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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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#13801

Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat

Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat

#13812

Overall Influence

1910 - 1999 (89 years)

Heinz Ludwig Fraenkel-Conrat was a biochemist, famous for his research on viruses. Early life Fraenkel-Conrat was born in Breslau/Germany. He was the son of Lili Conrat and Professor Ludwig Fraenkel, director of the Women's Clinic of the University of Breslau, Germany. His father, Ludwig Fraenkel, was a prominent gynecologist and medical researcher who published regarding endocrine function, social gynecology, and sexology during the first decades of the 20th century, and was one of the legion of scientists summarily dismissed from their positions by the Nazis.

#13802

Harry Kalas

#13813

Overall Influence

1936 - 2009 (73 years)

Harold Norbert Kalas was an American sportscaster, best known for his Ford C. Frick Award-winning role as lead play-by-play announcer for Major League Baseball 's Philadelphia Phillies, a position he held from 1971 until his death in 2009.

#13803

David Novak

#13814

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

David Novak, is a Jewish theologian, ethicist, and scholar of Jewish philosophy and law . He is an ordained Conservative rabbi and holds the J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies as Professor of the Study of Religion and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto since 1997. His areas of interest are Jewish theology, Jewish ethics and biomedical ethics, political theory , and Jewish-Christian relations.

#13804

Carlos Escudé

#13815

Overall Influence

1948 - 2021 (73 years)

Carlos Andrés Escudé Carvajal was an Argentine political scientist and author, who during the 1990s served as special advisor to foreign minister Guido di Tella. As such, he advised on Argentine foreign policy strategy vis-à-vis the Western powers particularly in the wake of the Falklands War.

#13805

Alain Bauer

#13816

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Alain Bauer is a French criminologist who has been a professor of criminology at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers since 2009. He is also a senior research fellow at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the China University of Political Science and Law . There were many protests in the scientific community in France against the appointment because he had not received a PhD.

#13806

Troy Duster

#13817

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Troy Smith Duster is an American sociologist with research interests in the sociology of science, public policy, race and ethnicity and deviance. He is a Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley, and professor of sociology and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University.

#13807

Lothar Matthäus

#13818

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Lothar Herbert Matthäus is a German football pundit, former professional football player and manager. After captaining West Germany to victory in the 1990 FIFA World Cup where he lifted the World Cup trophy, he was awarded the Ballon d'Or. In 1991, he was named the first FIFA World Player of the Year, and remains the only German to have received the award. He was also included in the Ballon d'Or Dream Team in 2020.

#13808

David Harker

#13819

Overall Influence

1906 - 1991 (85 years)

David Harker was an American medical researcher who according to The New York Times was "a pioneer in the use of X-rays to decipher the structure of critical substances in the life process of cells".

#13809

Wallace Clift

#13820

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

Wallace Bruce Clift, Jr. was an American priest and academic. He was the author of several books and articles in the field of the psychology of religion and a professor emeritus at the University of Denver, where he chaired the Department of Religion for many years. He lectured and gave workshops extensively in the United States, Australia, Europe, and Asia on such topics as Jungian psychology, Christian theology, pilgrimage, spiritual growth, dream interpretation, journaling, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Clift published six books, three of which were co-authored with his wife, the Re...

#13810

Henry Bond

#13821

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Henry Bond, FHEA is an English writer, photographer, and visual artist. In his Lacan at the Scene , Bond made contributions to theoretical psychoanalysis and forensics. In 1990, with Sarah Lucas, Bond organised the art exhibition East Country Yard Show, which was influential in the formation and development of the Young British Artists movement; together with Damien Hirst, Angela Bulloch, and Liam Gillick, the two were "the earliest of the YBAs."

#13811

Antonius Robben

Antonius Robben

#13822

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Antonius "Tony" Cornelis Gerardus Maria Robben is a Dutch cultural anthropologist and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. Career and fieldwork Robben received an M.A. in Sociology in 1976 and graduated cum laude with an M.Phil. in Anthropology in 1979 from the University of Amsterdam. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork between 1977 and 1978 among raft fishermen in the state of Alagoas, Brazil, under the supervision of Jeremy Boissevain and Bob Scholte. He received a Ph.D. in 1986 for his fieldwork from 1982 to 1983 on fishermen in Bahia, Brazil at the University of California, Berkeley.

#13812

Robert Arnott Wilson

#13823

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Robert Arnott Wilson is a retired mathematician in London, England, who is best known for his work on classifying the maximal subgroups of finite simple groups and for the work in the Monster group. He is also an accomplished violin, viola and piano player, having played as the principal viola in the Sinfonia of Birmingham. Due to a damaged finger, he now principally plays the kora.

#13813

Keith Campbell

#13824

Overall Influence

1954 - 2012 (58 years)

Keith Henry Stockman Campbell was a British biologist who was a member of the team at Roslin Institute that in 1996 first cloned a mammal, a Finnish Dorset lamb named Dolly, from fully differentiated adult mammary cells. He was Professor of Animal Development at the University of Nottingham. In 2008, he received the Shaw Prize for Medicine and Life Sciences jointly with Ian Wilmut and Shinya Yamanaka for "their works on the cell differentiation in mammals".

#13814

Jonathan Yudkin

#13825

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Jonathan Yudkin is an American multi-instrumentalist who is a proficient player of banjo, violin, mandolin, and other stringed instruments. He is a Nashville-based session musician, record producer, arranger, and band leader.

#13815

Larry Brown

#13826

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Lawrence Harvey Brown is an American basketball coach and former player who last served as an assistant coach for the Memphis Tigers. Brown is the only coach in basketball history to win both an NCAA national championship and an NBA title . He has a 1,275–965 lifetime professional coaching record in the American Basketball Association and the National Basketball Association and is the only coach in NBA history to lead eight teams to the playoffs. He also won an ABA championship as a player with the Oakland Oaks in the 1968–69 season, and an Olympic Gold Medal in 1964. He is also the only person ever to coach two NBA franchises in the same season .

#13816

Rüdiger Overmans

#13827

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Rüdiger Overmans is a German military historian who specializes in World War II history. His book German Military Losses in World War II, which he compiled as leader of a project sponsored by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, is one of the most comprehensive works about German casualties in World War II.

#13817

Jana Novotná

#13828

Overall Influence

1968 - 2017 (49 years)

Jana Novotná was a Czech professional tennis player. She played a serve and volley game, an increasingly rare style of play among women during her career. Novotná won the women's singles title at Wimbledon in 1998, and was runner-up in three other majorss. Novotná also won 12 major women's doubles titles , four major mixed doubles titles, and three Olympic medals. She reached a career-high singles ranking of world No. 2 in 1997, and held the No. 1 ranking in doubles for 67 weeks.

#13818

Thomas Eisner

#13829

Overall Influence

1929 - 2011 (82 years)

Thomas Eisner was a German-American entomologist and ecologist, known as the "father of chemical ecology." He was a Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology at Cornell University, and Director of the Cornell Institute for Research in Chemical Ecology . He was a world authority on animal behavior, ecology, and evolution, and, together with his Cornell colleague Jerrold Meinwald, was one of the pioneers of chemical ecology, the discipline dealing with the chemical interactions of organisms. He was author or co-author of some 400 scientific articles and seven books.

#13819

Jeremy Borash

#13830

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Jeremy Borash , is an American professional wrestling play-by-play commentator, announcer, ring announcer, booker, interviewer, and producer, currently working for WWE. He is known for his work in Impact Wrestling as a multifaceted staff member since the company's inception in 2002 until his departure in 2018. In March 2017, he was appointed as the lead play by play commentator for Impact Wrestling after being mentored by Mike Tenay for many years.

#13820

James Alan McPherson

James Alan McPherson

#13831

Overall Influence

1943 - 2016 (73 years)

James Alan McPherson was an American essayist and short-story writer. He was the first African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was included among the first group of artists who received a MacArthur Fellowship. At the time of his death, McPherson was a professor emeritus of fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

#13821

Kilnam Chon

#13832

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Kilnam Chon is a South Korean computer scientist. As a result of his contributions, South Korea became the second country in the world to have the IPv4 network , after the United States.<IEEE Communications Magazine, February 2013>

#13822

Philip Jackson

#13833

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Philip Henry Christopher Jackson CVO DL is a Scottish sculptor, noted for his modern style and emphasis on form. Acting as Royal Sculptor to Queen Elizabeth II, his sculptures appear in numerous UK cities, as well as Argentina and Switzerland.

#13823

Paul Addison

#13834

Overall Influence

1943 - 2020 (77 years)

Paul Addison was a British historian known for his research on the political history of Britain during the Second World War and the post-war period. Addison was part of the first generation of academic historians to study the conflict and is most notable for The Road to 1945 which traced the origins of the post-war consensus into the wartime period.

#13824

Elliot Tiber

#13835

Overall Influence

1935 - 2016 (81 years)

Elliot Michael Tiber was an artist, professor, and screenwriter who wrote a memoir about the Woodstock Festival held in Bethel, New York in 1969. He claimed responsibility for the relocation of the festival after a permit for it was withdrawn by the zoning board of a nearby town.

#13825

Choi Wonshik

#13836

Overall Influence

Choi Wonshik is an optical physicist researching deep-tissue imaging and imaging through scattering media. He is a full professor in the Department of Physics of Korea University where he serves as the associate director at the IBS Center for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics. Inside the Center, he leads the Super-depth Imaging Lab. He has been cited more than 4,000 times and has an h-index of 32. He is a fellow of The Optical Society and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology.

#13826

Gregory Abowd

#13837

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Gregory Dominic Abowd is a computer scientist best known for his work in ubiquitous computing, software engineering, and technologies for autism. He currently serves as the Dean of the College of Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. Previously he was the J.Z. Liang Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he joined the faculty in 1994.

#13827

Carlo H. Séquin

Carlo H. Séquin

#13838

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Carlo Heinrich Séquin is a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. Séquin is recognized as one of the pioneers in processor design. Séquin has worked with computer graphics, geometric modelling, and on the development of computer-aided design tools for circuit designers. He was born in Zurich, Switzerland.

#13828

Fadlo R. Khuri

#13839

Overall Influence

Fadlo R. Khuri , is a medical doctor and university administrator. He is the 16th and current president of the American University of Beirut. He assumed office in September 2015 and was inaugurated on January 25, 2016. Khuri was also a professor in the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Emory University School of Medicine and was the editor-in-chief of the medical journal Cancer.

#13829

Kurt Akeley

#13840

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Kurt Akeley is an American computer graphics engineer. Akeley was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2005 for contributions to the architecture of 3-D graphics systems and the definition of Open GL, now the industry standard.

#13830

Lennard J. Davis

Lennard J. Davis

#13841

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Lennard J. Davis, a nationally and internationally known American specialist in disability studies, is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Arts and Sciences, and also Professor of Disability and Human Development in the School of Applied Health Sciences and Professor of Medical Education in the University of Illinois College of Medicine.

#13831

Melvyn P. Leffler

Melvyn P. Leffler

#13842

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Melvyn Paul Leffler is an American historian and educator, currently Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Bancroft Prize for his book A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War, and the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for his book For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War.

#13832

Colin Masica

#13843

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Colin Paul Masica was an American linguist who was professor emeritus in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Besides being a specialist in Indo-Aryan languages, much of his work was on the typological convergence of languages belonging to different linguistic families in the South Asian area and beyond , more broadly on this phenomenon in general, and on possible explanations for it and implications of it in connection with both linguistic and cultural history.

#13833

Victor Scheinman

Victor Scheinman

#13844

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

Victor David Scheinman was an American pioneer in the field of robotics. He was born in Augusta, Georgia, where his father Léonard was stationed with the US Army. At the end of the war the family moved to Brooklyn and his father returned to work as a professor of psychiatry. His mother taught at a Hebrew school.

#13834

Hervé Le Bras

#13845

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Hervé Le Bras is a French demographer and historian. Early life Hervé Le Bras was born on June 6, 1943, in Paris, France. He graduated from the École Polytechnique. Career Le Bras did an internship in anthropology in Chad from 1966 to 1967. He was a statistician in neurolinguistics at the Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale from 1967 to 1970.

#13835

George Gobel

#13846

Overall Influence

1919 - 1991 (72 years)

George Leslie Goebel was an American humorist, actor, and comedian. He was best known as the star of his own weekly comedy variety television series, The George Gobel Show, on NBC from 1954 to 1959 and on CBS from 1959 to 1960 . He was also a familiar panelist on the NBC game show Hollywood Squares.

#13836

Tim Bollerslev

#13847

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Tim Peter Bollerslev is a Danish economist, currently the Juanita and Clifton Kreps Professor of Economics at Duke University. A fellow of the Econometric Society, Bollerslev is known for his ideas for measuring and forecasting financial market volatility and for the GARCH model.

#13837

Charles Moore

#13848

Overall Influence

1925 - 1993 (68 years)

Charles Willard Moore was an American architect, educator, writer, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and winner of the AIA Gold Medal in 1991. He is often labeled as the father of postmodernism. His work as an educator was important to a generation of American architects who read his books or studied with him at one of the several universities where he taught.

#13838

Robin Coombs

#13849

Overall Influence

1921 - 2006 (85 years)

Robert Royston Amos Coombs FRS FRCPath FRCP was a British immunologist, co-discoverer of the Coombs test used for detecting antibodies in various clinical scenarios, such as Rh disease and blood transfusion.

#13839

Johnny Adair

#13850

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

John Adair , better known as Johnny Adair or Mad Dog Adair, is an Ulster loyalist drug dealer and the former leader of the "C Company", 2nd Battalion Shankill Road, West Belfast Brigade of the Ulster Freedom Fighters . This was a cover name used by the Ulster Defence Association , a loyalist paramilitary organisation. In 2002 Adair was expelled from the organisation following a violent internal power struggle. Since 2003, he, his family and a number of supporters have been forced to leave Northern Ireland by the mainstream UDA.

#13840

Joan Higginbotham

Joan Higginbotham

#13851

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Joan Elizabeth Higginbotham is an electrical engineer and a former NASA astronaut. She flew aboard Space Shuttle Discovery mission STS-116 as a mission specialist and is the third African American woman to go into space, after Mae Jemison and Stephanie Wilson.

#13841

Rowland Evans

#13852

Overall Influence

1921 - 2001 (80 years)

Rowland Evans Jr. was an American journalist. He was known best for his decades-long syndicated column and television partnership with Robert Novak, a partnership that endured, if only by way of a joint subscription newsletter, until Evans's death.

#13842

John W. O'Malley

#13853

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

John William O'Malley was an American academic, Catholic historian, and Jesuit priest. He was a University Professor at Georgetown University, housed in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. O'Malley was a widely published expert on the religious history of Early Modern Europe, with specialities on the Council of Trent, the Second Vatican Council, and the First Vatican Council.

#13843

Abraham H. Haddad

#13854

Overall Influence

Abraham H. Haddad is an Israeli control theorist and the Henry and Isabelle Dever Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States. Haddad is known for his contributions to the theory of hybrid systems.

#13844

James Morris Blaut

#13855

Overall Influence

1927 - 2000 (73 years)

James Morris Blaut was an American professor of anthropology and geography at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His studies focused on the agricultural microgeography , cultural ecology, theory of nationalism, philosophy of science, historiography and the relations between the First and the Third World. He was a critic of Eurocentrism. Blaut was one of the most widely read authors in the field of geography.

#13845

John Perkins

#13856

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

John Perkins is an American author. His best known book is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man , in which Perkins describes playing a role in a process of economic colonization of Third World countries on behalf of what he portrays as a cabal of corporations, banks, and the United States government. The book's claims were contested by some involved parties. The book spent more than 70 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

#13846

John Tyler Bonner

#13857

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

John Tyler Bonner was an American biologist who was a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. He was a pioneer in the use of cellular slime molds to understand evolution and development over a career of 40 years and was one of the world's leading experts on cellular slime moulds. Arizona State University says that the establishment and growth of developmental-evolutionary biology owes a great debt to the work of Bonner's studies. His work is highly readable and unusually clearly written and his contributions have made many complicated ideas of...

#13847

Karen Leigh King

#13858

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Karen Leigh King is a historian of religion working in the field of Early Christianity, who is currently the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University, in the oldest endowed chair in the United States .

#13848

Cho-yun Hsu

#13859

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Cho-yun Hsu is a historian born in Xiamen, China, of Wuxi ancestry. His family moved to Taiwan after the Chinese Communist Revolution. He graduated from National Taiwan University and University of Chicago and held academic positions in Academia Sinica in Taiwan , before moving to University of Pittsburgh in 1970. He was elected as a Member of the Academica Sinica in 1980.

#13849

Valery Pokrovsky

#13860

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Valery Leonidovich Pokrovsky is a Soviet and Russian physicist. He is a member of the Landau Institute in Chernogolovka near Moscow in Russia and a Distinguished Professor of Theoretical Physics and holder of the William R. Thurman ’58 Chair in Physics at Texas A&M University. He has twice received the Landau Prize of the Soviet Academy of Science, in 1984 and in 2018.

#13850

Arnold Koller

#13861

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Arnold Koller is a Swiss professor and politician. He served as a member of the Federal Council from 1987 to 1999 for the Christian Democratic People's Party . Koller previously served as a member of the National Council from 1971 to 1986. He did also serve two terms of the as President of the Swiss Confederation in 1990 and 1997. He is primarily known for Lex Koller, a Swiss Federal Act on Acquisitions of Real Estate by Persons Abroad, which he initiated.

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