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
#14751
Stanley Cohen
#14762
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Stanley Cohen was an American physicist who worked at Argonne National Laboratory. He created Speakeasy, a numerical computational environment, implemented with OOPS, object-oriented system, and was the founder and president of Speakeasy Computing Corporation.
Go to Profile#14752
Cees Dekker
#14763
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Cornelis "Cees" Dekker is a Dutch physicist, and Distinguished University Professor at the Technical University of Delft. He is known for his research on carbon nanotubes, single-molecule biophysics, and nanobiology.
Go to Profile#14753
John Feerick
#14764
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
John D. Feerick is a law professor at Fordham University School of Law in New York City. He served as the school's eighth dean from 1982 to 2002. From 2002 to 2004, he was the Leonard F. Manning Professor of Law at Fordham, and in 2004 was named to the Sidney C. Norris Chair of Law in Public Service.
Go to Profile#14754
Heinz Insu Fenkl
#14765
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Heinz Insu Fenkl is an author, editor, translator, and folklorist. His autobiographical novels Memories of My Ghost Brother and Skull Water are widely taught at colleges and universities. He is known internationally for his collection of Korean Folktales and is also an expert on Asian American and Korean literature, including North Korean comics and literature.
Go to Profile#14755
James Soong
#14766
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
James Soong Chu-yu is a Taiwanese politician. He is the founder and current Chairman of the People First Party. Born to a Kuomintang military family of Hunanese origin, Soong began his political career as a secretary to Premier Chiang Ching-kuo and rose to prominence as director-general of the Government Information Office from 1979 to 1984. Upon Chiang's death, Soong was instrumental in silencing conservatives in the KMT from blocking the ascendancy of Lee Teng-hui as KMT leader. Soong was the only elected governor of Taiwan Province from 1994 to 1998, before the streamlining of the provincial government.
Go to Profile#14756
Jacob Katz
#14767
Overall Influence
1904 - 1998 (94 years)
Jacob Katz was an acclaimed Jewish historian and educator. Katz described "traditional society" and deployed sociological methods in his study of Jewish communities, with special attention to changes in halakhah and Orthodoxy. He pioneered the modern study of Orthodoxy and its formation in reaction to Reform Judaism.
Go to Profile#14757
Al Green
#14768
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Albert Leornes Greene , known professionally as Al Green, is an American singer, songwriter, pastor and record producer best known for recording a series of soul hit singles in the early 1970s, including "Take Me to the River", "Tired of Being Alone", "I'm Still in Love with You", "Love and Happiness", and his signature song, "Let's Stay Together". After his girlfriend died by suicide, Green became an ordained pastor and turned to gospel music. He later returned to secular music.
Go to Profile#14758
Abdul Rashid Dostum
#14769
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Abdul Rashid Dostum is an Afghan exiled politician, former Marshal in the Afghan National Army, founder and leader of the political party Junbish-e Milli. Dostum was a major army commander in the communist government during the Soviet–Afghan War, and in 2001 was the key indigenous ally to U.S. Special Forces and the CIA during the campaign to topple the Taliban government. He is one of the most powerful warlords since the beginning of the Afghan wars, known for siding with winners during different wars. Dostum has also referred to as a Kingmaker due to his significant role in Afghan politics.
Go to Profile#14759
Wolfgang Bibel
#14770
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Leonhard Wolfgang Bibel is a German computer scientist, mathematician and Professor emeritus at the Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. He was one of the founders of the research area of artificial intelligence in Germany and Europe and has been named as one of the ten most important researchers in German artificial intelligence history by the Gesellschaft für Informatik. Bibel established the necessary institutions, conferences and scientific journals and promoted the necessary research programs to establish the field of artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#14760
G. William Skinner
#14771
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
George William Skinner was an American anthropologist and scholar of China. Skinner was a proponent of the spatial approach to Chinese history, as explained in his Presidential Address to the Association for Asian Studies in 1984. He often referred to his approach as "regional analysis," and taught the use of maps as a key class of data in ethnography.
Go to Profile#14761
Lucy Shapiro
#14772
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Lucy Shapiro is an American developmental biologist. She is a professor of Developmental Biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research and the director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine.
Go to Profile#14762
Arun K. Pati
#14773
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Arun Kumar Pati is an Indian physicist notable for his research in quantum information, quantum computation and Foundations of quantum mechanics. He has made pioneering contributions in the area of quantum information.
Go to Profile#14763
Rob Sheffield
#14774
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Robert James Sheffield is an American music journalist and author. He is a long time contributing editor at Rolling Stone, writing about music, TV, and pop culture. Previously, he was a contributing editor at Blender, Spin and Details magazines. A native of Milton, Massachusetts, Sheffield has a bachelor's degree from Yale University and master's degree from the University of Virginia.
Go to Profile#14764
Burton Raffel
#14775
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Burton Nathan Raffel was an American writer, translator, poet and professor. He is best known for his vigorous translation of Beowulf, still widely used in universities, colleges and high schools. Other important translations include Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Poems and Prose from the Old English, The Voice of the Night: Complete Poetry and Prose of Chairil Anwar, The Essential Horace, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and Dante's The Divine Comedy.
Go to Profile#14765
Richard DeMillo
#14776
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Richard Allan DeMillo is an American computer scientist, educator and executive. He is Professor and holds the Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Chair in Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#14766
John Oliver
#14777
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
John William Oliver is a British-American comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television host. Oliver started his career as a stand-up comedian in the United Kingdom. He came to wider attention for his work in the United States as Senior British Correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from 2006 to 2013. Oliver won three Primetime Emmy Awards for writing for The Daily Show and he became the guest host for an eight-week period in 2013. He also co-hosted the comedy podcast The Bugle with Andy Zaltzman, with whom Oliver had previously worked with on the radio series Political Animal.
Go to Profile#14767
Caetano Veloso
#14778
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Caetano Emanuel Viana Teles Veloso is a Brazilian composer, singer, guitarist, writer, and political activist. Veloso first became known for his participation in the Brazilian musical movement Tropicalismo, which encompassed theatre, poetry and music in the 1960s, at the beginning of the Brazilian military dictatorship that took power in 1964. He has remained a constant creative influence and best-selling performing artist and composer ever since. Veloso has won nine Latin Grammy Awards and two Grammy Awards. On November 14, 2012, Veloso was honored as the Latin Recording Academy Person of th...
Go to Profile#14768
Ram Mohan
#14779
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Ram Mohan was an Indian animator, title designer and design educator, who was also known as father of Indian Animation and was a veteran in the Indian animation industry, who started his career at the Cartoon Films Unit, Films Division of India, Government of India in 1956. He was chairman and chief creative officer at Graphiti Multimedia, a Mumbai-based animation company which was established in 1995, and later he also established the Graphiti School of Animation in 2006.
Go to Profile#14769
Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr.
#14780
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. is an American astrophysicist and Nobel Prize laureate in Physics for his discovery with Russell Alan Hulse of a "new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."
Go to Profile#14770
Shahram Amiri
#14781
Overall Influence
1977 - 2016 (39 years)
Shahram Amiri was an Iranian nuclear scientist who disappeared from Iran during 2009–2010 under disputed circumstances, and was executed by the Iranian government in August 2016. In the spring of 2009, he disappeared while apparently on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. On 27 September 2009, Tehran Bureau noted conflicting information regarding the date of his disappearance: the Tehran Times claimed that Amiri disappeared on 31 May, but Press TV claimed he disappeared in June. In the same announcement by Tehran Bureau, it was claimed that Amiri conducted research on particle physics at the...
Go to Profile#14771
Martin Cline
#14782
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Martin J. Cline is an American geneticist who is the Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles . He did postdoctoral training in hematology-oncology at the University of Utah and was at the University of California, San Francisco before going to UCLA. His research has been in cell biology, molecular biology, and genetics.
Go to Profile#14772
George Yancy
#14783
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
#14773
Lê Văn Thiêm
#14784
Overall Influence
1918 - 1991 (73 years)
Lê Văn Thiêm was a Vietnamese scientist. Together with Hoàng Tụy, he is considered the father of Vietnam Mathematics society. He was the first director of the Vietnam Institute of Mathematics, and the first Headmaster of Hanoi National University of Education and Hanoi University of Science.
Go to Profile#14774
Carolina Neurath
#14785
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Anna Carolina Neurath is a Swedish journalist and writer. She specializes in writing business articles for the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. In 2016 her first work of fiction, Fartblinda, was published.
Go to Profile#14775
Dorit Aharonov
#14786
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Dorit Aharonov is an Israeli computer scientist specializing in quantum computing. Aharonov was born in Washington and grew up in Haifa, the daughter of the mathematician Dov Aharonov and the niece of the physicist Yakir Aharonov.
Go to Profile#14776
Paul McCracken
#14787
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Paul Winston McCracken was an American economist born in Richland, Iowa. He held an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in Economics and a B.A. from William Penn University. He was the Edmund Ezra Day Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Business Administration, Economics, and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. McCracken was chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors from 1969 to 1971 under President Richard Nixon. He took the lead in developing economic policy at the outset of the Nixon administration.
Go to Profile#14777
Beatriz Colomina
#14788
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Beatriz Colomina is an architecture historian, theorist and curator. She is the founding director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University, the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture and director of graduate studies in the School of Architecture.
Go to Profile#14778
Rick Kuhn
#14789
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Rick Kuhn is an Australian Marxian economist, political analyst and reader at the Australian National University in Canberra. He is best known for his biographical study on Henryk Grossman, for which he won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2007. Chris Harman of the British Socialist Workers Party and editor of International Socialism described the biography as "a valuable addition to our theoretical armour." Kuhn is of Jewish origin and is a member of Jews Against Oppression and Occupation. He was the convenor of ACTNOW, the umbrella anti-war organisation in Canberra, formed in response to the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Go to Profile#14779
Herbert Giersch
#14790
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Herbert Giersch was a German economist. He was one of the initial members of the German Council of Economic Experts in 1964, serving on the council until 1970, and also was president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy 1969–1989. Giersch was considered the most influential German economist during the chancellorships of Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, and Helmut Kohl.
Go to Profile#14780
Julie Beth Lovins
#14791
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Julie Beth Lovins was a computational linguist who published The Lovins Stemming Algorithm - a type of stemming algorithm for word matching - in 1968. The Lovins Stemmer is a single pass, context sensitive stemmer, which removes endings based on the longest-match principle. The stemmer was the first to be published and was extremely well developed considering the date of its release, having been the main influence on a large amount of the future work in the area. -Adam G., et al
Go to Profile#14781
Gary Peller
#14792
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Gary Peller is Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and a prominent member of the critical legal studies and critical race theory movements. Education and early career Peller received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Emory University in 1977 and a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School where he served as a member of the Harvard Law Review. Peller then clerked for Morris Lasker, a judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He is currently a member of the Maryland state bar.
Go to Profile#14782
Stanley Plotkin
#14793
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Stanley Alan Plotkin is an American physician who works as a consultant to vaccine manufacturers, such as Sanofi Pasteur, as well as biotechnology firms, non-profits and governments. In the 1960s, he played a pivotal role in discovery of a vaccine against rubella virus while working at Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Plotkin was a member of Wistar’s active research faculty from 1960 to 1991. Today, in addition to his emeritus appointment at Wistar, he is emeritus professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. His book, Vaccines, is the standard reference on the subject. He is a...
Go to Profile#14783
Rupert Read
#14794
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Rupert Read is an academic and a Green Party campaigner, a former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, and the current director of the Climate Majority Project. He is the author of several books on Wittgenstein, philosophy, and/or climate change, most recently Why Climate Breakdown Matters, Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, and Do You Want to Know the Truth? Until 2023, Read was a reader in philosophy at the University of East Anglia where he was awarded – as Principal Investigator – Arts and Humanities Research Council funding for two projects on "natural capital".
Go to Profile#14784
Adam Ulam
#14795
Overall Influence
1922 - 2000 (78 years)
Adam Bruno Ulam was a Polish-American historian of Jewish descent and political scientist at Harvard University. Ulam was one of the world's foremost authorities and top experts in Sovietology and Kremlinology, he authored multiple books and articles in these academic disciplines.
Go to Profile#14785
Hwang Woo-suk
#14796
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Hwang Woo-suk is a South Korean veterinarian and researcher. He was a professor of theriogenology and biotechnology at Seoul National University until he was dismissed on March 20, 2006. He was considered a pioneering expert in stem cell research and even called the "Pride of Korea". However, he became infamous around November 2005 for fabricating a series of stem cell experiments that were published in high-profile journals, the case known as the Hwang affair.
Go to Profile#14786
Guy McPherson
#14797
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Guy R. McPherson is an American scientist, professor emeritus of natural resources and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. He is known for inventing and promoting doomer fringe theories such as Near-Term Human Extinction , which predicts human extinction by 2026.
Go to Profile#14787
Larry Kramer
#14798
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Larry D. Kramer is an American legal scholar and nonprofit executive. He is the current president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the former dean of Stanford Law School . He is a scholar of both constitutional law and civil procedure.
Go to Profile#14788
Randeep Guleria
#14799
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Randeep Guleria is an Indian pulmonologist and the ex-director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, credited with the establishment of India's first centre for pulmonary medicines and sleep disorders at AIIMS. He was honoured by the Government of India in 2015 with Padma Shri, the fourth highest Indian civilian award.
Go to Profile#14789
Joseph H. Connell
#14800
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Joseph Hurd Connell FAA was an American ecologist. He earned his MA degree in zoology at the University of California, Berkeley and his PhD at Glasgow University. Connell's first research paper examined the effects of interspecific competition and predation on populations of a barnacle species on the rocky shores of Scotland. According to Connell, this classic paper is often cited because it addressed ecological topics that previously had been given minor roles. Together, with a subsequent barnacle study on the influence of competition and desiccation, these two influential papers have la...
Go to Profile#14790
Elizabeth Garrett
#14801
Overall Influence
1963 - 2016 (53 years)
Helen Elizabeth Garrett, commonly known as Elizabeth Garrett or Beth Garrett , was an American professor of law and academic administrator. On July 1, 2015, she became the 13th president of Cornell University—the first woman to serve as president of the university. She died from colon cancer on March 6, 2016, the first Cornell president to die while in office.
Go to Profile#14791
Steve Sailer
#14802
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Steven Ernest Sailer is an American far-right writer and blogger. A former columnist for National Review and correspondent for UPI, he is currently a columnist for Taki's Magazine and VDARE, a website associated with white supremacy. Since 2014, his personal blog, iSteve, has appeared in The Unz Review.
Go to Profile#14792
John Gross
#14803
Overall Influence
1935 - 2011 (76 years)
John Gross FRSL was an eminent English man of letters. A leading intellectual, writer, anthologist, and critic, The Guardian and The Spectator were among several publications to describe Gross as "the best-read man in Britain". The Guardians obituarist Ion Trewin wrote: "Mr Gross is one good argument for the survival of the species", a comment Gross would have disliked since he was known for his modesty. Charles Moore wrote in The Spectator: "I am left with the irritated sense that he was under-appreciated. He was too clever, too witty, too modest for our age."
Go to Profile#14793
Brian Iwata
#14804
Overall Influence
Brian Anthony Iwata was an American psychologist. He was a Distinguished Professor at University of Florida. Research Iwata was best known for his article, "Toward a Functional Analysis of Self-Injury" which was originally published in 1982 and was republished in 1994 in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. The significance of this article on the field of Applied Behavior Analysis was monumental. Iwata and his coauthors developed an approach to determining why self-injury was happening on an individual basis, which involved empirically measuring the role of environmental events on self-i...
Go to Profile#14794
Azeem Majeed
#14805
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Azeem Majeed is a Professor and Head of the Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College, London, as well as a general practitioner in South London and a consultant in public health. In the most recent UK University Research Excellence Framework results , Imperial College London was the highest ranked university in the UK for the quality of research in the “Public Health, Health Services and Primary Care” unit of assessment.
Go to Profile#14795
Robert Jenson
#14806
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Robert William Jenson was a leading American Lutheran and ecumenical theologian. Prior to his retirement in 2007, he spent seven years as the director of the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton Theological Seminary. He was the co-founder of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology and is known for his two-volume Systematic Theology published between 1997 and 1999.
Go to Profile#14796
David Duke
#14807
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David Ernest Duke is an American politician, white supremacist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, and former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. From 1989 to 1992, he was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives for the Republican Party. His politics and writings are largely devoted to promoting conspiracy theories about Jews, such as Holocaust denial and Jewish control of academia, the press, and the financial system. In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League called Duke "perhaps America's most well-known racist and anti-Semite".
Go to Profile#14797
Esther M. Conwell
#14808
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Esther Marley Conwell was a pioneering American chemist and physicist, best known for the Conwell-Weisskopf theory that describes how electrons travel through semiconductors, a breakthrough that helped revolutionize modern computing. During her life, she was described as one of the most important women in science.
Go to Profile#14798
Franco Piperno
#14809
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Franco Piperno is a former communist militant from Italy. He is an associate professor of Condensed Matter Physics in the University of Calabria. Biography Piperno was born in Catanzaro. He graduated in physics at the University of Pisa and was member of the FGCI . After his expulsion, in 1969 he was suspected of having sabotaged a Boston Chemical plant, which produced defoliant used in the Vietnam War, but he was immediately released. In Rome he was an activist in the 1968 movement and in the summer 1969 he took part in the demonstration against Fiat in Turin.
Go to Profile#14799
Philip Gabriel
#14810
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
James Philip Gabriel is an American translator and Japanologist. He is a full professor and former department chair of the University of Arizona's Department of East Asian Studies and is one of the major translators into English of the works of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.
Go to Profile#14800
Thomas Römer
#14811
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Thomas Christian Römer is a German-born Swiss biblical scholar, exegete, philologist, professor, and Reformed minister. After teaching at the University of Geneva, he became professor of the Old Testament at the University of Lausanne. From 2007, has held the chair "Biblical environments" at the Collège de France, of which he became administrator in 2019. The Collège de France is considered to be France's most prestigious research establishment.
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