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
#15201
Bill Travers
#15212
Overall Influence
1922 - 1994 (72 years)
William Inglis Lindon Travers was a British actor, screenwriter, director and animal rights activist. Prior to his show business career, he served in the British Army with Gurkha and special forces units.
Go to Profile#15202
Jeffrey Wooldridge
#15213
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Jeffrey Marc Wooldridge is an American econometrician. He is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University. Wooldridge is known for his theoretical contributions to the analysis of cross-sectional and panel data.
Go to Profile#15203
Robert Haynes
#15214
Overall Influence
1931 - 1998 (67 years)
Robert Hall Haynes, OC, FRSC was a Canadian geneticist and biophysicist. He was the Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Biology at York University. Haynes was best known for his contributions to the study of DNA repair and mutagenesis, and for helping promote the concept of terraforming through his invention of the term, ecopoiesis.
Go to Profile#15204
Cheryl Burke
#15215
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Cheryl Burke is an American dancer, model, and television host. She is best known for being a professional dancer on ABC's Dancing with the Stars. She was the first female professional to win the show and the first professional to win twice and also consecutively. She has participated in 26 seasons. She came in second on the NBC series I Can Do That. She replaced Abby Lee Miller on Dance Moms in 2017.
Go to Profile#15205
Ian Brownlie
#15216
Overall Influence
1932 - 2010 (78 years)
Sir Ian Brownlie, was an English barrister and academic, specialising in international law. He was Chichele Professor of Public International Law from 1980 to 1999. Early life and education Brownlie was born in Bootle, Liverpool; his father worked for an insurance company. He was evacuated during the Second World War to Heswell, near Wirral, going a year without any formal education after the local school was bombed. He attended Alsop High School. He then attended Hertford College, Oxford as a Gibbs Scholar in 1952 and received a first-class BA in law in 1953. Speaking of this time, C H S Fifoot described Brownlie his "ablest student".
Go to Profile#15206
Leslie Bethell
#15217
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Leslie Michael Bethell is an English historian and university professor, who specialises in the study of 19th- and 20th-century Latin America, focusing on Brazil in particular. He received both his Bachelor of Arts and doctorate in history at the University of London. He is emeritus professor of Latin American history, University of London, and emeritus fellow of St Antony's College, University of Oxford. Bethell has served as visiting professor at the University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro, the University of California, San Diego, the University of Chicago, the Fundação Getulio Varg...
Go to Profile#15207
Giovanni Dosi
#15218
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Giovanni Dosi is Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute of Economics at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa. He is the Co-Director of the task forces “Industrial Policy” and “Intellectual Property” at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. Dosi is Continental European Editor of Industrial and Corporate Change. Included in ISI Highly Cited Researchers.
Go to Profile#15208
J. Keith Murnighan
#15219
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
J. Keith Murnighan was an American social scientist and author, born on November 23, 1948, in Evanston, Illinois. He died on June 3, 2016. He was the Harold H. Hines Jr. Distinguished Professor of Risk Management at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, where he taught from 1996 to 2016. His areas of expertise included: leadership, negotiations, ethics, individual and group decision-making, group dynamics, teams, psychology, auctions, diversity, and trust.
Go to Profile#15209
Jonathan Bennett
#15220
Overall Influence
Jonathan Bennett is a mathematician and Professor of Mathematical Analysis at the University of Birmingham. He was a recipient of the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 2011 for "his foundational work on multilinear inequalities in harmonic and geometric analysis, and for a number of major results in the theory of oscillatory integrals."
Go to Profile#15210
George Tsebelis
#15221
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
George Tsebelis is a Greek-American political scientist who specializes in comparative politics and formal modeling. He is currently Anatol Rapoport Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#15211
Anil Kumble
#15222
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Anil Kumble is an Indian former cricket captain, coach and commentator who played Test and One Day International cricket for his national team over an international career of 18 years. Widely regarded as one of the best leg spin bowlers in Test Cricket History, he took 619 wickets in Test cricket and is the fourth highest wicket taker of all time as of 2022. In 1999 while playing against Pakistan, Kumble dismissed all ten batsmen in a Test match innings, joining England's Jim Laker as the second player to achieve the feat. Unlike his contemporaries, Kumble was not a big turner of the ball, but relied primarily on pace, bounce, and accuracy.
Go to Profile#15212
Chuck D
#15223
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Carlton Douglas Ridenhour , known professionally as Chuck D, is an American rapper, best known as the leader and frontman of the hip hop group Public Enemy, which he co-founded in 1985 with Flavor Flav. Chuck D is also a member of the rock supergroup Prophets of Rage. He has released several solo albums, most notably Autobiography of Mistachuck .
Go to Profile#15213
Tom Blundell
#15224
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Sir Thomas Leon Blundell, is a British biochemist, structural biologist, and science administrator. He was a member of the team of Dorothy Hodgkin that solved in 1969 the first structure of a protein hormone, insulin. Blundell has made contributions to the structural biology of polypeptide hormones, growth factors, receptor activation, signal transduction, and DNA double-strand break repair, subjects important in cancer, tuberculosis, and familial diseases. He has developed software for protein modelling and understanding the effects of mutations on protein function, leading to new approaches to structure-guided and Fragment-based lead discovery.
Go to Profile#15214
James Forman Jr.
#15225
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
James Forman Jr. is an American legal scholar currently on leave from serving as the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is the author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and a co-founder of the Maya Angelou School in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#15215
June Purvis
#15226
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
June Purvis is an emeritus professor of women's and gender history at the University of Portsmouth. From 2014-18, Purvis was Chair of the Women’s History Network UK and from 2015-20 Treasurer of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History. She organized at the University of Portsmouth on 31st August–1st September 2018 the Women's History Network Annual conference on the Campaigns for Women’s Suffrage: National and International Perspectives. She edits the journal Women's History Review.
Go to Profile#15216
Efraim Racker
#15227
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Efraim Racker was an Austrian biochemist who was responsible for identifying and purifying Factor 1 , the first part of the ATP synthase enzyme to be characterised. F1 is only a part of a larger ATP synthase complex known as Complex V. It is a peripheral membrane protein attached to component Fo, which is integral to the membrane.
Go to Profile#15217
Yvonne Libona Bonzi Coulibaly
#15228
Overall Influence
Yvonne Libona Bonzi Coulibaly is the first female doctor in chemistry in Burkina Faso, a full professor at the University of Ouagadougou, a member of the Academy of Sciences of Burkina Faso, the Director-General of the Institute of Sciences of Burkina Faso, and a laureate of the African Union Kwame Nkrumah Prize.
Go to Profile#15218
Turgay Uzer
#15229
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ahmet Turgay Uzer is a Turkish-born American theoretical physicist and nature photographer. Regents' Professor Emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology following Joseph Ford . He has contributed in the field of atomic and molecular physics, nonlinear dynamics and chaos significantly. His research on interplay between quantum dynamics and classical mechanics, in the context of chaos is considered to be novel in molecular and theoretical physics and chemistry.
Go to Profile#15219
David Lee Roth
#15230
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David Lee Roth is an American rock singer. Known for his wild and energetic stage persona, he was the lead vocalist of the hard rock band Van Halen for three stints; from 1974 to 1985, during 1996, and from 2006 to when they disbanded in 2020. He was also a successful solo artist, releasing numerous RIAA-certified Gold and Platinum albums. After more than two decades apart, Roth re-joined Van Halen in 2006 for a North American tour that became the highest-grossing in the band's history, and one of the highest-grossing of that year. In 2012, Roth and Van Halen released the comeback album A Different Kind of Truth.
Go to Profile#15220
Jack N. Rakove
#15231
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jack Norman Rakove is an American historian, author, and professor at Stanford University. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Biography Rakove was born in Chicago to Political Science Professor Milton L. Rakove and his wife, Shirley. The elder Rakove taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Barat College .
Go to Profile#15221
Christian Jambet
#15232
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Christian Jambet is a French philosopher and Islamologist. He was a student of Henry Corbin. His work has engaged with Nizari Isma'ilism and has explored the thought of Avicenna, Mulla Sadra, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi among others. In his treatment of these thinkers, he notes the lasting influence of figures associated with Neoplatonism such as Plotinus and Proclus.
Go to Profile#15222
Nancy Wexler
#15233
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Nancy Wexler FRCP is an American geneticist and the Higgins Professor of Neuropsychology in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, best known for her involvement in the discovery of the location of the gene that causes Huntington's disease. She earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology but instead chose to work in the field of genetics.
Go to Profile#15223
Rosemary Candlin
#15234
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Rosemary Candlin is a crystallographer and computer scientist who joined the University of Edinburgh Computer Science Department shortly after it was first established, and for some time was the only woman lecturer on the staff. She worked there from 1968 to 1995, helped design the curriculum in its early years, and developed a specialist interest in parallel programming. She then went on to work for CERN: the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Go to Profile#15224
François Ewald
#15235
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
François Ewald is a French philosopher. An assistant to Michel Foucault in the 1970s, he has overseen the publication of much of Foucault's literary estate. Ewald's own work has applied Foucault's notion of governmentality to a history of the welfare state.
Go to Profile#15225
David Robinson
#15236
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
David Maurice Robinson is an American former professional basketball player who played for the San Antonio Spurs in the National Basketball Association from 1989 to 2003, and minority owner of the Spurs. Nicknamed "the Admiral" for his service with the U.S. Navy, Robinson was a 10-time NBA All-Star, the 1995 NBA MVP, a two-time NBA champion , a two-time Olympic Gold Medal winner , a two-time Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame inductee , and a two-time U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame inductee . He was honored as one of the league's all-time players by being named to the NBA 50th Anniversary and 75th Anniversary Teams .
Go to Profile#15226
Russell Doolittle
#15237
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Russell F. Doolittle was an American biochemist who taught at the University of California, San Diego . Described as a "world-renowned evolutionary biologist", Doolittle's research primarily focused on the structure and evolution of proteins. Highlights of Doolittle's decades of research include his role in co-developing the hydropathy index and determining the structure of fibrinogen.
Go to Profile#15227
M. Brewster Smith
#15238
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Mahlon Brewster Smith was an American psychologist and past president of the American Psychological Association. His career included faculty appointments at Vassar College, New York University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago and University of California, Santa Cruz. Smith had been briefly involved with the Young Communist League as a student at Reed College in the 1930s, which resulted in a subpoena by the U.S. Senate in the 1950s. That activity caused him to be blacklisted by the National Institute of Mental Health for ten years without his knowledge.
Go to Profile#15228
Ahmet Mete Işıkara
#15239
Overall Influence
1941 - 2013 (72 years)
Ahmet Mete Işıkara was a Turkish geophysicist and earthquake scientist, well known for his efforts to create public awareness of the need for protection and safety during earthquakes. Early years Işıkara was born 1941 in Mersin. In 1947 he went to primary school and in 1954 to junior highschool in Mersin. After finishing high school in Mersin, he studied in Istanbul University graduating in 1965. In the same year, he began his academic career as an geophysics assistant at the Faculty of Science. He continued his studies in Imperial College London and University of Göttingen.
Go to Profile#15229
Dimitar Sasselov
#15240
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Dimitar D. Sasselov is a Bulgarian astronomer based in the United States. He is a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. In 2002, Sasselov led a team that discovered the most distant planet in the Milky Way known at the time.
Go to Profile#15230
Taslima Nasrin
#15241
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Taslima Nasrin is a Bangladeshi-Swedish writer, physician, feminist, secular humanist, and activist. She is known for her writing on women's oppression and criticism of religion; some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. She has also been blacklisted and banished from the Bengal region, both from Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.
Go to Profile#15231
R. W. B. Lewis
#15242
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis was an American literary scholar and critic. He gained a wider reputation when he won a 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the first National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and a Bancroft Prize for his biography of Edith Wharton. The New York Times called the book "a beautifully wrought, rounded portrait of the whole woman, including the part of her that remained in shade during her life" and said that the "expansive, elegant biography ... can stand as literature, if nothing else."
Go to Profile#15232
Anatoly Karatsuba
#15243
Overall Influence
1937 - 2008 (71 years)
Anatoly Alexeyevich Karatsuba was a Russian mathematician working in the field of analytic number theory, p-adic numbers and Dirichlet series. For most of his student and professional life he was associated with the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, defending a D.Sc. there entitled "The method of trigonometric sums and intermediate value theorems" in 1966. He later held a position at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#15233
Asaf Savaş Akat
#15244
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Professor Asaf Savaş Akat is a Turkish economist and academic. He served as Rector of Istanbul Bilgi University from 1996 to 1998, where he remains a Professor. Early life and education In 1954 he attended Levent İlkokulu, Istanbul . In 1961 he attended Redondo Union H.S., Redondo Beach CA, USA. In 1962 he attended Galatasaray Lisesi, Istanbul . During his time at the high school, he played a saxophone in Kafadarlar band created by Barış Manço. He was educated at Istanbul University and the University of East Anglia . He also spent time as a research student at the London School of Economics...
Go to Profile#15234
Greil Marcus
#15245
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics.
Go to Profile#15235
Mark Goresky
#15246
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Robert Mark Goresky is a Canadian mathematician who invented intersection homology with his advisor and life partner Robert MacPherson. Career Goresky received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1976. His thesis, titled Geometric Cohomology and Homology of Stratified Objects, was written under the direction of MacPherson. Many of the results in his thesis were published in 1981 by the American Mathematical Society. He has taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Northeastern University.
Go to Profile#15236
Harrison Schmitt
#15247
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Harrison Hagan Schmitt is an American geologist, retired NASA astronaut, university professor, former U.S. senator from New Mexico, and the most recent living person—and only person without a background in military aviation—to have walked on the Moon.
Go to Profile#15237
Juliana of the Netherlands
#15248
Overall Influence
1909 - 2004 (95 years)
Juliana was Queen of the Netherlands from 1948 until her abdication in 1980. Juliana was the only child of Queen Wilhelmina and Prince Henry of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. She received a private education and studied international law at the University of Leiden. In 1937, she married Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld with whom she had four daughters: Beatrix, Irene, Margriet, and Christina. During the German invasion of the Netherlands in the Second World War, the royal family was evacuated to the United Kingdom. Juliana then relocated to Canada with her children, while Wilhelmina and Bernhard remained in Britain.
Go to Profile#15238
Ken Russell
#15249
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell was a British film director, known for his pioneering work in television and film and for his flamboyant and controversial style. His films were mainly liberal adaptations of existing texts, or biographies, notably of composers of the Romantic era. Russell began directing for the BBC, where he made creative adaptations of composers' lives which were unusual for the time. He also directed many feature films independently and for studios.
Go to Profile#15239
Randy Katz
#15250
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Randy Howard Katz is a distinguished professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley of the electrical engineering and computer science department. Biography Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1955. He was first exposed to computers in Canarsie High School's well equipped laboratory. After graduating in 1973, Katz received an A.B. from Cornell University , where he was a Cornell College Scholar majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics, an M.S. from UC Berkeley , under the direction of Larry Rowe, and a Ph.D., from UC Berkeley , under the direction of Eugene Wong. He was a memb...
Go to Profile#15240
Margaret Lock
#15251
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Margaret Lock is a distinguished Canadian medical anthropologist, known for her publications in connection with an anthropology of the body and embodiment, comparative epistemologies of medical knowledge and practice, and the global impact of emerging biomedical technologies.
Go to Profile#15241
Aren Maeir
#15252
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Aren Maeir is an American-born Israeli archaeologist and professor in the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University. He is director of the Tell es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project.
Go to Profile#15242
David H. Bailey
#15253
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David Harold Bailey is a mathematician and computer scientist. He received his B.S. in mathematics from Brigham Young University in 1972 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University in 1976. He worked for 14 years as a computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, and then from 1998 to 2013 as a Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is now retired from the Berkeley Lab.
Go to Profile#15243
Juan Carlos Ferrero
#15254
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Juan Carlos Ferrero Donat is a Spanish former world No. 1 tennis player and current tennis coach. He won the men's singles title at the 2003 French Open, and in September of that year became the 21st player to hold the top ranking, which he held for eight weeks. He was runner-up at the 2002 French Open and 2003 US Open and won 16 ATP Tour titles, including four Masters events. He was nicknamed "Mosquito" for his speed and slender physical build.
Go to Profile#15244
Mark Frost
#15255
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mark Frost is an American novelist, screenwriter, film and television producer and director. He is the co-creator of the mystery television series Twin Peaks and was a writer and executive story editor of Hill Street Blues .
Go to Profile#15245
Leo Sachs
#15256
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Leo Sachs was a German-born Israeli molecular biologist and cancer researcher. Born in Leipzig, he emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1933, and to Israel in 1952. There he joined the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Go to Profile#15246
Philip Rivers
#15257
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Philip Michael Rivers is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 17 seasons, primarily with the Chargers franchise. He played college football for the NC State Wolfpack and was selected fourth overall in the 2004 NFL Draft by the New York Giants, who traded him to the San Diego Chargers for Eli Manning during the draft. Rivers was a member of the Chargers for 16 seasons and played his final season for the Indianapolis Colts. Since 2021, he has served as the head football coach at St. Michael Catholic High School.
Go to Profile#15247
Françoise Héritier
#15258
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Françoise Héritier was a French anthropologist, ethnologist, and feminist. She was the successor of Claude Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France . Her work dealt mainly with the theory of alliances and on the prohibition of incest . In addition to Lévi-Strauss, she was also influenced by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. She was replaced by Philippe Descola, who is the current holder of the chair of anthropology at the Collège.
Go to Profile#15248
Susan Mann
#15259
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Susan Mann Trofimenkoff is a Canadian historian and was president of York University from 1992 to 1997. Mann is the sister of politician Gretchen Brewin. Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Mann received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern History in 1963 from the University of Toronto, a Master of Arts degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1965, and a PhD from Université Laval in 1970. As professor, she has taught at the Université de Montréal , University of Calgary , and the University of Ottawa . She was chair of the Department of History at the University of Ottawa from 1977 to 1980. From 1984 to 1990 she was Vice-Rector Academic.
Go to Profile#15249
B. Jayant Baliga
#15260
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Bantval Jayant Baliga is an Indian electrical engineer best known for his work in power semiconductor devices, and particularly the invention of the insulated gate bipolar transistor . In 1993, Baliga was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to power semiconductor devices leading to the advent of smart power technology.
Go to Profile#15250
Fabrizio Zilibotti
#15261
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Fabrizio Zilibotti is an Italian economist. He is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. Zilibotti was previously professor of economics at University College London, the University of Zürich, and at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Stockholm.
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