Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people

#14501

Lane Kenworthy

#14512

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Lane Kenworthy is an American professor of sociology and political science. He has worked at the University of Arizona since 2004, being a full professor since 2007. He is known for his statistical and analytic work on the economic effects of income and wealth distribution. He currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

#14502

Bharat Aggarwal

#14513

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Bharat B. Aggarwal is an Indian-American biochemist. His research has been in the areas of cytokines, the role of inflammation in cancer, and the anti-cancer effects of spices and herbs, particularly curcumin . He was a professor in the Department of Clinical Immunology, Bioimmunotherapy, and Experimental Therapeutics at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

#14503

James P. Crutchfield

#14514

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

James P. Crutchfield is an American mathematician and physicist. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in physics and mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1979 and his Ph.D. in physics there in 1983. He is currently a professor of physics at the University of California, Davis, where he is director of the Complexity Sciences Center—a new research and graduate program in complex systems. Prior to this, he was research professor at the Santa Fe Institute for many years, where he ran the Dynamics of Learning Group and SFI's Network Dynamics Program. From 1985 to 1997, he was a research physicist in the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley.

#14504

Boris Cyrulnik

#14515

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Boris Cyrulnik is a French doctor, ethologist, neurologist, and psychiatrist. As a Jewish child during World War II, he was entrusted to a foster family for his own protection. In 1943 he was taken with adults in a Nazi-led capture in Bordeaux. He avoided detention by hiding for a while in the restrooms and later being hidden from Nazi searches as a farm boy under the name Jean Laborde until the end of the war. Both of his parents were arrested and murdered during World War II. His own survival motivated his career in psychiatry. He studied medicine at the University of Paris. He has written several books of popular science on psychology.

#14505

James Franklin Harris

#14516

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

James F. Harris is an American philosopher and Francis S. Haserot Emeritus Professor at College of William & Mary. He is known for his works on philosophy of religion. Books Against Relativism: A Philosophical Defense of Method Philosophical at 33 rpm: Themes of Classic Rock Music Analytic Philosophy of Religion The Ascent of Man: A Philosophy of Human Nature The Serpentine Wall: The Winding Boundary between Church and State in the United States .Analyticity Logic, God, and Metaphysics .

#14506

Stephen Whittle

Stephen Whittle

#14517

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Stephen Thomas Whittle, is a British legal scholar and activist with the transgender activist group Press for Change. Since 2007, he has been Professor of Equalities Law in the School of Law at Manchester Metropolitan University. Between 2007 and 2009, he was president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health . Having been assigned female at birth, he is described as "a radical lesbian before his sex change and now a leading commentator on gender issues", who after the Gender Recognition Act 2004 came into force in April 2005, achieved legal recognition as a man and so wa...

#14507

Baskın Oran

#14518

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Baskın Oran is a Turkish academic, politician and human rights activist. Currently, he is a teacher in Faculty of Political Science, Ankara University. Biography Baskın Oran finished his high school in Turkey. He attended high school Saint-Joseph, which explains his Francophonie then Izmir Atatürk High School. He then entered Ankara University and studied for Political Science. He graduated in 1968. Later in 1969, he started his academic career as a teaching assistant in the Department of International Relations.

#14508

Sayed Kashua

#14519

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Sayed Kashua is a Palestinian author and journalist born in Tira, Israel, known for his books and humorous columns in Hebrew and English. Biography Kashua was born in Tira in the Triangle region of Israel to Palestinian Muslim-Arab parents. In 1990, he was accepted to a prestigious boarding school in Jerusalem – Israel Arts and Science Academy. He studied sociology and philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kashua was a resident of Beit Safafa before moving to a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem with his wife and children.

#14509

G. Gordon Liddy

G. Gordon Liddy

#14520

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

George Gordon Battle Liddy was an American lawyer and FBI agent who was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping for his role in the Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration.

#14510

Mikhail Lukin

#14521

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Mikhail Lukin ; born 10 October 1971 Early life Mikhail "Misha" Lukin was born in Moscow, Russia. He studied physics and mathematics at MIPT, and he graduated in 1993. Following his graduation, he joined Texas A&M University where he wrote a research paper titled Quantum Coherence and Interference in Optics and Laser Spectroscopy that he used for his Ph.D. thesis. Between this and 1994 he was a visiting scientist to Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany. Later on he became a postdoc at Texas A&M University and then became a fellow, and later joint director, of the Institu...

#14511

Michael Grossman

#14522

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Michael Grossman is an American health economist and economics professor emeritus at the City University of New York Graduate Center . He directed the Health Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1972 to 2020. Grossman was an early contributor to New Home Economics .

#14512

Priscilla Cohn

#14523

Overall Influence

2000 - 2019 (19 years)

Priscilla T. Neuman Cohn Ferrater Mora was an American philosopher and animal rights activist. She was Emerita Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, associate director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, and co-editor of the centre's Journal of Animal Ethics.

#14513

Arthur Pardee

#14524

Overall Influence

1921 - 2019 (98 years)

Arthur Beck Pardee was an American biochemist. One biographical portrait begins "Among the titans of science, Arthur Pardee is especially intriguing." There is hardly a field of molecular biology that is not affected by his work, which has advanced our understanding through theoretical predictions followed by insightful experiments. He is perhaps most famous for his part in the 'PaJaMo experiment' of the late 1950s, which greatly helped in the discovery of messenger RNA. He is also well known as the discoverer of the restriction point, in which a cell commits itself to certain cell cycle events during the G1 cycle.

#14514

Omer Bartov

#14525

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Omer Bartov is an Israeli-born historian. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, where he has taught since 2000. Bartov is a noted historian of the Holocaust and is considered one of the world's leading authorities on genocide. The Forward calls him "one of the foremost scholars of Jewish life in Galicia."

#14515

William Sweet

#14526

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

William Sweet is a Canadian philosopher, and a past president of the Canadian Philosophical Association and of the Canadian Theological Society. Biography Sweet was born in St. Albert near Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and studied political science, theology, and philosophy in Canada, South Africa, France, and Germany. He completed a DEA in political science at the Sorbonne at the Université de Paris , a PhD in philosophy at the University of Ottawa, a DTh in systematic theology at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, and a D.Ph. at the Université Saint-Paul. He also studied at Carleton University, the University of Manitoba, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Centre Sèvres .

#14516

Anat Rafaeli

#14527

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Anat Rafaeli is an Israeli researcher, scholar of Organisational Behavior, a Professor Emerita at the Technion and the Yigal Alon Chair of Industrial Engineering and Mmanagement. She served as the Deputy Senior Vice President of International Academic Relations of the Technion and was the Executive Director of Technion International . Rafaeli is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, a member of the Academy of Management, with extensive experience as an author and a former member of the editorial boards of The Academy of Management Journal and The Academy of Management Review

#14517

Harry T. Edwards

Harry T. Edwards

#14528

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Harry Thomas Edwards is an American jurist. He served as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1980 to 2005, taking senior status in 2005, and a professor of law at the New York University School of Law.

#14518

Jean-Pierre Richard

#14529

Overall Influence

1922 - 2019 (97 years)

Jean-Pierre Richard was a French writer and literary critic. Biography Jean-Pierre Richard began his advanced studies at the École normale supérieure, at the time a school of the University of Paris, in 1941, passed the "agrégation" in literature in 1945, and got his doctoral degree in 1962 at the University of Paris. He taught literature first in foreign universities, and then in France, and finally became a professor at the University of Paris IV in 1978.

#14519

Marcos Baghdatis

Marcos Baghdatis

#14530

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (41 years)

Marcos Baghdatis is a Cypriot former professional tennis player and coach. He was the runner-up at the 2006 Australian Open and a semifinalist at the 2006 Wimbledon Championships, and reached a career-high ATP singles ranking of world No. 8 in August 2006. In the latter part of his career, Baghdatis endured a series of injuries that impacted his play.

#14520

Keith Hart

#14531

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Keith Hart is a British anthropologist and writer living in Paris. His main research has focused on economic anthropology, Africa and the African diaspora, and money. He has taught at universities including East Anglia, Manchester, Yale and the Chicago, as well as at Cambridge University where he was director of the African Studies Centre. He contributed the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has published widely on economic anthropology. He is the author of The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World and Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes. His written work f...

#14521

Roger G. Ibbotson

#14532

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Roger G. Ibbotson is Professor Emeritus in Practice of Finance at the Yale School of Management. He is also chairman of Zebra Capital Management LLC. He has written extensively on capital market returns, cost of capital, and international investment. He is the founder, advisor, and former chairman of Ibbotson Associates, now a Morningstar Company. He has written numerous books and articles including Bonds, Bills, and Inflation with Rex Sinquefield, which serves as a standard reference for information and capital market returns.

#14522

Karen Davila

#14533

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Kristen Karen Lising Davila-Sta. Ana , known professionally as Karen Davila, is a Filipino journalist and news anchor. Early life Davila went to high school at the Colegio San Agustin – Makati, where she was batchmates with Kris Aquino and Pinky Webb. She took a degree of Bachelor of Arts major in Mass Communication at the University of the Philippines Diliman in Quezon City.

#14523

Carl Trueman

#14534

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Carl R. Trueman is an English Christian theologian and ecclesiastical historian. He was Professor of Historical Theology and Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary, where he held the Paul Woolley Chair of Church History. In 2018 Trueman left Westminster and became a professor at Grove City College in their Department of Biblical and Religious Studies.

#14524

Mike W. Barr

#14535

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Mike W. Barr is an American writer of comic books, mystery novels, and science fiction novels. Barr has written for every one of the first four incarnations of Star Trek: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, in either comic book or other media.

#14525

George Marsaglia

#14536

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

George Marsaglia was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is best known for creating the diehard tests, a suite of software for measuring statistical randomness. Research on random numbers George Marsaglia established the lattice structure of linear congruential generators in the paper "Random numbers fall mainly in the planes", later termed Marsaglia's theorem. This phenomenon means that n-tuples with coordinates obtained from consecutive use of the generator will lie on a small number of equally spaced hyperplanes in n-dimensional space. He also developed the diehard tests...

#14526

Rob Manfred

#14537

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Robert Dean Manfred Jr. is an American lawyer and business executive who is serving as the tenth commissioner of Major League Baseball. He previously served as MLB's chief operating officer. Manfred succeeded Bud Selig as commissioner on January 25, 2015.

#14527

Hermann Knoflacher

Hermann Knoflacher

#14538

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Hermann Knoflacher is an Austrian civil engineer. He was the head of the Institute for Transport Planning and Technology at the Vienna University of Technology. Life and teachings Knoflacher completed degrees in civil engineering, geodesy, and mathematics. Since 1975 he is a professor at the Vienna University of Technology. In 1985 he became head of the Institute for Transport Planning. His research focuses on spatial planning, urban planning, and transport planning. He is one of the key contributors to the sustainable transport movement . Since 2004 he is the president of the Club of Vienna.

#14528

Nikolay Drozdov

Nikolay Drozdov

#14539

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Nikolay Nikolaievich Drozdov is a Russian doctor of biological sciences, candidate of geographical sciences, zoological sciences, professor of Moscow State University, a public figure, member of the expert council of the national award "Crystal Compass," a member of the media council of the Russian Geographical Society.

#14529

Giovanni Jona-Lasinio

Giovanni Jona-Lasinio

#14540

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Giovanni Jona-Lasinio , sometimes called Gianni Jona, is an Italian theoretical physicist, best known for his works on quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. He pioneered research concerning spontaneous symmetry breaking, and the Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model is named after him. When Yoichiro Nambu received the Nobel Prize, Jona-Lasinio gave the Nobel Lecture in his place, as a recognition from Nambu for their joint work. At present, he holds a faculty position in the Physics Department of Sapienza University of Rome, and is a full member of the Accademia dei Lincei.

#14530

Debora Hammond

#14541

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Debora Hammond is an American historian of science, former Provost and Professor Emerita of Interdisciplinary Studies of the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at the Sonoma State University. She is known as author of the 2003 book The Science of Synthesis: Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory, and as 2005–06 President of International Society for the Systems Sciences.

#14531

Harold Edwards

#14542

Overall Influence

1936 - 2020 (84 years)

Harold Mortimer Edwards, Jr. was an American mathematician working in number theory, algebra, and the history and philosophy of mathematics. He was one of the co-founding editors, with Bruce Chandler, of The Mathematical Intelligencer. He is the author of expository books on the Riemann zeta function, on Galois theory, and on Fermat's Last Theorem. He wrote a book on Leopold Kronecker's work on divisor theory providing a systematic exposition of that work—a task that Kronecker never completed. He wrote textbooks on linear algebra, calculus, and number theory. He also wrote a book of essays...

#14532

Donald Dedmon

#14543

Overall Influence

1931 - 1998 (67 years)

Donald Newton Dedmon was an American academic administrator and communications consultant. Early life and education Dedmon was born in Wright County, Missouri, and received his undergraduate degree English and speech from Southwest Missouri State College in 1953, and taught high school before earning a Master of Arts degree in speech in 1956 and a PhD in oral education from the University of Iowa in 1961.

#14533

Hazel Carby

#14544

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Hazel Vivian Carby is Professor Emerita of African American Studies and of American Studies. She served as Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.

#14534

Danny DeVito

#14545

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Daniel Michael DeVito Jr. is an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. He gained prominence for his portrayal of the taxi dispatcher Louie De Palma in the television series Taxi , which won him a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award. He plays Frank Reynolds on the FX and FXX sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia .

#14535

Margaret Wertheim

Margaret Wertheim

#14546

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Margaret Wertheim is an Australian-born science writer, curator, and artist based in the United States. She is the author of books on the cultural history of physics, and has written about science, including for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, Aeon and Cabinet. Wertheim and her twin sister, Christine Wertheim, are co-founders of the Institute For Figuring , a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization though which they create projects at the intersection of art, science and mathematics. Their IFF projects include their Crochet Coral Reef, which has been shown at the 2019 Veni...

#14536

James Miller

#14547

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

James Miller is an American writer and academic. He is known for writing about Michel Foucault, philosophy as a way of life, social movements, popular culture, intellectual history, eighteenth century to the present; radical social theory and history of political philosophy. He currently teaches at The New School.

#14537

Doug McAdam

#14548

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Doug McAdam is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of over a dozen books and over fifty articles, and is widely credited as one of the pioneers of the political process model in social movement analysis. He wrote one of the first books on the theory in 1982 when analyzing the U.S. Civil Rights Movement: Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency 1930-1970. His other book Freedom Summer won the C. Wright Mills Award in 1990. He served as the director of the prestigious Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences between 2001 and 2005.

#14538

Vincent Racaniello

Vincent Racaniello

#14549

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Vincent R. Racaniello is a Higgins Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is a co-author of a textbook on virology, Principles of Virology.

#14539

Andrei Slavnov

#14550

Overall Influence

1939 - 2022 (83 years)

Andrei Alekseevich Slavnov was a Russian theoretical physicist, known for Slavnov–Taylor identities. Life and career Slavnov was born in Moscow on 22 December 1939. He graduated in physics in 1962 from Moscow State University and received in 1965 his Russian candidate degree from the Steklov Institute. He then worked at the Steklov Institute in the department of theoretical physics, most recently as a principal researcher. In 1972 he received his Russian doctorate , becoming a professor in 1981. In 1992 he became the head of the department of quantum field theory and later became the head of the department of theoretical physics at the Steklov Institute.

#14540

Daniel Barenboim

#14551

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Daniel Barenboim is an Argentine-born classical pianist and conductor based in Berlin. From 1992 until January 2023, Barenboim was the general music director of the Berlin State Opera and "Staatskapellmeister" of its orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin.

#14541

Ellen Spertus

#14552

Overall Influence

Ellen R. Spertus is an American computer scientist who is currently the Elinor Kilgore Snyder Professor of computer science at Mills College, Oakland, California, and a former senior research scientist at Google.

#14542

Judith Lorber

#14553

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Judith Lorber is professor emerita of sociology and women’s studies at The CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is a foundational theorist of social construction of gender difference and has played a vital role in the formation and transformation of gender studies. She has more recently called for a de-gendering of the social world.

#14543

Ray C. Dougherty

#14554

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Ray C. Dougherty is an American linguist and was a member of the Arts and Science faculty at New York University until 2014 . He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from Dartmouth College in the early 1960s and his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. At MIT, Dougherty was one of the first students of Noam Chomsky, working in the field of transformational grammar. During the Linguistics Wars of the 1970s, Dougherty was a critic of the generative semantics movement. Specializing in computational linguistics, Dougherty has publ...

#14544

Tomonobu Imamichi

Tomonobu Imamichi

#14555

Overall Influence

1922 - 2012 (90 years)

Tomonobu Imamichi was a Japanese philosopher who studied Chinese philosophy. Life Imamichi taught in Europe as well as in Japan . Beginning in 1979 he was the president of the Centre International pour l'Étude Comparée de Philosophie et d'Esthétique and after 1997 of the International Institute of Philosophy. In 1976 he founded the journal Aesthetics.

#14545

Chuck Noll

#14556

Overall Influence

1932 - 2014 (82 years)

Charles Henry Noll was an American professional football player and head coach. Regarded as one of the greatest head coaches of all time, his sole head coaching position was for the Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League from 1969 to 1991. When Noll retired after 23 years, only three other head coaches in NFL history had longer tenures with one team.

#14546

Joan Coromines

#14557

Overall Influence

1905 - 1997 (92 years)

Joan Coromines i Vigneaux was a linguist who made important contributions to the study of Catalan, Spanish, and other Romance languages. His main works are the Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana , in four volumes, first version of his etymological dictionary of Spanish ; the Diccionari etimològic i complementari de la llengua catalana, which investigates the origin of most words in the Catalan language ; the Onomasticon Cataloniae, documenting place and person names, old and new, in all the Catalan-speaking territories ; and, with José Antonio Pascual, the Diccionario crí...

#14547

John Logsdon

#14558

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

John Logsdon is the founder and from 1987 to 2008 was the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. In 2003, Logsdon was a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. He is a former member of the NASA Advisory Council. He is frequently cited as an authority on space policy and history by press entities such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, and has appeared on various television networks.

#14548

Salvador Elizondo

#14559

Overall Influence

1932 - 2006 (74 years)

Salvador Elizondo Alcalde was a Mexican writer of the 60s Generation of Mexican literature. Regarded as one of the creators of the most influential cult noirè, experimental, intelligent style literature in Latin America, he wrote as a novelist, poet, critic, playwright, and journalist. His most famous novels are Farabeuf and El hipogeo Secreto . He is also known for El grafógrafo which is a series of short texts based on linguistic abbreviatory experimentation. Farabeuf was published in English by Ox & Pigeon in 2015.

#14549

Elisabeth Frink

Elisabeth Frink

#14560

Overall Influence

1930 - 1993 (63 years)

Dame Elisabeth Jean Frink was an English sculptor and printmaker. Her Times obituary noted the three essential themes in her work as "the nature of Man; the 'horseness' of horses; and the divine in human form".

#14550

Volker Heine

#14561

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Volker Heine FRS is a New Zealand / British physicist. He is married to Daphne and they have three children. Volker Heine is considered a pioneer of theoretical and computational studies of the electronic structure of solids and liquids and the determination of physical properties derived from it.

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