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
#14401
Robert M. Wachter
#14412
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Robert M. "Bob" Wachter is an academic physician and author. He is on the faculty of University of California, San Francisco, where he is chairman of the Department of Medicine, the Lynne and Marc Benioff Endowed Chair in Hospital Medicine, and the Holly Smith Distinguished Professor in Science and Medicine. He is generally regarded as the academic leader of the hospitalist movement, the fastest growing specialty in the history of modern medicine. He and a colleague, Lee Goldman, are known for coining the term "hospitalist" in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article.
Go to Profile#14402
Martin Rhonheimer
#14413
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Martin Rhonheimer is a Swiss political philosophy professor and priest of the Catholic personal prelature Opus Dei. he is teaching professor at the Opus Dei-affiliated Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.
Go to Profile#14403
Fred Durst
#14414
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
William Frederick Durst is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and director. He is the frontman and lyricist of the nu metal band Limp Bizkit, formed in 1994, with whom he has released nine studio albums.
Go to Profile#14404
Irwin Kra
#14415
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Irwin Kra is an American mathematician, who works on the function theory in complex analysis. Life and work Kra studied at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and at Columbia University, where he graduated in 1964 and received his doctorate in 1966 under supervision of Lipman Bers . After that, he was from 1966 to 1968 a C.L.E. Moore instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he chaired from 1975 to 1981 the Faculty of Mathematics. From 1991 to 1996, there, he was Dean of the Division of Physical Sciences and Mathematics.
Go to Profile#14405
Jonathan Baron
#14416
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jonathan Baron is an American psychologist. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in the science of decision-making. Early lif and eduction Baron was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1944, and received a B.A. in psychology from Harvard in 1966 and a Ph.D. from Michigan in 1970 for thesis titled The threshold for successiveness.
Go to Profile#14406
Ian Simmons
#14417
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Ian Gordon Simmons is a British geographer. He retired as Professor of Geography from the University of Durham in 2001. He has made significant contributions to environmental history and prehistoric archaeology.
Go to Profile#14407
Matthew Bourne
#14418
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Sir Matthew Christopher Bourne is a British choreographer. His productions contain many classic cinema and popular culture references and draw thematic inspiration from musicals, film noir and popular culture
Go to Profile#14408
Jerome H. Barkow
#14419
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jerome H. Barkow is a Canadian anthropologist who works in the field of evolutionary psychology. He is a professor emeritus at Dalhousie University. Barkow received a BA in Psychology from Brooklyn College in 1964 and a PhD in Human Development from the University of Chicago in 1970. Formerly a professor of Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, he retired as professor emeritus in 2008, and was an honorary professor at Queen's University Belfast from 2010 to 2017.
Go to Profile#14409
Charles Pasqua
#14420
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Charles Victor Pasqua was a French businessman and Gaullist politician. He was Interior Minister from 1986 to 1988, under Jacques Chirac's cohabitation government, and also from 1993 to 1995, under the government of Edouard Balladur.
Go to Profile#14410
Vilém Flusser
#14421
Overall Influence
1920 - 1991 (71 years)
Vilém Flusser was a Brazilian Czech-born philosopher, writer and journalist. He lived for a long period in São Paulo and later in France, and his works are written in many different languages. His early work was marked by discussion of the thought of Martin Heidegger, and by the influence of existentialism and phenomenology. Phenomenology would play a major role in the transition to the later phase of his work, in which he turned his attention to the philosophy of communication and of artistic production. He contributed to the dichotomy in history: the period of image worship, and period of ...
Go to Profile#14411
Bongbong Marcos
#14422
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Ferdinand "Bongbong" Romualdez Marcos Jr. , commonly referred to by the initials PBBM or BBM, is a Filipino politician who is the 17th and current President of the Philippines. He previously served as a senator from 2010 to 2016. He is the second child and only son of 10th President, kleptocrat and dictator Ferdinand Marcos and former First Lady Imelda Marcos.
Go to Profile#14412
Mark Taylor
#14423
Overall Influence
Mark Taylor is a British record producer and songwriter. He has worked with artists such as Cher, Tina Turner, Lady Gaga, Nelly Furtado, Lionel Richie, Hall & Oates, Rod Stewart, Belinda Carlisle, Daniel Bedingfield, Ronan Keating, Enrique Iglesias, Britney Spears, James Morrison, Kylie Minogue, Jennifer Lopez. Taylor worked on Cher's 1998 album Believe, which won a Grammy for its title track. The album went on to sell over 20 million copies worldwide. The song "Believe" featured an early example of the vocal effect Auto tune.
Go to Profile#14413
Robert Jeffress
#14424
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Robert James Jeffress Jr. is an American Southern Baptist pastor, author, radio host, and televangelist. He is the senior pastor of the 14,000-member First Baptist Church, a megachurch in Dallas, Texas, and is a Fox News Contributor. His sermons are broadcast on the television and radio program Pathway to Victory, which is broadcast on more than 1,200 television stations in the United States and 28 other countries, and is heard on 900 stations and broadcast live in 195 countries.
Go to Profile#14414
Anders Björner
#14425
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Anders Björner received his Ph.D. from Stockholm University in 1979, under Bernt Lindström. He is a Swedish professor of mathematics, in the Department of Mathematics at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. His research interests are in combinatorics, as well as the related areas of algebra, geometry, topology, and computer science.
Go to Profile#14415
Riccardo Poli
#14426
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Riccardo Poli is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems of the University of Essex. His work has centered on genetic programming. Education Poli started his academic career with a Laurea in electronic engineering from the University of Florence in 1989. He then did a PhD in biomedical image analysis at the same university. He later became an expert in the field of evolutionary computation, working as a Lecturer and then a Reader at the University of Birmingham from 1994 until 2001, when he moved to Essex as a professor. Poli has published around 240 refereed papers...
Go to Profile#14416
Vít Jedlička
#14427
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Vít Jedlička is a Czech libertarian politician, publicist and activist. He was the chairman of the Party of Free Citizens in the Hradec Králové Region and currently serves as the founder and chairman of the Czech voluntary association Reformy.cz. On 13 April 2015, he founded the self-declared libertarian micronation the Free Republic of Liberland and has been president since the micronation was founded.
Go to Profile#14417
Tommy Robredo
#14428
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Tomás Robredo Garcés, known as Tommy Robredo , is a Spanish former professional tennis player. His career-high singles ranking was world No. 5, which he reached in August 2006 as a result of winning the Hamburg Masters earlier in the year. Robredo reached the quarterfinals at seven singles major tournaments. He was also a three-time semifinalist at the US Open men's doubles tournament, and a semifinalist at the Australian Open in mixed doubles.
Go to Profile#14418
Manfred Broy
#14429
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Manfred Broy is a German computer scientist, and an emeritus professor in the Department of Informatics at the Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany. Biography Broy gained his Doctor of Philosophy in 1980 at the chair of Friedrich L. Bauer on the subject of transformation of programs running in parallel .
Go to Profile#14419
Keith Clark
#14430
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Keith Leonard Clark is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, England. Education Clark studied Mathematics at Durham University , graduating in 1964 with a first-class degree. Clark then continued his studies at Cambridge University, taking a second undergraduate degree in Philosophy in 1966. He earned a Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of London with thesis titled Predicate logic as a computational formalism.
Go to Profile#14420
Brad D. Smith
#14431
Overall Influence
Brad D. Smith is the president of Marshall University in West Virginia and a former business executive. Brad was unanimously chosen as Marshall’s 38th president in October 2021 and began acting in the role in January 2022. He was officially installed as president in a ceremony on September 16, 2022. As a Marshall alum, Brad has remained a dedicated servant-leader to his alma mater over the years. Understanding the value of education – viewing it as “the great equalizer” – Brad, alongside his wife — now Marshall First Lady — Alys Smith have supported the university and its students over the years by giving both their time and financial support.
Go to Profile#14421
Manson Benedict
#14432
Overall Influence
1907 - 2006 (99 years)
Manson Benedict was an American nuclear engineer and a professor of nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . From 1958 to 1968, he was the chairman of the advisory committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.
Go to Profile#14422
William R. Polk
#14433
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
William Roe Polk was an American foreign policy consultant and author. He was a professor of history at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, and was President of the latter's Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs.
Go to Profile#14423
Shah M. Faruque
#14434
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Shah Mohammad Faruque is a professor in the School of Environment and Life Sciences at Independent University Bangladesh . He is widely recognized for his research in Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium which causes the epidemic diarrhoeal disease Cholera. Among other positions, previously he was a professor at BRAC University; director of the Genomics Centre at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh , and formerly director of the Centre for Food and Water Borne Diseases in ICDDR,B. His areas of research interest include microbial genomics, bacteriophages, environmen...
Go to Profile#14424
Prabhākara
#14435
Overall Influence
Prabhākara was an Indian philosopher-grammarian in the Mīmāṃsā tradition of Kerala. Probable date Hariswamin's commentary on Shatapatha Brahmana which dates to 638 CE discusses the doctrine of Prabhākara's followers. Prabhākara in his book Bṛhati quotes only Bhartṛhari and Bharavi . Thus his probable time can be assigned to the latter half of the 6th century.
Go to Profile#14425
Peter Schjeldahl
#14436
Overall Influence
1942 - 2022 (80 years)
Peter Charles Schjeldahl was an American art critic, poet, and educator. He was noted for being the head art critic at The New Yorker, having earlier written for The Village Voice, ARTnews, and The New York Times.
Go to Profile#14426
Carol J. Clover
#14437
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Carol Jeanne Clover is an American professor of Medieval Studies and American Film at the University of California, Berkeley. Clover has been widely published in her areas of expertise, and is the author of three books. Clover's 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film achieved popularity beyond academe. Clover is credited with developing the "final girl" theory in the horror genre, which has changed both popular and academic conceptions of gender in horror films.
Go to Profile#14427
Donna Cox
#14438
Overall Influence
Donna J. Cox is an American artist and scientist, Michael Aiken Endowed Chair; Professor of Art + Design; Director, Advanced Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ; Director, Visualization and Experimental Technologies at National Center for Supercomputing Applications ; and Director, edream . She is a recognized pioneer in computer art and scientific visualization, specifically cinematic scientific visualization.
Go to Profile#14428
Tina Fey
#14439
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Elizabeth Stamatina "Tina" Fey is an American actress, comedian, writer, and producer. Fey was a cast member and head writer for the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1997 to 2006. After her departure from SNL, she created the NBC sitcom 30 Rock and the Netflix sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt , the former of which she also starred in. Fey is also known for her work in film, including Mean Girls , Baby Mama , Date Night , Megamind , Muppets Most Wanted , Sisters , Whiskey Tango Foxtrot , Wine Country , Soul , and A Haunting in Venice .
Go to Profile#14429
Mark S. Smith
#14440
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mark Stratton John Matthew Smith is an American biblical scholar, anthropologist, and professor. Early life and education Born in Paris to Donald Eugene Smith and Mary Elizabeth Reichert, Smith grew up in Washington, D.C., with his six sisters and two brothers. For elementary school, he attended Blessed Sacrament School. For grades 7–12, he went to St. Anselm's Abbey School.
Go to Profile#14430
Shlomo Moran
#14441
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Shlomo Moran is an Israeli computer scientist, the Bernard Elkin Chair in Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Moran received his Ph.D. in 1979 from the Technion, under the supervision of Azaria Paz; his dissertation was entitled "NP Optimization Problems and their Approximation".
Go to Profile#14431
Sven Ove Hansson
#14442
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Sven Ove Hansson is a Swedish philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy and History of Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He is an author and scientific skeptic, with a special interest in environmental risk assessment, as well as in decision theory and belief revision.
Go to Profile#14432
Eva Klein
#14443
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (101 years)
Eva Klein is a Hungarian-Swedish scientist. Klein has worked at the Karolinska Institute since leaving Hungary in 1947. She is regarded as a founder of cancer immunology. Her life and career choices as a young Jewish woman were constrained by discrimination, and she survived the late stages of German occupation in hiding. A medical doctor with a PhD in biology, she has worked in cancer immunology and virology.
Go to Profile#14433
David Brading
#14444
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
David Anthony Brading FRHistS, FBA , is a British historian and Professor Emeritus of Mexican History at the University of Cambridge, where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including the Bolton Prize in 1972, the Order of the Aztec Eagle, and the Medalla 1808—both of which were awarded by the Mexican government—and the Medal of Congress from the Peruvian government in 2011.
Go to Profile#14434
Lina Khan
#14445
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Lina M. Khan is a British-born American legal scholar serving as chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission since 2021. While a student at Yale Law School, she became known for her work in antitrust and competition law in the United States after publishing the influential essay "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox". She was nominated by President Joe Biden to the Commission in March 2021, and has served since June 2021 following her confirmation. She is also an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School.
Go to Profile#14435
Michael Voris
#14446
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Gary Michael Voris is an American Catholic author, speaker and apologist. Voris was formerly the president of St. Michael's Media, a Christian right-wing outlet he founded to produce catechetical and news videos and articles on the website Church Militant. In November 2023, Voris was asked to resign as president by the board of directors, due to Voris "breaching the Church Militant morality clause." Voris confirmed his resignation on his personal X account.
Go to Profile#14436
Stephen Muggleton
#14447
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Stephen H. Muggleton FBCS, FIET, FAAAI, FECCAI, FSB, FREng is Professor of Machine Learning and Head of the Computational Bioinformatics Laboratory at Imperial College London. Education Muggleton received his Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and Doctor of Philosophy in artificial intelligence supervised by Donald Michie at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#14437
Philipp Kohlschreiber
#14448
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Philipp Eberhard Hermann Kohlschreiber is a German former professional tennis player. The right-hander won eight singles and seven doubles titles on the ATP World Tour and made the quarterfinals at the 2012 Wimbledon Championships. He reached his highest ATP singles ranking of world No. 16 in July 2012.
Go to Profile#14438
Peter Weill
#14449
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Peter Weill is an Australian computer scientist and organizational theorist, Professor of Information Systems Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and chairman of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research .
Go to Profile#14439
Nancy Pearcey
#14450
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Nancy Randolph Pearcey is an American evangelical author on the Christian worldview. Education Pearcey earned a BA from Iowa State University, an MA in Biblical Studies from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. She also did additional non-degree study in philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Canada and received an honorary doctorate from Cairn University in 2007.
Go to Profile#14440
John Newsinger
#14451
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
John Newsinger is a British historian and academic, who is an emeritus professor of history at Bath Spa University. Newsinger is a book reviewer for Race & Class and the New Left Review. He is also author of numerous books and articles, as well as studies of science fiction and of the cinema. He teaches on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
Go to Profile#14441
Mangala Narlikar
#14452
Overall Influence
1943 - 2023 (80 years)
Mangala Narlikar was an Indian mathematician who did research in pure mathematics as well as writing for a lay audience. After her degrees in mathematics, she initially worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and later worked as a lecturer in the University of Bombay and Pune.
Go to Profile#14442
Kjell Espmark
#14453
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Kjell Erik Espmark was a Swedish writer, literary historian, member of the Swedish Academy, and Professor of the History of Literature at Stockholm University. He was elected to the Swedish Academy on 5 March 1981 and admitted on 20 December 1981. Kjell Espmark succeeded the linguist Elias Wessén to Seat No.16. He was chair of the Swedish Academy's Nobel committee between 1987 and 2004.
Go to Profile#14443
Michael Heinrich
#14454
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Michael Heinrich is a German historian of philosophy, political scientist, and mathematician, specialising in the critical study of the development of Marx's thought. Heinrich's work, influenced by Elmar Altvater and the Neue Marx-Lektüre of Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt is characterised by its focus on the points of ambivalence and inconsistency in the work of Marx. Through this theme, Heinrich challenges both the closed system he identifies with "worldview Marxism", as well as teleological narratives of Marx's intellectual development throughout his life. He is best known for his ...
Go to Profile#14444
Stephen B. Oates
#14455
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Stephen Baery Oates was an American historian. He was a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He specialized in the American Civil War era and authored numerous books. Early life and education Stephen Baery Oates was born in Pampa, Texas, on January 5, 1936. He obtained a bachelor's degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1958. He remained at that institution, receiving a Master of Arts two years later. He taught at Texas for four years before being awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in 1969.
Go to Profile#14445
Gilles Châtelet
#14456
Overall Influence
1944 - 1999 (55 years)
Gilles Châtelet was a French philosopher and mathematician. Biography Châtelet began studying at the École Normale Supérieure Fontenay-Saint-Cloud-Lyon in 1963. During the student upheavals of the late 1960s and the following years, he was a member of the Communist Party and associated with the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire . He became a gay activist due to his time in California in 1969, but went to the FHAR as a "way of finding again the ambiance of the United States." He later studied at University of Paris XI where he obtained his PhD in pure mathematics on 20 December 1975 a...
Go to Profile#14446
Ken Lum
#14457
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Kenneth Robert Lum, OC DFA is a dual citizen Canadian and American academic, painter, photographer, sculptor, and writer. Working in a number of media including painting, sculpture and photography, his art ranges from conceptual in orientation to representational in character and is generally concerned with issues of identity in relation to the categories of language, portraiture and spatial politics.
Go to Profile#14447
Jean-Michel Jarre
#14458
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jean-Michel André Jarre is a French composer, performer and record producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient and new-age genres, and is known for organising outdoor spectacles featuring his music, accompanied by vast laser displays, large projections and fireworks.
Go to Profile#14448
Gian Carlo Wick
#14459
Overall Influence
1909 - 1992 (83 years)
Gian Carlo Wick was an Italian theoretical physicist who made important contributions to quantum field theory. The Wick rotation, Wick contraction, Wick's theorem, and the Wick product are named after him.
Go to Profile#14449
Dean Smith
#14460
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Dean Edwards Smith was an American men's college basketball head coach. Called a "coaching legend" by the Basketball Hall of Fame, he coached for 36 years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Smith coached from 1961 to 1997 and retired with 879 victories, which was the NCAA Division I men's basketball record at that time. Smith had the ninth-highest winning percentage of any men's college basketball coach . During his tenure as head coach, North Carolina won two national championships and appeared in 11 Final Fours. Smith played college basketball at the University of Kansas...
Go to Profile#14450
Paola Severino
#14461
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Paola Severino is an Italian lawyer, academic and politician. She served as Minister of Justice in the Monti cabinet from November 2011 to April 2013, being the first woman appointed Minister of Justice in Italian history. On 3 October 2016, she was nominated rector of Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli.
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