The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#14351
Kōbun Chino Otogawa
#14362
Overall Influence
1938 - 2002 (64 years)
Kōbun Otogawa was an American Sōtō Zen priest. Biography Otogawa, who preferred to be called by his first name, rather than by either of the Japanese Zen honorifics: sensei or roshi , came to San Francisco, California, United States, from Japan in 1967 in response to an invitation from Shunryu Suzuki-roshi, serving as his assistant at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center until 1970.
Go to Profile#14352
M. Karunanidhi
#14363
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
Muthuvel Karunanidhi was an Indian writer and politician who served as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for almost two decades over five terms between 1969 and 2011. He is popularly referred to as Kalaignar and Mutthamizh Arignar for his contributions to Tamil literature. He had the longest tenure as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu with 6,863 days in office. He was also a long-standing leader of the Dravidian movement and ten-time president of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam political party. Karunanidhi has the record of never losing an election to the Tamil Nadu Assembly, having won 13 times since his first victory in 1957.
Go to Profile#14353
Axl Rose
#14364
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
W. Axl Rose is an American singer and songwriter. He is best known for being the lead vocalist and lyricist of the hard rock band Guns N' Roses, and has been the band's sole constant member since its inception in 1985. Possessing a distinctive and powerful wide-ranging voice, Rose has been named one of the greatest singers of all time by various media outlets, including Rolling Stone, NME and Billboard.
Go to Profile#14354
Peter Taylor
#14365
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Peter Taylor, is a British journalist and documentary-maker. He is best known for his coverage of the political and armed conflict in Northern Ireland, widely known as the Troubles, and for his investigation of Al Qaeda and Islamist extremism in the wake of 9/11. He also covers the issue of smoking and health and the politics of tobacco for which he was awarded the WHO Gold Medal for Services to Public Health. He has written books and researched, written and presented television documentaries over a period of more than forty years. In 2014, Taylor was awarded both a Royal Television Society l...
Go to Profile#14355
Dan-Virgil Voiculescu
#14366
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Dan-Virgil Voiculescu is a Romanian professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked in single operator theory, operator K-theory and von Neumann algebras. More recently, he developed free probability theory.
Go to Profile#14356
Joe Flacco
#14367
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Joseph Vincent Flacco is an American football quarterback for the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League . He played college football at Delaware after transferring from Pittsburgh and was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens in the first round of the 2008 NFL Draft. Flacco has also played for the Denver Broncos, Philadelphia Eagles, and New York Jets.
Go to Profile#14357
Audrey F. Manley
#14368
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Audrey Forbes Manley is an American pediatrician and public health administrator. Manley was the first African-American woman appointed as chief resident at Cook County Children's Hospital in Chicago . Manley was the first to achieve the rank of Assistant Surgeon General in 1988 and later served as the eighth president of Spelman College.
Go to Profile#14358
Mark G. Raizen
#14369
Overall Influence
Mark George Raizen is an American physicist who conducts experiments on quantum optics and atom optics. Early life and education Raizen was born in New York City. Raizen's uncle, Dr. Robert F. Goldberger, was provost of Columbia University and deputy director for science at the NIH.
Go to Profile#14359
Douglas C. Schmidt
#14370
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Douglas C. Schmidt is a computer scientist and author in the fields of object-oriented programming, distributed computing and design patterns. Biography In August 1994 he joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis. From August 1999 to December 2002 he was associate professor with tenure at the University of California, Irvine. During much of this time he worked for DARPA managing US federal funded research programs. In 2003 he became professor of computer Science at Vanderbilt University, and associate chair of computer science and engineering in December 2004. In August 2010 he became a deputy director, research, and chief technology officer at Software Engineering Institute.
Go to Profile#14360
Luboš Kohoutek
#14371
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Luboš Kohoutek is a Czech astronomer and a discoverer of minor planets and comets, including Comet Kohoutek which was visible to the naked eye in 1973. He also discovered a large number of planetary nebulae.
Go to Profile#14361
Mario De Caro
#14372
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Mario De Caro is an Italian philosopher, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Rome III in Italy. Since 2000, he has also been teaching at Tufts University, where he is regularly a visiting professor. He is interested in moral philosophy, the free-will controversy, theory of action, history of science, Donald Davidson's and Hilary Putnam's philosophies, and early modern philosophy. With David Macarthur, he has defended a metaphilosohical view called liberal naturalism.
Go to Profile#14362
Chad Orzel
#14373
Overall Influence
Chad Orzel is a professor of physics and science author, noted for his books How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, which has been translated into 9 languages, and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog. Chad as a science communicator is a regular contributor on Forbes.com, on his personal website, and, through October 2017, on ScienceBlogs.com, while continuing his work as an associate professor at Union College.
Go to Profile#14363
Richard L. Thompson
#14374
Overall Influence
1947 - 2008 (61 years)
Richard Leslie Thompson, also known as Sadaputa Dasa , was an American mathematician, author and Gaudiya Vaishnava religious figure. Historian Meera Nanda described him as a driving intellectual force of 'Vedic creationism' as co-author of Forbidden Archeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race , a work that has attracted significant criticism from the scientific community. Thompson also published several books and articles on the relationship between religion and science, Hindu cosmology and astronomy. He was a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness and a founding ...
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Roger McGuinn
#14375
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
James Roger McGuinn is an American musician. He is best known for being the frontman and leader of the Byrds. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work with the Byrds. As a solo artist he has released 10 albums and collaborated with, among others, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Chris Hillman. The 12-string Rickenbacker guitar is his signature instrument.
Go to Profile#14365
Kris Holmes
#14376
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kris Holmes is an American typeface designer, calligrapher, type design educator and animator. She, with Charles Bigelow, is the co-creator of the Lucida and Wingdings font families, among many other typeface designs. She is President of Bigelow & Holmes Inc., a typeface design studio.
Go to Profile#14366
Mary Fulbrook
#14377
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Mary Jean Alexandra Fulbrook, is a British academic and historian. Since 1995, she has been Professor of German History at University College London. She is a noted researcher in a wide range of fields, including religion and society in early modern Europe, the German dictatorships of the twentieth century, Europe after the Holocaust, and historiography and social theory.
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Gajo Petrović
#14378
Overall Influence
1927 - 1993 (66 years)
Gajo Petrović was one of the main theorists in the Marxist humanist Praxis School in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He was the only one among the editors of the Praxis journal to stay in this position throughout the journal's publication. He is credited by Milan Kangrga to be the mastermind behind the Korčula Summer School, which was a meeting place for Marxists and other philosophers from the East and the West in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Norman Horowitz
#14379
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Norman Harold Horowitz was a geneticist at Caltech who achieved national fame as the scientist who devised experiments to determine whether life might exist on Mars. His experiments were carried out by the Viking Lander of 1976, the first U.S. mission to successfully land an unmanned probe on the surface of Mars.
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Michael Kammen
#14380
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Michael Gedaliah Kammen was an American professor of American cultural history in the Department of History at Cornell University. At the time of his death, he held the title "Newton C. Farr professor emeritus of American history and culture".
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Sammy Sosa
#14381
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Samuel Peralta Sosa is a Dominican-American former professional baseball right fielder. He played in Major League Baseball for 19 seasons, primarily with the Chicago Cubs. After playing for the Texas Rangers and Chicago White Sox, Sosa joined the Cubs in 1992 and became regarded as one of the game's best hitters. Sosa hit his 400th home run in his 1,354th game and his 5,273rd at-bat, reaching this milestone quicker than any player in National League history. He is one of nine players in MLB history to hit 600 career home runs.
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Barry Halliwell
#14382
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Barry Halliwell is an English biochemist, chemist and university administrator, specialising in free radical metabolism in both animals and plants. His name is included in the "Foyer–Halliwell–Asada" pathway, a cellular process of hydrogen peroxide metabolism in plants and animals, named for the three principal discoverers, with Christine Foyer and Kozi Asada. He moved to Singapore in 2000, and served as Deputy President of the National University of Singapore , where he continues to hold a Tan Chin Tuan Centennial professorship.
Go to Profile#14372
Boyan Jovanovic
#14383
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Boyan Jovanovic is a professor of economics at New York University and a long-term consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Jovanovic, of Serbian descent, received his Bachelor's and master's degrees from the London School of Economics and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
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Mark Steiner
#14384
Overall Influence
1942 - 2020 (78 years)
Mark Steiner was an American-born Israeli professor of philosophy. He taught philosophy of mathematics and physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Steiner died after contracting COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Timothy Findley
#14385
Overall Influence
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
Timothy Irving Frederick Findley was a Canadian novelist and playwright. He was also informally known by the nickname Tiff or Tiffy, an acronym of his initials. Biography Early life One of three sons, Findley was born in Toronto, Ontario, to Allan Gilmour Findley, a stockbroker, and his wife, the former Margaret Maude Bull. His paternal grandfather was president of Massey-Harris, the farm-machinery company. He was raised in the upper class Rosedale district of the city, attending boarding school at St. Andrew's College . He pursued a career in the arts, studying dance and acting, and had significant success as an actor before turning to writing.
Go to Profile#14375
Seth Rollins
#14386
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Colby Daniel Lopez is an American professional wrestler. He is currently signed to WWE, where he performs on the Raw brand under the ring name Seth "Freakin" Rollins. He is the current and inaugural World Heavyweight Champion in his first reign. Rollins is generally considered to be one of the best currently active professional wrestlers in the world, being credited for his in-ring ability and aptness of reinventing his on-screen character.
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Eliot A. Cohen
#14387
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Eliot Asher Cohen is an American political scientist. He was a counselor in the United States Department of State under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009. In 2019, Cohen was named the 9th Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, succeeding the former dean, Vali Nasr. Before his time as dean, he directed the Strategic Studies Program at SAIS. Cohen "is one of the few teachers in the American academy to treat military history as a serious field", according to international law scholar Ruth Wedgwood. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
Go to Profile#14377
Doug Cutting
#14388
Overall Influence
Douglass Read Cutting is a software designer, advocate, and creator of open-source search technology. He founded two technology projects, Lucene, and Nutch, with Mike Cafarella. Both projects are now managed through the Apache Software Foundation. Cutting and Cafarella are also the co-founders of Apache Hadoop.
Go to Profile#14378
Markus Gabriel
#14389
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher and author at the University of Bonn. In addition to his more specialized work, he has also written popular books about philosophical issues. Career Gabriel was educated in philosophy and Ancient Greek in Germany. After completing his doctorate and habilitation at Heidelberg University, he held a faculty position at New School for Social Research. He then came to the University of Bonn, where he holds the chair for Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy and is Director of the International Centre for Philosophy. Gabriel has also been a visiting...
Go to Profile#14379
Takayasu Okushima
#14390
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Takayasu Okushima is a law professor, President of Hakuoh University, former President of Waseda University, the 10th and present Chief Scout of the Scout Association of Japan since April 1, 2010, and served as the Camp Chief of the 23rd World Scout Jamboree.
Go to Profile#14380
Michael Buffer
#14391
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Michael Buffer is an American ring announcer for boxing, professional wrestling, and National Football League events. Pioneering a distinct announcing style in which he rolls certain letters and adds other inflections to a fighter’s name, and known for his trademarked catchphrase: "Let's get ready to rumble!", he was inducted into the International Sports Hall of Fame in 2019.
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Peter Diamandopoulos
#14392
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Peter Theodore Diamandopoulos was a Greek–American academic administrator. He served as the president of Sonoma State University from 1977 to 1983, when he was forced to resign; followed by serving as the seventh president of Adelphi University from 1985 until his dismissal in 1997, due to the school's financial problems.
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Louis E. Brus
#14393
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Louis Eugene Brus is the Samuel Latham Mitchell Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University. He is the co-discoverer of the colloidal semi-conductor nanocrystals known as quantum dots. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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Patricia Benner
#14394
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Patricia Sawyer Benner is a nursing theorist, academic and author. She is known for one of her books, From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice . Benner described the stages of learning and skill acquisition across the careers of nurses, applying the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition to nursing practice. Benner is a professor emerita at the University of California, San Francisco UCSF School of Nursing.
Go to Profile#14384
Abel Aganbegyan
#14395
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Abel Gezevich Aganbegyan is a leading Soviet and Russian economist of Armenian descent, a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and an honorary doctor of business administration of Kingston University, the founder and first editor of the journal EKO.
Go to Profile#14385
Bùi Diễm
#14396
Overall Influence
1923 - 2021 (98 years)
Bùi Diễm was South Vietnam's ambassador to the United States under President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. He played a key role in the last desperate attempt to secure US$722 million in military aid to defend South Vietnam against the North in 1975. He was the nephew of Trần Trọng Kim, who served as the Prime Minister of Emperor Bảo Đại.
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John Meurig Thomas
#14397
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Sir John Meurig Thomas , also known as JMT, was a Welsh scientist, educator, university administrator, and historian of science primarily known for his work on heterogeneous catalysis, solid-state chemistry, and surface and materials science.
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George Bain
#14398
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Professor Sir George Sayers Bain is a Canadian-British academic who has contributed to the study and practice of industrial relations, has led several academic institutions, has been a non-executive director of companies in the UK and Canada, and has engaged extensively in public service.
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John McHardy Sinclair
#14399
Overall Influence
1933 - 2007 (74 years)
John McHardy Sinclair was a Professor of Modern English Language at Birmingham University from 1965 to 2000. He pioneered work in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, and language teaching.
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Dave Cullen
#14400
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Dave Cullen is an American journalist and non-fiction writer. Life Cullen graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His work has appeared in The Daily Beast and Vanity Fair. Works Columbine, New York: Twelve, 2009. , Parkland: Birth of a Movement, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2019. ,
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Zeus A. Salazar
#14401
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Zeus Atayza Salazar is a Filipino historian, anthropologist, and philosopher of history, best known for pioneering an emic perspective in Philippine history called Pantayong Pananaw , earning him the title "Father of New Philippine Historiography." He is a major player in the indigenization campaign in the Philippines. Salazar spent 30 years teaching at University of the Philippines Diliman and held both history department chair and college dean positions.
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Pat Brown
#14402
Overall Influence
1905 - 1996 (91 years)
Edmund Gerald "Pat" Brown was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 32nd governor of California from 1959 to 1967. His first elected office was as district attorney for San Francisco, and he was later elected Attorney General of California in 1950, before becoming the state's governor after the 1958 California gubernatorial election.
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James Q. Miller
#14403
Overall Influence
1926 - 2005 (79 years)
James Q. Miller, MD was an American neurologist and educator in neurology based at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. Early life and education He was born James Quinter Miller in Ohio. His undergraduate education was at Haverford College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and his medical degree from the Columbia Medical School in New York City. He was one of the first neurology residents at the Department of Neurology of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. He received additional training in neuropathology, genetics, and child neurology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Bert Rürup
#14404
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Hans-Adalbert Rürup is a German economist and former chairman of the German Council of Economic Experts. He was formerly a professor of economics at the Darmstadt University of Technology. From 2010 to 2012, he was president of the International School of Management in Dortmund. In 2013 he changed into the ISM's board of trustees and took up a position as the president of the newly founded Handelsblatt Research Institute .
Go to Profile#14394
Michelle Pfeiffer
#14405
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michelle Marie Pfeiffer is an American actress. Prolific in film for over four decades, she became one of Hollywood's most bankable stars during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as one of the era's defining sex symbols. She is known for pursuing a wide range of character roles that span multiple genres. The recipient of various accolades, she has received a Golden Globe Award and a British Academy Film Award, in addition to nominations for three Academy Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award. In 2007, she was awarded a motion picture star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Go to Profile#14395
Ivan Van Sertima
#14406
Overall Influence
1935 - 2009 (74 years)
Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima was a Guyanese-born British associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in the United States. He was best known for his Olmec alternative origin speculations, a brand of pre-Columbian contact theory, which he proposed in his book They Came Before Columbus . While his Olmec theory has "spread widely in African American community, both lay and scholarly", it was mostly ignored in Mesoamericanist scholarship, and has been dismissed as Afrocentric pseudoarchaeology and pseudohistory to the effect of "robbing native American cultures."
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Vivianne Crowley
#14407
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Vivianne Crowley is an author, university lecturer, psychologist, and a High Priestess and teacher of the Wiccan religion. Life She was initiated into the London coven of Alex Sanders at the age of eighteen, but later joined a Gardnerian coven in the famous Whitecroft line derived from Eleanor Bone, and so she was one of few people in the seventies to be part of both traditions.
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Dubravka Ugrešić
#14408
Overall Influence
1949 - 2023 (74 years)
Dubravka Ugrešić was a Yugoslav-Croatian and Dutch writer. A graduate of University of Zagreb, she was based in Amsterdam from 1996; she was identified as a Yugoslav writer. Early life and education Ugrešić was born on 27 March 1949 in Kutina, Yugoslavia . She was born into an ethnically mixed family; her mother was an ethnic Bulgarian from Varna. She majored in comparative literature and Russian language at the University of Zagreb's Faculty of Arts, pursuing parallel careers as a scholar and as a writer. After graduation, she continued to work at the university, at the Institute for Theory of Literature.
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Gail Heriot
#14409
Overall Influence
Gail L. Heriot is an American attorney and legal scholar serving as a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law. Since 2007, she has been a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
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Christoph Thiele
#14410
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Christoph Thiele is a German mathematician working in the field of harmonic analysis. After completing his undergraduate studies at TU Darmstadt and Bielefeld University,he obtained his Ph.D. in 1995 at Yale under the supervision of Ronald Coifman. After spending time at UCLA, where he was promoted to full professor, he occupied the Hausdorff Chair at the University of Bonn.
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Geddy Lee
#14411
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Geddy Lee is a Canadian musician, best known as the lead vocalist, bassist, and keyboardist for the rock group Rush. Lee joined the band in September 1968, at the request of his childhood friend Alex Lifeson, replacing original bassist and frontman Jeff Jones. Lee's solo effort, My Favourite Headache, was released in 2000.
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