Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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Search Influential People

Person Name

School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#15151

Peter Pronovost

Peter Pronovost

#15162

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Peter J. Pronovost is Chief Quality and Transformation Officer at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, the main affiliate of the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. At UH, Pronovost is responsible for improving value across the health system, helping people stay well, get well and manage their most acute medical conditions. He is the clinical lead for population health and the lead for high-reliability medicine, with direct responsibility for the UH employee accountable care organization. He is also responsible for telehealth and virtual health programs serving patie...

#15152

Kari Polanyi Levitt

#15163

Overall Influence

1923 - Present (103 years)

Kari Polanyi Levitt is a Canadian economist, currently Emerita Professor of Economics at McGill University, Montreal. She is known for her work on economic development and economic sovereignty, and in particular for her 1970 book Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada. She is also the literary executor of her father, the economic historian Karl Polanyi.

#15153

Julius Posener

#15164

Overall Influence

1904 - 1996 (92 years)

Julius Posener was a German architectural historian, author and higher education teacher. Coming from a bourgeois-Jewish background, son of the painter Moritz Posener and a daughter of the real estate developer Oppenheim, Julius Posener grew up in the middle-class environment in the architecturally stimulating Berlin villa colony Lichterfelde-West. His parents had built themselves a villa in the English country home style there as founders of progressive architecture. This environment had lastingly formed him from his own statement:

#15154

Mats Wilander

#15165

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Mats Arne Olof Wilander is a Swedish former world No. 1 tennis player. From 1982 to 1988, he won seven major singles titles , and one major men's doubles title . His breakthrough came suddenly and unexpectedly when he won the 1982 French Open at the age of 17.

#15155

Manuel Arellano

#15166

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Manuel Arellano is a Spanish economist specialising in econometrics and empirical microeconomics. Together with Stephen Bond, he developed the Arellano–Bond estimator, a widely used GMM estimator for panel data. This estimator is based on the earlier article by Arellano's PhD supervisor, John Denis Sargan, and Alok Bhargava . RePEc lists the paper about the Arellano-Bond estimator as the most cited article in economics.

#15156

James Worthy

#15167

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

James Ager Worthy is an American sports commentator, television host, analyst, and former professional basketball player. Nicknamed "Big Game James", he played his entire professional career with the Los Angeles Lakers in the National Basketball Association . Worthy was a seven-time NBA All-Star, a two-time All-NBA Team member who won three NBA championships and was voted the NBA Finals MVP in 1988. He was named to both the NBA's 50th and 75th anniversary teams.

#15157

Stephen David Ross

#15168

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Stephen David Ross is an American philosopher, currently Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. He has published over 30 books in interdisciplinary philosophy, especially on art, literature, ethics, and metaphysics, from American pragmatism through poststructuralism, from human beings to animals and things.

#15158

Martin J. Whitman

#15169

Overall Influence

1924 - 2018 (94 years)

Martin J. Whitman was an American investment adviser and a strong critic of the direction of recent changes in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in the U.S. He was founder and Co-Chief Investment Officer of Third Avenue Management, and Portfolio Manager of the Third Avenue Value Fund.

#15159

Tad Williams

#15170

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Robert Paul "Tad" Williams is an American fantasy and science fiction writer. He is the author of the multivolume Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series, Otherland series, Shadowmarch series, and The Bobby Dollar series, as well as the standalone novels Tailchaser's Song and The War of the Flowers. Most recently, Williams published three novels in his series The Last King of Osten Ard, with the final novel The Navigator's Children set to be published in 2024. Cumulatively, over 17 million copies of Williams's works have been sold.

#15160

Nabiel Makarim

#15171

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

Nabiel Makarim was Indonesia's Minister of the Environment and Forestry from 2001 to 2004. Early life Makarim graduated from Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, where he received his Master of Public Administration in 1984. Makarim also received his master's degree in Management from the Sloan Fellows program of the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1985.

#15161

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi

#15172

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Abdel Fattah Saeed Hussein Khalil el-Sisi is an Egyptian politician and retired military officer who has served as the sixth and current president of Egypt since 2014. Before retiring as a general in the Egyptian military in 2014, Sisi served as Egypt's deputy prime minister from 2013 to 2014, as its minister of defense from 2012 to 2013, and as its director of military intelligence from 2010 to 2012. He was promoted to the rank of Field Marshal in January 2014.

#15162

Avrum Stroll

#15173

Overall Influence

1921 - 2013 (92 years)

Avrum Stroll was a research professor at the University of California, San Diego. Born in Oakland, California, he was a distinguished philosopher and a noted scholar in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of language, and twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

#15163

Antony Jameson

#15174

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Guy Antony Jameson, FRS, FREng is Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University. Jameson is known for his pioneering work in the field of computational fluid dynamics. He has published more than 300 scientific papers in a wide range of areas including computational fluid dynamics, aerodynamics, and control theory.

#15164

Lennart Ljung

#15175

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Lennart Ljung is a Swedish professor in the Chair of Control Theory at Linköping University since 1976. He is known for his pioneering research in system identification, and is regarded as a leading researcher in control theory.

#15165

Barrie R. Cassileth

#15176

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Barrie Joyce Rabinowitz Cassileth was an American medical sociologist and researcher of complementary medicine and a critic of alternative medicine. She published extensively on alternative cancer treatments.

#15166

Athan Theoharis

#15177

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

Athan George Theoharis was an American historian, professor of history at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As well as his extensive teaching career, he was noteworthy as an expert on the Federal Bureau of Investigation , J. Edgar Hoover, and U.S. intelligence agencies, having written and edited many books on these and related subjects.

#15167

Geert Wilders

#15178

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician who has led the Party for Freedom since he founded it in 2006. He is also the party's leader in the House of Representatives, having held a parliamentary seat since 1998. In the 2010 formation of the first Rutte cabinet, a minority government of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy – which he left in 2004 – and Christian Democratic Appeal , Wilders actively participated in the negotiations, resulting in a "tolerance agreement" between the PVV and these parties. He withdrew his party's parliamentary support in 2012, citing disagreements with the cabinet over proposed budget cuts.

#15168

Rod Burstall

#15179

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Rodney Martineau "Rod" Burstall FRSE is a British computer scientist and one of four founders of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Biography Burstall studied physics at the University of Cambridge, then an M.Sc. in operational research at Birmingham University. He worked for three years before returning to Birmingham University to earn a Ph.D. in 1966 with thesis titled Heuristic and Decision Tree Methods on Computers: Some Operational Research Applications under the supervision of N. A. Dudley and K. B. Haley.

#15169

Alicia Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker

#15180

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.

#15170

Amia Srinivasan

#15181

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Amia Srinivasan is a philosopher noted for her work in epistemology and feminist philosophy. Since January 2020, she has been Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford.

#15171

Boris Kerner

#15182

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Boris S. Kerner is a German physicist and civil engineer who created three phase traffic theory. The three phase traffic theory is the framework for the description of empirical vehicular traffic states in three traffic phases: free traffic flow , synchronized traffic flow , and wide moving jam . The synchronized traffic flow and wide moving jam phases belong to congested traffic.

#15172

Douglas Dunn

#15183

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Douglas Eaglesham Dunn, OBE is a Scottish poet, academic, and critic. He is Professor of English and Director of St Andrew's Scottish Studies Institute at St Andrew's University. Background Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire. He was educated at the Scottish School of Librarianship, and worked as a librarian before he started his studies in Hull. After graduating with a First Class Honours degree from the University of Hull, he worked in the university's Brynmor Jones Library under Philip Larkin. He was friendly with Larkin and admired his poetry, but did not share his political opinions...

#15173

Robbie Robertson

#15184

Overall Influence

1943 - 2023 (80 years)

Jaime Royal "Robbie" Robertson was a Canadian musician. He was lead guitarist for Bob Dylan in the mid-late 1960s and early-mid 1970s, guitarist and songwriter with the Band from their inception until 1978, and a solo artist.

#15174

Sigrid Löffler

#15185

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Sigrid Löffler is an Austrian cultural commentator, arts correspondent and literary critic. Life Sigrid Löffler was born in Aussig in Czechoslovakia, at the height of the Second World War. As she later spelled out to an interviewer, she was presumably conceived while her father was on leave from the frontline. Her mother's family came from the northern border region of Bohemia that had more recently become known as the Sudetenland. During the ethnic cleansing of 1945 her mother took her to rejoin her father in Vienna where he was rebuilding his peace-time career as a teacher. It was in...

#15175

Simon Amstell

#15186

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Simon Marc Amstell is an English comedian, writer and director. He wrote and directed the films Carnage and Benjamin . His work on television has included presenting Popworld and Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

#15176

Franco Amatori

#15187

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Franco Amatori is professor of economic history at Bocconi University, Milan, Italy. With a scholarship of the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, Amatori spent three semesters in the individual studies program of Harvard Business School under the tutelage of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

#15177

Kirill Martynov

#15188

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Kirill Konstantinovich Martynov is a Russian journalist, political scientist, philosopher and writer. He is the editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta Europe and former associate professor at the Higher School of Economics .

#15178

John Sterman

#15189

Overall Influence

John David Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management, and the current director of the MIT System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He is mostly considered as the current leader of the System Dynamics school of thought. He is the author of Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World.

#15179

Ying Xu

#15190

Overall Influence

Ying Xu is a computational biologist and bioinformatician, and a chair professor under the title 'Regents-Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar' in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Institute of Bioinformatics at the University of Georgia, USA.

#15180

Norah Jones

#15191

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Norah Jones is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. She has won several awards for her music and, as of 2023, had sold more than 50 million records worldwide. Billboard named her the top jazz artist of the 2000s decade. She has won nine Grammy Awards and was ranked 60th on Billboard magazine's artists of the 2000s decade chart.

#15181

Genevieve Lloyd

#15192

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Genevieve Mary Lloyd , is an Australian philosopher and feminist. Biography Lloyd studied philosophy at the University of Sydney in the early 1960s and then at Somerville College, Oxford. Her D.Phil, awarded in 1973, was on "Time and Tense". From 1967 until 1987 she lectured at the Australian National University, during which period she developed her most influential ideas and wrote The Man of Reason, which was published in 1984. In 1987 she was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of New South Wales, being the first female professor of philosophy appointed in Australia. On r...

#15182

Armando Uribe

#15193

Overall Influence

1933 - 2020 (87 years)

Armando Uribe Arce was a Chilean writer, poet, lawyer, and diplomat. Biography Uribe was born in Santiago. He was educated at the Saint George's College. He later studied law in the University of Chile and received his law degree in 1959, where he served as a law professor for over 30 years.

#15183

S. Ramanan

#15194

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Sundararaman Ramanan is an Indian mathematician who works in the area of algebraic geometry, moduli spaces and Lie groups. He is one of India's leading mathematicians and recognised as an expert in algebraic geometry, especially in the area of moduli problems. He has also worked in differential geometry: his joint paper with MS Narasimhan on universal connections has been influential. It enabled SS Chern and B Simons to introduce what is known as the Chern-Simons invariant, which has proved useful in theoretical physics.

#15184

Michael Lacey

#15195

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Michael Thoreau Lacey is an American mathematician. Lacey received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1987, under the direction of Walter Philipp. His thesis was in the area of probability in Banach spaces, and solved a problem related to the law of the iterated logarithm for empirical characteristic functions. In the intervening years, his work has touched on the areas of probability, ergodic theory, and harmonic analysis.

#15185

Raúl

#15196

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Raúl González Blanco , known as Raúl, is a Spanish football manager and former player who played as a forward. He is the current manager of Real Madrid Castilla, the reserve team of La Liga club Real Madrid. Raúl is regarded as one of the greatest players of his era.

#15186

Kypros Nicolaides

Kypros Nicolaides

#15197

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Kyprianos "Kypros" Nicolaides is a Greek Cypriot physician of British citizenship, Professor of Fetal Medicine at King's College Hospital, London. He is one of the pioneers of fetal medicine and his discoveries have revolutionised the field. He was elected to the US National Academy of Medicine in 2020 for 'improving the care of pregnant women worldwide with pioneering rigorous and creative approaches, and making seminal contributions to prenatal diagnosis and every major obstetrical disorder'. This is considered to be one of the highest honours in the fields of health and medicine and recog...

#15187

Paul Alan Cox

#15198

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Paul Alan Cox is an American ethnobotanist whose scientific research focuses on discovering new medicines by studying patterns of wellness and illness among indigenous peoples. Cox was born in Salt Lake City in 1953.

#15188

Michael E. Taylor

#15199

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Michael Eugene Taylor is an American mathematician, working in partial differential equations. Taylor obtained his bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1967, and completed his Ph.D. under the supervision of Heinz Otto Cordes at the University of California, Berkeley . He held a professorship at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and is now the William R. Kenan Professor of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

#15189

Jelani Cobb

#15200

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

William Jelani Cobb is an American writer, author, educator, and dean of the Columbia Journalism School. Before joining Columbia University as the Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism in 2016, Cobb was an associate professor of history and director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut from 2012 to 2016. Since 2015, he has been a staff writer at The New Yorker.

#15190

Nancy Kopell

#15201

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Nancy Jane Kopell is an American mathematician and professor at Boston University. She is co-director of the Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology . She organized and directs the Cognitive Rhythms Collaborative . Kopell received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1963 and her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1967. She held visiting positions at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France , MIT , and the California Institute of Technology .

#15191

Cathy Davidson

#15202

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Cathy N. Davidson is an American scholar and university professor. Beginning July 1, 2014, she is a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She was a professor of English at Duke University in 2006. She has authored or edited 18 books. Her work focuses on technology, collaboration, cognition, learning, and the digital age.

#15192

Walter Bender

#15203

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Walter Bender is a technologist and researcher who works in the field of electronic publishing, media and technology for learning. From the MIT Media Lab's founding 1985 through 2006, Bender directed the lab's Electronic Publishing Group. Previous to the lab's creation, the group had also existed in the Architecture Machine Group. The research group is one of the Media Lab's oldest and one of a few that predates the creation of the lab. While at the lab, Bender held the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Chair. Bender's research has attempted to build upon the interactive styles associated with existing media and extend them into domains where a computer is incorporated into the interaction.

#15193

Nigel Godrich

#15204

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Nigel Timothy Godrich is an English record producer, recording engineer and musician. He has worked with acts including Radiohead, Travis, Beck, Air, Paul McCartney, U2, R.E.M., Pavement, Roger Waters and Arcade Fire.

#15194

Douglas Crimp

#15205

Overall Influence

1944 - 2019 (75 years)

John Douglas Crimp was an American art historian, critic, curator, and AIDS activist. He was known for his scholarly contributions to the fields of postmodern theories and art, institutional critique, dance, film, queer theory, and feminist theory. His writings are marked by a conviction to merge the often disjunctive worlds of politics, art, and academia. From 1977 to 1990, he was the managing editor of the journal October. Before his death, Crimp was Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester.

#15195

Vadim Utkin

#15206

Overall Influence

1937 - 2022 (85 years)

Vadim Ivanovich Utkin was a Russian-American control theorist, electrical engineer and a professor of Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at the Ohio State University. He is best known for being one of the originators of Sliding Mode Control and Variable Structure Systems, which have become fundamental concepts in the field of nonlinear control .

#15196

William Rathje

#15207

Overall Influence

1945 - 2012 (67 years)

William Laurens Rathje was an American archaeologist. He was professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Arizona, with a joint appointment with the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, and was consulting professor of anthropological sciences at Stanford University. He was the longtime director of the Tucson Garbage Project, which studied trends in discards by field research in Tucson, Arizona, and in landfills elsewhere, pioneering the field now known as garbology.

#15197

Luigi Snozzi

#15208

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Luigi Snozzi was a Swiss architect, born in Mendrisio, Ticino. He worked in Locarno and Lugano. Life He studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. From 1962 to 1971, Snozzi worked in association with architect Livio Vacchini. From 1982 to 1984, he was a Visiting Professor and in 1985 he was appointed Professor of Architecture at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Snozzi was a professor of the University of Sassari, at the Faculty of Architecture of Alghero, Sardinia.

#15198

Uzzi Ornan

#15209

Overall Influence

1923 - 2022 (99 years)

Uzzi Ornan was an Israeli linguist and social activist. Ornan was a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, professor of natural languages computing at the Technion and professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Ornan was a member of the Israeli Canaanite movement, founded by his brother Yonatan Ratosh. He was the founder of the League against religious coercion in Israel and an active supporter of the separation of church and state.

#15199

Jennifer Egan

#15210

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. As of February 28, 2018, she is the president of PEN America.

#15200

Bettino Craxi

#15211

Overall Influence

1934 - 2000 (66 years)

Benedetto "Bettino" Craxi was an Italian politician, leader of the Italian Socialist Party from 1976 to 1993, and the 45th prime minister of Italy from 1983 to 1987. He was the first PSI member to become prime minister and the second from a socialist party to hold the office. He led the third-longest government in the Italian Republic and he is considered one of the most powerful and prominent politicians of the First Italian Republic.

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