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

#14301

Thomas Palley

#14312

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Thomas Palley is an American economist who was the chief economist for the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Career Palley received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oxford University in 1976. He earned a master's degree in international relations and a PhD in economics from Yale University. Palley founded the Economics for Democratic & Open Societies project. He states its purpose is to "stimulate public discussion about what kinds of economic arrangements and conditions are needed to promote democracy and open society." Palley's previous positions include director ...

#14302

Josiah Thompson

#14313

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Josiah "Tink" Thompson is an American writer, retired professional private investigator, and former philosophy professor. In 1967, he published both The Lonely Labyrinth, a study of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works, and Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination. The culmination of his half-century-long Kennedy assassination project, updating his own and others’ investigative work, correcting certain errors, and reconciling the whole body of valid forensic and eyewitness evidence, was published in early 2021 as Last Second in Dallas.

#14303

Elizabeth Moberly

#14314

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Elizabeth Moberly is a British research psychologist and theologian. Moberly is the author of Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic, in which she suggests several possible causes of male homosexuality and a therapeutic cure.

#14304

Michael Cole

#14315

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Michael Cole is an American psychologist and emeritus distinguished professor at the University of California, San Diego , where he held positions in the Department of Psychology, the Department of Communication, and the Human Development Program. His research focuses on the development of a mediational theory of mind, as well as the promotion of partnerships between UCSD and the community.

#14305

Paul Smolensky

#14316

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Paul Smolensky is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond Washington. Along with Alan Prince, in 1993 he developed Optimality Theory, a grammar formalism providing a formal theory of cross-linguistic typology within linguistics. Optimality Theory is popularly used for phonology, the subfield to which it was originally applied, but has been extended to other areas of linguistics such as syntax and semantics.

#14306

Hans Belting

#14317

Overall Influence

1935 - 2023 (88 years)

Hans Belting was a German art historian and media theorist with a focus on image science, and this with regard to contemporary art and to the Italian art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Biography Belting was born in Andernach, Rhine Province, on 7 July 1935. He studied at the universities of Mainz and Rome, and took his doctorate in art history at the University of Mainz. Belting taught as a professor of art history at the University of Hamburg in 1966, then at the University of Heidelberg, and from 1980 to 1992 at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität at Munich.

#14307

Thomas Blom Hansen

#14318

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Thomas Blom Hansen is a Danish anthropologist and leading contemporary commentator on religious and political violence in India. Background Hansen has a BA in Sociology and an MA in political theory from the University of Aalborg in Denmark. He then did development work in Orissa, India, in the mid-1980s. He became interested in anthropology during a PhD on Indian nationalism in Pune and Mumbai in western India, begun in the late 1980s when he was unexpectedly granted a research visa to study nationalism. He graduated from Roskilde University and his D.Phil. was later made into a book .

#14308

Arlen Specter

#14319

Overall Influence

1930 - 2012 (82 years)

Arlen Specter was an American lawyer, author and politician who served as a United States Senator from Pennsylvania from 1981 to 2011. Specter was a Democrat from 1951 to 1965, then a Republican from 1965 until 2009, when he switched back to the Democratic Party. First elected in 1980, he was the longest-serving senator from Pennsylvania, having represented the state for 30 years.

#14309

Louise Richardson

Louise Richardson

#14320

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Dame Louise Mary Richardson is an Irish political scientist whose specialist field is the study of terrorism. In January 2023, she became president of the philanthropic foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York. In January 2016, she became the vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, having formerly been the principal and vice-chancellor of the University of St Andrews, and as the executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her leadership at the University of Oxford played an important role in the successful development of a vaccine to combat CO...

#14310

George Adomian

#14321

Overall Influence

1922 - 1996 (74 years)

George Adomian was an American mathematician of Armenian descent who developed the Adomian decomposition method for solving nonlinear differential equations, both ordinary and partial. The method is explained, among other places, in his book Solving Frontier Problems in Physics: The Decomposition Method . He was a faculty member at the University of Georgia from 1966 through 1989. While at UGA, he started the Center for Applied Mathematics. Adomian was also an aerospace engineer.

#14311

Anthony Birley

#14322

Overall Influence

1937 - 2020 (83 years)

Anthony Richard Birley was a British ancient historian, archaeologist and academic. He was the son of Margaret Isabel and historian and archaeologist Eric Birley. Early life and education Anthony Birley was the son of the archaeologist Eric Birley. Eric bought the house next to the archeological site Vindolanda where Anthony and his brother, Robin, began to excavate the site. The brothers took part in many of the excavations there. From 1950 to 1955, Anthony studied at Clifton College, a private school in Bristol, England. He studied classics at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in 1960.

#14312

Lydia Kavraki

#14323

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Lydia E. Kavraki is a Greek-American computer scientist, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, a professor of bioengineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering at Rice University. She is also the director of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University. She is known for her work on robotics/AI and bioinformatics/computational biology and in particular for the probabilistic roadmap method for robot motion planning and biomolecular configuration analysis.

#14313

Shihoko Ishii

#14324

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Shihoko Ishii is a Japanese mathematician and professor at the University of Tokyo. Her research area is algebraic geometry. Education Ishii received her bachelor's degree from Tokyo Women's Christian University in 1973 and her master's degree from Waseda University in 1975. She earned her PhD from Tokyo Metropolitan University in 1983.

#14314

Peter Martins

#14325

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Peter Martins is a Danish ballet dancer and choreographer. Martins was a principal dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet and with the New York City Ballet, where he joined George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and John Taras as balletmaster in 1981. He retired from dancing in 1983, having achieved the rank of danseur noble, becoming Co-Ballet Master-In-Chief with Robbins. From 1990 until January 2018, he was solely responsible for artistic leadership of City Ballet.

#14315

Harald Wohlrapp

Harald Wohlrapp

#14326

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Harald R. Wohlrapp is a German philosopher. His main focus is argumentation theory. Philosophy Harald Rüdiger Wohlrapp was a student of the German philosophers Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen . After studies in Freiburg, Paris and Erlangen, Wohlrapp was appointed to a teaching position at the university of Hamburg, where he was a professor of philosophy from 1983 through 2009 and is presently a senior research fellow. His main areas of interest lie in dialectics , pragmatism , philosophy of science and philosophy of language . The pervading concern of his efforts, however, is the philosophy of argument.

#14316

Julia Driver

#14327

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Julia Driver is professor of philosophy and holder of the Darrell K. Royal Chair in Ethics and American Society at the University of Texas, Austin. She is a specialist in moral philosophy. Education and career She received her Ph.D. in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in 1990 under the supervision of Susan R. Wolf. She received her BA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983.

#14317

Donald Geman

#14328

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Donald Jay Geman is an American applied mathematician and a leading researcher in the field of machine learning and pattern recognition. He and his brother, Stuart Geman, are very well known for proposing the Gibbs sampler and for the first proof of the convergence of the simulated annealing algorithm, in an article that became a highly cited reference in engineering . He is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and simultaneously a visiting professor at École Normale Supérieure de Cachan.

#14318

Simon Bisley

#14329

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Simon Bisley is a British comic book artist best known for his 1990s work on ABC Warriors, Lobo and Sláine. Early life Simon Bisley began drawing when he was six years old. He is self-taught, with only a short one-year stay at an art college, saying "I found it very difficult to get any kind of feedback from the art teachers. They weren't interested at all in what I was doing, so I became kind of very introverted with regard to my artwork and yeah, I was just all self-taught."

#14319

Markus Breitschmid

Markus Breitschmid

#14330

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Markus Breitschmid is an American architectural theoretician, architect, and the author of several books on contemporary architecture and philosophical aesthetics. His most highly regarded books are Der bauende Geist. Friedrich Nietzsche und die Architektur , The Significance of the Idea , and Non-Referential Architecture . His writings have been translated into Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. Breitschmid has been invited to contribute to the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Architecture Biennale of Chicago, the Salone Internationale del Mobile di Milano in Milan, and the Triennale of Architecture in Lisbon.

#14320

Mahesh Bhupathi

Mahesh Bhupathi

#14331

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Mahesh Shrinivas Bhupathi is an Indian former doubles world No. 1 tennis player. In 1997, he became the first Indian to win a major tournament . With his win at the 2006 Australian Open mixed doubles, he joined the elite group of eight tennis players who have achieved a career Grand Slam in mixed doubles. He is also the founder of International Premier Tennis League. In December 2016, Bhupathi was appointed as India's next non-playing Davis Cup captain and took over the reins from Anand Amritraj in February 2017.

#14321

D. Wayne Lukas

#14332

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Darrell Wayne Lukas is an American horse trainer and a U.S. Racing Hall of Fame inductee. He has won twenty Breeders' Cup races, received five Eclipse Awards for his accomplishments, and his horses have won 25 year-end Eclipse Awards. He was inducted into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame in 2007.

#14322

Steven Durlauf

#14333

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Steven Neil Durlauf is an American social scientist and economist. He is currently Steans Professor in Educational Policy and the inaugural Director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Durlauf was previously the William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As of 2021, is also a Part Time Professor at the New Economic School.

#14323

Frederick K. Goodwin

#14334

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Frederick King Goodwin was an American psychiatrist and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center, where he was also director of the Center on Neuroscience, Medical Progress, and Society. He was a specialist in bipolar disorder and recurrent depression.

#14324

Cassie Kozyrkov

Cassie Kozyrkov

#14335

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Cassie Kozyrkov is a South African data scientist and statistician. She worked at Google in Developer Relations team and with Decision Intelligence at Google. Early life and education Kozyrkov was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and grew up in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. As a child, Kozyrkov became interested in data when she discovered spreadsheet software and later became interested in the relationship between information and decision-making. She began her studies in economics and mathematical statistics at Nelson Mandela University at the age of fifteen, and transferred to the University of Chicago to complete her undergraduate degree.

#14325

Tom Heinsohn

#14336

Overall Influence

1934 - 2020 (86 years)

Thomas William Heinsohn was an American professional basketball player. He was associated with the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association for six decades as a player, coach and broadcaster. He played for the Celtics from 1956 to 1965, and also coached the team from 1969 to 1978. He spent over 30 years as the color commentator for the Celtics' local broadcasts alongside play-by-play commentator Mike Gorman. He is regarded as one of the most iconic Celtics figures in the franchise's history, known during his lifetime for his charisma and loyalty to the team and its traditions. From this, he earned the nickname "Mr.

#14326

Linda Zagzebski

#14337

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski is an American philosopher. She is the Emerita George Lynn Cross Research Professor, as well as Emerita Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, at the University of Oklahoma. She writes in the areas of epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory.

#14327

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou

#14338

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou is a Greek and American economist, author, and college professor. He is President of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College since its inception in 1986 and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics and Executive Vice President Emeritus, at Bard College since 1977.

#14328

Rishi Sunak

#14339

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Rishi Sunak is a British politician who has served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party since 2022. The first British Asian prime minister, he previously held two cabinet positions under Boris Johnson, latterly as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2020 to 2022. Sunak has been Member of Parliament for Richmond since 2015.

#14329

Gary Soto

#14340

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Gary Anthony Soto is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Life and career Soto was born to Mexican-American parents Manuel and Angie Soto . In his youth, he worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. Soto's father died in 1957, when he was five years old. As his family had to struggle to find work, he had little time or encouragement in his studies. Soto notes that in spite of his early academic record, while at high school he found an interest in poetry through writers such as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Jules Verne, Robert Frost and Thornton Wilder.

#14330

Shalini Randeria

#14341

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Shalini Randeria is an American-born Indian anthropologist. Education She was born in Washington, D.C. in 1955, and brought up in Mumbai and New Delhi, Randeria is an alumna of the University of Delhi, the University of Oxford and Heidelberg University, and earned her PhD at the Free University of Berlin.

#14331

Don Hahn

#14342

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Donald Paul Hahn is an American film producer who is credited with producing some of the most successful animated films in recent history, including Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.

#14332

Morton Kaplan

#14343

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

Morton A. Kaplan was an American political scientist who was Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at the University of Chicago. He was also President of the Professors World Peace Academy International; and Editor of the World&I magazine from its founding in 1986 until 2004.

#14333

Brian Ross

#14344

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Brian Elliot Ross is an American investigative journalist who served as the Chief Investigative Correspondent for ABC News until 2018. He reported for ABC World News Tonight with David Muir, Nightline, Good Morning America, 20/20, and ABC News Radio. Ross joined ABC News in July 1994 and was fired in 2018. His investigative reports have often covered government corruption. From 1974 until 1994, Ross was a correspondent for NBC News.

#14334

Günter P. Wagner

Günter P. Wagner

#14345

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Günter P. Wagner is an Austrian-born evolutionary biologist who is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary biology at Yale University, and head of the Wagner Lab. Education and training After undergraduate education in chemical engineering, Wagner studied zoology and mathematical logic at the University of Vienna, Austria. During his graduate study, Wagner worked with the Viennese zoologist Rupert Riedl and the theoretical chemist Peter Schuster, and finished his PhD in theoretical population genetics in 1979. Wagner conducted postdoctoral research at Max Planck Institutes in Göttingen and Tübi...

#14335

Joshua Nkomo

#14346

Overall Influence

1917 - 1999 (82 years)

Joshua Mqabuko Nyongolo Nkomo was a Zimbabwean revolutionary and politician who served as Vice-President of Zimbabwe from 1990 until his death in 1999. He founded and led the Zimbabwe African People's Union from 1961 until it merged in 1987 with Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union to form ZANU–PF after an internal military crackdown called Gukurahundi in western Zimbabwe, mostly on ethnic Ndebele ZAPU supporters.

#14336

Bruce Arden

#14347

Overall Influence

1927 - 2021 (94 years)

Bruce Wesley Arden was an American computer scientist. Arden enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II as a Radar Technician Third Class in California, Chicago, and Kodiak, Alaska. He graduated from Purdue University with a BS in 1949 and started his computing career in 1950 with the wiring and programming of IBM's hybrid Card Programmed Computer/Calculator at the Allison Division of General Motors. Next he spent a short period as a programmer for computations being done at the University of Michigan's Willow Run Laboratory using the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer.

#14337

Chaim Elata

#14348

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Chaim Elata is an Israeli professor emeritus of mechanical engineering, and former President of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is also the former Chairman of the Israel Public Utility Authority for Electricity.

#14338

Uğur Mumcu

#14349

Overall Influence

1942 - 1993 (51 years)

Uğur Mumcu was a Turkish investigative journalist for the daily Cumhuriyet. He was assassinated by a bomb placed in his car outside his home. Biography Uğur Mumcu was born the third of four siblings in Kırşehir. He went to school in Ankara and in 1961 attended School of Law at Ankara University. Graduating in 1965 he initially began his career practicing law. In 1969 he ended his legal career to return to his alma mater; working as a teaching assistant until 1972.

#14339

M. Lynne Markus

#14350

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

M. Lynne Markus is an American Information systems researcher, and John W. Poduska, Sr. Chair of Information and Process Management, Bentley University, who has made fundamental contributions to the study of enterprise systems and inter-enterprise systems, IT and organizational change, and knowledge management.

#14340

John Froines

#14351

Overall Influence

1939 - 2022 (83 years)

John Radford Froines was an American chemist and anti-war activist, noted as a member of the Chicago Seven, a group charged with involvement with the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Froines, who held a Ph.D. in chemistry from Yale, was charged with interstate travel for purposes of inciting a riot and with making incendiary devices, but was acquitted. He later served as the Director of Toxic Substances at the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and then director of UCLA’s Occupational Health Center. He also served as chair of the California Scie...

#14341

Ken Booth

#14352

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Ken Booth FBA is a British international relations theorist, and the former E. H. Carr Professor of the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University. He has been a visiting researcher at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island; at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada; and at Cambridge University. He is a former Chair, and the first President of the British International Studies Association. He was part of the editorial team of the Review of International Studies, and currently serves as both Academic Editor of the Lynne Rienner Critical Security Studies series and...

#14342

Markus Lüpertz

#14353

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Markus Lüpertz is a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and writer. He also publishes a magazine, and plays jazz piano. He is one of the best-known German contemporary artists. His subjects are characterized by suggestive power and archaic monumentality. Lüpertz insists on capturing the object of representation with an archetypal statement of his existence. His art work is associated to neo-expressionism. Known for his eccentricity, German press has stylized him as a "painter prince".

#14343

Richard G. Hovannisian

Richard G. Hovannisian

#14354

Overall Influence

1932 - 2023 (91 years)

Richard Hovannisian was an American historian and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known mainly for his four-volume history of the First Republic of Armenia. Biography Background Hovannisian was born and raised in Tulare, California, into a family of Armenian genocide survivors. His father, Kaspar Gavroian, was born in 1901 in the village of Bazmashen , near Kharpert in the Ottoman Empire. Surviving the Genocide of 1915, he moved to the United States by 1920 and changed his last name from Gavroian to Hovannisian, after his father's name, Hovhannes. In 1927, Kaspar married Siroon Nalbandian, born in Kesserig, Kharpert.

#14344

Adam Cohen

#14355

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Adam Seth Cohen is an American journalist, author, lawyer, and former assistant editorial page editor of The New York Times. He also worked in the administration of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

#14345

Michael Osterholm

Michael Osterholm

#14356

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Michael Thomas Osterholm is an American epidemiologist, Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

#14346

Sara Seager

#14357

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Sara Seager is a Canadian–American astronomer and planetary scientist. She is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is known for her work on extrasolar planets and their atmospheres. She is the author of two textbooks on these topics, and has been recognized for her research by Popular Science, Discover Magazine, Nature, and TIME Magazine. Seager was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 citing her theoretical work on detecting chemical signatures on exoplanet atmospheres and developing low-cost space observatories to observe planetary transits.

#14347

Alistair Cameron Crombie

#14358

Overall Influence

1915 - 1996 (81 years)

Alistair Cameron Crombie was an Australian historian of science who began his career as a zoologist. He was noted for his contributions to research on competition between species before turning to history.

#14348

Michael Cox

#14359

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

#14349

David Germano

#14360

Overall Influence

David Francis Germano is an American Tibetologist and Professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia , the largest Tibetan Studies program in the Americas, where he has taught and researched since 1992. With dual appointments in the School of Nursing and the Department of Religious Studies, Germano currently oversees the work of over twenty graduate students. He is on the board of the International Association of Tibetan Studies and is Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies , a leading journal of Tibetology. In 2000, he found...

#14350

Mia Farrow

#14361

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Maria de Lourdes Villiers "Mia" Farrow is an American actress. She first gained notice for her role as Allison MacKenzie in the television soap opera Peyton Place and gained further recognition for her subsequent short-lived marriage to Frank Sinatra. An early film role, as Rosemary in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby , saw her nominated for a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress. She went on to appear in several films throughout the 1970s, such as Follow Me! , The Great Gatsby , and Death on the Nile . Her younger sister is Prudence Farrow.

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