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

#14151

Ole Barndorff-Nielsen

Ole Barndorff-Nielsen

#14162

Overall Influence

1935 - 2022 (87 years)

Ole Eiler Barndorff-Nielsen was a Danish statistician who has contributed to many areas of statistical science. Education and career He was born in Copenhagen, and became interested in statistics when, as a student of actuarial mathematics at the University of Copenhagen, he worked part-time at the Department of Biostatistics of the Danish State Serum Institute. He graduated from the University of Aarhus in 1960, where he has spent most of his academic life, and where he became professor of statistics in 1973. However, in 1962-1963 and 1963-1964 he stayed at the University of Minnesota and S...

#14152

Martin Haspelmath

#14163

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Martin Haspelmath is a German linguist working in the field of linguistic typology. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he worked from 1998 to 2015 and again since 2020. Between 2015 and 2020, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. He is also an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Leipzig.

#14153

Tomás Taveira

#14164

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Tomás Taveira is a Portuguese architect. He has a degree in architecture from the Technical University of Lisbon and owns a post-graduation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some of his most recognizable works include the Amoreiras Towers in Lisbon, three of the new stadiums for the 2004 UEFA European Football Championship in Portugal and the Allianz Parque stadium in São Paulo, Brazil.

#14154

Norman Lloyd Johnson

#14165

Overall Influence

1917 - 2004 (87 years)

Norman Lloyd Johnson was a professor of statistics and author or editor of several standard reference works in statistics and probability theory. Education Johnson attended Ilford County High School, and went on to University College London, where he obtained a B.Sc. in mathematics 1936 and a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in statistics in 1937 and 1938.

#14155

Michal Kosinski

Michal Kosinski

#14166

Overall Influence

1982 - Present (44 years)

Michal Kosinski is an associate professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University, a computational psychologist, and a psychometrician. He studies the psychological processes in Large Language Models , as well as AI and Big Data to model and predict human behavior.

#14156

Michael E. Zimmerman

#14167

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Michael E. Zimmerman is an American integral theorist whose interests include Buddhism, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ken Wilber. After a year as assistant professor at Denison University, he was Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University from 1975 to 2005, and Director of the Institute for Humanities and the Arts at Tulane. He is also affiliated with the Integral Institute. Together with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, he wrote a book on integral ecology, Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives on the Natural World. Since 2006, Zimmerman has been a faculty member at the Universi...

#14157

Lee Anna Clark

#14168

Overall Influence

Lee Anna Clark is an American psychologist and William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Professor of Psychology Emerite in the Department of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana, United States. She used to be a professor and collegiate fellow at the University of Iowa. She was, as of 2007, the director of clinical training in the Clinical Science Program. Prior to her appointment at the University of Iowa, she was a professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her research focuses on personality and temperament, clinical and personality asse...

#14158

Bill Schelter

#14169

Overall Influence

1947 - 2001 (54 years)

William Frederick Schelter was a professor of mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin and a Lisp developer and programmer. Schelter is credited with the development of the GNU Common Lisp implementation of Common Lisp and the GPL'd version of the computer algebra system Macsyma called Maxima. Schelter authored Austin Kyoto Common Lisp under contract with IBM. AKCL formed the foundation for Axiom, another computer algebra system. AKCL eventually became GNU Common Lisp. He is also credited with the first port of the GNU C compiler to the Intel 386 architecture, used in the original ...

#14159

Daniele Ganser

#14170

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Daniele Ganser is a Swiss author and conspiracy theorist. He is best known for his 2005 book NATO's Secret Armies. Background His father Gottfried Ganser-Bosshart , whose parents were Germans, was a Protestant pastor of the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches . His mother Jeannette Ganser was a nurse. He has a sister named Tea.

#14160

Robert Roswell Palmer

#14171

Overall Influence

1909 - 2002 (93 years)

Robert Roswell Palmer was an American historian at Princeton and Yale universities, who specialized in eighteenth-century France. His most influential work of scholarship, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 , examined the Atlantic Revolutions, an age of democratic revolution that swept Europe and the Americas between 1760 and 1800. He was awarded the Bancroft Prize in History for the first volume. Palmer also achieved distinction as a history text writer.

#14161

Sidney Crosby

#14172

Overall Influence

1987 - Present (39 years)

Sidney Patrick Crosby is a Canadian professional ice hockey centre and captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins of the National Hockey League . Nicknamed "Sid the Kid" and dubbed "The Next One", he was selected first overall by the Penguins in the 2005 NHL Entry Draft. Born and raised in Halifax, Crosby was considered one of the most lauded prospects in ice hockey history and is widely regarded as one of the greatest ice hockey players of all time.

#14162

Daniel W. Stroock

Daniel W. Stroock

#14173

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Daniel Wyler Stroock is an American mathematician, a probabilist. He is regarded and revered as one of the fundamental contributors to Malliavin calculus with Shigeo Kusuoka and the theory of diffusion processes with S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan with an orientation towards the refinement and further development of Itô’s stochastic calculus.

#14163

David Graeber

#14174

Overall Influence

1961 - 2020 (59 years)

Areas of Specialization: Social Anthropology David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the ’s School of Economics. He earned his B.A. from the State University of New York at Purchase and his M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Chicago. From there, he spent twenty months conducting research in Madagascar on a Fulbright fellowship. Graeber became a famous anthropologist for his work on anarchism. Graeber published notable works such as Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and his major work, Debt: The First 5000 Years, in which he raises criticisms about the actual harm/benefit caused by the International Monetary Fund and their loans to struggling nations.

#14164

Aslan Maskhadov

#14175

Overall Influence

1951 - 2005 (54 years)

Aslan Aliyevich Maskhadov was a Soviet and Chechen politician and military commander who served as the third president of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. He was credited by many with the Chechen victory in the First Chechen War, which allowed for the establishment of the de facto independent Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Maskhadov was elected President of Chechnya in January 1997. Following the start of the Second Chechen War in August 1999, he returned to leading the guerrilla resistance against the Russian army. De facto Ichkeria ceased to exist at the beginning of 2000. Until his death, Maskhadov was President in exile.

#14165

Mir-Hossein Mousavi

#14176

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khameneh is an Iranian reformist politician, artist and architect who served as the 49th and last Prime Minister of Iran from 1981 to 1989. He was a reformist candidate for the 2009 presidential election and eventually the leader of the opposition in the post-election unrest. Mousavi served as the president of the Iranian Academy of Arts until 2009, when conservative authorities removed him. Although Mousavi had always considered himself a reformist and believed in promoting change within the 1979 Revolution constitution, on 3 Feb 2023, in response to the violent suppressi...

#14166

Susan E. Jackson

#14177

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Susan E. Jackson is an American researcher in the fields of managing for environmental sustainability, strategic human resource management, occupational burnout, and work team diversity. She was the co-author of the Maslach Burnout Inventory in 1981, the primary diagnostic instrument for the condition of occupational burnout.

#14167

Paul Brown

#14178

Overall Influence

1907 - 1991 (84 years)

Paul Eugene Brown was an American football coach and executive in the All-America Football Conference and National Football League . Brown was both the co-founder and first coach of the Cleveland Browns, a team named after him, and later co-founded the Cincinnati Bengals. His teams won seven league championships in a professional coaching career spanning 25 seasons.

#14168

Jeanne Hersch

#14179

Overall Influence

1910 - 2000 (90 years)

Jeanne Hersch was a Swiss philosopher of Polish-Jewish origin, whose works dealt with the concept of freedom. She was the daughter of Liebman Hersch. Education and career Hersch was born in 1910 in Geneva, Switzerland. She later studied under the existentialist Karl Jaspers in Germany in the early 1930s. She taught French, Latin and Philosophy in the International School of Geneva, the world's first international school, for 33 years .

#14169

Willem Adelaar

#14180

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Willem F. H. Adelaar is a Dutch linguist specializing in Native American languages, specially those of the Andes. He is Professor of indigenous American Linguistics and Cultures at Leiden University.

#14170

Tibisay Lucena

#14181

Overall Influence

1959 - 2023 (64 years)

Tibisay Lucena Ramírez was a Venezuelan politician, president of the National Electoral Council between 2006 and 2020, one of the five branches of government of Venezuela. Since 2017, Lucena was sanctioned by several countries for her role in undermining democracy and human rights in the country.

#14171

Nicholas Shackleton

#14182

Overall Influence

1937 - 2006 (69 years)

Sir Nicholas John Shackleton was an English geologist and paleoclimatologist who specialised in the Quaternary Period. He was the son of the distinguished field geologist Robert Millner Shackleton and great-nephew of the explorer Ernest Shackleton.

#14172

Jayme Tiomno

#14183

Overall Influence

1920 - 2011 (91 years)

Jayme Tiomno was a Brazilian experimental and theoretical physicist with interests in particle physics and general relativity. He was member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit. He was the son of Jewish Russian immigrants.

#14173

Alec Douglas-Home

#14184

Overall Influence

1903 - 1995 (92 years)

Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel , styled as Lord Dunglass between 1918 and 1951 and the Earl of Home from 1951 until 1963, was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1963 to 1964. He is notable for being the last Prime Minister to hold office while being a member of the House of Lords, before renouncing his peerage and taking up a seat in the House of Commons for the remainder of his premiership. His reputation, however, rests more on his two stints as Foreign Secretary than on his brief premiership. During his firs...

#14174

Daniel Zajfman

#14185

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Daniel Zajfman is an Israeli physicist whose main research interests are centered on the physics of simple molecular ions. On December 1, 2006, he was elected as the tenth president of the Weizmann Institute.

#14175

Chip Tsao

#14186

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Chip Tsao , also known by his Chinese language pen name To Kit, is a multilingual Hong Kong-based columnist, broadcaster, and writer. His writings are mostly in Chinese. He is well known for his sarcasm and wry sense of humour.

#14176

Robert Goldblatt

#14187

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Robert Ian Goldblatt is a mathematical logician who is Emeritus Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. His doctoral advisor was Max Cresswell. His most popular books are Logics of Time and Computation and Topoi: the Categorial Analysis of Logic. He has also written a graduate level textbook on hyperreal numbers which is an introduction to nonstandard analysis.

#14177

Arumugam Manthiram

#14188

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Arumugam Manthiram is an American materials scientist and engineer, best known for his identification of the polyanion class of lithium ion battery cathodes, understanding of how chemical instability limits the capacity of layered oxide cathodes, and technological advances in lithium sulfur batteries. He is a Cockrell Family Regents Chair in engineering, Director of the Texas Materials Institute, the Director of the Materials Science and Engineering Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and a former lecturer of Madurai Kamaraj University. Manthiram delivered the 2019 Nobel Lecture in Chemistry on behalf of Chemistry Laureate John B.

#14178

Carl W. Ernst

#14189

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Carl W. Ernst is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Islamic studies at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was also the founding director of the UNC Center for Islamic and Middle East Studies.

#14179

Saul Teukolsky

#14190

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Saul Arno Teukolsky is a theoretical astrophysicist and a professor of Physics and Astronomy at Caltech and Cornell University. His major research interests include general relativity, relativistic astrophysics, and computational astrophysics.

#14180

Jean-Marie Tarascon

#14191

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Jean-Marie Tarascon FRSC is Professor of Chemistry at the Collège de France in Paris and Director of the French Research Network on Electrochemical Energy Storage . Education Tarascon was educated at the University of Bordeaux, where he was awarded a Diplôme d'études universitaires générales in physics and chemistry, a Master of Science degree in chemical engineering, and a PhD in solid-state chemistry in 1981.

#14181

Tom Calma

#14192

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Thomas Edwin Calma, , is an Aboriginal Australian human rights and social justice campaigner, and 2023 senior Australian of the Year. He is the sixth chancellor of the University of Canberra, a post held since January 2014, after two years as deputy chancellor. Calma is the second Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person to hold the position of chancellor of any Australian university.

#14182

Albert Carnesale

#14193

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Albert Carnesale is an American academic and a specialist in arms control and national security. He is a former chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, provost of Harvard University, and dean of the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. He was also acting president of Harvard while President Neil L. Rudenstine was on leave for three months. He has also been active in international diplomacy on nuclear arms control and nuclear non-proliferation. From 1970-72, he was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union—a major step towards controlling nuclear weapons.

#14183

Pier Giorgio Perotto

Pier Giorgio Perotto

#14194

Overall Influence

1930 - 2002 (72 years)

Pier Giorgio Perotto was an Italian electrical engineer and inventor. Working for the manufacturer Olivetti, he led a design team that built the Programma 101, one of the world's first programmable calculators.

#14184

Peeter Torop

#14195

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Peeter Torop is an Estonian semiotician. Following Roman Jakobson, he expanded the scope of the semiotic study of translation to include intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual translation and stressing the productivity of the notion of translation in general semiotics. He is a co-editor of the journal Sign Systems Studies, the oldest international semiotic periodical, the chairman of the Estonian Semiotics Association and professor of semiotics of culture at Tartu University.

#14185

Avi Bell

#14196

Overall Influence

Abraham Bell is an Israeli Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law and at Bar-Ilan University's Faculty of Law. Bell received his B.A. and J.D. from the University of Chicago, and his S.J.D. from Harvard. He interned in the office of Israeli Supreme Court judge Mishael Cheshin.

#14186

Fotis Kafatos

#14197

Overall Influence

1940 - 2017 (77 years)

Fotis Constantine Kafatos was a Greek biologist. Between 2007-2010 he was the founding president of the European Research Council . He chaired the ERC Scientific Council from 2006-2010. Thereafter, he was appointed Honorary President of the ERC.

#14187

Chen Yun

#14198

Overall Influence

1905 - 1995 (90 years)

Chen Yun was a Chinese revolutionary leader who was one of the most influential leaders of the People's Republic of China during the 1980s and 1990s and one of the major architects and important policy makers for the reform and opening up period, alongside Deng Xiaoping. He was also known as Liao Chenyun , as he took his uncle's family name when he was adopted by him after his parents died.

#14188

Luther Vandross

#14199

Overall Influence

1951 - 2005 (54 years)

Luther Ronzoni Vandross Jr. was an American soul and R&B singer, songwriter, and record producer. Throughout his career, he achieved eleven consecutive RIAA-certified platinum albums and sold over 40 million records worldwide. Known as the "Velvet Voice", Vandross has been recognized as one of the 200 greatest singers of all time by Rolling Stone, as well as one of the greatest R&B artists by Billboard. In addition, NPR named him one of the 50 Great Voices. He was the recipient of eight Grammy Awards, including Song of the Year in 2004 for a track recorded not long before his death, "Dance with My Father".

#14189

Lanhee Chen

#14200

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Lanhee Joseph Chen is an American policy advisor, attorney, and academic. Chen serves as the David and Diane Steffy Fellow in American Public Policy Studies at the Hoover Institution, director of domestic policy studies and lecturer in the public policy program at Stanford University, and lecturer in law at Stanford Law School.

#14190

A. G. Sulzberger

A. G. Sulzberger

#14201

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Arthur Gregg Sulzberger is an American journalist serving as chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of its flagship newspaper, The New York Times. Early life and education Sulzberger was born in Washington, D.C., on August 5, 1980, to Gail Gregg and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. He is of German ancestry. His paternal grandfather, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was Jewish, and the rest of his family is of Christian background .

#14191

Bertil Hille

#14202

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Bertil Hille is an Emeritus Professor, and the Wayne E. Crill Endowed Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington. He is particularly well known for his pioneering research on cell signalling by ion channels. His book Ion Channels of Excitable Membranes has been the standard work on the subject, appearing in multiple editions since its first publication in 1984.

#14192

Gary Knell

#14203

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Gary Evan Knell is a senior advisor at the Boston Consulting Group in Media and Social Impact. He was previously the Chairman of National Geographic Partners. Formerly, he was president and CEO of the National Geographic Society. He joined National Geographic as chief executive in January 2014. He has been a member of the Society's board of trustees since April 2013 and has served on the board of governors of the National Geographic Education Foundation since November 2003.

#14193

Georges Mathé

#14204

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Georges Mathé was a French oncologist and immunologist. In November 1958, he performed the first successful allogeneic bone marrow transplant ever performed on unrelated human beings. Biography Georges Mathé was born in 1922 in the village of Sermages, France, from a rural family. Selected by his village school master, he was sent to study in a boarding school in Moulins, Allier.

#14194

Yvonne Ridley

#14205

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Yvonne Ridley is a British journalist, author and politician who holds several committee positions with the Alba Party in Scotland. She was a former chair of the National Council of the now-defunct Respect Party. Ridley made global headlines when she was captured by the Taliban in 2001 after the events of 9/11 and before the start of the U.S.-led war. Two years later she converted to Islam. She is a vocal supporter of Palestine, which she took up as a schoolgirl in her native County Durham. She is an avid critic of Zionism and of Western media portrayals and foreign policy in the War on Terr...

#14195

Alexander Levitzki

Alexander Levitzki

#14206

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Alexander Levitzki is an Israeli biochemist who is a professor of biochemistry at the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Birth and education Levitzki was born in 1940 in Palestine. He completed his M.Sc. in chemistry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science, in 1968. From 1968 to 1971, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Biochemistry, University of California at Berkeley in California, with Professor Daniel E.

#14196

Drummond Matthews

#14207

Overall Influence

1931 - 1997 (66 years)

Drummond Hoyle Matthews FRS , known as "Drum", was a British marine geologist and geophysicist and a key contributor to the theory of plate tectonics. His work, along with that of fellow Briton Fred Vine and Canadian Lawrence Morley, showed how variations in the magnetic properties of rocks forming the ocean floor could be consistent with, and ultimately help confirm, Harry Hammond Hess's 1962 theory of seafloor spreading. In 1989 he was awarded the Geological Society of London's highest honour, the Wollaston Medal.

#14197

Jo Boaler

#14208

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Jo Boaler is a British education author and Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Mathematics Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Boaler is involved in promoting reform mathematics and equitable mathematics classrooms. She is the co-founder and faculty director of youcubed a Stanford centre that offers free mathematics education resources to teachers, students and parents. She is the author of nine books, including Limitless Mind , Mathematical Mindsets , What's Math Got To Do With It? and The Elephant in the Classroom , all written for teachers and parents with the goal of im...

#14198

Trenton Merricks

#14209

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Trenton Merricks is an American philosopher and the Commonwealth Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. While Merricks' primary field of study is metaphysics, he has also published scholarship in epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion.

#14199

Bernhard Schlink

Bernhard Schlink

#14210

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Bernhard Schlink is a German lawyer, academic, and novelist. He is best known for his novel The Reader, which was first published in 1995 and became an international bestseller. He won the 2014 Park Kyong-ni Prize.

#14200

Ali Abdullah Saleh

#14211

Overall Influence

1947 - 2017 (70 years)

Ali Abdullah Saleh al-Ahmar was a Yemeni politician who served as the first President of Yemen, from Yemeni unification on 22 May 1990 to his resignation on 25 February 2012, following the Yemeni Revolution. Previously, he had served as President of the Yemen Arab Republic, or North Yemen, from July 1978 to 22 May 1990, after the assassination of President Ahmad al-Ghashmi.

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