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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List of the most influential people

#13901

Franco Zeffirelli

#13912

Overall Influence

1923 - 2019 (96 years)

Gian Franco Corsi Zeffirelli was an Italian stage and film director, producer, production designer and politician. He was one of the most significant opera and theatre directors of the post–World War II era, gaining both acclaim and notoriety for his lavish stagings of classical works, as well as his film adaptations of the same. A member of the Forza Italia party, he served as the Senator for Catania between 1994 and 2001.

#13902

Benjamin Elazari Volcani

#13913

Overall Influence

1915 - 1999 (84 years)

Benjamin Elazari Volcani was an Israeli microbiologist who discovered life in the Dead Sea and pioneered biological silicon research at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

#13903

Alexander Pruss

#13914

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Alexander Robert Pruss is a Canadian philosopher and mathematician. He is currently a professor of philosophy and the co-director of graduate studies in philosophy at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

#13904

James K. Baker

#13915

Overall Influence

James K. Baker and his wife Janet M. Baker are the co-founders of Dragon Systems. Together they are credited with the creation of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. James Baker is an expert in speech recognition technology and a Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

#13905

Christopher DeMuth

Christopher DeMuth

#13916

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Christopher C. DeMuth is an American lawyer and a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, as well as director of the National Conservatism conference organized by the Edmund Burke Society. He was the president of the American Enterprise Institute , a conservative think tank, from 1986 to 2008. DeMuth is widely credited with reviving AEI's fortunes after its near-bankruptcy in 1986 and leading the institute to new levels of influence and growth. Before joining AEI, DeMuth worked on regulatory issues in the Ronald Reagan administration.

#13906

Steve Lillywhite

Steve Lillywhite

#13917

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Stephen Alan Lillywhite, is a British record producer. Since he began his career in 1977, Lillywhite has been credited on over 500 records, and has collaborated with a variety of musicians including new wave acts XTC, Big Country, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Simple Minds, the Psychedelic Furs, Toyah, David Byrne, Talking Heads and Kirsty MacColl, as well as U2, the Rolling Stones, the Pogues, Blue October, Steel Pulse, the La's, Peter Gabriel, Morrissey, the Killers, Dave Matthews Band, Phish, Counting Crows and Joan Armatrading. He has won six Grammy Awards, including Producer of the Year, Non-Classical in 2006.

#13907

Anthony Bradley

#13918

Overall Influence

Anthony B. Bradley is an American author and professor of religion, theology and ethics at the King's College in New York City, where he also serves as the chair of the Religious and Theological Studies program and directs the Galsworthy Criminal Justice Reform Program. He is also a research fellow for The Acton Institute.

#13908

Arpad Vass

#13919

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Arpad Alexander Vass is a research scientist and forensic anthropologist. He is also a teaching associate with the Law Enforcement Innovation Center, which is part of the University of Tennessee's Institute for Public Service.

#13909

Andrei Oișteanu

Andrei Oișteanu

#13920

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Andrei Oișteanu is a Romanian historian of religions and mentalities, ethnologist, cultural anthropologist, literary critic and novelist. Specialized in the history of religions and mentalities, he is also noted for his investigation of rituals and magic and his work in Jewish studies and the history of antisemitism. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, he also became noted for his articles and essays on the Holocaust in Romania.

#13910

Berni Alder

#13921

Overall Influence

1925 - 2020 (95 years)

Berni Julian Alder was a German-born American physicist specialized in statistical mechanics, and a pioneer of computational modelling of matter. Biography Alder was born in Duisburg, Prussia, in September 1925, to Jewish parents, a chemist and a homemaker. After the Nazis came to power, the family moved to Zurich, Switzerland. Fearing an invasion by Nazi Germany after the outbreak of World War II, the family applied for a visa to the United States, which was granted in 1941. They left by sealed train from neutral Switzerland to Spain, then to Portugal, where they took a ship to the US. Foll...

#13911

Shimon Sakaguchi

Shimon Sakaguchi

#13922

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Shimon Sakaguchi is an immunologist and a Distinguished Professor of Osaka University. He is best known for the discovery of regulatory T cells and to describe their role in the immune system. This discovery is used in the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases.

#13912

Vojtěch Rödl

#13923

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Vojtěch Rödl is a Czech American mathematician, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor at Emory University. He is noted for his contributions mainly to combinatorics having authored hundreds of research papers.

#13913

Per-Olov Löwdin

#13924

Overall Influence

1916 - 2000 (84 years)

Per-Olov Löwdin was a Swedish physicist, professor at the University of Uppsala from 1960 to 1983, and in parallel at the University of Florida until 1993. A former graduate student under Ivar Waller, Löwdin formulated in 1950 the symmetric orthogonalization scheme for atomic and molecular orbital calculations, greatly simplifying the tight-binding method. This scheme is the basis of the zero-differential overlap approximation used in semiempirical theories. In 1956 he introduced the canonical orthogonalization scheme, which is optimal for eliminating approximate linear dependencies of a basis set.

#13914

Utz Claassen

#13925

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Utz Claassen is a German manager, management consultant, entrepreneur, investor and author. He has held senior management positions in some of Germany’s most prominent companies such as Volkswagen and EnBW.

#13915

Hans-Peter Seidel

#13926

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Hans-Peter Seidel is a computer graphics researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and Saarland University. Education and career Hans-Peter Seidel earned his doctorate degree in mathematics at the University of Tübingen in 1987, under the supervision of Rainer Löwen; his dissertation was entitled "Symmetrische Strukturen und Zentralkollineationen auf topologischen Ebenen". In 1989, still at Tübingen University, he earned a habilitation degree in computer science. Since 1999, he has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science and a professor at Saarland University.

#13916

Joseph Berger

#13927

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (102 years)

Joseph Berger is an American sociologist and social psychologist best known for co-founding expectation states theory. Expectation states theory explains how individuals use social information about one another to create informal status hierarchies in small groups. Researchers have used this program to develop interventions that counteract the disadvantages faced most notably by black students in the classroom and women leaders in the workplace. Social scientists have also applied this work to study hiring bias against mothers and discrimination against loan applicants among other topics.

#13917

Elena Cattaneo

#13928

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Elena Cattaneo is an Italian pharmacologist and co-founding director of the University of Milan's Center for Stem Cell Research. She is an internationally prominent Huntington's disease researcher and stem cell research advocate. She is internationally recognised for her major commitment to research ethics and research policy, and for increasing knowledge and engagement in research among the general public.

#13918

Robert Burchfield

#13929

Overall Influence

1923 - 2004 (81 years)

Robert William Burchfield CNZM, CBE was a lexicographer, scholar, and writer, who edited the Oxford English Dictionary for thirty years to 1986, and was chief editor from 1971. Education and career Born in Whanganui, New Zealand, he studied at Wanganui Technical College and Victoria University in Wellington. After war service in the Royal Regiment of New Zealand Artillery, he graduated MA from Wellington in 1948 and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford University, in England, where he was tutored by C. S. Lewis. He became a Fellow of Magdalen and lecturer in English straight after graduating , subsequently moving colleges to Christ Church and St Peter's .

#13919

Richard M. Daley

Richard M. Daley

#13930

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Richard Michael Daley is an American politician who served as the 54th mayor of Chicago, Illinois, from 1989 to 2011. Daley was elected mayor in 1989 and was reelected five times until declining to run for a seventh term. At 22 years, his was the longest tenure in Chicago mayoral history, surpassing the 21-year stay of his father, Richard J. Daley.

#13920

James J. Martin

#13931

Overall Influence

1916 - 2004 (88 years)

James J. Martin was an American historian and author known for espousing Holocaust denial in his works. He is known for his book, American Liberalism and World Politics, 1931–1941 . Fellow Holocaust denier Harry Elmer Barnes called it "unquestionably the most formidable achievement of World War II Revisionism."

#13921

Govind Swarup

#13932

Overall Influence

1929 - 2020 (91 years)

Govind Swarup was a pioneer in radio astronomy. In addition to research contributions in multiple areas of astronomy and astrophysics, he was a driving force behind the building of "ingenious, innovative and powerful observational facilities for front-line research in radio astronomy".

#13922

Gabriel Batistuta

#13933

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Gabriel Omar Batistuta is an Argentine former professional footballer. During his playing career, Batistuta was nicknamed Batigol as well as El Ángel Gabriel . Regarded as one of the greatest strikerss of his generation, noted in particular for powerful strikes from volleys or from distance while on the run, in 1999, Batistuta placed third for the FIFA World Player of the Year award. In 2004, he was named by Pelé in the FIFA 100 list of the world's greatest living players.

#13923

John McCormick

#13934

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

John McCormick is Jean Monnet Chair of European Union Politics at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis , and was department chair from 2001 until 2008. He spent eight years working in the environmental movement before becoming an academic. His research and teaching interests have moved from environmental policy to comparative politics and the politics and policies of the European Union.

#13924

Jan Ullrich

#13935

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Jan Ullrich is a German former professional road bicycle racer. Ullrich won gold and silver medals in the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. He won the 1999 Vuelta a España and the HEW Cyclassics in front of a home crowd in Hamburg in 1997. He had podium finishes in the hilly classic Clásica de San Sebastián. His victorious ride in the 1997 Tour de France led to a bicycle boom in Germany. He retired in February 2007.

#13925

Sheldon Solomon

#13936

Overall Influence

Sheldon Solomon is an American social psychologist. He is a professor of psychology at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Solomon is best known for developing terror management theory, along with Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski. This theory is concerned with how humans deal with their own sense of mortality.

#13926

Ben Fry

#13937

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Benjamin Fry is an American designer who has expertise in data visualization. Early life and education Fry was born in 1975 in Ann Arbor, Michigan . Fry received his BFA in Communication Design, minor in Computer Science at the Carnegie Mellon University. He received Master and Ph.D. degrees from the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab, under the direction of John Maeda. His doctoral dissertation, "Computational Information Design" introduces the seven stages of visualizing data: acquiring, parsing, filtering, mining, representing, refining and interacting.

#13927

Betty White

#13938

Overall Influence

1922 - 2021 (99 years)

Betty Marion Ludden was an American actress, comedian and producer. A pioneer of early television with a career spanning almost seven decades, she was noted for her vast television appearances acting in sitcoms, sketch comedy, and game shows. She produced and starred in the series Life with Elizabeth , thus becoming the first woman to produce a sitcom.

#13928

Selmer M. Johnson

#13939

Overall Influence

1916 - 1996 (80 years)

Selmer Martin Johnson was an American mathematician, a researcher at the RAND Corporation. Biography Johnson was born on May 21, 1916, in Buhl, Minnesota. He earned a B.A. and then an M.A. in mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1938 and 1940 respectively. World War II interrupted Johnson's mathematical studies: he enlisted in the United States Air Force, earning the rank of major. While serving, he also earned an M.S. in meteorology from New York University in 1942. After the war, Johnson returned to graduate study in mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, ...

#13929

David Carr

#13940

Overall Influence

1956 - 2015 (59 years)

David Michael Carr was an American columnist, author, and newspaper editor. He wrote the Media Equation column and covered culture for The New York Times. Early life David Michael Carr was born on September 8, 1956 in Minneapolis, to Joan Laura Carr , a local community leader, and John Lawrence Carr. He had three brothers and three sisters and grew up in the suburb of Minnetonka. He attended the University of Wisconsin–River Falls and the University of Minnesota; he graduated from the latter with a degree in psychology and journalism.

#13930

David Tennant

#13941

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

David John Tennant is a Scottish actor. He was the tenth incarnation of the Doctor in the sci-fi series Doctor Who , returning to the show as the fourteenth incarnation of the character in 2022. His other notable screen roles include DI Alec Hardy in the crime drama series Broadchurch , Kilgrave in the superhero series Jessica Jones , and Crowley in the fantasy series Good Omens .

#13931

Henry Riecken

#13942

Overall Influence

1917 - 2012 (95 years)

Henry William Riecken was an American psychologist. Biography Riecken was born on November 11, 1917, and was raised in Brooklyn. He obtained a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1939, and completed a master's degree in psychology from the University of Connecticut in 1941. Following his service in the United States Army Air Forces in the midst of World War II, Riecken earned a doctorate from the Harvard University Department of Social Relations in 1949. He began teaching at Harvard upon finishing his doctoral studies and later joined the University of Minnesota faculty. Riecken left Minnesota for Washington, D.

#13932

Siavash Teimouri

Siavash Teimouri

#13943

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Siavash Teimouri is an Iranian architect, artist and scholar. Born in Tehran, Iran, he graduated from the College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran with the highest mark under the supervision of Hooshang Seyhoun. He was then granted a scholarship to pursue his education in France in 1962, where he studied at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and graduated with a Diploma of Architecture in 1969 under the supervision of Le Corbusier. He worked with world-class architects of his time and received the French Association Architects' Prize in 1967. He is a member of the French Society of...

#13933

Fats Domino

#13944

Overall Influence

1928 - 2017 (89 years)

Antoine Dominique Domino Jr. , known as Fats Domino, was an American pianist, singer and songwriter. One of the pioneers of rock and roll music, Domino sold more than 65 million records. Born in New Orleans to a French Creole family, Domino signed to Imperial Records in 1949. His first single "The Fat Man" is cited by some historians as the first rock and roll single and the first to sell more than 1 million copies. Domino continued to work with the song's co-writer Dave Bartholomew, contributing his distinctive rolling piano style to Lloyd Price's "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" and scoring a string of mainstream hits beginning with "Ain't That a Shame" .

#13934

Randall Wright

#13945

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Randall D. Wright is a Canadian academic macroeconomist who advanced the fields of monetary economics and labor economics through his role in the development of matching theory. Biography Wright obtained a B.A. in Economics at the University of Manitoba in 1979 and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Minnesota in 1986. He was awarded an honorary M.A. by the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. His first position was as an assistant professor at Cornell from 1984 to 1987. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he became a full professor in 1994, later becoming the James Joo-Jin Kim Professor of Economics.

#13935

Alfons Maria Stickler

#13946

Overall Influence

1910 - 2007 (97 years)

Alfons Maria Stickler was an Austrian cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Archivist and Librarian of the Holy Roman Church from 1985 to 1988. Stickler was elevated to the cardinalate in 1985, and was the oldest member of the College of Cardinals. A traditionalist, he was a strong supporter of the Tridentine Mass and clerical celibacy.

#13936

Ibrahim Abdulaziz Al-Assaf

#13947

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Ibrahim bin Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Al-Assaf is a Saudi politician who served as finance minister, foreign minister, and state minister of Saudi Arabia. Early life and education Ibrahim was born in the Qassim Province in central Saudi Arabia on 28 January 1949. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economic and political science from King Saud University, Riyadh, in 1971. He later obtained a Master of Arts degree in economics from the University of Denver in 1976 and a PhD in economics from Colorado State University in 1982.

#13937

Sarvadaman Chowla

#13948

Overall Influence

1907 - 1995 (88 years)

Sarvadaman D. S. Chowla was an Indian American mathematician, specializing in number theory. Early life He was born in London, since his father, Gopal Chowla, a professor of mathematics in Lahore, was then studying in Cambridge. His family returned to India, where he received his master's degree in 1928 from the Government College in Lahore. In 1931 he received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge, where he studied under J. E. Littlewood.

#13938

David Gordon

#13949

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

David Gordon is an American libertarian philosopher and intellectual historian influenced by Murray Rothbard's views of economics. He is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and is editor of The Mises Review.

#13939

Anja Feldmann

#13950

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Anja Feldmann is a German computer scientist. Education and career Feldmann studied computer science at Universität Paderborn and received her degree in 1990. She continued her studies at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned her M.Sc. in 1991 and her Ph.D. in 1995. Following four years of postdoctoral work at AT&T Labs Research, she held research positions at Saarland University and Technical University Munich.

#13940

Linda Gordon

#13951

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Linda Gordon is an American feminist and historian. She lives in New York City and in Madison, Wisconsin. She won the Marfield Prize and the WILLA Literary Award in Historical Nonfiction for Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, and the Antonovych Prize for Cossack Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine .

#13941

Eduardo Duhalde

#13952

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Eduardo Alberto Duhalde is an Argentine Peronist politician who served as the interim President of Argentina from January 2002 to May 2003. He also served as Vice President and Governor of Buenos Aires in the 1990s.

#13942

Luis Garicano

#13953

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Luis Garicano Gabilondo is a Spanish economist and politician who was a Member of the European Parliament from 2019 to 2022. He was also vice president of Renew Europe and vice president of the European political party Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe . Before entering politics, he was a professor of strategy and economics at IE Business School in Madrid and at the London School of Economics . After leaving the European Parliament he has returned to academia as a visiting professor at Columbia Business School and at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. An overview...

#13943

David Ho

#13954

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

David Da-i Ho is a Taiwanese American AIDS researcher, physician, and virologist who has made a number of scientific contributions to the understanding and treatment of HIV infection. He championed for combination anti-retroviral therapy instead of single therapy, which turned HIV from absolute terminal disease into a chronic disease.

#13944

James Fujimoto

#13955

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

James G. Fujimoto is Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting professor of ophthalmology at Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts.

#13945

Nader Khalili

#13956

Overall Influence

1936 - 2008 (72 years)

Nader Khalili was an Iranian-born American architect, author, and educator. He is best known for his inventive structures that incorporated a range of atypical building materials to provide shelter in the developing world and emergency contexts. His work was heavily influenced by the traditional arid house designs of Iran.

#13946

Captain Beefheart

#13957

Overall Influence

1941 - 2010 (69 years)

Don Van Vliet was an American singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. Conducting a rotating ensemble known as the Magic Band, he recorded 13 studio albums between 1967 and 1982. His music blended elements of blues, free jazz, rock, and avant-garde composition with idiosyncratic rhythms, absurdist wordplay, a loud, gravelly voice, and his claimed wide vocal range, though reports of it have varied from three octaves to seven and a half. Known for his enigmatic persona, Beefheart frequently constructed myths about his life and was known to exercise an almost dictatorial control over his supporting musicians.

#13947

Jon Robin Baitz

#13958

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Jon Robin Baitz is an American playwright, screenwriter and television producer. He is a two time Pulitzer Prize finalist, as well as a Guggenheim, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.

#13948

Holm Putzke

#13959

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Holm Putzke is a professor for criminal law at the University of Passau, Germany. Education and career Putzke studied law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bochum and passed the First State Examination in Law 1997, followed by the Second State Examination in Law in 2002. In 2003 he received the PhD in law and 2009 the Master of Laws at the Jagiellonian University of Kraków/Poland. From 2002 until 2003 he was a graduate teaching assistant at the chair of criminal law, criminal procedure law and general legal philosophy at the Faculty of Law, University of Bochum and from 2003 until...

#13949

Pete Holmes

#13960

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Peter Benedict Holmes is an American comedian, actor, writer, producer, and podcaster. Musings on spirituality and religion are frequent themes in his works. Holmes gained recognition in the early 2010s as a stand-up comic, during which he launched his podcast You Made It Weird , released his first comedy special, and worked as an actor and television writer. Subsequently, he began his own late-night talk show The Pete Holmes Show , which ran on TBS for two seasons in the time-slot after Conan, a frequent champion of his work. During the decade, he released five comedy specials: Impregnated w...

#13950

Aaron Allston

#13961

Overall Influence

1960 - 2014 (54 years)

Aaron Dale Allston was an American game designer and author of many science fiction books, notably Star Wars novels. His works as a game designer include game supplements for role-playing games, several of which served to establish the basis for products and subsequent development of TSR's Dungeons & Dragons game setting Mystara. His later works as a novelist include those of the X-Wing series: Wraith Squadron, Iron Fist, Solo Command, Starfighters of Adumar, and Mercy Kill. He wrote two entries in the New Jedi Order series: Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream and Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand. Allston ...

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