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
#14851
Blake Edwards
#14862
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Blake Edwards was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. Edwards began his career in the 1940s as an actor, but he soon began writing screenplays and radio scripts before turning to producing and directing in television and films. His best-known films include Breakfast at Tiffany's , Days of Wine and Roses , A Shot in the Dark , The Great Race , 10 , Victor/Victoria , Blind Date , and the hugely successful Pink Panther film series with British actor Peter Sellers. Often thought of as primarily a director of comedies, he also directed several drama, musical, and detective films.
Go to Profile#14852
Nicholas Schaffner
#14863
Overall Influence
1953 - 1991 (38 years)
Nicholas Schaffner was an American non-fiction author, journalist, and singer-songwriter. Biography Schaffner was born in Manhattan to John V. Schaffner , a literary agent whose clients included Ray Bradbury, and his wife Perdita Macpherson Schaffner . His maternal grandparents were the Imagist poet H.D., and the composer and music critic Cecil Gray. He attended the Choate School and the New College of Florida, graduating from both schools.
Go to Profile#14853
Richard Lipton
#14864
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Richard Jay Lipton is an American computer scientist who is Associate Dean of Research, Professor, and the Frederick G. Storey Chair in Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has worked in computer science theory, cryptography, and DNA computing.
Go to Profile#14854
Constantin Zureiq
#14865
Overall Influence
1909 - 2000 (91 years)
Constantin Zurayk was a prominent and influential Syrian Arab intellectual who was one of the first to pioneer and express the importance of Arab nationalism. He stressed the urgent need to transform stagnant Arab society by means of rational thought and radical modification of the methods of thinking and acting. He developed some ideas, such as the "Arab mission" and "national philosophy", which were to become key concepts for Arab nationalist thinkers, and in more recent years was a strong proponent of an intellectual reformation of Arab society, emphasizing the need for rationalism and a...
Go to Profile#14855
Graham Colditz
#14866
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Graham Andrew Colditz MD, DrPH is an Australian chronic disease epidemiologist. He is the inaugural Niess-Gain Professor at Washington University School of Medicine, where he is associate director for Prevention and Control at the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center. He directs the Master of Population Health Science at Washington University School of Medicine. During medical training he was excited by the potential for prevention of chronic diseases. With encouragement from mentors he pursued training in the US as it was routine for academics in Australia to obtain overseas training at that time.
Go to Profile#14856
Pat Hayes
#14867
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Patrick John Hayes FAAAI is a British computer scientist who lives and works in the United States. , he is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida.
Go to Profile#14857
David Baldacci
#14868
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
David Baldacci is an American novelist. An attorney by education, Baldacci writes mainly suspense novels and legal thrillers. Early life and education David Baldacci was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He graduated from Henrico High School and earned a B.A. in political science from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia School of Law, after which he practiced law for nine years in Washington, D.C. He is of Italian descent.
Go to Profile#14858
Niall Lucy
#14869
Overall Influence
1956 - 2014 (58 years)
Niall Lucy was an Australian writer and scholar best known for his work in deconstruction. Career Niall Lucy served as a professor in the School of Media, Culture & Creative Arts at Curtin University, and a former Head of the School of Arts at Murdoch University. In 1997, he was a visiting scholar in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at the University of Wales, Cardiff. He worked mainly in the fields of deconstruction, literary theory and cultural criticism.
Go to Profile#14859
Dmitri Bondarenko
#14870
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Dmitri Mikhailovich Bondarenko is a Russian anthropologist, historian, and Africanist. He has conducted field research in a number of African countries and among Black people in Russia and the United States. He is Principal Research Fellow and Vice-Director for Research with the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the International Center of Anthropology of the HSE University, and Full Professor in Ethnology with the Center of Social Anthropology of the Russian State University for the Humanities. He holds the titles of Professor in Ethnology from th...
Go to Profile#14860
William P. Rogers
#14871
Overall Influence
1913 - 2001 (88 years)
William Pierce Rogers was an American politician, diplomat, and attorney. A member of the Republican Party, Rogers served as the 4th Deputy Attorney-General of the United States and as the 63rd Attorney-General of the United States in the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and as the 55th Secretary of State in the administration of Richard Nixon.
Go to Profile#14861
Ravindran Kannan
#14872
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Ravindran Kannan is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he leads the algorithms research group. He is also the first adjunct faculty of Computer Science and Automation Department of Indian Institute of Science.
Go to Profile#14862
Marc Miyake
#14873
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Marc Hideo Miyake is an American linguist who specializes in historical linguistics, particularly the study of Old Japanese and Tangut. Biography Miyake was born in Aiea, Hawaii in 1971, and attended Punahou School in Honolulu, graduating in 1989. He studied Japanese language and literature at University of California, Berkeley, and then studied linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, from where he obtained his doctorate in 1999, with a dissertation entitled The Phonology of Eighth-Century Japanese Revisited: Another Reconstruction Based upon Written Records. He is best known for hi...
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Peter Newman
#14874
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Peter William Geoffrey Newman is an environmental scientist, author and educator based in Perth, Western Australia. He is currently Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University. He is best known for his contributions to the development of Perth's electrified metropolitan rail network through both activist and official consulting roles since the 1980s.
Go to Profile#14864
Yu In-chon
#14875
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Yu In-chon is a South Korean actor and the current Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism under president Yoon Suk Yeol, the position which he previously held under president Lee Myung-bak. He was formerly the Special Presidential Adviser on Culture and Sports.
Go to Profile#14865
Doug Flutie
#14876
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Douglas Richard Flutie is an American former football quarterback who played professionally for 21 seasons. He played 12 seasons in the National Football League , eight seasons in the Canadian Football League , and one season in the United States Football League . Flutie played college football for the Boston College Eagles, where he won the Heisman Trophy in 1984 amid a season that saw him throw the game-winning touchdown pass in the final seconds against the Miami Hurricanes.
Go to Profile#14866
Jerome Charyn
#14877
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Jerome Charyn is an American writer. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life, writing in multiple genres.
Go to Profile#14867
Anurag Kumar
#14878
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Anurag Kumar was the Director of the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, India from 2014–2020. He is a professor at the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, and has served as the Chairperson of the Electrical Sciences Division at the Indian Institute of Science, before being appointed as the Director in 2014.
Go to Profile#14868
Jiro Kawakita
#14879
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Jiro Kawakita was an ethnographer, a pioneer in participation of remote Nepalese villagers in researching their problems, resulting in practical benefits of portable water supplies and rapid rope-way transport across mountain gorges. He was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1984.
Go to Profile#14869
Way Kuo
#14880
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Way Kuo is the 4th President of the City University of Hong Kong and University Distinguished Professor of the City University of Hong Kong. Before joining CityU, he was University Distinguished Professor and Dean of Engineering at the University of Tennessee.
Go to Profile#14870
Amanda Marcotte
#14881
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Amanda Marie Marcotte is an American blogger and journalist who writes on feminism and politics from a liberal perspective. Marcotte has written for several online publications, including Slate, The Guardian, and Salon, where she is currently senior politics writer.
Go to Profile#14871
Meghan O'Rourke
#14882
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Meghan O'Rourke is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic. Background and education O'Rourke was born January 26, 1976, in Brooklyn, New York. The eldest of three children born to Paul and Barbara O’Rourke, she had two younger brothers. Her mother was a longtime teacher and administrator at Saint Ann's, an elite independent school in Brooklyn, and later headmaster of the Pierrepont School in Westport, Connecticut. Her father, a classicist and Egyptologist, also taught at Saint Ann's and Pierrepont. O'Rourke attended St. Ann's through high school. She earned a bachelor's of arts degree...
Go to Profile#14872
Clarence Taylor
#14883
Overall Influence
Clarence Taylor is professor emeritus of History at Baruch College in New York City and author of books on racism, religion, and civil rights in 20th-century America. Background Clarence Taylor was born in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the East New York elementary school and Canarsie High School in Brooklyn. He received a BA from Brooklyn College and MA from New York University. In 1992, he received a doctorate in American history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Go to Profile#14873
Scott Kirkpatrick
#14884
Overall Influence
Scott Kirkpatrick is a computer scientist, and professor in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He has over 75,000 citations in the fields of: information appliances design, statistical physics, and distributed computing.
Go to Profile#14874
Andrew Pawley
#14885
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Andrew Kenneth Pawley , FRSNZ, FAHA, is Emeritus Professor at the School of Culture, History & Language of the College of Asia & the Pacific at the Australian National University. Career Pawley was born in Sydney but moved to New Zealand at the age of 12. He was educated at the University of Auckland, gaining a PhD in anthropology in 1966.
Go to Profile#14875
Thelma Estrin
#14886
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Thelma Estrin was an American computer scientist and engineer who did pioneering work in the fields of expert systems and biomedical engineering. Estrin was one of the first to apply computer technology to healthcare and medical research. In 1954, Estrin helped to design the Weizmann Automatic Computer, or WEIZAC, the first computer in Israel and the Middle East, a moment marked as an IEEE Milestone in Electrical and Computer Engineering. She was professor emerita in the Department of Computer Science, University of California at Los Angeles .
Go to Profile#14876
John Hammersley
#14887
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
John Michael Hammersley, was a British mathematician best known for his foundational work in the theory of self-avoiding walks and percolation theory. Early life and education Hammersley was born in Helensburgh in Dunbartonshire, and educated at Sedbergh School. He started reading mathematics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge but was called up to join the Royal Artillery in 1941. During his time in the army he worked on ballistics. He graduated in mathematics in 1948. He never studied for a PhD but was awarded an ScD by Cambridge University and a DSc by Oxford University in 1959.
Go to Profile#14877
Alford T. Welch
#14888
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Alford T. Welch is a Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. Welch got his Ph.D. degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Edinburgh in 1970. He also holds a M.Div. degree on Biblical language, literature and Near Eastern history from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Welch's research areas include History of religions, and Arabic and Islamic studies.
Go to Profile#14878
Justin Hall
#14889
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Justin Hall is an American journalist and entrepreneur, best known as a pioneer blogger. Biography Born in Chicago, Hall graduated Francis W. Parker High School in 1993. In 1994, while a student at Swarthmore College, Justin started his web-based diary Justin's Links from the Underground, which offered one of the earliest guided tours of the web. Over time, the site came to focus on Hall's life in intimate detail. In December 2004, The New York Times Magazine referred to him as "the founding father of personal blogging."
Go to Profile#14879
Gerard Labuda
#14890
Overall Influence
1916 - 2010 (94 years)
Gerard Labuda was a Polish historian whose main fields of interest were the Middle Ages and the Western Slavs. He was born in Kashubia. He lived and died in Poznań, Poland. Life Labuda was born in Nowa Huta, Pomeranian Voivodeship, Kartuzy, Poland , into a Kashubian family. He was the son of Stanislaw Labuda and Anastazja Baranowska. From 1950 he was a professor at Poznań University; rector 1962–1965; from 1951 a member of the Polish Academy of Learning ; president 1989–1994; from 1964 member of the Polish Academy of Sciences ; vice-president 1984–1989; from 1959 to 1961 director of the Western Institute in Poznań and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#14880
Matteo Thun
#14891
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Matteo Thun is an Italian architect and designer. Biography Matteo Thun was born in Bolzano in 1952 as the first son of the South Tyrolean entrepreneurial family Thun , his younger brother Peter took over the management of Thun AG in 1978.
Go to Profile#14881
Steven Skiena
#14892
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Steven Sol Skiena is a Computer Scientist and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. He is also Director of AI Institute at Stony Brook. He was co-founder of General Sentiment, a social media and news analytics company, and served as Chief Science Officer from 2009 until it shut down in 2015. His research interests include algorithm design and its applications to biology. Skiena is the author of several popular books in the fields of algorithms, programming, and mathematics. The Algorithm Design Manual is widely used as an undergraduate text in algorithms and within the tech industry for job interview preparation.
Go to Profile#14882
Fat Joe
#14893
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Joseph Antonio Cartagena , better known by his stage name Fat Joe, is an American rapper from New York City. He began his music career as a member of hip hop group Diggin' in the Crates Crew in 1992, he then embarked on a solo career a year later with his debut album Represent . Cartegena formed the hip hop group Terror Squad and its namesake record label in the late 1990s, through which he would discover and sign fellow New York artists including Big Pun, Remy Ma, Tony Sunshine, and Cuban Link, as well as then-unknown producers DJ Khaled and Cool & Dre.
Go to Profile#14883
Psy
#14894
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Park Jae-sang , known professionally as Psy , is a South Korean singer, rapper, songwriter, and record producer. Psy is known domestically for his humorous videos and stage performances, and internationally for his hit single "Gangnam Style". The song's refrain was entered into The Yale Book of Quotations as one of the most famous quotations of 2012.
Go to Profile#14884
Rakesh Aggarwal
#14895
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Rakesh Aggarwal is an Indian gastroenterologist, who is currently the Director of Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education & Research , Puducherry, India. He was previously a Professor of Gastroenterology at the Sanjay Gandhi Postgraduate Institute of Medical Sciences. Known for his studies on Gastrointestinal diseases, Liver diseases, and Viral Hepatitis, Aggarwal is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies, namely National Academy of Sciences, India, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy, and of the National Academy of Medical Sciences.
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John Richard Sisson
#14896
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
John Richard Sisson was the acting President of Ohio State University from December 15, 1997, to June 30, 1998, after Elwood Gordon Gee left the office. Sisson graduated from Ohio State with a Bachelor of Arts in international studies in 1958 and a Master of Arts in political science in 1960. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1967. After completing his education, Sisson held administrative and academic positions at the United States Military Academy, UCLA, and Ohio State University. At Ohio State Sisson was Provost from 1993 to 1998. Sisson returned to teaching comparative politics at Ohio State University until his retirement in 2002.
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Peter Goldreich
#14897
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Peter Goldreich is an American astrophysicist whose research focuses on celestial mechanics, planetary rings, helioseismology and neutron stars. He is the Lee DuBridge Professor of Astrophysics and Planetary Physics at California Institute of Technology. Since 2005 he has also been a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Asteroid 3805 Goldreich is named after him.
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Khaleel Mohammed
#14898
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Khaleel Mohammed was a Guyanese-born professor of Religion at San Diego State University , in San Diego, California, a member of Homeland Security Master's Program, and, as of January 2021, Director of SDSU's Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies.
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Renée Fox
#14899
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Renée Claire Fox was an American sociologist. She was a summa cum laude graduate of Smith College in 1949, earned her Ph.D. in Sociology in 1954 from Radcliffe College, Harvard University, where she studied in the Department of Social Relations. Renée Fox’s major teaching and research interests – sociology of medicine, medical research, medical education, and medical ethics – involved her in first-hand, participant observation-based studies in Continental Europe , in Central Africa , and in the People’s Republic of China, as well as in the United States. She lectured in colleges, universities...
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Milton Berle
#14900
Overall Influence
1908 - 2002 (94 years)
Milton Berle was an American actor and comedian. His career as an entertainer spanned over eight decades, first in silent films and on stage as a child actor, then in radio, movies and television. As the host of NBC's Texaco Star Theatre , he was the first major American television star and was known to millions of viewers as "Uncle Miltie" and "Mr. Television" during the first Golden Age of Television. He was honored with two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in both radio and TV.
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V. V. Chari
#14901
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Varadarajan Venkata Chari is an Indian-American economist and professor of economics, currently teaches macroeconomic theory, public economics, and monetary economics at the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts.
Go to Profile#14891
J. William Schopf
#14902
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
James William Schopf is an American paleobiologist and professor of earth sciences at the University of California Los Angeles. He is also Director of the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, and a member of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA. He is most well known for his study of Precambrian prokaryotic life in Australia's Apex chert. Schopf has published extensively in the peer reviewed literature about the origins of life on Earth. He is the first to discover Precam...
Go to Profile#14892
Quentin Bell
#14903
Overall Influence
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
Quentin Claudian Stephen Bell was an English art historian and author. Early life Bell was born in London, the second and younger son of the art critic and writer Clive Bell and the painter and interior designer Vanessa Bell . He was a nephew of Virginia Woolf . He was educated at the Quaker Leighton Park School and at Cambridge.
Go to Profile#14893
Usha Lee McFarling
#14904
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Usha Lee McFarling is an American science reporter who is an Artist In Residence at the University of Washington Department of Communication. She won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. University of Washington Department of Communication.
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Bob Haney
#14905
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Robert Gilbert Haney, Jr. was an American comic book writer, best known for his work for DC Comics. He co-created the Teen Titans as well as characters such as Metamorpho, Eclipso, Cain, and the Super-Sons.
Go to Profile#14895
Bohdan Pomahač
#14906
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Bohdan Pomahač is a Czech plastic surgeon. He led the team that performed the first full face transplant in United States and the third overall in the world. Biography Pomahač's parents were a chemical engineer and a school teacher. The family lived in the industrial city of Ostrava, today's Czech Republic, in a small three-room apartment, and used to spend weekends at their weekend house in Morávka, a municipality in the Moravian-Silesian Beskids mountain range.
Go to Profile#14896
Alan Grafen
#14907
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Alan Grafen is a Scottish ethologist and evolutionary biologist. He currently teaches and undertakes research at St John's College, Oxford. Along with regular contributions to scientific journals, Grafen is known publicly for his work as co-editor of the 2006 festschrift Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, honouring the achievements of his colleague and former academic advisor. He has worked extensively in the field of biological game theory, and, in 1990, devised a model showing that Zahavi's well-known handicap principle could theoretically exist in natural populatio...
Go to Profile#14897
Martin Nakata
#14908
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Martin Nakata is an Australian academic, researcher and scholar in the field of Indigenous education, knowledge, and studies. He is the first aboriginal/indigenous person from the Torres Strait Islands to obtain a doctoral degree. He is also a proponent of indigenous standpoint theory. As of 2021, he is Deputy Vice-Chancellor of James Cook University. In 2020 he was conferred with Member of the Order of Australia for "significant service to tertiary education, and to learning outcomes for Indigenous students". An asteroid in the Koronis family has been named in his honour as 7547 Martinnakata...
Go to Profile#14898
Kylian Mbappé
#14909
Overall Influence
1998 - Present (28 years)
Kylian Mbappé Lottin is a French professional footballer who plays as a forward for club Paris Saint-Germain and captains the France national team. Regarded as one of the best players in the world, he is renowned for his dribbling abilities, exceptional speed, and finishing.
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David Trezeguet
#14910
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
David Sergio is a French former professional footballer who played as a striker. Trezeguet began his career in Argentina with Club Atlético Platense at the age of eight, progressing through their youth system to their first team, where he made his debut in the Primera División in 1994. After one season, he transferred to Division 1 side AS Monaco, where he would form a striking partnership with international teammate Thierry Henry, winning the league in the 1996–97 season. He left the club in 2000, having scored 52 goals in 93 Division 1 appearances and having claimed two Division 1 champions...
Go to Profile#14900
Julia Hirschberg
#14911
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. Hirschberg was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for contributions to the use of prosody in text-to-speech and spoken dialogue systems, and to audio browsing and retrieval.
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