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
Peter Lewis Allen
#125773
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Peter Lewis Allen is an American former academic, whose research concerns included culture, history, and sexuality. Education and career Allen earned a B.A. in classics and English from Haverford College, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. He taught literature for a time at institutions including Princeton University, the University of Southern California, and Pomona College. He went back to earn an M.B.A. from the Wharton School in 2000, at which time he left academia for the business world. He has held positions at McKinsey & Company, at Google Universi...
Go to Profile#152
Daniel Mears
#134504
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
#153
Jesse Ehrenfeld
#134561
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Jesse Menachem Ehrenfeld is an American physician. Ehrenfeld is President of the American Medical Association and Professor of Anesthesiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He is also a former Speaker of the Massachusetts Medical Society, where he was the youngest officer in the 228-year history of the organization. He is also a former Vice-President of the Massachusetts Society of Anesthesiologists. The inaugural recipient on the NIH Sexual and Gender Minority Research Award from the NIH Director, Ehrenfeld has been recognized for his contributions to advancing health equity. A 2008 re...
Go to Profile#154
Richard Unger
#139153
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Richard W. Unger is a professor of Medieval History at the University of British Columbia and a specialist in European maritime history in the medieval period. He served as Second Vice-President of the Medieval Academy of America in 2011, First Vice-President in 2012, and President in 2013.
Go to Profile#155
Howard Lutnick
#145620
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Howard William Lutnick is an American billionaire businessman, who succeeded Bernard Gerald Cantor as the head of Cantor Fitzgerald. Lutnick is the chairman and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and BGC Partners. After losing 658 employees, including his brother, in the September 11 attacks, Lutnick survived the collapse of towers on the ground, and has become known for his charity efforts through the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, which helps to aid families of the attacks and natural disasters.
Go to Profile#156
William R. Beardslee
#147906
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#157
Norman R. La Jolla Klinman
#153217
Overall Influence
#158
Jane Silber
#154916
Overall Influence
Jane Silber is a board member of Canonical Ltd. and was its chief executive officer from 2010 to 2017. Silber is also the chair of the board of The Sensible Code Company and Diffblue . Silber joined Canonical in July 2004, where her work has included leading the Ubuntu One project and ensuring that large organizations find Ubuntu "enterprise-ready". She partially attributes the increasing attention to user research and design in open source since 2009 to Canonical's leadership in this area. Silber announced her transition out of the CEO role in April 2017, with Canonical founder Mark Shut...
Go to Profile#159
Peter Bacon Hales
#156568
Overall Influence
1950 - 2014 (64 years)
Peter Bacon Hales was an American historian, photographer, author and musician specializing in American spaces and landscapes, the history of photography and contemporary art. Biography Hales graduated from Haverford College in 1972, earning a BA in English and American Literature. After spending some time in New York working as a photographer and musician, he moved to Texas in the mid-1970s to begin his graduate education under the photographers Russell Lee and Garry Winogrand. Hales completed both his MA and PhD at the University of Texas, specializing in American Civilization under the tutelage of cultural historians William H.
Go to Profile#160
Thomas Devaney
#163870
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Thomas Devaney is an American poet and a 2014 Pew Fellow in the Arts. His poem “The Blue Stoop,” which is after a photograph by Zoe Strauss, is also the name of a community literary hub in Philadelphia, founded in 2018. His 2014 book The Picture that Remains with Will Brown is a collaboration between image and text with Devaney’s poems and Brown’s photographs from the early 70’s in Philadelphia. From 2001-2005, he was program coordinator of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2011, he has taught in the English Department at Haverford College.
Go to Profile#161
Jess F. Adkins
#167279
Overall Influence
#162
Ronald M. Shapiro
#175428
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Ronald M. Shapiro is an American attorney and businessman. Biography Shapiro was born on March 29, 1943, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Mark and Lillian Shapiro. He grew up in neighboring Cheltenham Township and graduated from Cheltenham High School in 1960. Shapiro then attended Haverford College and graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1967. From 1972 to 1974, Shapiro served as Maryland State Securities Commissioner. In 1972, he founded a Baltimore law firm now known as Shapiro Sher. Subsequently, in 1976, Shapiro founded Shapiro, Robinson & Associates, a sports management firm.
Go to Profile#163
James B. Ranck Jr.
#182909
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
James B. Ranck Jr. is a distinguished professor of Physiology at the SUNY Downstate Medical Center. His research involves recording from single neurons in living animals for behavioral studies. He discovered head-direction cells in 1984.
Go to Profile#164
Michael Weber
#182946
Overall Influence
#165
Kimberly Benston
#183144
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Kimberly W. Benston is an American literary historian and academic administrator. Benston earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree from Yale University. He taught at his alma mater and Princeton University before joining the Haverford College faculty in 1984. Benston was appointed Francis B. Gummere Professor of English in 2002 and served as provost between 2012 and 2015. He was named president of Haverford College later that year and took office on July 1, 2015. Benston stepped down from the presidency and returned to teaching in 2019.
Go to Profile#166
Nikhil Anand
#185262
Overall Influence
2001 - Present (23 years)
Nikhil Anand is an Indian cricketer. He made his first-class debut on 4 February 2020, for Bihar in the 2019–20 Ranji Trophy. He made his List A debut on 11 December 2021, for Bihar in the 2021–22 Vijay Hazare Trophy.
Go to Profile#167
Temple Painter
#185791
Overall Influence
1933 - 2016 (83 years)
Temple Painter was an American harpsichordist and organist. He was born in 1933 in Pulaski, Virginia. Temple Painter performed as solo organist with members of the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center under Hermann Scherchen, as harpsichord soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, and as solo harpsichordist for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. He performed as solo pianist, harpsichordist and organist with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, and concertized extensively in the United States, Europe and Israel.
Go to Profile#168
David Thornburgh
#190379
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
David Bradford Thornburgh is senior advisor, and former president and CEO, of the Committee of Seventy, an influential independent government reform group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Seventy in December 2014, he served as executive director of the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government. He is a frequent commentator on regional development, public policy and civic affairs. He has been recognized by Leadership Philadelphia as one of the most trusted and respected civic "connectors" in the Philadelphia area. He is the son of former Pennsylvania governor and U.S.
Go to Profile#169
Emmett Reid Dunn
1894 - 1956 (62 years)
Emmett Reid Dunn was an American herpetologist and educator noted for his work in Panama and for studies of salamanders in the Eastern United States. Early life and education Emmett Reid Dunn was born on November 21, 1894, in Arlington, Virginia, to Mary Reid Dunn and Emmett Clark Dunn, a civil engineer. He spent much of his childhood at a family farm near the James River in Nelson County. Dunn attended Haverford College in Philadelphia, receiving his B.A. and M.A. in 1915 and 1916, respectively. His childhood connection to Arlington allowed him to connect with his first professional mentor, Leonhard Stejneger, the Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians at the Smithsonian Institution.
Go to Profile#170
Arthur F. Coca
1875 - 1959 (84 years)
Arthur Fernandez Coca was an American immunologist known for his research on allergies. Biography Coca was born in Philadelphia. He was educated at Haverford College and obtained his M.D. from University of Pennsylvania in 1900. He studied at Heidelberg University and during 1907–1909 was an assistant to Emil von Dungern at the Cancer Institute of Heidelberg's chemical laboratory. He worked as a bacteriologist at the Bureau of Science in Manila and was instructor in Pathology and Bacteriology at Cornell University Medical College during 1910–1919. He was Professor of Immunology and Professor of Medicine at the New York Postgraduate Medical School, Columbia University from 1924 to 1935.
Go to Profile#171
Howard Thurman
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Howard Washington Thurman was an American author, philosopher, theologian, mystic, educator, and civil rights leader. As a prominent religious figure, he played a leading role in many social justice movements and organizations of the twentieth century. Thurman's theology of radical nonviolence influenced and shaped a generation of civil rights activists, and he was a key mentor to leaders within the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr.
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Cecil Kent Drinker
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
Cecil Kent Drinker was an American physician and founder of the Harvard School of Public Health. He was professor at Harvard School of Public Health from 1923 till 1935. Drinker was involved in the effect of radium on the women painting luminous dials. Drinker's father was railroad man and Lehigh University president Henry Sturgis Drinker; his siblings included lawyer and musicologist Henry Sandwith Drinker, Jr., industrial hygienist Philip Drinker and biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen.
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David Harris Willson
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
David Harris Willson was an American historian and professor who specialized in the history of 17th-century England. Early life and education Willson's progenitors bearing the Willson name first arrived from England in 1638, settling in Dedham, Massachusetts. Another English progenitor, John Harris, Sr., founded Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. David Harris Willson's parents were Thomas Harris Willson and Amelia Shryrock Willson. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#174
Henry Cadbury
1883 - 1974 (91 years)
Henry Joel Cadbury was an American biblical scholar, Quaker historian, writer, and non-profit administrator. Life A graduate of Haverford College, Cadbury was a Quaker throughout his life, as well as an agnostic. Forced out of his teaching position at Haverford for writing an anti-war letter to the Philadelphia Public Ledger, in 1918, he saw the experience as a milestone, leading him to larger service beyond his Orthodox Religious Society of Friends. He was offered a position in the Divinity School at Harvard University, from which he had received his Ph.D., but he first rejected its teacher...
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Maxfield Parrish
1870 - 1966 (96 years)
Maxfield Parrish was an American painter and illustrator active in the first half of the 20th century. He is known for his distinctive saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery. His career spanned fifty years and was wildly successful: the National Museum of American Illustration deemed his painting Daybreak to be the most successful art print of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#176
Clarence Pickett
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Clarence Evan Pickett was an American religious leader, notable 20th century Quaker, and head of a non-governmental, humanitarian relief agency. Background Pickett was born on October 19, 1884, in Cissna Park, Illinois. He came from a family of Quakers and grew up in Glen Elder, Kansas. He studied at Penn College in Iowa, the Hartford Theological Seminary and at Harvard.
Go to Profile#177
Edgar B. Graves
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Edgar Baldwin Graves was an American medievalist and professor of history at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. His primary area of expertise was medieval English law and the relationship between royal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions.
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Henry Shoemaker Conard
1874 - 1971 (97 years)
Henry Shoemaker Conard was a leading authority on bryophytes and water lilies, as well as an early advocate of environmental preservation. From 1906 to 1955, Professor Conard worked at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. In 1954, he became the first to receive the Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America, an award that has continued annually ever since.
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Arthur R. M. Spaid
1866 - 1936 (70 years)
Arthur Rusmiselle Miller Spaid was an American educator, school administrator, lecturer, and writer. He served as principal of Alexis I. duPont High School in Wilmington, Delaware, superintendent of New Castle County Public Schools in Delaware, superintendent of Dorchester County Public Schools in Maryland, and Delaware State commissioner of Education .
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Frank Vigor Morley
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Frank Vigor Morley was an American mathematician, author, editor and publishing executive. As had his two older brothers, Christopher and Felix, Morley attended Haverford College and then studied at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Morley worked in book publishing in London and New York and played a significant role in the early history of the publishing firm Faber and Faber, where he became a close friend of the poet T. S. Eliot.
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Alexander Friedmann
1888 - 1925 (37 years)
Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann was a Russian and Soviet physicist and mathematician. He originated the pioneering theory that the universe is expanding, governed by a set of equations he developed known as the Friedmann equations.
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William Lloyd Garrison Williams
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
William Lloyd Garrison Williams was an American-Canadian Quaker and mathematician, known for the founding of the Canadian Mathematical Society and overseeing Elbert Frank Cox's doctorate in mathematics.
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Carl B. Allendoerfer
1911 - 1974 (63 years)
Carl Barnett Allendoerfer was an American mathematician in the mid-twentieth century, known for his work in topology and mathematics education. Background Allendoerfer was born in Kansas City, the son of a prominent banker. He graduated from Haverford College in 1932 and attended New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, 1932-1934. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1937.
Go to Profile#184
William T. R. Fox
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
William Thornton Rickert Fox , generally known as William T. R. Fox , was an American foreign policy professor and international relations theoretician at the Columbia University . He is perhaps mostly known as the coiner of the term "superpower" in 1944. He wrote several books about the foreign policy of the United States of America and the United Kingdom . He was a pioneer in establishing international relations, and the systematic study of statecraft and war, as a major academic discipline. National security policy and an examination of civil-military relations were also focuses of his interests and career.
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Ira De Augustine Reid
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Ira De Augustine Reid was a prominent sociologist, who wrote extensively on the lives of black immigrants and communities in the United States. He was also influential in the field of educational sociology. He held faculty appointments at Atlanta University, New York University, and Haverford College, one of very few African American faculty members in the United States at white institutions during the era of "separate but equal" and the first to be awarded tenure at a prestigious Northern institution .
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Lynn Townsend White Jr.
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Lynn Townsend White Jr. was an American historian. He was a professor of medieval history at Princeton from 1933 to 1937, and at Stanford from 1937 to 1943. He was president of Mills College, Oakland, from 1943 to 1958 and a professor at University of California, Los Angeles from 1958 until 1987. Lynn White helped to found the Society for the History of Technology and was president from 1960 to 1962. He won the Pfizer Award for "Medieval Technology and Social Change" from the History of Science Society and the Leonardo da Vinci medal and Dexter prize from SHOT in 1964 and 1970. He was president of the History of Science Society from 1971 to 1972.
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Ernest William Brown
1866 - 1938 (72 years)
Ernest William Brown FRS was an English mathematician and astronomer, who spent the majority of his career working in the United States and became a naturalised American citizen in 1923. His life's work was the study of the Moon's motion and the compilation of extremely accurate lunar tables. He also studied the motion of the planets and calculated the orbits of Trojan asteroids.
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Takeo Arishima
1878 - 1923 (45 years)
was a Japanese novelist, short-story writer and essayist during the late Meiji and Taishō periods. His two younger brothers, and , were also authors. His son was the internationally known film and stage actor, Masayuki Mori.
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Thomas Raymond Kelly
1893 - 1941 (48 years)
Thomas Raymond Kelly was an American Quaker educator. He taught and wrote on the subject of mysticism. His books are widely read, especially by people interested in spirituality. Kelly was born in 1893 in Chillicothe, Ohio, to a Quaker family . The branch of Quakerism in which he was raised had been influenced by the 19th century revivalists and worship services were similar to other low-church Protestant groups.
Go to Profile#190
William Draper Lewis
1867 - 1949 (82 years)
William Draper Lewis was the first full-time dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School , and the founding director of the American Law Institute. Personal life and education William Draper Lewis was reported by the Pennsylvania Law Review as being a devout Episcopalian born to Quaker parents, Henry and Fannie Hannah Wilson Lewis, in Philadelphia, in 1867. Lewis was the great-grandson of Simeon Draper, and a descendant of James Draper, an early settler of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He also descended from Puritan pioneer George Lewes , an early settler at Plymouth Colony; the clothi...
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Frederic M. Wheelock
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Frederic Melvin Wheelock was an American Latin professor, best known for his authorship of Wheelock's Latin. Early life He was the son of Franklin M. and Etta R. Wheelock. He graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1925 and later received both M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University.
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Warner Fite
1867 - 1955 (88 years)
Warner Fite was an American philosopher. Biography Warner Fite was born in Philadelphia. He graduated with a BA from Haverford College in 1889 and received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1894. Besides teaching at the University of Chicago , Fite also worked at the University of Texas , Indiana University and Harvard University . He held the chair of Stuart Professor of Ethics at Princeton University from 1917 until his retirement in 1935.
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Henry H. Goddard
1866 - 1957 (91 years)
Henry Herbert Goddard was an American psychologist, eugenicist, and segregationist during the early 20th century. He is known especially for his 1912 work The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, which he himself came to regard as flawed for its ahistoric depiction of the titular family, and for translating the Binet intelligence test into English in 1908 and distributing an estimated 22,000 copies of the translated test across the United States. He also introduced the term "moron" for clinical use.
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Louis Round Wilson
1876 - 1979 (103 years)
Louis Round Wilson was an important figure to the field of library science, and is listed in "100 of the most important leaders we had in the 20th century," an article in the December 1999 issue of American Libraries. The article lists what he did for the field of library science including dean at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, directing the library at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and as one of the “internationally oriented library leaders in the U.S. who contributed much of the early history of the International Federation of Library Associations and Inst...
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John Sebastian
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
John Sebastian was an American musician and composer known as a master of the classical chromatic harmonica. He was the first harmonicist to adopt an all-classical repertoire and, along with Larry Adler and Tommy Reilly, established the harmonica as a serious instrument for classical music. In addition to performing, Sebastian increased the range of classical music available for the harmonica by transcribing numerous existing classical works for the harmonica, composing works of his own, and commissioning or otherwise encouraging other composers to write for the instrument.
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Warren Sturgis McCulloch
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Warren Sturgis McCulloch was an American neurophysiologist and cybernetician, known for his work on the foundation for certain brain theories and his contribution to the cybernetics movement. Along with Walter Pitts, McCulloch created computational models based on mathematical algorithms called threshold logic which split the inquiry into two distinct approaches, one approach focused on biological processes in the brain and the other focused on the application of neural networks to artificial intelligence.
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Frank Morley
1860 - 1937 (77 years)
Frank Morley was a leading mathematician, known mostly for his teaching and research in the fields of algebra and geometry. Among his mathematical accomplishments was the discovery and proof of the celebrated Morley's trisector theorem in elementary plane geometry. He led 50 Ph.D.'s to their degrees, and was said to be:"...one of the more striking figures of the relatively small group of men who initiated that development which, within his own lifetime, brought Mathematics in America from a minor position to its present place in the sun."
Go to Profile#198
George Aaron Barton
1859 - 1942 (83 years)
George Aaron Barton was a Canadian author, Episcopal clergyman, and professor of Semitic languages and the history of religion. Biography Barton was born on 12 November 1859 in East Farnham, Canada East, Canada. After attending Oakwood Seminary in Union Springs, New York. Barton became a minister in the Religious Society of Friends and continued his education at Haverford College, completing a MA in 1885. He taught in Rhode Island from 1884 to 1889, then earned a PhD at Harvard and became a professor of Semitic languages at Bryn Mawr College in 1891.
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Charles Wharton Stork
1881 - 1971 (90 years)
Charles Wharton Stork was an American literary author, poet, and translator. Early life and education Stork was born in Philadelphia on February 12, 1881 to Theophilus Baker and Hannah Stork. He graduated from Haverford College and Harvard University.
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Christopher Morley
1890 - 1957 (67 years)
Christopher Darlington Morley was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet. He also produced stage productions for a few years and gave college lectures. Biography Morley was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. His father, Frank Morley, was a mathematics professor at Haverford College; his mother, Lilian Janet Bird, was a violinist who provided Christopher with much of his later love for literature and poetry.
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