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
#1451
Tariq Aziz
#1453
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
Tariq Aziz was an Iraqi politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs and a close advisor of President Saddam Hussein. Their association began in the 1950s when both were activists for the then-banned Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. He was both an Arab nationalist and a member of the Chaldean Catholic Church.
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Arthur Penn
#1454
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Arthur Hiller Penn was an American director and producer of film, television and theater. Closely associated with the American New Wave, Penn directed critically acclaimed films throughout the 1960s such as the drama The Chase , the biographical crime film Bonnie and Clyde and the comedy Alice's Restaurant . He also received attention for his acclaimed revisionist Western Little Big Man . Night Moves and The Missouri Breaks which were commercial flops, though they first generated positive reviews.
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Peter Lindbergh
#1455
Overall Influence
1944 - 2019 (75 years)
Peter Lindbergh was a German fashion photographer and film director. He had studied arts in Berlin and Krefeld, and exhibited his works before graduation. In 1971, he turned to photography and worked for the Stern magazine.
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Howie Weinberg
#1456
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Howie Weinberg is an American audio mastering engineer. Over the course of his career, he has received over 2,257 mastering credits, three TEC Awards, 21 Grammy Awards, two Juno Awards, and one Mercury Prize.
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Lars Ahlfors
#1457
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Lars Valerian Ahlfors was a Finnish mathematician, remembered for his work in the field of Riemann surfaces and his textbook on complex analysis. Background Ahlfors was born in Helsinki, Finland. His mother, Sievä Helander, died at his birth. His father, Axel Ahlfors, was a professor of engineering at the Helsinki University of Technology. The Ahlfors family was Swedish-speaking, so he first attended the private school Nya svenska samskolan where all classes were taught in Swedish. Ahlfors studied at University of Helsinki from 1924, graduating in 1928 having studied under Ernst Lindelöf and Rolf Nevanlinna.
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Irving Azoff
#1458
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Irving Azoff is an American entertainment executive and chairman of Full Stop Management, which represents recording artists. Since September 2013, he has been chairman and CEO of Azoff MSG Entertainment, a venture with The Madison Square Garden Company. Prior to this he served as chairman and CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment and was executive chairman of Live Nation Entertainment and CEO of Front Line Management. He is also on the board of Starz Inc. and IMG.
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Masha Gessen
#1459
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist, author, translator, and activist who has been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns. Gessen has written extensively on LGBT rights. Described as "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist", they have said that for many years they were "probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country". They now live in New York with their wife and children.
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Roy Ascott
#1460
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Roy Ascott FRSA is a British artist, who works with cybernetics and telematics on an art he calls technoetics by focusing on the impact of digital and telecommunications networks on consciousness. Since the 1960s, Ascott has been a practitioner of interactive computer art, electronic art, cybernetic art and telematic art.
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Edward Norton Lorenz
#1461
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Edward Norton Lorenz was an American mathematician and meteorologist who established the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability, as well as the basis for computer-aided atmospheric physics and meteorology. He is best known as the founder of modern chaos theory, a branch of mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.
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G. Evelyn Hutchinson
#1462
Overall Influence
1903 - 1991 (88 years)
George Evelyn Hutchinson was a British ecologist sometimes described as the "father of modern ecology." He contributed for more than sixty years to the fields of limnology, systems ecology, radiation ecology, entomology, genetics, biogeochemistry, a mathematical theory of population growth, art history, philosophy, religion, and anthropology. He worked on the passage of phosphorus through lakes, the chemistry and biology of lakes, the theory of interspecific competition, and on insect taxonomy and genetics, zoo-geography, and African water bugs. He is known as one of the first to combine ecology with mathematics.
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Javed Akhtar
#1463
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Javed Akhtar is an Indian screenwriter, lyricist and poet. Known for his work in Hindi cinema, he has won five National Film Awards, and received the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Padma Bhushan in 2007, two of India's highest civilian honours.
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Karl Wirtz
#1464
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Karl Eugen Julius Wirtz was a German nuclear physicist, born in Cologne. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Epsilon.
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Maryanne Trump Barry
#1465
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Maryanne Trump Barry was an American attorney and United States federal judge. She became an assistant United States attorney in 1974 and was first appointed to the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. In 1999, she was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President Bill Clinton.
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Anton Zeilinger
#1466
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anton Zeilinger is an Austrian quantum physicist and Nobel laureate in physics of 2022. Zeilinger is professor of physics emeritus at the University of Vienna and senior scientist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Most of his research concerns the fundamental aspects and applications of quantum entanglement.
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John Yoo
#1467
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#1466
Steven C. Hayes
#1468
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#1467
Paul Churchland
#1469
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#1468
Elizabeth Loftus
#1470
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#1469
John Osborne
#1471
Overall Influence
1929 - 1994 (65 years)
John James Osborne was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, and entrepreneur. Born in London, he briefly worked as a journalist before starting out in theatre as a stage manager and actor. He lived in poverty for several years before his third produced play, Look Back in Anger , brought him national fame.
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Anselm Kiefer
#1472
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Peter Dreher and Horst Antes at the end of the 1960s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history and the horrors of the Holocaust, as have the spiritual concepts of Kabbalah.
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Anish Kapoor
#1473
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor, is a British-Indian sculptor specializing in installation art and conceptual art. Born in Mumbai, Kapoor attended the elite all-boys Indian boarding school The Doon School, before moving to the UK to begin his art training at Hornsey College of Art and, later, Chelsea School of Art and Design.
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Christiane Amanpour
#1474
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Christiane Maria Heideh Amanpour is a British-Iranian journalist and television host. Amanpour is the Chief International Anchor for CNN and host of CNN International's nightly interview program Amanpour and CNN show The Amanpour hour on Saturday. She is also the host of Amanpour & Company on PBS.
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Tom Beauchamp
#1475
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Tom Lamar Beauchamp is an American philosopher specializing in the work of David Hume, moral philosophy, bioethics, and animal ethics. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University, where he was Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics.
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Queen Sofía of Spain
#1476
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Sofía is a member of the Spanish royal family who was Queen of Spain from 1975 to 2014 as the wife of King Juan Carlos I. She is the first child of Paul of Greece and Frederica of Hanover. Sofía married then Infante Juan Carlos of Spain in 1962 and became queen of Spain upon her husband's accession in 1975. On 19 June 2014, Juan Carlos abdicated in favour of their son Felipe VI.
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Robert S. Kaplan
#1477
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Robert Samuel Kaplan is an American accounting academic, and Emeritus Professor of Leadership Development at the Harvard Business School. He is known as co-creator of Balanced Scorecard. together with David P. Norton.
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R. Duncan Luce
#1478
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Robert Duncan Luce was an American mathematician and social scientist, and one of the most preeminent figures in the field of mathematical psychology. At the end of his life, he held the position of Distinguished Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine.
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Patricia Churchland
#1479
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
#1478
Ettore Majorana
#1480
Overall Influence
1906 - Present (118 years)
Ettore Majorana was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked on neutrino masses. On 25 March 1938, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances after purchasing a ticket to travel by ship from Palermo to Naples.
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Arthur Janov
#1481
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Arthur Janov , also known as Art Janov, was an American psychologist, psychotherapist, and writer. He gained notability as the creator of primal therapy, a treatment for mental illness that involves repeatedly descending into, feeling, and experiencing long-repressed childhood pain. Janov first directed a psychotherapy institute called the Primal Institute on North Almont Dr. in West Hollywood, California and from 1980 at the Janov Primal Center at 1205 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, in Venice, Los Angeles and latterly on Ashland Avenue in Santa Monica, California.
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John B. Taylor
#1482
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
John Brian Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He taught at Columbia University from 1973 to 1980 and the Woodrow Wilson School and Economics Department of Princeton University from 1980 to 1984 before returning to Stanford. He has received several teaching prizes and teaches Stanford's introductory economics course as well as PhD courses in monetary economics.
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Alan Bullock
#1483
Overall Influence
1914 - 2004 (90 years)
Alan Louis Charles Bullock, Baron Bullock, was a British historian. He is best known for his book Hitler: A Study in Tyranny , the first comprehensive biography of Adolf Hitler, which influenced many other Hitler biographies.
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Solomon Feferman
#1484
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Solomon Feferman was an American philosopher and mathematician who worked in mathematical logic. In addition to his prolific technical work in proof theory, recursion theory, and set theory, he was known for his contributions to the history of logic and as a vocal proponent of the philosophy of mathematics known as predicativism, notably from an anti-platonist stance.
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Jean Leray
#1485
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Jean Leray was a French mathematician, who worked on both partial differential equations and algebraic topology. Life and career He was born in Chantenay-sur-Loire . He studied at École Normale Supérieure from 1926 to 1929. He received his Ph.D. in 1933. In 1934 Leray published an important paper that founded the study of weak solutions of the Navier–Stokes equations. In the same year, he and Juliusz Schauder discovered a topological invariant, now called the Leray–Schauder degree, which they applied to prove the existence of solutions for partial differential equations lacking uniqueness.
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Julia Serano
#1486
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Julia Michelle Serano is an American writer, musician, spoken-word performer, transgender and bisexual activist, and biologist. She is known for her transfeminist books, such as Whipping Girl , Excluded , and Outspoken . She is also a public speaker who has given many talks at universities and conferences. Her writing is frequently featured in queer, feminist, and popular culture magazines.
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Bernie Sanders
#1487
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Bernard Sanders is an American politician and activist who is the senior United States senator from Vermont. Sanders is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history but has a close relationship with the Democratic Party, having caucused with House and Senate Democrats for most of his congressional career and sought the party's presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, coming second in both campaigns. He is often seen as a leader of the U.S. progressive movement.
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Nam June Paik
#1488
Overall Influence
1932 - 2006 (74 years)
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use of the term "electronic super highway" to describe the future of telecommunications.
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Rigoberta Menchú
#1489
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a K'iche' Guatemalan human rights activist, feminist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the rights of Guatemala's Indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War , and to promoting Indigenous rights internationally.
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Peter McLaren
#1490
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Peter McLaren is a Canadian scholar who serves as a Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies at Attallah College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. He is also Emeritus Professor of Urban Education, University of California, Los Angeles, and Emeritus Professor of Educational Leadership, Miami University of Ohio. He is also the Honorary Director of the Center for Critical Studies in Education at Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China. According to ...
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Jeremy Paxman
#1491
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jeremy Dickson Paxman is an English retired broadcaster, journalist, author, and television presenter. Born in Leeds, Paxman was educated at Malvern College and St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he edited the undergraduate newspaper Varsity. At Cambridge, he was a member of a Labour Party club and described himself as a socialist, in later life describing himself as a one-nation conservative. He joined the BBC in 1972, initially at BBC Radio Brighton, relocating to London in 1977. In following years, he worked on Tonight and Panorama, becoming a newsreader for the BBC Six O'Clock News ...
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Günter Blobel
#1492
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Günter Blobel was a Silesian German and American biologist and 1999 Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell.
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Sathya Sai Baba
#1493
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Sathya Sai Baba was an Indian guru. At the age of fourteen, he claimed that he was the reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba, and left his home to serve his devotees. Sai Baba's believers credited him with miracles such as materialisations of vibhuti and other small objects such as rings, necklaces and watches, along with reports of miraculous healings, resurrections, clairvoyance, bilocation and was purportedly omnipotent and omniscient. His devotees believe them to be signs of his divinity, while some individuals have concluded that his acts were based on sleight of hand or had other explanatio...
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Christy Turlington
#1494
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Christy Nicole Turlington Burns is an American fashion model and humanitarian. Turlington initially attracted fame in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a supermodel. She represented Calvin Klein's Eternity campaign in 1989 and again in 2014, and also represents Maybelline. Grace Coddington, the long-time creative director of American Vogue magazine, has described Turlington as "the most beautiful woman in the world."
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Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan
#1495
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan was an Emirati royal, politician, philanthropist and the founder of the United Arab Emirates. Zayed served as the governor of Eastern Region from 1946 until he succeeded Sheikh Shakhbut as the ruler of Abu Dhabi in 1966, and then as the first president of the United Arab Emirates while he retained his position as Abu Dhabi's ruler from 1971 until his death in 2004. He is revered in the United Arab Emirates as the Waalid al-Ummah , credited for being the principal driving force behind uniting seven emirates.
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Robert Bly
#1496
Overall Influence
1926 - 2021 (95 years)
Robert Elwood Bly was an American poet, essayist, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. His best-known prose book is Iron John: A Book About Men , which spent 62 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, and is a key text of the mythopoetic men's movement. He won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body.
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Len Deighton
#1497
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Leonard Cyril Deighton is a British author. His publications have included cookery books and works on history, but he is best known for his spy novels. After completing his national service in the Royal Air Force, Deighton attended the Saint Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London; he graduated from the latter in 1955. He had several jobs before becoming a book and magazine illustrator and designed the cover for the first UK edition of Jack Kerouac's 1957 work On the Road. He also worked for a period in an advertising agency. During an extended holiday in France he wrote...
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J. J. C. Smart
#1498
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
John Jamieson Carswell Smart was a British-Australian philosopher who was appointed as an Emeritus Professor by the Australian National University. He worked in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. He wrote several entries for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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John B. Cobb
#1499
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
John Boswell Cobb, Jr. is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist. Cobb is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Cobb is the author of more than fifty books. In 2014, Cobb was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Guido van Rossum
#1500
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Guido van Rossum is a Dutch programmer best known as the creator of the Python programming language, for which he was the "benevolent dictator for life" until he stepped down from the position on 12 July 2018. He remained a member of the Python Steering Council through 2019, and withdrew from nominations for the 2020 election.
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Steve Crocker
#1501
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Stephen D. Crocker is an Internet pioneer. In 1969, he created the ARPA "Networking Working Group" and the Request for Comments series. He served as chair of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers from 2011 through 2017.
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Aldo Rossi
#1502
Overall Influence
1931 - 1997 (66 years)
Aldo Rossi was an Italian architect and designer who achieved international recognition in four distinct areas: architectural theory, drawing and design and also product design. He was one of the leading proponents of the postmodern movement.
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