William Carey was an American communication theorist, media critic, and a journalism instructor at the University of Illinois, and later at Columbia University. He was a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors from 1995 to 2002. He died in 2006 at age 71. Carey is credited with developing the ritual view of communication.

#13774

Judith N. Shklar

#13785

Overall Influence

1928 - 1992 (64 years)

Judith Nisse Shklar was a philosopher and political theorist who studied the history of political thought, notably that of the Enlightenment period. She was appointed the John Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University in 1980.

#13775

H. Bentley Glass

#13786

Overall Influence

1906 - 2005 (99 years)

Hiram Bentley Glass was an American geneticist and noted columnist. Career Born in China to missionary parents, he attended college at Baylor University in Texas. He then furthered his education at the University of Texas, where he received his Ph.D. degree under the mentorship of geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller. His first major academic appointment was at Johns Hopkins University, at which time he was also a regular columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper. He taught at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri and at Goucher College in Maryland before joining the faculty at Johns Hop...

#13776

John Guerin

#13787

Overall Influence

1939 - 2004 (65 years)

John Payne Guerin was an American percussionist. He was a proponent of the jazz-rock style. Biography Guerin was born in Hawaii and raised in San Diego. As a young drummer, he began performing with Buddy DeFranco in 1960. In the late 1960s, he moved to Los Angeles where his drum work was utilized by artists including Frank Sinatra, The Beach Boys, George Harrison, Frank Zappa, The Animals, Joni Mitchell, Them, Thelonious Monk, Lou Rawls, Ray Conniff, George Shearing, Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald, Linda Ronstadt, Nelson Riddle and many others.

#13777

Moshe Prywes

#13788

Overall Influence

1914 - 1998 (84 years)

Moshe Prywes was a Polish-Israeli physician and educator. He was the first President of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev . Biography Prywes was born in Warsaw, Poland. He studied medicine for two years at the University of Tours in France, and graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1939.

#13778

Ashton Kutcher

#13789

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Christopher Ashton Kutcher is an American actor, producer and entrepreneur. Kutcher began his acting career portraying Michael Kelso in the Fox sitcom That '70s Show . He made his film debut in the romantic comedy Coming Soon , followed by the comedy film Dude, Where's My Car? , which was a box office success. In 2003, Kutcher starred in the romantic comedies Just Married and My Boss's Daughter. That year, he created and produced the television series Punk'd, also serving as host for the first eight of its ten seasons. Kutcher starred in the science fiction film The Butterfly Effect and had ...

#13779

Tan Jiazhen

#13790

Overall Influence

1909 - 2008 (99 years)

Tan Jiazhen , also known as C. C. Tan, was a Chinese geneticist. He was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of United States National Academy of Sciences. Tan was a main founder of modern Chinese genetics.

#13780

José Manuel Barroso

#13791

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

José Manuel Durão Barroso is a Portuguese politician, lobbyist and university teacher, he previously served as non-executive chairman of Goldman Sachs International. He previously served as the 11th president of the European Commission and the 115th prime minister of Portugal.

#13781

April Greiman

#13792

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

April Greiman is an American designer widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. Greiman is also credited, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers, with helping to import the European New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s." According to design historian Steven Heller, “April Greiman was a bridge between the modern and postmodern, the analog and the digital.” “She is a pivotal proponent of the ‘new typography’ and new wave that defined late twentieth-century graphic design.” Her art combines her Swiss design t...

#13782

Anthony Shorrocks

#13793

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Anthony F. Shorrocks is a British development economist. Academic career Between January 2001 and April 2009 he was Director of UNU-WIDER. Prior to that he was Professor at the London School of Economics and before that he worked at the University of Essex. He has also had several visiting appointments in the US, Canada, Italy, and Russia.

#13783

Mark Messier

#13794

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Mark John Douglas Messier is a Canadian former professional ice hockey centre. His playing career in the National Hockey League lasted 25 years with the Edmonton Oilers, New York Rangers, and Vancouver Canucks. He also played professionally with the World Hockey Association 's Indianapolis Racers and Cincinnati Stingers. He also played a short four-game stint in the original Central Hockey League with the Houston Apollos in 1979. He was the last WHA player to be active in professional ice hockey, and the last active player in any of the major North American professional sports leagues to have played in the 1970s.

#13784

Thomas F. Torrance

Thomas F. Torrance

#13795

Overall Influence

1913 - 2007 (94 years)

Thomas Forsyth Torrance , commonly referred to as T. F. Torrance, was a Scottish Protestant theologian and minister. He was a member of the famed Torrance family of theologians. Torrance served for 27 years as professor of Christian dogmatics at New College, in the University of Edinburgh. He is best known for his pioneering work in the study of science and theology, but he is equally respected for his work in systematic theology.

#13785

James Traub

#13796

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

James Traub is an American journalist. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, where he has worked since 1998. From 1994 to 1997, he was a staff writer for The New Yorker. He has also written for The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review and Foreign Affairs. He is a senior fellow at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University and also teaches at the university.

#13786

Peter Latz

#13797

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Peter Latz is a German landscape architect and a professor for landscape architecture at the Technical University of Munich. He is best known for his emphasis on reclamation and conversion of former industrialized landscapes. Retired today, he was an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and was also a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

#13787

Alexander Shapiro

#13798

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Alexander Shapiro is an A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor in H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He was editor-in-chief of the journal Mathematical Programming, Series A and was an area editor of the journal Operations Research. Shapiro graduated with M.Sc. degree in mathematics from Moscow State University in 1971 and ten years later got his Ph.D. in applied mathematics and statistics from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

#13788

Robert Kurz

#13799

Overall Influence

1943 - 2012 (69 years)

Robert Kurz was a German philosopher, social critic, journalist and editor of the journal Exit! He was one of Germany's most prominent theorists of value criticism. Life and work Robert Kurz was born on 24 December 1943 in Nuremberg to a German working-class family. During his military service he was involved in pacifist propaganda and participated in the "Ostermärschen," protest marches against atomic weapons in the 1960s. Kurz studied philosophy, history and paedagogy at the university of Erlangen without taking a degree. He participated in the "student revolt" in 1968 and took part in the intense discussions within the New Left.

#13789

Philippe Taquet

Philippe Taquet

#13800

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Philippe Taquet is a French paleontologist who specializes in dinosaur systematics of finds primarily in northern Africa. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences since November 30, 2004, president since 2012. He has studied and described a number of new dinosaur species from Africa, especially from the Aptian site of Gadoufaoua in Niger . He also researches the Lower Cretaceous stratigraphic relationship between western Africa and Brazil by reconstructing the paleobiology from fossil floras and faunas. He was president of the French National Museum of Natural History from 1985 to 1...

#13790

Robert M. Graham

#13801

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Robert M. Graham was a cybersecurity researcher computer scientist and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was born to a Scottish emigrant. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Michigan. While working at the UofM's Computing Center he co-authored two compilers, GAT for the IBM 650 and MAD for the IBM 704/709/7090.

#13791

Yasunori Nomura

Yasunori Nomura

#13802

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Yasunori Nomura is a theoretical physicist working on particle physics, quantum gravity, and cosmology. He is a professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley, a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a senior research scientist at Riken, and an affiliate member at Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe. Since 2015, he has been the director of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics.

#13792

Richard Reeves

#13803

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Richard Furman Reeves was an American writer, syndicated columnist, and lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Life and career Reeves was born in 1936 in New York City, the son of Dorothy , an actress, and Furman W. Reeves, a judge in Hudson County, New Jersey. He received his Mechanical Engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1960. After graduation, he spent a year working as an engineer for Ingersoll-Rand, after which he moved to journalism. From 1961–1965, Reeves co-founded and worked for the Phillipsbu...

#13793

Timothy Sands

#13804

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Timothy D. Sands is an American materials engineer, researcher and the 16th president of Virginia Tech. Sands previously served as the acting president and as the provost of Purdue University. Education Sands earned his B.S. with Highest Honors in Engineering Physics in 1980, his M.S. in Material Science and Engineering in 1981, and his Ph.D. in Material Science and Engineering in 1984, all from the University of California, Berkeley.

#13794

Costanzo Preve

#13805

Overall Influence

1943 - 2013 (70 years)

Costanzo Preve was an Italian philosopher and a political theoretician. Preve is widely considered one of the most important anti-capitalist European thinkers and a renowned expert in the history of Marxism. His thought is based on the Ancient Greek and idealistic tradition philosophy under the influence of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx. He is author of many essays and volumes about philosophical interpretation, communitarianism and universalism.

#13795

Antony Valentini

#13806

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Antony Valentini is a theoretical physicist known for his work on the foundations of quantum physics. Education and career Valentini obtained an undergraduate degree from Cambridge University, then earned his Ph.D. in 1992 with Dennis Sciama at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. In 1999, after seven years in Italy, he took up a post-doc grant to work at the Imperial College with Lee Smolin and Christopher Isham.

#13796

Edwin Lemert

#13807

Overall Influence

1912 - 1996 (84 years)

Edwin M. Lemert was a sociology professor at the University of California. Lemert was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He acquired his bachelor's degree in sociology from Miami University and his doctorate from Ohio State University . He distinctly specialized in sociology and anthropology. For a short period of time he became a professor at Kent State and at Western Michigan Universities.

#13797

Liz Truss

#13808

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Mary Elizabeth Truss is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from September to October 2022. On her fiftieth day in office, she stepped down amid a government crisis, making her the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. The member of Parliament for South West Norfolk since 2010, Truss previously held various Cabinet positions under three prime ministersDavid Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnsonlastly as foreign secretary from 2021 to 2022.

#13798

Martin Theodore Orne

#13809

Overall Influence

1927 - 2000 (73 years)

Martin Theodore Orne was a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Orne is best known for his pioneering research into demand characteristics, illustrating the weakness of informing participants that they are taking part in a psychology experiment and yet expecting them to act normally. He was well known as a researcher in the field of hypnosis and is also noted for his involvement with the poet Anne Sexton, and with the trials of Patty Hearst and Kenneth Bianchi.

#13799

Kim B. Clark

#13810

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Kim Bryce Clark is an American scholar, educator, and religious leader who has been a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since April 2015, and was the church's seventeenth Commissioner of Church Education from 2015 to 2019. He served previously as the 15th president of Brigham Young University–Idaho from 2005 to 2015, and as the dean of the Harvard Business School from 1995 to 2005, where he was also the George F. Baker Professor of Business Administration.

#13800

Bimal Kumar Roy

#13811

Overall Influence

Bimal Kumar Roy is a former Director of the Indian Statistical Institute. He is a cryptologist from the Cryptology Research Group of the Applied Statistics Unit of ISI, Kolkata. He received a Ph.D. in Combinatorics and Optimization in 1982 from the University of Waterloo under the joint supervision of Ronald C. Mullin and Paul Jacob Schellenberg.

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