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
#15301
Andrea Fraser
#15312
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Andrea Rose Fraser is a performance artist, mainly known for her work in the area of Institutional Critique. Fraser is based in New York and Los Angeles and is currently Department Head and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studio of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#15302
Daniel H. Janzen
#15313
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Daniel Hunt Janzen is an American evolutionary ecologist, and conservationist. He divides his time between his professorship in biology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology, and his research and field work in Costa Rica.
Go to Profile#15303
Micere Githae Mugo
#15314
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo was a Kenyan professor, playwright, author, activist and poet. She was a literary critic and professor of Literature, Creative Writing and Research Methods in the Department of African American Studies at Syracuse University. She was forced into exile in 1982 from Kenya during the Daniel Arap Moi dictatorship for activism and moved to teach in the United States, and later Zimbabwe. She taught Orature, Literature, and Creative Writing.
Go to Profile#15304
Wolfgang Stroebe
#15315
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Ernst Joachim Wolfgang Stroebe is a German social psychologist and Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology at the Utrecht University and now visiting professor at the University of Groningen, particularly known for his work on social and health psychology.
Go to Profile#15305
Ferdinand P. Beer
#15316
Overall Influence
1915 - 2003 (88 years)
Ferdinand Pierre Beer was a French mechanical engineer and university professor. He spent most of his career as a member of the faculty at Lehigh University, where he served as the chairman of the mechanics and mechanical engineering departments. His most significant contribution was the co-authorship of several textbooks in the field of mechanics, which have been widely cited and utilized in engineering education.
Go to Profile#15306
Gordon Marshall
#15317
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Gordon Marshall is a British sociologist and former Director of the Leverhulme Trust in England. Education Born in Falkirk, Gordon Marshall was educated at Falkirk High School, the University of Stirling and Nuffield College, Oxford .
Go to Profile#15307
Joseph Rallo
#15318
Overall Influence
Joseph Rallo is the State of Louisiana's Commissioner of Higher Education. Previously he served as vice chancellor of the Texas Tech University System and as the 5th president of Angelo State University. He assumed his current position in 2015.
Go to Profile#15308
Russell Brand
#15319
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Russell Edward Brand is an English comedian, actor, presenter, activist, and campaigner. He established himself as a standup comedian and radio host before becoming a film actor. He has received three British Comedy Awards and nomination for a BAFTA Award. He has since transitioned into becoming a controversial activist and has been accused of spreading conspiracy theories. Over the course of his career, Brand has been the subject of frequent media coverage for issues such as his promiscuity, drug use, political views, provocative behaviour at various award ceremonies, his dismissal from MTV,...
Go to Profile#15309
David R. Morrison
#15320
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
David Robert Morrison is an American mathematician and theoretical physicist. He works on string theory and algebraic geometry, especially its relations to theoretical physics. Morrison studied at Princeton University with bachelor's degree in 1976 and at Harvard University with master's degree in 1977 and PhD under Phillip Griffiths in 1980 with thesis Semistable Degenerations of Enriques' and Hyperelliptic Surfaces. From 1980 he was an instructor and from 1982 an assistant professor at Princeton University and in the academic year 1984–1985 a visiting scientist at the University of Kyoto . ...
Go to Profile#15310
Moshe Halbertal
#15321
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Moshe Halbertal is an Israeli philosopher, professor, and writer, a noted expert on Maimonides, and co-author of the Israeli Army Code of Ethics. He currently holds positions as the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Gruss Professor of Law at NYU School of Law. In 2021 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Go to Profile#15311
Stephen Davies
#15322
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Stephen John Davies is a Distinguished Professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He mainly writes on aesthetics, particularly the philosophy of music but also works on political philosophy. He is a past president of the American Society for Aesthetics , and the New Zealand division of the Australasian Association of Philosophy .
Go to Profile#15312
Bernardo Sepúlveda Amor
#15323
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Bernardo Sepúlveda Amor is a Mexican diplomat and jurist. He was Secretary of Foreign Affairs during the 1980s under President Miguel de la Madrid and is a former judge of the International Court of Justice.
Go to Profile#15313
Daniel R. Denison
#15324
Overall Influence
Daniel "Dan" R. Denison is professor of organization and management at IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, and chairman and founding partner of Denison Consulting. His area of special interest is organizational culture and leadership, and the impact they have on the performance and effectiveness of organizations. His work on organizational culture is heavily cited in the field, and he is the author of a seminal article on the distinction between organizational culture and climate . His model of organizational culture is widely known and used in academic research in organizational cul...
Go to Profile#15314
Paul Baltes
#15325
Overall Influence
1939 - 2006 (67 years)
Paul B. Baltes was a German psychologist whose broad scientific agenda was devoted to establishing and promoting the life-span orientation of human development. He was also a theorist in the field of the psychology of aging. He has been described by American Psychologist as one of the most influential developmental psychologists.
Go to Profile#15315
Robin Givhan
#15326
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Robin Givhan is an American fashion editor and Pulitzer Prize winning writer. Givhan was a fashion editor for The Washington Post. She joined the Post in 1995, and left in 2010 to become the fashion critic and fashion correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. She returned to the "Post" in 2014.
Go to Profile#15316
Yu Hu
#15327
Overall Influence
Yu Jeffrey Hu is a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s Scheller College of Business. He is a Digital Fellow at MIT's Initiative on Digital Economy. Career Hu's research has been published in leading journals such as Management Science, Review of Financial Studies, Information Systems Research, Management Information Systems Quarterly, and MIT Sloan Management Review, as well as in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, InformationWeek, Wired Magazine, TIME Magazine, and INC. Magazine.
Go to Profile#15317
John Deacon
#15328
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
John Richard Deacon is an English retired musician, best known for being the bass guitarist for the rock band Queen. He wrote several songs for the group, including Top 10 hits "You're My Best Friend", "Another One Bites the Dust" and "I Want to Break Free"; co-wrote "Under Pressure", "Friends Will Be Friends" and "One Vision"; and he was involved in the band's financial management.
Go to Profile#15318
Gareth Roberts
#15329
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Gareth John Pritchard Roberts is a British television screenwriter, novelist and columnist best known for his work related to the science-fiction television series Doctor Who. He has also worked on various comedy series and soap operas.
Go to Profile#15319
Edith Bouvier Beale
#15330
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Edith Bouvier Beale , nicknamed Little Edie, was an American socialite, fashion model, and cabaret performer. She was a first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Lee Bouvier Radziwill. She is best known for her participation in the 1975 documentary film, Grey Gardens, by Albert and David Maysles, .
Go to Profile#15320
Michael Lou Martin
#15331
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Michael Lou Martin was an American philosopher and former professor at Boston University. Martin specialized in the philosophy of religion, although he also worked on the philosophies of science, law, and social science. He served with the US Marine Corps in Korea.
Go to Profile#15321
Caroline Elkins
#15332
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School, and the Founding Oppenheimer Faculty Director of Harvard's Center for African Studies.
Go to Profile#15322
Anders Flodström
#15333
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Sven Anders Flodström is a Swedish professor of materials physics at the Royal Institute of Technology. Flodström was born in Söderhamn, Sweden. He studied engineering physics and electrical engineering in Linköping. In 1975, he was awarded a Ph.D. in physics in Linköping with the thesis "Electronic structure of clean and oxygen covered aluminium and magnesium surfaces studied by photoelectron spectroscopy". Flodström was also one of the initiators of the synchrotron facility MAX-Lab in Lund, where he served as a coordinator until 1985. In 1985 he was appointed professor of materials physics ...
Go to Profile#15323
Leonid Pastur
#15334
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Leonid Andreevich Pastur is a Ukrainian mathematical physicist and theoretical physicist, known in particular for contributions to random matrix theory, the spectral theory of random Schrödinger operators, statistical mechanics, and solid state physics . Currently, he heads the Department of Theoretical Physics at the B Verkin Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering.
Go to Profile#15324
Pan Suiming
#15335
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Pan Suiming is a Chinese sexologist and professor at the Renmin University of China who has taught sexology for more than 30 years. He is hailed as "the First Person in Sexology in China". Early life Pan was born in 1950 to an official family. At the age of 9, his father was classified as right winger and suffered unfair treatment. In 1966, Mao Zedong launched the ten-year Cultural Revolution, Pan became a sent-down youth at a state farm in Heilongjiang province.
Go to Profile#15325
Douglas Robinson
#15336
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Douglas Robinson is an American academic scholar, translator, and fiction-writer who is best known for his work in translation studies, but has published widely on various aspects of human communication and social interaction . He has translated several Finnish novels, plays, and monographs into English, and his own novel was written in English but first published in Finnish translation.
Go to Profile#15326
Marcel Desailly
#15337
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Marcel Desailly is a French former professional footballer, widely considered to be among the greatest centre-backs and defensive midfielders to ever play football. During a successful career at club level, lasting from 1986 to 2006, Desailly won several titles, including UEFA Champions League medals with both Marseille and AC Milan, and also played for Nantes and Chelsea, among other teams. At international level, he collected 116 caps between 1993 and 2004, scoring three goals, and was a member of the France international squads that won the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000.
Go to Profile#15327
Akinori Yonezawa
#15338
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Akinori Yonezawa is a Japanese computer scientist specializing in object-oriented programming, distributed computing and information security. Being a graduate of the University of Tokyo, Yonezawa has a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in the Actor group at the MIT AI Lab. He currently teaches at the University of Tokyo. He is the designer of ABCL/R, a reflective subset of the first concurrent object-oriented programming language ABCL/1.
Go to Profile#15328
John Gofman
#15339
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
John William Gofman was an American scientist and advocate. He was Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley. Gofman pioneered the field of clinical lipidology, and in 2007 was honored by the Journal of Clinical Lipidology with the title of "Father of Clinical Lipidology". With Frank T. Lindgren and other research associates, Gofman discovered and described three major classes of plasma lipoproteins, fat molecules that carry cholesterol in the blood. The team he led at the Donner Laboratory went on to demonstrate the role of lipoproteins in t...
Go to Profile#15329
Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst
#15340
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst is a German prelate of the Catholic Church and theologian. He was a vicar and an auxiliary bishop in Münster before becoming the Bishop of Limburg in January 2008. Pope Francis removed him from the exercise of his episcopal office on 23 October 2013 and on 26 March 2014 accepted his resignation as Bishop of Limburg, following a long-standing public dispute about the costs and financing of a diocesan construction project.
Go to Profile#15330
Peter O. Steiner
#15341
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Peter Otto Steiner was a noted economist and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Michigan. His research was on a wide range of topics and he published several books including a standard textbook, and on the Economic Status of the Aged but is perhaps best remembered for his work, also jointly with Dorfman, on advertising. The Dorfman–Steiner theorem carries his name. He also served as president of the American Association of University Professors .
Go to Profile#15331
Tavis Ormandy
#15342
Overall Influence
Tavis Ormandy is an English computer security white hat hacker. He is currently employed by Google and was formerly part of Google's Project Zero team. Notable discoveries Ormandy is credited with discovering severe vulnerabilities in LibTIFF, Sophos' antivirus software and Microsoft Windows. With Natalie Silvanovich he discovered a severe vulnerability in FireEye products in 2015.
Go to Profile#15332
Donald Tsang
#15343
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Sir Donald Tsang Yam-kuen is a former Hong Kong civil servant who served as the second Chief Executive of Hong Kong from 2005 to 2012. Tsang joined the colonial civil service as an Executive Officer in 1967, occupying various positions in local administration, finance and trade before he was appointed Financial Secretary of Hong Kong in 1995, becoming the first ethnic Chinese to hold the position under British administration. He continued to serve in the Hong Kong SAR government after 1997 and gained his reputation internationally for his intervention in Hong Kong's stock market in defending...
Go to Profile#15333
W. B. R. Lickorish
#15344
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
William Bernard Raymond Lickorish is a mathematician. He is emeritus professor of geometric topology in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge, and also an emeritus fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. His research interests include topology and knot theory. He was one of the discoverers of the HOMFLY polynomial invariant of links, and proved the Lickorish-Wallace theorem which states that all closed orientable 3-manifolds can be obtained by Dehn surgery on a link.
Go to Profile#15334
Costas Azariadis
#15345
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Constantine Christos "Costas" Azariadis is a macroeconomist born in Athens, Greece. He has worked on numerous topics, such as labor markets, business cycles, and economic growth and development. Azariadis originated and developed implicit contract theory.
Go to Profile#15335
Pedro Martínez
#15346
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Pedro Jaime Martínez is a Dominican-American former professional baseball starting pitcher, who played in Major League Baseball from to , for five teams—most notably the Boston Red Sox from to .
Go to Profile#15336
Seinosuke Toda
#15347
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Seinosuke Toda is a computer scientist working at the Nihon University in Tokyo. Toda earned his Ph.D. from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1992, under the supervision of Kojiro Kobayashi. He was a recipient of the 1998 Gödel Prize for proving Toda's theorem in computational complexity theory, which states that every problem in the polynomial hierarchy has a polynomial-time Turing reduction to a counting problem.
Go to Profile#15337
Wolfgang Huber
#15348
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Wolfgang Huber is a prominent German theologian and ethicist. Huber served as bishop of the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia until November 2009. Huber succeeded Manfred Kock as Chairperson of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany in November 2003 and was succeeded by Bishop Margot Käßmann, the first woman in that position, in October 2009.
Go to Profile#15338
Donald G. Saari
#15349
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Donald Gene Saari is an American mathematician, a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Economics and former director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include the -body problem, the Borda count voting system, and application of mathematics to the social sciences.
Go to Profile#15339
Isidore Dyen
#15350
Overall Influence
1913 - 2008 (95 years)
Isidore Dyen was an American linguist, Professor Emeritus of Malayo-Polynesian and Comparative Linguistics at Yale University. He was one of the foremost scholars in the field of Austronesian linguistics, publishing extensively on the reconstruction of Proto-Austronesian phonology and on subgrouping within the language family, the latter principally by means of lexicostatistics.
Go to Profile#15340
Joseph Born Kadane
#15351
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Joseph "Jay" Born Kadane is the Leonard J. Savage University Professor of Statistics, Emeritus in the Department of Statistics and Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Kadane is one of the early proponents of Bayesian statistics, particularly the subjective Bayesian philosophy.
Go to Profile#15341
PJ Harvey
#15352
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Polly Jean Harvey is an English singer-songwriter. Primarily known as a vocalist and guitarist, she is also proficient with a wide range of instruments. Harvey began her career in 1988 when she joined local band Automatic Dlamini as a vocalist, guitarist and saxophonist. The band's frontman, John Parish, became her long-term collaborator. In 1991, she formed an eponymous trio called PJ Harvey and subsequently began her career as PJ Harvey. The trio released two studio albums called Dry and Rid of Me before disbanding, after which Harvey continued as a solo artist. Since 1995, she has relea...
Go to Profile#15342
Richard Timberlake
#15353
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Richard Henry Timberlake Jr. was an American economist who was Professor of Economics at the University of Georgia for much of his career. He became a leading advocate of free banking, the belief that money should be issued by private companies, not by a government monopoly. He wrote about the Legal Tender Cases of the U.S. Supreme Court in his book Constitutional Money: A Review of the Supreme Court's Monetary Decisions.
Go to Profile#15343
Toni Cade Bambara
#15354
Overall Influence
1939 - 1995 (56 years)
Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade , was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor. Biography Early life and education Toni Cade Bambara was born in Harlem, New York, to parents Walter and Helen Cade. She grew up in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant , Queens, and New Jersey. At the age of six, she changed her name from Miltona to Toni, and then in 1970, changed her name to include the name of a West African ethnic group, Bambara, after finding the name written as part of a signature on a sketchbook discovered in a trunk among her great-grandmother's other belongings.
Go to Profile#15344
Doris Schattschneider
#15355
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Doris J. Schattschneider is an American mathematician, a retired professor of mathematics at Moravian College. She is known for writing about tessellations and about the art of M. C. Escher, for helping Martin Gardner validate and popularize the pentagon tiling discoveries of amateur mathematician Marjorie Rice, and for co-directing with Eugene Klotz the project that developed The Geometer's Sketchpad.
Go to Profile#15345
Nancy Milford
#15356
Overall Influence
1938 - 2022 (84 years)
Nancy Lee Milford was an American biographer. She was noted for her biographies on Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Early life and education Nancy Lee Winston was born in Dearborn, Michigan, on March 26, 1938. Her father, Joseph Winston, worked as an engineer at General Motors and served in the United States Navy during World War II; her mother, Vivienne , was a housewife and volunteered at a Dearborn hospital. During her father's stint in the Navy, the family relocated to Washington, D.C., and San Francisco before going back to Michigan.
Go to Profile#15346
Dolph Ziggler
#15357
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Nicholas Theodore Nemeth is an American professional wrestler and stand-up comedian. He performed under the ring name Dolph Ziggler during his time with WWE. Known for his athleticism, in-ring prowess and versatility, Ziggler is regarded as one of the most talented and underrated wrestlers in the world.
Go to Profile#15347
Timothy Miller
#15358
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Timothy A. Miller is a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. He has been involved in the Communal Studies Association and Utopian Studies Society , and is past president of the International Communal Studies Association . He has a particular interest in intentional communities and new religious movements. His son is Aber Miller, noted 'sweetheart jazz man' of Humboldt County.
Go to Profile#15348
Nalin de Silva
#15359
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Thakurartha Devadithya Guardiyawasam Lindamulage Nalin Kumara de Silva is a Sri Lankan philosopher and a political analyst. He is the former Sri Lankan ambassador in Myanmar. He was a professor in the department of mathematics, a member of University Grant Commission and the dean of the faculty of science at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.
Go to Profile#15349
Semir Zeki
#15360
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Semir Zeki FMedSci FRS is a British and French neurobiologist who has specialised in studying the primate visual brain and more recently the neural correlates of affective states, such as the experience of love, desire and beauty that are generated by sensory inputs within the field of neuroesthetics. He was educated at University College London where he was Henry Head Research Fellow of the Royal Society before being appointed Professor of Neurobiology. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Neuroesthetics at UCL.
Go to Profile#15350
Jens Stoltenberg
#15361
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jens Stoltenberg is a Norwegian politician who has served as the 13th secretary general of NATO since 2014. A member of the Norwegian Labour Party, he previously served as the 34th prime minister of Norway from 2000 to 2001 and again from 2005 until 2013.
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