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
Eric Scerri
#5561
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
#152
Van H. Vu
#5562
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Van H. Vu is a Vietnamese mathematician, Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. Education and career Vu was born in Hanoi in 1970. He went to special math classes for gifted children at Chu Van An and Hanoi-Amsterdam high schools. In 1987, he went to Hungary for his undergraduate studies, and in 1994, obtained his M.Sc in mathematics at the Faculty of Sciences of the Eötvös University, Budapest. His thesis supervisor was Tamás Szőnyi. He received his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1998 under the direction of László Lovász. He worked as a postdoc at IAS and Microsoft Research .
Go to Profile#153
Robert McEliece
#5597
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Robert J. McEliece was the Allen E. Puckett Professor and a professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology best known for his work in error-correcting coding and information theory. He was the 2004 recipient of the Claude E. Shannon Award and the 2009 recipient of the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. He was a life fellow of the IEEE and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998.
Go to Profile#154
Henry Fuchs
#5619
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Henry Fuchs is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association for Computing Machinery and the Federico Gil Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . He is also an adjunct professor in biomedical engineering.
Go to Profile#155
W. Hugh Woodin
#5624
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
William Hugh Woodin is an American mathematician and set theorist at Harvard University. He has made many notable contributions to the theory of inner models and determinacy. A type of large cardinals, the Woodin cardinals, bear his name. In 2023, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#156
Samuel Karlin
#5695
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Samuel Karlin was an American mathematician at Stanford University in the late 20th century. Education and career Karlin was born in Janów, Poland and immigrated to Chicago as a child. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, Karlin became an atheist in his teenage years and remained an atheist for the rest of his life. Later in life he told his three children, who all became scientists, that walking down the street without a yarmulke on his head for the first time was a milestone in his life.
Go to Profile#157
Lior Pachter
#5704
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Lior Samuel Pachter is a computational biologist. He works at the California Institute of Technology, where he is the Bren Professor of Computational Biology. He has widely varied research interests including genomics, combinatorics, computational geometry, machine learning, scientific computing, and statistics.
Go to Profile#158
Nick Katz
#5764
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Nicholas Michael Katz is an American mathematician, working in arithmetic geometry, particularly on p-adic methods, monodromy and moduli problems, and number theory. He is currently a professor of Mathematics at Princeton University and an editor of the journal Annals of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#159
A. W. Kuchler
#5772
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
August William Kuchler was a German-born American geographer and naturalist who is noted for developing a plant association system that has become widely used in the United States. Some of this database has been digitized for integration into GIS mapping systems. Kuchler received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of Munich in 1935. In 1978, he received the Association of American Geographers' Honors award. He is the author of the book Vegetation Mapping.
Go to Profile#160
Vern Poythress
#5855
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Vern Sheridan Poythress is an American philosopher, theologian, New Testament scholar and mathematician, who is currently the New Testament chair of the ESV Oversight Committee. He is also the Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Biblical Interpretation, and Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary and editor of Westminster Theological Journal.
Go to Profile#161
Don Page
#5888
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Don Nelson Page, , is an American-born Canadian theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta, Canada. Work Page's work focuses on quantum cosmology and theoretical gravitational physics, and he is noted for being a doctoral student of Stephen Hawking, in addition to publishing several journal articles with him. Page got his BA at William Jewell College in the United States in 1971, attaining an MS in 1972 and a PhD in 1976 at Caltech.
Go to Profile#162
Thomas Felix Rosenbaum
#5889
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Thomas Felix Rosenbaum is an American condensed matter physicist, professor of physics, and the current president of the California Institute of Technology . Previously, Rosenbaum served as a faculty member and Provost of the University of Chicago. He has also served as the vice president for research at Argonne National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#163
Babak Hassibi
#5942
Overall Influence
Babak Hassibi is an Iranian-American electrical engineer, computer scientist, and applied mathematician who is the inaugural Mose and Lillian S. Bohn Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology . From 2011 to 2016 he was the Gordon M Binder/Amgen Professor of Electrical Engineering. During 2008-2015 he was the Executive Officer of Electrical Engineering and Associate Director of Information Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#164
Les Earnest
#6135
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Lester Donald Earnest is an American computer scientist. Education and career After receiving his B.S. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1953, he began his career as a computer programmer in 1954 during a stint as a U.S. Navy Aviation Electronics Officer & Digital Computer Project Officer at the Naval Air Development Center in Johnsville, Pennsylvania. In 1956, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 's Lincoln Laboratory to help design the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment air defense system.
Go to Profile#165
David Singmaster
#6144
Overall Influence
1938 - 2023 (85 years)
David Breyer Singmaster was an American-British mathematician who was emeritus professor of mathematics at London South Bank University, England. He had a huge personal collection of mechanical puzzles and books of brain teasers. He was most famous for being an early adopter and enthusiastic promoter of the Rubik's Cube. His Notes on Rubik's "Magic Cube" which he began compiling in 1979 provided the first mathematical analysis of the Cube as well as providing one of the first published solutions. The book contained his cube notation which allowed the recording of Rubik's Cube moves, and which...
Go to Profile#166
James Demmel
#6168
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
James Weldon Demmel Jr. is an American mathematician and computer scientist, the Dr. Richard Carl Dehmel Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#167
Yuan-Cheng Fung
#6175
Overall Influence
1919 - 2019 (100 years)
#168
Michael R. Douglas
#6228
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Michael R. Douglas is an American theoretical physicist, best known for his work in string theory and mathematical physics. Biography Douglas was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the son of Nancy and Ronald G. Douglas, a mathematician specializing in operator algebras. He received his bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University. He then went to Caltech and received a PhD in physics in 1988 under John Schwarz, one of the developers and leading researchers in superstring theory.
Go to Profile#169
William H. Press
#6231
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
William Henry Press is an astrophysicist, theoretical physicist, computer scientist, and computational biologist. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1989 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "in recognition of important theoretical contributions to relativistic astrophysics and to cosmology" Other honors include the 1981 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy. Press has been a member of the JASON defense advisory group since 1977 and is a past chair.
Go to Profile#170
Donald Prothero
#6431
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Donald Ross Prothero is an American geologist, paleontologist, and author who specializes in mammalian paleontology and magnetostratigraphy, a technique to date rock layers of the Cenozoic era and its use to date the climate changes which occurred 30–40 million years ago. He is the author or editor of more than 30 books and over 300 scientific papers, including at least 5 geology textbooks.
Go to Profile#171
David Goodstein
#6447
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
David Louis Goodstein is an American physicist and educator. From 1988 to 2007 he served as Vice-provost of the California Institute of Technology , where he is also a professor of physics and applied physics, as well as the Frank J. Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor.
Go to Profile#172
Thomas Sterling
#6489
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Thomas Sterling is a full professor for the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. At IU, he is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Computing Systems Laboratory . He received his Ph.D in 1984 at MIT. For more than four decades, Thomas Sterling has dedicated his professional contributions to research for advancements in parallel high-performance computing. Dr. Sterling is best known as the “father of Beowulf” clusters. Among his other early accomplishments, Dr. Sterling was Principal investigator for the multi-agency multi-institution Hybrid Technology Multi-Threaded Project for advanced research on Petaflops computing systems.
Go to Profile#173
Benjamin S. Blanchard
#6573
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Benjamin Seaver Blanchard, Jr. was an American systems engineer and Emeritus Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech, who was awarded the INCOSE Pioneer Award jointly with Wolt Fabrycky as "practitioner, teacher, and advocate of Systems Engineering."
Go to Profile#174
John D. Roberts
#6679
Overall Influence
1918 - 2016 (98 years)
John Dombrowski Roberts was an American chemist. He made contributions to the integration of physical chemistry, spectroscopy, and organic chemistry for the understanding of chemical reaction rates. Another characteristic of Roberts' work was the early use of NMR, focusing on the concept of spin coupling.
Go to Profile#175
Ben Green
#6711
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Ben Joseph Green FRS is a British mathematician, specialising in combinatorics and number theory. He is the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford. Early life and education Ben Green was born on 27 February 1977 in Bristol, England. He studied at local schools in Bristol, Bishop Road Primary School and Fairfield Grammar School, competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1994 and 1995. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1995 and completed his BA in mathematics in 1998, winning the Senior Wrangler title. He stayed on for Part III and earned his do...
Go to Profile#176
Joseph Henrich
#6744
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Joseph Henrich is an American professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Before arriving at Harvard, Henrich was a professor of psychology and economics at the University of British Columbia. He is interested in the question of how humans evolved from "being a relatively unremarkable primate a few million years ago to the most successful species on the globe", and how culture shaped our species' genetic evolution.
Go to Profile#177
Peter Zoller
#6772
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Peter Zoller is a theoretical physicist from Austria. He is professor at the University of Innsbruck and works on quantum optics and quantum information and is best known for his pioneering research on quantum computing and quantum communication and for bridging quantum optics and solid state physics.
Go to Profile#178
George B. Field
#6824
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
George B. Field is an American astrophysicist. Early life, family and education Field was born in Providence, Rhode Island. His father Winthrop Brooks Field and mother Pauline Woodworth Field were Harvard and Radcliffe graduates, respectively. He became interested in astronomy at an early age, but at the urging of his father he studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Disliking engineering, he later switched to astrophysics. After MIT, he attended the graduate school at Princeton University. When working at Princeton he had his first child, Christopher Field in 1957.
Go to Profile#179
James R. Rice
#7040
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
James Robert Rice is an American engineer, scientist, geophysicist, and Mallinckrodt Professor of Engineering Sciences and Geophysics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Go to Profile#180
Charles M. Rice
#7043
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Charles Moen Rice is an American virologist and Nobel Prize laureate whose main area of research is the hepatitis C virus. He is a professor of virology at the Rockefeller University in New York City and an adjunct professor at Cornell University and Washington University School of Medicine. At the time of the award he was a faculty at Rockefeller.
Go to Profile#181
Robert B. Leighton
#7074
Overall Influence
1919 - 1997 (78 years)
Robert Benjamin Leighton was a prominent American experimental physicist who spent his professional career at the California Institute of Technology . His work over the years spanned solid state physics, cosmic ray physics, the beginnings of modern particle physics, solar physics, the planets, infrared astronomy, and millimeter- and submillimeter-wave astronomy. In the latter four fields, his pioneering work opened up entirely new areas of research that subsequently developed into vigorous scientific communities.
Go to Profile#182
Muhammad Suhail Zubairy
#7179
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Muhammad Suhail Zubairy, HI, SI, FPAS , is a University Distinguished Professor as of 2014 in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Texas A&M University and is the inaugural holder of the Munnerlyn-Heep Chair in Quantum Optics.
Go to Profile#183
David J. C. MacKay
#7296
Overall Influence
1967 - 2016 (49 years)
Sir David John Cameron MacKay was a British physicist, mathematician, and academic. He was the Regius Professor of Engineering in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge and from 2009 to 2014 was Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change . MacKay wrote the book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air.
Go to Profile#184
David A. Evans
#7323
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
David A. Evans was an American chemist who was the Abbott and James Lawrence professor of chemistry at Harvard University. He was a prominent figure in the field of organic chemistry and his research focused on synthetic chemistry and total synthesis, particularly of large biologically active molecules. Among his best-known works is the development of aldol reaction methodology .
Go to Profile#185
Mark Adler
#7432
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Mark Adler is an American software engineer. He is best known for his work in the field of data compression as the author of the Adler-32 checksum function, and a co-author together with Jean-loup Gailly of the zlib compression library and gzip. He has contributed to Info-ZIP, and has participated in developing the Portable Network Graphics image format. Adler was also the Spirit Cruise Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission.
Go to Profile#186
Nicholas A. Peppas
#7447
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
#187
Franklin Stahl
#7470
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (96 years)
Franklin William Stahl is an American molecular biologist and geneticist. With Matthew Meselson, Stahl conducted the famous Meselson-Stahl experiment showing that DNA is replicated by a semiconservative mechanism, meaning that each strand of the DNA serves as a template for production of a new strand.
Go to Profile#188
Nets Katz
#7484
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Nets Hawk Katz is the W.L. Moody Professor of Mathematics at Rice University. He was a professor of Mathematics at Indiana University Bloomington until March 2013 and the IBM Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology until 2023.
Go to Profile#189
Jean-Lou Chameau
#7541
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Jean-Lou Chameau is a French civil engineer who served as the president of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology from 2013 to 2017, and California Institute of Technology from 2006 to 2013. In addition, he previously served as a Dean of Engineering and provost of the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#190
Harry B. Gray
#7612
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Harry Barkus Gray is the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry at California Institute of Technology. Career Gray received his B.S. in chemistry from Western Kentucky University in 1957. He began his work in inorganic chemistry at Northwestern University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1960 working under Fred Basolo and Ralph Pearson. He was initiated into the Upsilon chapter of Alpha Chi Sigma at Northwestern University in 1958. After that, he spent a year as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, where, along with Walter A. Manch, he collaborated with Carl J. Ballhaus...
Go to Profile#191
Robert F. Christy
#7623
Overall Influence
1916 - 2012 (96 years)
Robert Frederick Christy was a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and later astrophysicist who was one of the last surviving people to have worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He briefly served as acting president of California Institute of Technology .
Go to Profile#192
Subrata Roy
#7630
Overall Influence
Subrata Roy is an Indian-born inventor, educator, and scientist known for his work in plasma-based flow control and plasma-based self-sterilizing technology. He is a professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida and the founding director of the Applied Physics Research Group at the University of Florida.
Go to Profile#193
June Huh
#7633
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
June Huh is an American mathematician who is currently a professor at Princeton University. Previously, he was a professor at Stanford University. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022. He has been noted for the linkages that he has found between algebraic geometry and combinatorics.
Go to Profile#194
Mark Satterthwaite
#7681
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Mark Allen Satterthwaite is an economist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is currently an A.C. Buehler Professor in Hospital & Health Services Management, Professor of Strategic Management & Managerial Economics, and chair of the Management & Strategy Department. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#195
Abe Sklar
#7695
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Abe Sklar was an American mathematician and a professor of applied mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the inventor of copulas in probability theory. Education and career Sklar was born in Chicago to Jewish parents who immigrated to the United States from Ukraine. He attended Von Steuben High School and later enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1942, when he was only 16. Sklar went on to become a student of Tom M. Apostol at the California Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1956. His students at IIT have included geometers Clark Kimberling and Marj...
Go to Profile#196
Allan Sandage
#7788
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Allan Rex Sandage was an American astronomer. He was Staff Member Emeritus with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. He determined the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble constant and the age of the universe.
Go to Profile#197
Richard Scheller
#7832
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Richard H. Scheller is the former Chief Science Officer and Head of Therapeutics at 23andMe and the former Executive Vice President of Research and Early Development at Genentech. He was a professor at Stanford University from 1982 to 2001 before joining Genentech. He has been awarded the Alan T. Waterman Award in 1989, the W. Alden Spencer Award in 1993 and the NAS Award in Molecular Biology in 1997, won the 2010 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience with Thomas C. Südhof and James E. Rothman, and won the 2013 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Thomas Südhof. He was also given the Life Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award from University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#198
Dean Wooldridge
#7924
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Dean Everett Wooldridge was a prominent engineer in the aerospace industry. Something of a prodigy, Wooldridge graduated from high school at the age of 14. He received his bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Oklahoma. Like his future colleague Simon Ramo, Wooldridge went on to study at the California Institute of Technology under William Smythe, from which he received his PhD in physics in 1936, studying the separation of isotopes.
Go to Profile#199
Jeffrey A. Harvey
#7927
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Jeffrey A. Harvey is an American string theorist at the University of Chicago. Scientific contributions Among Harvey's many contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he is one of the co-discoverers of the heterotic string, along with David Gross, Emil Martinec, and Ryan Rohm. The four physicists were colloquially known as the "Princeton string quartet".
Go to Profile#200
Mark Ptashne
#7941
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Mark Ptashne is a molecular biologist. He is the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Ptashne grew up in Chicago. He earned his undergraduate degree at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1961 and his PhD from Harvard in 1968, after which he joined the faculty of Harvard. He was made professor there in 1971 and became chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1980. In 1993 he was awarded an endowed chair, and in 1997 he left Harvard for MSK.
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