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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School

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Ranking

List of the most influential people

#14801

Thomas F. Hogan

Thomas F. Hogan

#14812

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Thomas Francis Hogan is a Senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, who served as director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts from October 17, 2011, until June 30, 2013.

#14802

Dmitry Galkovsky

#14813

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Dmitry Yevgenyevich Galkovsky is a Russian writer, journalist, philosopher and blogger. Most famous as author of the novel The Infinite Deadlock . Biography Dmitry Galkovsky was born in Moscow in a working-class family, his father being an engineer, and his mother a tailor. Both his parents were originated from the families of Russian Orthodox clerics. He graduated from school No. 51 in Moscow in 1977.

#14803

Mark Hamill

#14814

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Mark Richard Hamill is an American actor, voice artist, and writer. He is most widely known for his role as Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars franchise, beginning with the original 1977 film and subsequently winning three Saturn Awards for his performances in The Empire Strikes Back , Return of the Jedi , and The Last Jedi .

#14804

Calvin O. Butts

#14815

Overall Influence

1949 - 2022 (73 years)

Calvin Otis Butts III was an American academic administrator and a senior pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which historically was the largest black church in New York City. He led the Abyssinian Development Corporation, which focuses on Harlem, and was president of the State University of New York College at Old Westbury.

#14805

Howard Newby

#14816

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Sir Howard Joseph Newby is a British sociologist. He was appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2008 and retired in December 2014. He was vice-chancellor of the University of Southampton from 1994 to 2001. He was appointed as the vice-chancellor of the University of the West of England , from March 2006. After 15 months at UWE he moved to the University of Liverpool and was almost immediately put on "gardening leave" at UWE for the duration of his year-long notice period, with the then deputy vice-chancellor, Steve West, acting up to the VC role before his subsequent substantive appointment.

#14806

Christian Rätsch

Christian Rätsch

#14817

Overall Influence

1957 - 2022 (65 years)

Christian Rätsch was a German anthropologist and writer on topics like ethnopharmacology, psychoactive plants and animals. Life Rätsch was born in 1957 in a Bohemian community in Hamburg, Germany. His father was an opera singer, his mother a ballet dancer. He started learning about shamanism and sacred plants at 10 and had his first drug experience at 12.

#14807

James J. Stoker

#14818

Overall Influence

1905 - 1992 (87 years)

James Johnston Stoker was an American applied mathematician and engineer. He was director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and is considered one of the founders of the institute, Courant and Friedrichs being the others. Stoker is known for his work in differential geometry and theory of water waves. He is also the author of the now classic book Water Waves: The Mathematical Theory with Applications.

#14808

Arthur Mattuck

#14819

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Arthur Paul Mattuck was an emeritus professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He may be best known for his 1998 book, Introduction to Analysis and his differential equations video lectures featured on MIT's OpenCourseWare.

#14809

Sally Morgan

#14820

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Sally Jane Morgan is an Australian Aboriginal author, dramatist, and artist. Her works are on display in numerous private and public collections in Australia and around the world. Early life, education, and personal life Morgan was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1951 as the eldest of five children. She was raised by her mother Gladys and her maternal grandmother Daisy. Her mother, a member of the Bailgu people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, grew up in the Parkerville Children's Home as part of the Stolen Generations. Her father, William, a plumber by trade, died after a long-term battle with post-war experience post-traumatic stress disorder.

#14810

Ömer Özkan

#14821

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Ömer Özkan is a Turkish plastic surgeon. An associate professor at the Akdeniz University in Antalya, he led the team that performed in 2012 the first full face transplant in Turkey. Education He finished in 1988 Cumhuriyet High School in Ankara. After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine at the Hacettepe University in 1995, he completed his special studies in plastic and reconstructive surgery between 1995 and 2001 at the same university.

#14811

David E. Bloom

#14822

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

David E. Bloom is an American author, professor, economist, and demographer. He is a Professor of Economics and Demography at the Harvard School of Public Health, and director of the Program on the Global Demography of Aging. He is widely considered as one of the greatest multidisciplinary social science researchers of the world.

#14812

Walpola Rahula Thero

Walpola Rahula Thero

#14823

Overall Influence

1907 - 1997 (90 years)

Walpola Rahula Thero was a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, scholar and writer. In 1964, he became the Professor of History and Religions at Northwestern University, thus becoming the first bhikkhu to hold a professorial chair in the Western world. He also once held the position of Vice-Chancellor at the then Vidyodaya University . He has written extensively about Buddhism in English, French and Sinhala. He wrote the book What the Buddha Taught about Theravada Buddhism.

#14813

Franklin David Murphy

#14824

Overall Influence

1916 - 1994 (78 years)

Franklin David Murphy was an American administrator, educator, and medical doctor. During his life, he served as Chancellor of the University of Kansas and Chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles .

#14814

David Shapiro

#14825

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

David Shapiro is an American poet, literary critic, and art historian. He has written some twenty volumes of poetry, literary, and art criticism. He was first published at the age of thirteen, and his first book was published when he was eighteen.

#14815

Alain Mabanckou

Alain Mabanckou

#14826

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Alain Mabanckou is a novelist, journalist, poet, and academic, a French citizen born in the Republic of the Congo, he is currently a Professor of Literature at UCLA. He is best known for his novels and non-fiction writing depicting the experience of contemporary Africa and the African diaspora in France. He is among the best known and most successful writers in the French language, and one of the best known African writers in France. In some circles in Paris he is known as "the Samuel Beckett of Africa".

#14816

Matthew Broderick

Matthew Broderick

#14827

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Matthew Broderick is an American actor. His roles include the Golden Globe–nominated portrayal of the title character in Ferris Bueller's Day Off , the voice of adult Simba in Disney's The Lion King , and Leo Bloom in both the Broadway musical The Producers and its 2005 film adaptation. Other films he had starring credits in include WarGames , Glory , The Freshman , The Cable Guy , Godzilla , Inspector Gadget , You Can Count on Me and The Last Shot . Broderick also directed himself in Infinity and provided voice work in Good Boy! , Bee Movie , and The Tale of Despereaux .

#14817

Shmuel Agmon

#14828

Overall Influence

1922 - Present (104 years)

Shmuel Agmon is an Israeli mathematician. He is known for his work in analysis and partial differential equations. Biography Shmuel Agmon was born in Tel Aviv to writer Nathan Agmon and Chaya Gutman, and spent the first years of his life in Nazareth. A member of the HaMahanot HaOlim youth movement, Agmon studied at the Gymnasia Rehavia and joined a hakhshara program at Kibbutz Na'an after graduating from high school.

#14818

Herbert Gelernter

#14829

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Herbert Leo Gelernter was a professor in the Computer Science Department of Stony Brook University. Short biography Having taken his B.S. in 1951 from Brooklyn College, Gelernter received his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in 1957.

#14819

Ernst Fuchs

#14830

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Ernst Fuchs was an Austrian painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, architect, stage designer, composer, poet, and one of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism. In 1972, he acquired the derelict Otto Wagner Villa in Hütteldorf, which he restored and transformed. The villa was inaugurated as the Ernst Fuchs Museum in 1988.

#14820

Gottfried Münzenberg

#14831

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Gottfried Münzenberg is a German physicist. He studied physics at Justus-Liebig-Universität in Giessen and Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck and completed his studies with a Ph.D. at the University of Giessen, Germany, in 1971. In 1976, he moved to the department of nuclear chemistry at GSI in Darmstadt, Germany, which was headed by Peter Armbruster. He played a leading role in the construction of SHIP, the 'Separator of Heavy Ion Reaction Products'. He was the driving force in the discovery of the cold heavy ion fusion and the discovery of the elements bohrium , hassium , meitnerium , darmstadtium , roentgenium , and copernicium .

#14821

Pamela Ronald

#14832

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Pamela Christine Ronald is an American plant pathologist and geneticist. She is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis and a member of the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as Director of Grass Genetics at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, California. In 2018 she served as a visiting professor at Stanford University in the Center on Food Security and the Environment.

#14822

Raymond Plant, Baron Plant of Highfield

#14833

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Raymond Plant, Baron Plant of Highfield FKC is a British Labour peer and academic. Lord Plant was educated at Havelock School in Grimsby, King's College London , and the University of Hull . He is currently Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Philosophy at King's College London and was previously Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, having previously served as Master of St Catherine's College, Oxford, from 1994 to 2000. He is an Honorary Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford. Before moving to Oxford he was Professor of European Political Thought at the University of Southampto...

#14823

Robert K. Crane

Robert K. Crane

#14834

Overall Influence

1919 - 2010 (91 years)

Robert Kellogg Crane was an American biochemist best known for his discovery of sodium–glucose cotransport. Early life Crane was born on December 20, 1919, in Palmyra, New Jersey, to Wilbur Fiske Crane, Jr. architect and engineer, and Mary Elizabeth McHale Crane. He is the grandson of Stephen Crane's brother Wilbur.

#14824

Cyril Toumanoff

#14835

Overall Influence

1913 - 1997 (84 years)

Cyril Leo Toumanoff was a Russian-born Georgian historian and genealogist who mostly specialized in the history and genealogies of medieval Georgia, Armenia, Iran and the Byzantine Empire. His works have significantly influenced the Western scholarship of the medieval Caucasus.

#14825

Ayşe Buğra

#14836

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Ayşe Buğra is a Turkish social scientist, currently professor of Political Economy at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History and the co-founder of the Social Policy Forum of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. She is a recipient of the TWAS Prize for Social Sciences which she received in 2014.

#14826

Pat O'Brien

#14837

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Patrick John O'Brien is an American author and radio host, best known for his work as a sportscaster with CBS Sports from 1981 to 1997, as well as his work as the anchor and host of Access Hollywood from 1997 to 2004, and The Insider from 2004 to 2008.

#14827

Winifred Asprey

Winifred Asprey

#14838

Overall Influence

1917 - 2007 (90 years)

Winifred "Tim" Alice Asprey was an American mathematician and computer scientist. She was one of only around 200 women to earn PhDs in mathematics from American universities during the 1940s, a period of women's underrepresentation in mathematics at this level. She was involved in developing the close contact between Vassar College and IBM that led to the establishment of the first computer science lab at Vassar.

#14828

Peter B. Andrews

Peter B. Andrews

#14839

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Peter Bruce Andrews is an American mathematician and Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the creator of the mathematical logic Q0. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1964 under the tutelage of Alonzo Church. He received the Herbrand Award in 2003. His research group designed the TPS automated theorem prover. A subsystem ETPS of TPS is used to help students learn logic by interactively constructing natural deduction proofs.

#14829

Morwen Thistlethwaite

#14840

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Morwen Bernard Thistlethwaite is a knot theorist and professor of mathematics for the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He has made important contributions to both knot theory and Rubik's Cube group theory.

#14830

James Cantor

#14841

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

James M. Cantor is an American-Canadian clinical psychologist and sexologist specializing in hypersexuality and paraphilias. A former senior scientist with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Cantor was editor-in-chief of the journal Sexual Abuse from 2010 to 2014. His research on brain differences in pedophiles has been cited as evidence that pedophilia is something unchangeable and that people are probably born with it.

#14831

Vicente Blanco Gaspar

#14842

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Vicente Blanco Gaspar is a Spanish ambassador, diplomat and writer who is an expert in international law, diplomacy and international organizations. Biography Blanco Gaspar studied law at the Complutense University of Madrid between 1958 and 1963. The same year he obtained his law degree, he obtained a scholarship from the Fulbright Program to continue his education at the University of Michigan where he studied a master's degree in comparative law on international aggression with Professor Wm.W. Bishop. He continued researching the issue of weighted voting and writing his doctoral thesis at Harvard University where he was an assistant professor, in 1965 under Louis B.

#14832

Thomas Tuchel

#14843

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Thomas Tuchel is a German professional football manager and former player who is the head coach of Bundesliga club Bayern Munich. He is widely regarded as a tactical innovator in modern football and one of the best coaches in the world.

#14833

Irving Finkel

#14844

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Irving Leonard Finkel is a British philologist and Assyriologist. He is the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay from ancient Mesopotamia.

#14834

Menas Kafatos

#14845

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Menas C. Kafatos is a Greek-born American physicist and a writer on spirituality and science. His publications include: The Nonlocal Universe and The Conscious Universe. Kafatos has written and lectured extensively promoting discourse between science, spirituality, and religion. He has held numerous positions at institutions including Chapman University, George Mason University, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

#14835

Peter M. Bentler

#14846

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Peter M. Bentler is an American psychologist, statistician, and distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. In multivariate analysis and psychometrics, Bentler is the developer of the structural equation modeling software EQS. Bentler received a doctorate in clinical psychology from Stanford University in 1964. His publications have over 300,000 citations . In 2014, he was awarded the Psychometric Society Career Award. In 2015, he was elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

#14836

Michael D. Smith

#14847

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Michael D. Smith is an American academic who is the J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at the Heinz College of Carnegie Mellon University with joint-appointment at the Tepper School of Business.

#14837

Walter Benn Michaels

#14848

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Walter Benn Michaels is an American literary theorist and author whose areas of research include American literature , Critical Theory, identity politics, and visual arts. Known for challenging the "prevailing trends of postmodernist theory," Michaels has produced works connecting postmodernism, neoliberal capitalism, and socioeconomic inequality. Two of his best-known books are Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History —the latter being adopted from his 2001 essay of the same name.

#14838

Paul Tagliabue

#14849

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Paul John Tagliabue is an American lawyer who was the commissioner of the National Football League . He took the position in 1989 and served until September 1, 2006. He had previously served as a lawyer for the NFL. Tagliabue also served as Chairman of Board of Directors of Georgetown University from 2009 to 2015.

#14839

Jennifer Eberhardt

#14850

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt is an American social psychologist who is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. Eberhardt has been responsible for major contributions on investigating the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime through methods such as field studies and laboratory studies. She has also contributed to research on unconscious bias, including demonstrating how racial imagery and judgment affect culture and society within the domain of social justice. The results from her work have contributed to training law enforcement officers and state agencies to better their judgments through implicit bias training.

#14840

Michel Kervaire

#14851

Overall Influence

1927 - 2007 (80 years)

Michel André Kervaire was a French mathematician who made significant contributions to topology and algebra. He introduced the Kervaire semi-characteristic. He was the first to show the existence of topological n-manifolds with no differentiable structure , and computed the number of exotic spheres in dimensions greater than four. He is also well known for fundamental contributions to high-dimensional knot theory. The solution of the Kervaire invariant problem was announced by Michael Hopkins in Edinburgh on 21 April 2009.

#14841

David Viñas

#14852

Overall Influence

1927 - 2011 (84 years)

David Viñas was an Argentine dramatist, critic, and novelist. Life and career Viñas was born and raised in Buenos Aires, and enrolled in the University of Buenos Aires, becoming head of the Argentine University Federation student organization. He published his first novel in 1955, and first came to wide attention when he won the Gerchunoff Prize for his novel Un Dios Cotidiano . He received the National Prize for Jauria . The following year, his play Lisandro won the National Prize for Theater.

#14842

Paul Salopek

#14853

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Paul Salopek is a journalist and writer from the United States. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and was raised in central Mexico. Salopek has reported globally for the Chicago Tribune, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, National Geographic Magazine and many other publications. In January 2013, Salopek embarked on the "Out of Eden Walk", originally projected to be a seven-year walk along one of the routes taken by early humans to migrate out of Africa, a transcontinental foot journey that was planned to cover more than 20,000 miles funded by the National Geographic Society, the Knight Found...

#14843

Bengt-Åke Lundvall

#14854

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Bengt-Åke Lundvall is an emeritus professor in economics at the Department of Business and Management at Aalborg University. Biography Lundvall obtained his MA in economics at the University of Gothenburg in 1967.

#14844

Günter Harder

#14855

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Günter Harder is a German mathematician, specializing in arithmetic geometry and number theory. Education and career Harder studied mathematics and physics in Hamburg und Göttingen. Simultaneously with the Staatsexamen in 1964 in Hamburg, he received his doctoral degree under Ernst Witt with a thesis Über die Galoiskohomologie der Tori. Two years later he completed his habilitation. After a one-year postdoc position at Princeton University and a position as an assistant professor at the University of Heidelberg, he became a professor ordinarius at the University of Bonn. With the exception o...

#14845

Halbert White

#14856

Overall Influence

1950 - 2012 (62 years)

Halbert Lynn White Jr. was the Chancellor’s Associates Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#14846

William I. Brustein

William I. Brustein

#14857

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

William I. Brustein is Professor Emeritus at West Virginia University, having recently stepped down as Vice President for Global Strategies and International Affairs and Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of History. Previously, he was the Vice Provost for Global Strategies and International Affairs at The Ohio State University, as well as the Associate Provost for International Affairs and Director of International Programs and Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Brustein has spent much of his administrative career focused on international education. He has published...

#14847

Muhammad Sahimi

#14858

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Muhammad Sahimi is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and holds the NIOC Chair in petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He is also active in journalism, frequently writing on Iranian politics.

#14848

Jörg Baberowski

Jörg Baberowski

#14859

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Jörg Baberowski is a German historian and Professor of Eastern European History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He studies the history of the Soviet Union and Stalinist violence. Baberowski earlier served as Director of the Historical Institute and Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy I at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

#14849

Michael Keaton

#14860

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Michael John Douglas , known professionally as Michael Keaton, is an American actor. He is known for his leading roles in a wide variety of genre films. He has received numerous accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award. In 2016, he was named Officer of Order of Arts and Letters in France.

#14850

James Olthuis

#14861

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

James Herman Olthuis is an interdisciplinary scholar in ethics, hermeneutics, philosophical theology, as well as a theorist and practitioner of psychotherapy of a kind he calls "relational psychotherapy".

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