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
#151
Fred Brooks
#151
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing the development of IBM's System/360 family of computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about those experiences in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month.
Go to Profile#152
Wole Soyinka
#152
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka Hon. FRSL , known as Wole Soyinka , is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, for "in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence", the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category.
Go to Profile#153
Elie Wiesel
#153
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.
Go to Profile#154
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
#154
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an Indian-American theoretical physicist who spent his professional life in the United States. He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics with William A. Fowler for "...theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars". His mathematical treatment of stellar evolution yielded many of the current theoretical models of the later evolutionary stages of massive stars and black holes. Many concepts, institutions, and inventions, including the Chandrasekhar limit and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, are named after ...
Go to Profile#155
Jared Diamond
#155
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Jared Mason Diamond is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books. Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond is commonly referred to as a polymath, stemming from his knowledge in many fields including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography at UCLA.
Go to Profile#156
Hans Eysenck
#156
Overall Influence
1916 - 1997 (81 years)
Hans Jürgen Eysenck was a German-born British psychologist who spent his professional career in Great Britain. He is best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, although he worked on other issues in psychology. At the time of his death, Eysenck was the most frequently cited living psychologist in the peer-reviewed scientific journal literature.
Go to Profile#157
John Backus
#157
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form , a widely used notation to define formal language syntax. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"
Go to Profile#158
Jürgen Schmidhuber
#158
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Jürgen Schmidhuber is a German computer scientist noted for his work in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically artificial neural networks. He is a scientific director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research in Switzerland. He is also director of the Artificial Intelligence Initiative and professor of the Computer Science program in the Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering division at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.
Go to Profile#159
Grace Hopper
#159
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Grace Brewster Hopper was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and the FLOW-MATIC programming language she created using this theory was later extended to create COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.
Go to Profile#160
Sandra Day O'Connor
#160
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Sandra Day O'Connor is a retired American lawyer, former politician, and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. O'Connor was the first woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. A moderate conservative, O'Connor was known for her precisely researched opinions. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan, she was considered a swing vote for the Rehnquist Court and the first four months of the Roberts Court.
Go to Profile#161
Lawrence Lessig
#161
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Lester Lawrence Lessig III is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 US presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
Go to Profile#162
Ivan Sutherland
#162
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Ivan Edward Sutherland is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subject at the University of Utah in the 1970s was pioneering in the field. Sutherland, Evans, and their students from that era developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of the Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.
Go to Profile#163
Kip Thorne
#163
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#164
Hans Moravec
#164
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Hans Peter Moravec is an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on the impact of technology. Moravec also is a futurist with many of his publications and predictions focusing on transhumanism. Moravec developed techniques in computer vision for determining the region of interest in a scene.
Go to Profile#165
Benoit Mandelbrot
#165
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Benoit B. Mandelbrot was a Polish-born French-American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life". He referred to himself as a "fractalist" and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal", as well as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature.
Go to Profile#166
Eric Hobsbawm
#166
Overall Influence
1917 - 2012 (95 years)
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the "long 19th century" and the "short 20th century" , and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions". A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work.
Go to Profile#167
Richard Thaler
#167
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#168
Paul Feyerabend
#168
Overall Influence
1924 - 1994 (70 years)
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian philosopher best known for his work in the philosophy of science. He started his academic career as lecturer in the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol ; afterwards, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for three decades . At various points in his life, he held joint appointments at the University College London , the London School of Economics , the FU Berlin , Yale University , the University of Auckland , the University of Sussex , and, finally, the ETH Zurich . He gave lectures and lecture series at the Uni...
Go to Profile#169
Bill Moyers
#169
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Bill Moyers is an American journalist and political commentator. Under the Johnson administration he served from 1965 to 1967 as the eleventh White House Press Secretary. He was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, from 1967 to 1974. He also worked as a network TV news commentator for ten years. Moyers has been extensively involved with public broadcasting, producing documentaries and news journal programs, and has won numerous awards and honorary degrees for his investigative journalism and civic activities. He has become well known as a trenchant critic of the corporately structured U.S.
Go to Profile#170
Johnny Carson
#170
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
John William Carson was an American television host, comedian, writer, and producer. He is best known as the host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson . Carson received six Primetime Emmy Awards, the Television Academy's 1980 Governor's Award, and a 1985 Peabody Award. He was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1987. Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992 and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 1993.
Go to Profile#171
David Attenborough
#171
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Sir David Frederick Attenborough is a British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian and author. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, the nine natural history documentary series forming the Life collection, a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth.
Go to Profile#172
Mother Teresa
#172
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu MC , better known as Mother Teresa, was an Albanian-Indian Catholic nun and the founder of the Missionaries of Charity. Born in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire, at the age of 18 she moved to Ireland and later to India, where she lived most of her life. On 4 September 2016, she was canonised by the Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta. The anniversary of her death, 5 September, is her feast day.
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Sheldon Glashow
#173
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Sheldon Lee Glashow is a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Harvard University, and is a member of the board of sponsors for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Go to Profile#174
Jean-François Lyotard
#174
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as epistemology and communication, the human body, modern art and postmodern art, literature and critical theory, music, film, time and memory, space, the city and landscape, the sublime, and the relation between aesthetics and politics. He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition. Lyotard was a key personality in contemporary continental philosophy and authored 26 books and many articles.
Go to Profile#175
Paul Volcker
#175
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Paul Adolph Volcker Jr. was an American economist who served as the 12th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987. During his tenure as chairman, Volcker was widely credited with having ended the high levels of inflation seen in the United States throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, with measures known as the Volcker shock. He previously served as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1975 to 1979.
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Terence Tao
#176
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
#177
Betty Friedan
#177
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women , which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men".
Go to Profile#178
Tsung-Dao Lee
#178
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (98 years)
Tsung-Dao Lee is a Chinese-American physicist, known for his work on parity violation, the Lee–Yang theorem, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion physics, nontopological solitons, and soliton stars. He was a University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University in New York City, where he taught from 1953 until his retirement in 2012.
Go to Profile#179
Tom Stoppard
#179
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. Stoppard was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
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Eric S. Raymond
#180
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Eric Steven Raymond , often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote a guidebook for the Roguelike game NetHack. In the 1990s, he edited and updated the Jargon File, published as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
Go to Profile#181
H. L. A. Hart
#181
Overall Influence
1907 - 1992 (85 years)
Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart was an English legal philosopher. He was the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and the Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. His most famous work is The Concept of Law, which has been hailed as "the most important work of legal philosophy written in the twentieth century". He is considered one of the world's foremost legal philosophers in the twentieth century.
Go to Profile#182
George Dantzig
#182
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
George Bernard Dantzig was an American mathematical scientist who made contributions to industrial engineering, operations research, computer science, economics, and statistics. Dantzig is known for his development of the simplex algorithm, an algorithm for solving linear programming problems, and for his other work with linear programming. In statistics, Dantzig solved two open problems in statistical theory, which he had mistaken for homework after arriving late to a lecture by Jerzy Neyman.
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J. K. Rowling
#183
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Joanne Rowling , better known by her pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author and philanthropist. She wrote Harry Potter, a seven-volume fantasy series published from 1997 to 2007. The series has sold over 600 million copies, been translated into 84 languages, and spawned a global media franchise including films and video games. The Casual Vacancy was her first novel for adults. She writes Cormoran Strike, an ongoing crime fiction series, under the alias Robert Galbraith.
Go to Profile#184
Hubert Dreyfus
#184
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. He was widely known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger".
Go to Profile#185
Mario Bunge
#185
Overall Influence
1919 - 2020 (101 years)
Mario Augusto Bunge was an Argentine-Canadian philosopher and physicist. His philosophical writings combined scientific realism, systemism, materialism, emergentism, and other principles. He was an advocate of "exact philosophy" and a critic of existentialist, hermeneutical, phenomenological philosophy, and postmodernism. He was popularly known for his opinions against pseudoscience.
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Nick Bostrom
#186
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
#187
W. Edwards Deming
#187
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
William Edwards Deming was an American business theorist, composer, economist, industrial engineer, management consultant, statistician, and writer. Educated initially as an electrical engineer and later specializing in mathematical physics, he helped develop the sampling techniques still used by the United States Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He is also known as the father of the quality movement and was hugely influential in post-WWII Japan. He is best known for his theories of management.
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Maya Angelou
#188
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou's series of seven autobiographies focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.
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Julian Schwinger
#189
Overall Influence
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
Julian Seymour Schwinger was a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on quantum electrodynamics , in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order. Schwinger was a physics professor at several universities.
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Daisaku Ikeda
#190
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
was a Japanese Buddhist philosopher, educator, author, and nuclear disarmament advocate. He served as the third president and then honorary president of the Soka Gakkai, the largest of Japan's new religious movementss. Ikeda is the founding president of the Soka Gakkai International , the world's largest Buddhist lay organization, which claims to have approximately 12 million practitioners in 192 countries and territories, more than 1.5 million of whom reside outside of Japan as of 2012.
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Yann LeCun
#191
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
#192
Humberto Maturana
#192
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Humberto Maturana Romesín was a Chilean biologist and philosopher. Many consider him a member of a group of second-order cybernetics theoreticians such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün and Ernst von Glasersfeld, but in fact he was biologist, scientist.
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James Comey
#193
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
James Brien Comey Jr. is an American lawyer who was the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2013 until his termination in May 2017. Comey was a registered Republican for most of his adult life; however, in 2016, he described himself as unaffiliated.
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Malcolm Gladwell
#194
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has published seven books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference ; Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking ; Outliers: The Story of Success ; What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures , a collection of his journalism; David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants ; Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know and The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War .
Go to Profile#195
Thomas Szasz
#195
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Thomas Stephen Szasz was a Hungarian-American academic and psychiatrist. He served for most of his career as professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, New York. A distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a life member of the American Psychoanalytic Association, he was best known as a social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, as what he saw as the social control aims of medicine in modern society, as well as scientism.
Go to Profile#196
Anthony Fauci
#196
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Anthony Stephen Fauci is an American physician-scientist and immunologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, and the chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022. Fauci was one of the world's most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals from 1983 to 2002. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, for his work on the AIDS relief program PEPFAR.
Go to Profile#197
John Maynard Smith
#197
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
John Maynard Smith was a British theoretical and mathematical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution with George R. Price, and theorised on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signalling theory.
Go to Profile#198
Octavio Paz
#198
Overall Influence
1914 - 1998 (84 years)
Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican poet and diplomat. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1977 Jerusalem Prize, the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Brian Kernighan
#199
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan affirmed that he had no part in the design of the C language . He authored many Unix programs, including ditroff. Kernighan is coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages. The "K" of K&R C and of AWK both stand for "Kernighan".
Go to Profile#200
Ilya Prigogine
#200
Overall Influence
1917 - 2003 (86 years)
Viscount Ilya Romanovich Prigogine was a Belgian physical chemist of Russian-Jewish origin, noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility. Prigogine's work most notably earned him the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as well as the Francqui Prize in 1955 and the Rumford Medal in 1976.
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