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
#15001
Attila Brungs
#15012
Overall Influence
Attila Brungs is the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of New South Wales. He was appointed to the role in January 2022. Prior to this role, he was the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Technology Sydney ; a role that he held from July 2014 to October 2022.
Go to Profile#15002
Mike Patton
#15013
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Michael Allan Patton is an American singer, songwriter, producer, and voice actor, best known as the lead vocalist of the alternative metal band Faith No More. Noted for his vocal proficiency, diverse singing techniques, wide range of projects, style-transcending influences, eccentric public image and contempt for the music industry, Patton has earned critical praise and influenced many contemporary singers. Patton is also co-founder and lead vocalist of Mr. Bungle, and has played with Tomahawk, Fantômas, Moonchild Trio, Kaada/Patton, Dead Cross, Lovage, Mondo Cane, and Peeping Tom. Consisten...
Go to Profile#15003
Vincent Price
#15014
Overall Influence
Vincent Price is an American academic administrator who has served as the 10th president of Duke University in North Carolina since 2017. Price previously served as provost of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from 2009 to 2017.
Go to Profile#15004
Mildred García
#15015
Overall Influence
Mildred García is the Chancellor of the California State University system. She is also current president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities in Washington, D.C. Early life García was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She is a first-generation college student.
Go to Profile#15005
Robert Walter
#15016
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Robert Walter is an editor and an executive with several not-for-profit organizations. Most notably, he is the executive director and board president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation , an organization that he helped found in 1990 with choreographer Jean Erdman, Joseph Campbell's widow.
Go to Profile#15006
Alan A. Brown
#15017
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Alan A. Brown was a Hungarian professor of Economics. He founded the international honor society in Economics, Omicron Delta Epsilon , while he was a student at City College of New York in 1955. The society now has 600 chapters worldwide. Brown arrived in the U.S. in 1949 at age 21, having survived the Nazi Holocaust as the sole survivor of his family , without money or knowledge of English.
Go to Profile#15007
John Alexander Simpson
#15018
Overall Influence
1916 - 2000 (84 years)
John Alexander Simpson was an American physicist and science educator. He was deeply committed to educating the public and political leaders about science and its implications, most notably as a principal founder of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and a long-time member of the organizations Board of Sponsors.
Go to Profile#15008
Benny Lévy
#15019
Overall Influence
1945 - 2003 (58 years)
Benny Lévy was a philosopher, political activist and author. A political figure of May 1968 in France, he was the disciple and last personal secretary of Jean-Paul Sartre from 1974 to 1980. Along with him, he helped founding the French newspaper Libération in 1972.
Go to Profile#15009
David B. Hertz
#15020
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
David Bendel Hertz was an operations research practitioner and academic, known for various contributions to the discipline, and specifically, and more widely, for pioneering the use of Monte Carlo methods in finance. He developed innovative modeling approaches for the solution of complex management issues. His earliest publications added insights to the industrial process of research and development.
Go to Profile#15010
Chris Blackwell
#15021
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Christopher Percy Gordon Blackwell OJ is a Jamaican-British former record producer and the founder of Island Records, which has been called "one of Britain's great independent labels". According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to which Blackwell was inducted in 2001, he is "the single person most responsible for turning the world on to reggae music." Variety describes him as "indisputably one of the greatest record executives in history".
Go to Profile#15011
Robert Sungenis
#15022
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Robert A. Sungenis is an American Catholic apologist and advocate of the pseudoscientific belief that the Earth is the center of the universe. He has made statements about Jews and Judaism which have been criticized as being antisemitic, which he denies. Sungenis is a member of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, a Catholic Young Earth creationist group.
Go to Profile#15012
Jeffrey A. Winters
#15023
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Jeffrey A. Winters is an American political scientist at Northwestern University, specialising in the study of oligarchy. He has written extensively on Indonesia and on oligarchy in the United States. His 2011 book Oligarchy was the 2012 winner of the American Political Science Association's Luebbert Award for the Best Book in Comparative politics.
Go to Profile#15013
Padma Desai
#15024
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Padma Desai was an Indian-American development economist who was the Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor Emerita of comparative economic systems and director of the Center for Transition Economies at Columbia University. Known for her scholarship on Soviet and Indian industrial policy, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2009.
Go to Profile#15014
George Selgin
#15025
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
George Selgin is an American economist. He is Senior Fellow and Director Emeritus of the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, where he is editor-in-chief of the center's blog, Alt-M, Professor Emeritus of economics at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, and an associate editor of Econ Journal Watch. Selgin formerly taught at George Mason University, the University of Hong Kong, and West Virginia University.
Go to Profile#15015
Don Criqui
#15026
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Don Criqui is an American sportscaster. He holds the record for longest-tenured NFL broadcaster in U.S. TV history, calling NFL football for 47 seasons on NBC and CBS. Criqui's final NFL broadcast came on December 8, 2013, when he filled in for Bill Macatee as he was having traveling issues in a ice storm in Dallas, calling the 27-26 New England Patriots victory over the Cleveland Browns.
Go to Profile#15016
Tom Maibaum
#15027
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Thomas Stephen Edward Maibaum Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts is a computer scientist. Maibaum has a Bachelor of Science undergraduate degree in pure mathematics from the University of Toronto, Canada , and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from Queen Mary and Royal Holloway Colleges, University of London, England .
Go to Profile#15017
Richard Bushman
#15028
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Richard Lyman Bushman is an American historian and Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, having previously taught at Brigham Young University, Harvard University, Boston University, and the University of Delaware. Bushman is the author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, an important biography of Joseph Smith, progenitor of the Latter Day Saint movement. Bushman also was an editor for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and now serves on the national advisory board. Bushman has been called "one of the most important scholars of American religious history" of the late-20th century.
Go to Profile#15018
Sari Nusseibeh
#15029
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sari Nusseibeh is a Palestinian professor of philosophy and former president of the Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. Until December 2002, he was the representative of the Palestinian National Authority in that city. In 2008, in an open online poll, Nusseibeh was voted the 24th most influential intellectual in the world on the list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals by Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy .
Go to Profile#15019
Ruth Behar
#15030
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ruth Behar is a Cuban-American anthropologist and writer. Her work includes academic studies, as well as poetry, memoir, and literary fiction. As an anthropologist, she has argued for the open adoption and acknowledgement of the subjective nature of research and participant-observers. She is a recipient of the Belpré Medal.
Go to Profile#15020
Nivedita Menon
#15031
Overall Influence
Nivedita Menon is a writer and a professor of political thought at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She previously taught at Lady Shri Ram College and the Department of Political Science at Delhi University.
Go to Profile#15021
Marlene Scardamalia
#15032
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Marlene Scardamalia is an education researcher, professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Contributions She is considered one of the pioneers in computer-supported collaborative learning. Other areas of research where Scardamalia made contributions are:Cognitive developmentEducational uses of computersIntentional learningThe nature of expertisePsychology of writingResearch-based innovation in learning and knowledge workKnowledge innovation.Since the 1980s she supervised the design, development and research of Computer Supported Intentional Learning Environments .
Go to Profile#15022
W. Robert Godfrey
#15033
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
W. Robert Godfrey is a minister in the United Reformed Churches in North America and formerly served as the third president of Westminster Seminary California. As of 2017 he is president emeritus and professor emeritus of church history. He currently is chairman of Ligonier Ministries, located in Sanford, Florida, a position he took over from the late Dr. R. C. Sproul.
Go to Profile#15023
James B. Jordan
#15034
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
James Burrell Jordan is an American Protestant theologian and author. He is the director of Biblical Horizons ministries, an organisation in Niceville, Florida that publishes books, essays and other media dealing with Bible commentary, Biblical theology, and liturgy. It adheres to biblical absolutism including Young Earth Creationism and is committed to the concept of biblical theocracy.
Go to Profile#15024
Amos Fiat
#15035
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Amos Fiat is an Israeli computer scientist, a professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University. He is known for his work in cryptography, online algorithms, and algorithmic game theory. Biography Fiat earned his Ph.D. in 1987 from the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Adi Shamir. After postdoctoral studies with Richard Karp and Manuel Blum at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Israel, taking a faculty position at Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#15025
Mark Steedman
#15036
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Mark Jerome Steedman, is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist. Biography Steedman graduated from the University of Sussex in 1968, with a B.Sc. in Experimental Psychology, and from the University of Edinburgh in 1973, with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence .
Go to Profile#15026
Amar'e Stoudemire
#15037
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Amar'e Carsares Jehoshaphat Stoudemire is an American-Israeli professional basketball coach and former player who most recently served as a player development assistant for the Brooklyn Nets of the National Basketball Association . He won the NBA Rookie of the Year Award in 2003 with the Phoenix Suns, who selected him with the ninth overall pick of the 2002 NBA draft. He made six appearances in the NBA All-Star Game and was named to the All-NBA Team five times, including one first-team selection in 2007.
Go to Profile#15027
Kate Wilhelm
#15038
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Kate Wilhelm was an American author. She wrote novels and stories in the science fiction, mystery, and suspense genres, including the Hugo Award–winning Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Wilhelm established the Clarion Workshop along with her husband Damon Knight and writer Robin Scott Wilson.
Go to Profile#15028
Alan G. Poindexter
#15039
Overall Influence
1961 - 2012 (51 years)
Alan Goodwin "Dex" Poindexter was an American naval officer and a NASA astronaut. Poindexter was selected in the 1998 NASA Group and went into orbit aboard Space Shuttle missions STS-122 and STS-131.
Go to Profile#15029
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
#15040
Overall Influence
1946 - 2011 (65 years)
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was an American academic, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. She published a wide range of books, most notably biographies of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud. Her 1982 biography of Arendt won the first Harcourt Award while The Anatomy of Prejudices won the Association of American Publishers' prize for Best Book in Psychology in 1996. She was a member of the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and co-founder of Caversham Productions, a company that makes psychoanalytic educational materials.
Go to Profile#15030
John Calvin Jeffries
#15041
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
John Calvin Jeffries, Jr. is a prominent law professor and was dean of the University of Virginia School of Law from 2001 to 2008. Biography Jeffries is the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. He is best known for his work in criminal law, with his essays included in many major textbooks in the subject area. He is also a co-author of one of the foremost criminal law textbooks, Criminal Law with Professors Richard J. Bonnie, Anne M. Coughlin, and Peter W. Low. Jeffries has authored or co-authored a total of ten textbooks, primarily on civil rights and criminal law.
Go to Profile#15031
Jonathan A. C. Brown
#15042
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Jonathan Andrew Cleveland Brown is an American scholar of Islamic studies. Since 2012, he has served as an associate professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He holds the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University.
Go to Profile#15032
Gerard Mortier
#15043
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
Gerard Alfons August, Baron Mortier was a Belgian opera director and administrator of Flemish origin. Biography Born in Ghent, the son of a baker, Mortier attended in youth the Jesuit school Sint-Barbaracollege, following the death of his mother. He subsequently studied law and journalism at Ghent University.
Go to Profile#15033
Joe Gastwirt
#15044
Overall Influence
Joe Gastwirt is an American audio engineer, known for digitally remastering hundreds of CDs and LPs for famous artists, including the Grateful Dead, Tom Petty, Helen Reddy, Electric Light Orchestra, Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, The Blues Brothers, and Yes. His remasters have been critically acclaimed.
Go to Profile#15034
Billy Bragg
#15045
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Stephen William Bragg is an English singer, songwriter, musician, author and political activist. His music blends elements of folk music, punk rock and protest songs, with lyrics that mostly span political or romantic themes. His music is centred on change and activist causes.
Go to Profile#15035
Yves Balasko
#15046
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Yves Balasko is a French economist working in England. He was born in Paris on 9 August 1945 to a Hungarian father and a French mother. After studying mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris he became interested in economics. He subsequently spent six years at Électricité de France where he was involved in the application of the theory of marginal cost pricing to electricity pricing. While at Électricité de France, he proved his first results on the structure of the equilibrium manifold in the theory of general equilibrium. After completing his dissertation on "L'équilibre économ...
Go to Profile#15036
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
#15047
Overall Influence
1941 - 2007 (66 years)
Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese was an American historian best known for her works on women and society in the Antebellum South. A Marxist early on in her career, she later converted to Roman Catholicism and became a primary voice of the conservative women's movement. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2003.
Go to Profile#15037
Ned Price
#15048
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Edward Price is an American political advisor and former intelligence officer who serves as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State and previously was the Spokesperson for the United States Department of State from 2021 to 2023. He worked at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 until 2017.
Go to Profile#15038
Kenneth Kantzer
#15049
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Kenneth S. Kantzer was an American theologian and educator in the evangelical Christian tradition. Life and career He was born Detroit, Michigan, United States. Kantzer, having studied at Faith Theological Seminary, Trinity Seminary and Bible College, and earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Religion from Harvard University , was a professor of biblical and systematic theology and academic dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School from 1960 to 1978. There he helped to grow TEDS from a small denominational seminary to a major evangelical Christian graduate school with a national and internation...
Go to Profile#15039
Julio Rotemberg
#15050
Overall Influence
1953 - 2017 (64 years)
Julio Jacobo Rotemberg was an Argentine/American economist at Harvard Business School. He was known for his collaboration with Michael Woodford on the first New Keynesian DSGE model, especially on monopolistic competition. He was also known for an alternative model of sticky prices.
Go to Profile#15040
Roddy Piper
#15051
Overall Influence
1954 - 2015 (61 years)
Roderick George Toombs , better known as "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, was a Canadian professional wrestler, amateur wrestler, and actor. In professional wrestling, Piper was best known to international audiences for his work with the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling between 1984 and 2000. Although he was Canadian, Piper was billed as coming from Glasgow and was known for his signature kilt and bagpipe entrance music; this was because of his Scottish heritage. Piper earned the nicknames "Rowdy" and "Hot Rod" by displaying his trademark "Scottish" short temper, spontaneity, and quick wit.
Go to Profile#15041
Noreen Murray
#15052
Overall Influence
1935 - 2011 (76 years)
Noreen Elizabeth, Lady Murray was an English molecular geneticist who helped pioneer recombinant DNA technology by creating a series of bacteriophage lambda vectors into which genes could be inserted and expressed in order to examine their function. During her career she was recognised internationally as a pioneer and one of Britain's most distinguished and highly respected molecular geneticists. Until her 2001 retirement she held a personal chair in molecular genetics at the University of Edinburgh. She was president of the Genetical Society, vice president of the Royal Society, and a memb...
Go to Profile#15042
Barbara J. Grosz
#15053
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Barbara J. Grosz CorrFRSE is an American computer scientist and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University. She has made seminal contributions to the fields of natural language processing and multi-agent systems. With Alison Simmons, she is co-founder of the Embedded EthiCS programme at Harvard, which embeds ethics lessons into computer science courses.
Go to Profile#15043
Lars von Trier
#15054
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Lars von Trier is a Danish film director, producer, writer, actor, and songwriter. Beginning in the late-1960s as a child actor working on Danish television series Secret Summer, Von Trier's career has spanned more than five decades. Considered a major figure of the European film industry, he and his works have been variously described as ambitious and provocative, as well as technically innovative. His films offer confrontational examinations of existential, social, psychosexual, and political issues, and deal in subjects including mercy, sacrifice, and mental health. He frequently collabora...
Go to Profile#15044
Caleb Finch
#15055
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Caleb Ellicott Finch is an American academic who is a professor at the USC Davis School of Gerontology. Finch's research focuses on aging in humans, with a specialization in cell biology and Alzheimer's disease.
Go to Profile#15045
Reimund Neugebauer
#15056
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Reimund Neugebauer is a German mechanical engineer and professor who has been working in the field of machine tools and forming processes. On 1 October 2012 he took office as the tenth President of the Fraunhofer Society, the largest research organization in Europe, from his predecessor Hans-Jörg Bullinger.
Go to Profile#15046
Azar Gat
#15057
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Azar Gat is an Israeli researcher of war, nationalism and ideology, and a professor at the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. His research combines expertise in the fields of history, evolution, anthropology, and social sciences. He is the author of ten books that deal with the history of military thought, the fundamental questions of war and its causes, the struggles between democratic and non-democratic states, nationalism, and the phenomenon of ideological fixation. His books have been translated into many languages.
Go to Profile#15047
Roger Blandford
#15058
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Roger David Blandford, FRS, FRAS is a British theoretical astrophysicist, best known for his work on black holes. Early life Blandford was born in Grantham, England and grew up in Birmingham. Career Blandford is famous in the astrophysical community for the Blandford–Znajek process, which is a mechanism for powering relativistic jets by the extraction of rotational energy from a black hole. The Blandford–Znajek mechanism has been invoked by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration to explain the jet power in the first observation of a black hole shadow in the giant elliptical galaxy M87. Bla...
Go to Profile#15048
Utako Okamoto
#15059
Overall Influence
1918 - 2016 (98 years)
Utako Okamoto was a Japanese medical doctor working as a medical scientist who discovered tranexamic acid in the 1950s in her quest to find a drug that would treat bleeding after childbirth . After publishing results in 1962 she became a chair at Kobe Gakuin University, where she worked from 1966 until her retirement in 1990. Okamoto's career was hampered by a very male dominated environment. During her lifetime she was unable to persuade obstetricians at Kobe to trial the antifibrinolytic agent, which had become a drug on the WHO list of essential medicines in 2009. She lived to see the 2010 ...
Go to Profile#15049
Frank Chipasula
#15060
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Frank Mkalawile Chipasula is a Malawian writer, editor and university professor, "easily one of the best of the known writers in the discourse of Malawian letters". Life Born in Luanshya, Northern Rhodesia, Frank Chipasula attended St. Peter's Primary School on Likoma Island, Soche Hill Day Secondary School, Malosa Secondary School, Chancellor College, University of Malawi, and, finally, the Great East Road Campus of the University of Zambia, Lusaka, where he graduated B.A., in exile, in 1976. Before leaving Malawi, Chipasula had worked as a freelance broadcaster for the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation while studying English and French at the university.
Go to Profile#15050
Yaneer Bar-Yam
#15061
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Yaneer Bar-Yam is an American scientist and activist specializing in complex systems. An expert in the quantitative analysis of pandemics, he advised policy makers on the Western African Ebola virus epidemic and founded EndCoronavirus.org, a global network of several volunteers formed in February 2020 to provide information, guidelines, and policy advocacy to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute , an independent research institution that studies complex systems science and its real-world applications.
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