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
#14451
Harold Leavitt
#14462
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Harold Jack Leavitt was an American psychologist of management. Life and career Leavitt was born on 14 January 1922. A native of Lynn, Massachusetts, he was the youngest of eleven siblings. Following the conclusion of his baccalaureate studies at Harvard University in 1943, Leavitt continued graduate study at Brown University in 1944. He then served as a United States Navy reservist for two years, and earned a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949. Leavitt taught at the University of Chicago and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute prior to joining the Carnegie Mellon University in 1958.
Go to Profile#14452
Leonard J. Arrington
#14463
Overall Influence
1917 - 1999 (82 years)
Leonard James Arrington was an American author, academic and the founder of the Mormon History Association. He is known as the "Dean of Mormon History" and "the Father of Mormon History" because of his many influential contributions to the field. Since 1842, he was the first non-general authority Church Historian for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , from 1972 to 1982, and was director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History from 1982 until 1986.
Go to Profile#14453
Sergey Kapitsa
#14464
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Sergey Petrovich Kapitsa was a Russian physicist and demographer. He was best known as host of the popular and long-running Russian scientific TV show, Evident, but Incredible. His father was the Nobel laureate Soviet-era physicist Pyotr Kapitsa, and his brother was the geographer and Antarctic explorer Andrey Kapitsa.
Go to Profile#14454
Benedict Cumberbatch
#14465
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch is an English actor. Known for his work on screen and stage, he has received various accolades, including a BAFTA Award, a Primetime Emmy Award and a Laurence Olivier Award, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards and four Golden Globes. In 2014, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and in 2015, he was appointed a CBE for services to performing arts and charity.
Go to Profile#14455
William A. Stein
#14466
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
William Arthur Stein is a software developer and previously a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington. He is the lead developer of SageMath and founder of CoCalc. Stein does computational and theoretical research into the problem of computing with modular forms and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. He is considered "a leading expert in the field of computational arithmetic".
Go to Profile#14456
Laurent Gbagbo
#14467
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Koudou Laurent Gbagbo is an Ivorian politician who was the president of Côte d'Ivoire from 2000 until his arrest in April 2011. A historian, Gbagbo was imprisoned in the early 1970s and again in the early 1990s, and he lived in exile in France during much of the 1980s as a result of his union activism. Gbagbo founded the Ivorian Popular Front in 1982 and ran unsuccessfully for president against Félix Houphouët-Boigny at the start of multi-party politics in 1990. He won a seat in the National Assembly of Côte d'Ivoire in 1990.
Go to Profile#14457
Mike Jackson
#14468
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael Christopher Jackson OBE is a British systems scientist, consultant and Emeritus Professor of Management Systems and former Dean of Hull University Business School, known for his work in the field of systems thinking and management.
Go to Profile#14458
Mai Yamani
#14469
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mai Yamani is an independent Saudi scholar, author and anthropologist. Early life Yamani was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1956 to an Iraqi mother from Mosul and a Saudi Arabian father from Mecca. Her paternal grandfathers came from Yemen, hence the surname Yamani . Her early education included schooling in Baghdad, Iraq and Mecca, Saudi Arabia. She attended secondary school at the renowned Château Mont-Choisi in Lausanne, Switzerland, from 1967 to 1975. She received her bachelor's degree summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania; and subsequently attended Somerville College, University of Oxford, where she was the first Yemeni woman to obtain a M.St.
Go to Profile#14459
Huda Akil
#14470
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Huda Akil is a Syrian–American neuroscientist whose pioneering research has contributed to the understanding of the neurobiology of emotions, including pain, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Akil and colleagues are best known for providing the first physiological evidence for a role of endorphins in the brain and demonstrating that endorphins are activated by stress and can cause pain inhibition.
Go to Profile#14460
Sverker Sörlin
#14471
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Sverker Sörlin is a Swedish historian of ideas, professor in environmental history, and writer. Biography Sörlin has a PhD in the history of ideas from Umeå University from 1988. In 1993, he assumed the first chair in environmental history in Scandinavia, also at Umeå University. Since 2007, he is professor of environmental history at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He's had an adjunct position at the Stockholm Resilience Centre , and visiting positions at University of California Berkeley , University of Ca...
Go to Profile#14461
Giuliano Preparata
#14472
Overall Influence
1942 - 2000 (58 years)
Giuliano Preparata was an Italian physicist. Biography He attended the High School Umberto I of Rome , and graduated in theoretical physics with honors in 1964. The following year he was in Florence with a CNR grant, later to become appointed as Professor. From 1967 to 1972 he was a research associate at several prestigious universities in the United States, including Princeton, Harvard, and NYU. From 1974 to 1980 he was a staff member in the theory division of CERN, in Geneva.
Go to Profile#14462
Xabi Alonso
#14473
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Xabier Alonso Olano is a Spanish football coach and former professional player who is currently the head coach of Bundesliga club Bayer Leverkusen. He is frequently described as one of the best midfielders of his generation.
Go to Profile#14463
Peter Bradshaw
#14474
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Peter Nicholas Bradshaw is a British writer, art and film critic. He has been chief film critic at The Guardian since 1999, and is a contributing editor at Esquire. Early life and education Bradshaw was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Hertfordshire and studied English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was president of the Cambridge Footlights. He was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1984, followed by postgraduate research in the Early Modern period in which he studied with Lisa Jardine and Anne Barton. He received his PhD in 1989.
Go to Profile#14464
James Patrick Kelly
#14475
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
James Patrick Kelly is an American science fiction author who has won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Biography Kelly made his first fiction sale in 1975. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1972, with a B.A. in English Literature. After graduating from college, he worked as a full-time proposal writer until 1977. He attended the Clarion Workshop twice, once in 1974 and again in 1976.
Go to Profile#14465
Newton Morton
#14476
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Newton Ennis Morton was an American population geneticist and one of the founders of the field of genetic epidemiology. Early life and education Morton was born in Camden, New Jersey. When he was three months old, his family moved to New Haven, Connecticut. His interest in science started at an early age, when he would collect butterflies. Morton attended Hopkins School, later transferring to Swarthmore College for two years. He lost enthusiasm for entomology, so instead he decided to pursue a career in genetics after being inspired by Dobzhansky's book, Genetics and the Origin of Species.
Go to Profile#14466
Saul Rosen
#14477
Overall Influence
1922 - 1991 (69 years)
Saul Rosen was an American computer science pioneer. He is known for designing the software of the first transistor-based computer Philco Transac S-2000, and for his work on programming language design which influenced the ALGOL language.
Go to Profile#14467
Patricia Devine
#14478
Overall Influence
Patricia Grace Devine is a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was the psychology department chair from 2009 to 2014. She was also the 2012 president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Go to Profile#14468
Christine Darden
#14479
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Christine Darden is an American mathematician, data analyst, and aeronautical engineer who devoted much of her 40-year career in aerodynamics at NASA to researching supersonic flight and sonic booms. She had an M.S. in mathematics and had been teaching at Virginia State University before starting to work at the Langley Research Center in 1967. She earned a Ph.D. in engineering at George Washington University in 1983 and has published numerous articles in her field. She was the first African-American woman at NASA's Langley Research Center to be promoted to the Senior Executive Service, the to...
Go to Profile#14469
Faye Dunaway
#14480
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Dorothy Faye Dunaway is an American actress. She is the recipient of many accolades, including an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, three Golden Globe Awards, and a BAFTA Award. In 2011, the government of France made her an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Go to Profile#14470
Colin G. DeYoung
#14481
Overall Influence
Colin G. DeYoung is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota . His research is in the field of personality psychology and personality neuroscience. Background DeYoung earned his A.B. in the Mind, Brain, Behavior program of the History and Science concentration at Harvard University in 1998. He obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology in 2000 and 2005, respectively, at the University of Toronto where he studied under Jordan B. Peterson.
Go to Profile#14471
Grigory Pomerants
#14482
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Grigory Solomonovich Pomerants was a Russian philosopher and cultural theorist. He is the author of numerous philosophical works that circulated in samizdat and made an impact on the liberal intelligentsia in the 1960s and 1970s.
Go to Profile#14472
Daniel Lazard
#14483
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Daniel Lazard is a French mathematician and computer scientist. He is emeritus professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University. Career Daniel Lazard was born in Carpentras, in southern France. His undergraduate education was at the École Normale Supérieure. Following graduate work at the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Paris, he was granted a doctorat d'état in 1968 by the University of Paris. His dissertation was supervised by the commutative algebraist Pierre Samuel, and was titled "Autour de la platitude" .
Go to Profile#14473
John J. McNeill
#14484
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
John J. McNeill was an American Catholic priest, psychotherapist and academic theologian in the United States, with a particular reputation within the field of queer theology. McNeill was awarded the National Human Rights Award in 1984 for his contributions to lesbian and gay rights, and was made the Grand Marshal of the New York City Gay Rights Parade in 1987. McNeill was expelled from the Society of Jesus in 1987 at the request of the Vatican, but continued to serve as a Catholic priest in New York City until his death on September 22, 2015.
Go to Profile#14474
John Rennie
#14485
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
John Rennie is an American science writer who was the seventh editor in chief of Scientific American magazine. After leaving Scientific American in 2009, he began writing for Public Library of Science Blogs. Rennie has also been involved with several television programs and podcasts as well as multiple writing projects, including his latest position as a deputy editor on the staff of Quanta Magazine.
Go to Profile#14475
Norman Breslow
#14486
Overall Influence
1941 - 2015 (74 years)
Norman Edward Breslow was an American statistician and medical researcher. At the time of his death, he was Professor of Biostatistics in the School of Public Health, of the University of Washington. He is co-author or author of hundreds of published works during 1967 to 2015.
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R. Graham Cooks
#14487
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Robert Graham Cooks is the Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in the Aston Laboratories for Mass Spectrometry at Purdue University. He is an ISI Highly Cited Chemist, with over 1,000 publications and an H-index of 144.
Go to Profile#14477
Mary Doria Russell
#14488
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mary Doria Russell is an American novelist. Early life and education Russell was born in Elmhurst, Illinois She graduated from Glenbard East High School in Lombard, Illinois, which has registered its chapter of the National English Honor Society.
Go to Profile#14478
Dannie Abse
#14489
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Daniel Abse CBE FRSL was a Welsh poet and physician. His poetry won him many awards. As a medic, he worked in a chest clinic for over 30 years. Early years Abse was born in Cardiff, Wales, as the younger brother of the politician and reformer Leo Abse and the eminent psychoanalyst Wilfred Abse. Unusually for a middle-class Jewish boy, Dannie Abse attended St Illtyd's College, a working-class Catholic school in Splott. Abse studied medicine, first at the University of Wales College of Medicine and then at Westminster Hospital Medical School and King's College London.
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Simon Gächter
#14490
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Simon Gächter is an Austrian economist. He currently is professor of the psychology of economic decision making at the University of Nottingham. Gächter attended the University of Vienna, where he received his doctoral degree in economics in 1994. He earned his habilitation at the University of Zürich in 1999.
Go to Profile#14480
Mark Welsh
#14491
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mark Anthony Welsh III is the 27th president of Texas A&M University, former Dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and a retired United States Air Force four-star general. Prior to his current role, he served as Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the United States Senate. Prior to that, General Welsh served as Commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, as the Associate Director for Military Affairs of the Central Intelligence Agency, and as the Vice Commander of Air Education and Training Command.
Go to Profile#14481
Stanley G. Love
#14492
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Stanley Glen Love is an American scientist and a NASA astronaut from Oregon. Early life Love was born on June 8, 1965, to Glen A. Love and Rhoda M. Love in San Diego, California. However, Love has stated he considers Eugene, Oregon, to be his hometown. Love graduated from Winston Churchill High School in Eugene, Oregon, in 1983. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California , and M.S. and Ph.D degrees from the University of Washington in Astronomy.
Go to Profile#14482
Sam Mendes
#14493
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes is a British film and stage director, producer, and screenwriter. In 2000, Mendes was appointed a CBE for his services to drama, and he was knighted in the 2020 New Years Honours List.
Go to Profile#14483
Heinz Edelmann
#14494
Overall Influence
1934 - 2009 (75 years)
Heinz Edelmann was a Czech-German illustrator and designer. His art direction and character designs for the Beatles' 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine brought him additional recognition around the world.
Go to Profile#14484
Christopher Wheeldon
#14495
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Christopher Peter Wheeldon is an English international choreographer of contemporary ballet. Life and career Born in Yeovil, Somerset, to an engineer and a physical therapist, Wheeldon began training to be a ballet dancer at the age of 8. He attended the Royal Ballet School between the ages of 11 and 18. In 1991, Wheeldon joined the Royal Ballet, London; and in that same year, he won the gold medal at the Prix de Lausanne competition.
Go to Profile#14485
Robert Sproull
#14496
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Robert Lamb Sproull was an American educator, physicist and US Department of Defense official. Sproull was born in Lacon, Illinois. A graduate of Deep Springs College, Sproull studied English literature at Cornell University before taking a PhD at the same university in physics. He began a promising and productive career as a physicist at Cornell and headed the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics and the Materials Science Center. Sproull left Cornell to become director of ARPA, where he was a strong advocate of cooperation among academia, government, and industry to meet US scient...
Go to Profile#14486
Leon Simon
#14497
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Leon Melvyn Simon , born in 1945, is a Leroy P. Steele Prize and Bôcher Prize-winning mathematician, known for deep contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, geometric measure theory, and partial differential equations. He is currently Professor Emeritus in the Mathematics Department at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#14487
Franco Malerba
#14498
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Franco Egidio Malerba is an Italian astronaut and Member of the European Parliament. He was the first citizen of Italy to travel to space. In 1994, he was elected to the European Parliament on the lists of Forza Italia, serving until 1999.
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Richard Bentall
#14499
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Richard Bentall is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Sheffield in the UK. Early life Richard Pendrill Bentall was born in Sheffield in the United Kingdom. After attending Uppingham School in Rutland and then High Storrs School in his home town, he attended the University College of North Wales, Bangor as an undergraduate before registering for a PhD in Experimental Psychology at the same institution.
Go to Profile#14489
Arturo Ardao
#14500
Overall Influence
1912 - 2003 (91 years)
Arturo Ardao was a Uruguayan philosopher and historian of ideas. From 1968 to 1972 he was dean of the Faculty of Humanities. Before the Military Coup in 1973, he was forced into exile in Venezuela, where he continued his academic activity as professor at the Simón Bolívar University in Caracas . In addition, he participates as researcher at the Center for Latin American Studies Rómulo Gallegos.
Go to Profile#14490
Ciaran Carson
#14501
Overall Influence
1948 - 2019 (71 years)
Ciaran Gerard Carson was a Northern Ireland-born poet and novelist. Early life and education Ciaran Carson was born on 9 October 1948 in Belfast into an Irish-speaking family. His father, William, was a postman and his mother, Mary, worked in the linen mills. He spent his early years in the lower Falls Road where he attended Slate Street School and then St. Gall's Primary School, both of which subsequently closed. He then attended St. Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School before proceeding to Queen's University, Belfast to read for a degree in English.
Go to Profile#14491
Klaus M. Schmidt
#14502
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Klaus M. Schmidt is a German economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at the University of Munich . His research focuses on behavioural economics, game theory and contract theory. In 2001, Schmidt was awarded the Gossen Prize in recognition for his contributions to economic research on game theory, contract theory, and the economics of fairness. He is a member of the council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.
Go to Profile#14492
V. Craig Jordan
#14503
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Virgil Craig Jordan, , is a scientist with American and British citizenship specializing in drugs for breast cancer treatment and prevention. Currently, he is Professor of Breast Medical Oncology, and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas. Previously, he was Scientific Director and Vice Chairman of Oncology at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center of Georgetown University. Jordan was the first to discover the breast cancer prevention properties of tamoxifen and the scientific principles for adjuvant therapy with antihormones.
Go to Profile#14493
Bob Altemeyer
#14504
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Robert Anthony Altemeyer is a retired Professor of Psychology at the University of Manitoba. Altemeyer also produced the right-wing authoritarianism scale, or RWA Scale, as well as the related left-wing authoritarianism scale, or LWA Scale.
Go to Profile#14494
Włodzimierz Brus
#14505
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Włodzimierz Brus was an economist and party functionary in communist Poland. He emigrated from Poland in 1972, removed from power after the 1968 Polish political crisis. Brus spent the rest of his life in the United Kingdom.
Go to Profile#14495
Günther Domenig
#14506
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Günther Domenig was an Austrian architect. Domenig was born in Klagenfurt, and studied architecture at the Graz University of Technology . After working as an architectural assistant, he set up in practice with Eilfried Huth , producing buildings in a brutalist vein. They designed buildings with exposed concrete that are among the outstanding examples of brutalism in Austria. Both the Pedagogical Academy Graz and the Oberwart Parish Church were commissioned by the Catholic Church.
Go to Profile#14496
Qingyun Ma
#14507
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Qingyun Ma is a Chinese architect. Early life and education Born in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, Ma received a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering in Architecture from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Later on, he pursued architecture at the Graduate School of Fine Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#14497
Aubrey Levin
#14508
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Aubrey Levin is a South African-born Canadian psychiatrist and former Colonel in the South African Defence Force who used abusive procedures on homosexual army conscripts and conscientious objectors in an attempt to cure them of suspected same-sex attraction in apartheid era South Africa.
Go to Profile#14498
Philip Bourne
#14509
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Philip Eric Bourne is an Australian bioinformatician, non-fiction writer, and businessman. He is currently Stephenson Chair of Data Science and Director of the School of Data Science and Professor of Biomedical Engineering and was the first associate director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health, where his projects include managing the Big Data to Knowledge initiative, and formerly Associate Vice Chancellor at UCSD. He has contributed to textbooks and is a strong supporter of open-access literature and software. His diverse interests have spanned structural biology, medical i...
Go to Profile#14499
Greg Giraldo
#14510
Overall Influence
1965 - 2010 (45 years)
Gregory Carlos Giraldo was an American stand-up comedian, television personality, and lawyer. He is remembered for his appearances on Comedy Central's televised roast specials, and for his work on that network's television shows Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn, Lewis Black's Root of All Evil, and the programming block Stand-Up Nation, the last of which he hosted.
Go to Profile#14500
Brian Alters
#14511
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Brian J. Alters is a Canadian academic who is a professor in Chapman University's College of Educational Studies. He directs Chapman's Evolution Education Research Center, has taught science education at both Harvard and McGill Universities, and is regarded as a specialist in evolution education.
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