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
#15351
David Stasavage
#15362
Overall Influence
David Stasavage is an American political scientist. Stasavage attended a bachelor's degree at Cornell University in 1989, then obtained his doctorate from Harvard University in 1995. He subsequently went to Europe, working successively for the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Centre for the Study of African Economies, and the Bank of England. Stasavage began teaching as a faculty associate within the London School of Economics in 1999. By 2005, his final year at the LSE, Stasavage had acquired the rank of reader. Stasavage returned to the United States in 2006, as an associate professor at New York University.
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Oliver Harris
#15363
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Oliver C. G. Harris is a British academic and Professor of American Literature at Keele University. He is the author and editor of seventeen books, including a dozen editions of works by William S. Burroughs: Letters, 1945–1959 , Junky: the definitive text of Junk , The Yage Letters Redux , Queer , The Cut-Up Trilogy, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded , Blade Runner: A Movie , Minutes to Go Redux , The Exterminator Redux , BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS and Dead Fingers Talk . In 2022, he published two short books of essays, A Burroughs Triptych and Making Naked Lunch and in 2023 a collaborative hybrid of criticism and memoir, Two Assassins: William Burroughs/Hassan Sabbah.
Go to Profile#15353
Nick Montfort
#15364
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for Digital Narrative. Among his publications are seven books of computer-generated literature and six books from the MIT Press, several of which are collaborations. His work also includes digital projects, many of them in the form of short programs. He lives in New York City.
Go to Profile#15354
Françoise Hardy
#15365
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Françoise Madeleine Hardy is a retired French singer-songwriter. Mainly known for singing melancholic sentimental ballads, Hardy rose to prominence in the early 1960s as a leading figure of the yé-yé wave. In addition to her native French, she also sang in English, Italian and German. Her career spanned more than fifty years with over thirty studio albums released.
Go to Profile#15355
Angela D. Friederici
#15366
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Angela Friederici is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in neuropsychology and linguistics. She is the author of over 400 academic articles and book chapters, and has edited 15 books on linguistics, neuroscience, language and psychology.
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Jean-Marie Souriau
#15367
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Jean-Marie Souriau was a French mathematician. He was one of the pioneers of modern symplectic geometry. Education and career Souriau started studying mathematics in 1942 at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 1946 he was a research fellow of CNRS and an engineer at ONERA. His PhD thesis, defended in 1952 under the supervision of Joseph Pérès and André Lichnerowicz, was entitled "Sur la stabilité des avions" .
Go to Profile#15357
Donald Livingston
#15368
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Donald Livingston is a former Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and a David Hume scholar. In 2003 he founded the Abbeville Institute, which is devoted to the study of Southern culture and political ideas.
Go to Profile#15358
Françoise Claustre
#15369
Overall Influence
1937 - 2006 (69 years)
Françoise Claustre , was a French archaeologist. Life and career Claustre was taken hostage by a group of Chadian rebels, led by Hissène Habré, on 20 April 1974, at Bardaï, in the Tibesti Mountains of northern Chad. At the same time, the rebels also seized a German doctor, Christophe Staewen, and Marc Combe, who was an assistant of Claustre's husband, Pierre. Marc Combe managed to escape and Staewan was released on 11 June 1974, after a ransom had been paid by the West German government.
Go to Profile#15359
John G. Webster
#15370
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
#15360
John Kessel
#15371
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John Joseph Vincent Kessel is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. He is a prolific short story writer, and the author of four solo novels, Good News From Outer Space , Corrupting Dr. Nice , The Moon and the Other , and Pride and Prometheus , and one novel, Freedom Beach in collaboration with his friend James Patrick Kelly. Kessel is married to author Therese Anne Fowler.
Go to Profile#15361
Hans-Georg Backhaus
#15372
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Hans-Georg Backhaus is a German Marxian economist and philosopher. He is considered one of the most important theorists on the field of Marx's theory of value. He began a long-term cooperation with Helmut Reichelt already from his years of university studies.
Go to Profile#15362
Bertrand Badie
#15373
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Bertrand Badie is a French political scientist and international relations specialist, emeritus professor at Sciences Po. He is one of the most renowned French specialists in international relations.
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John Punter
#15374
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Punter is an English former record producer and recording engineer. He has worked with many bands and musicians, such as Japan, Procol Harum, Roxy Music, Doctors of Madness, Sad Café and Slade. His career in music spanned over 30 years and many different genres. He is now retired from the entertainment business, and ran a small bar in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. On July 24, 2019, he became a citizen of Canada.
Go to Profile#15364
Shamit Kachru
#15375
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Shamit Kachru is an American theoretical physicist, a professor emeritus of physics at Stanford University, and a former Wells Family Director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. He served as the Stanford Physics Department Chair from 2018 to 2021. He retired in 2023.
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Gustavo Franco
#15376
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Gustavo Henrique de Barroso Franco is a Brazilian economist. Former Governor of the Brazilian Central Bank, is best known for being one of the "fathers" of the Real Plan, the 1994 monetary reform that ended hyperinflation in Brazil. He teaches economics at the Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro since 1986. He is also a businessman, consultant and has served on many boards. He founded Rio Bravo Investimentos where he works as Senior Advisor. He has written several books, academic papers and contributes regularly to newspapers and magazines.
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Anthony Marx
#15377
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Anthony William "Tony" Marx is an American academic. He became the current president and CEO of the New York Public Library in July 2011, succeeding Paul LeClerc. Marx is the former president of Amherst College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Since joining the New York Public Library, Marx has focused on expanding the library’s education programs and on increasing public access to library e-books. He has also prioritized services for researchers and bringing library materials to public schools.
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R. Brent Tully
#15378
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Richard Brent Tully is a Canadian-born American astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu, Hawaii. Born in Toronto, Ontario, and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, Tully's specialty is the astrophysics of galaxies. With J. Richard Fisher, he proposed the Tully–Fisher relation, which shows that the luminosity of a galaxy and the orbital velocities of its stars are correlated. This relation can be used to determine the distances of galaxies and, by inference, the size and age of the universe. His books The Nearby Galaxies Atlas & Catalog published in 1988 give the 3D locations for 2,400 galaxies within 130 million light years of Earth.
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Irving Copi
#15379
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Irving Marmer Copi was an American philosopher, logician, and university textbook author. Biography Copi studied under Bertrand Russell while at the University of Chicago. In 1948 he contributed to the calculus of relations with his article using logical matrices.
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Gérard Cornuéjols
#15380
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Gérard Pierre Cornuéjols is the IBM University Professor of Operations Research in the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business. His research interests include facility location, integer programming, balanced matrices, and perfect graphs.
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Dawn French
#15381
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Dawn Roma French is a British actress, comedian, presenter and writer. French is known for writing and starring on the BBC comedy sketch show French and Saunders with her best friend and comedy partner, Jennifer Saunders, and played the lead role as Geraldine Granger in the BBC sitcom The Vicar of Dibley. She has been nominated for seven BAFTA TV Awards and won a BAFTA Fellowship with Saunders in 2009.
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Ernesto Screpanti
#15382
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Ernesto Screpanti is a professor of Political Economy who worked in various universities, like Trento, Florence, Trieste, Parma, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Siena. He did research in the “rethinking Marxism” scientific programme, in the attempt to update Marxist analysis by bringing it in line with the reality of contemporary capitalism, on the one hand, and to liberate Marxism from any residue of Hegelian metaphysics, Kantian ethics and economic determinism, on the other.
Go to Profile#15372
Simon Mitton
#15383
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Simon Mitton is a British astronomer and writer. He is based at St Edmund's College, Cambridge. He has written numerous astronomical works. The most well known of these is his biography of fellow Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle.
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Makarand Paranjape
#15384
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Makarand R. Paranjape is an Indian novelist, poet, a former Director at Indian Institute of Advanced Study , Shimla and, since 1999, a Professor of English in the Centre for English Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
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Wolfgang Benz
#15385
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Wolfgang Benz is a German historian from Ellwangen. He was the director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism of the Technische Universität Berlin between 1990 and 2011. Personal life Benz studied history, political science and art history in Frankfurt am Main, Kiel and Munich. In 1968 he completed his doctoral thesis on under the supervision of Karl Bosl at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. From 1969 till 1990, Benz worked at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.
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William Yeager
#15386
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
William "Bill" Yeager is an American engineer. He is best known for being the inventor of a packet-switched, "Ships in the Night", multiple-protocol router in 1981, during his 20-year tenure at Stanford's Knowledge Systems Laboratory as well as the Stanford University Computer Science department.
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Hubert Lacroix
#15387
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Hubert T. Lacroix is a Canadian lawyer who last served as the President and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation , the national public radio and television broadcaster, from 2008 until 2018.
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Sharon Osbourne
#15388
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sharon Rachel Osbourne is a British-American television personality, music manager, and author. She is married to heavy metal singer-songwriter Ozzy Osbourne and came to prominence while appearing on The Osbournes , a reality television show that aired on MTV, which followed her family's daily life. Osbourne later became a judge on the television talent competition shows The X Factor and America's Got Talent .
Go to Profile#15378
Tom Ford
#15389
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Thomas Carlyle Ford is an American fashion designer and filmmaker. He launched his eponymous luxury brand in 2005, having previously served as the creative director at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. Ford wrote and directed the films A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals . From 2019 to 2022 he served as Chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
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Amir Hetsroni
#15390
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Amir Hetsroni is an Israeli professor of communication science, novelist and social media personality. Commonly described as an internet troll, Hetsroni is known for his extremely divisive views and frequent employment of shock humor.
Go to Profile#15380
Steven Reinemund
#15391
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Steven S. Reinemund is an American businessman who was chairman and chief executive officer of PepsiCo between 2001 and 2006 and dean of the Schools of Business at Wake Forest University between 2008 and 2014. Reinemund spent 22 years working for PepsiCo in various capacities. During his CEO tenure at PepsiCo, revenues grew by $9 billion, net income rose 70%, earnings per share were up 80% and PepsiCo's market cap exceeded $100 billion. He led the acquisitions of several other food and beverage companies including Quaker Oats, Naked Juice, Izze and Stacy's Chips.
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Manny Farber
#15392
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Emanuel Farber was an American painter, film critic and writer. Often described as "iconoclastic", Farber developed a distinctive prose style and set of theoretical stances which have had a large influence on later generations of film critics and influence on underground culture. Susan Sontag considered him to be "the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country has ever produced."
Go to Profile#15382
Mark Watson
#15393
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Mark W. Watson is the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Prior to coming to Princeton in 1995, Watson served on the economics faculty at Harvard University and Northwestern University. His research focuses on time-series econometrics, empirical macroeconomics, and macroeconomic forecasting.
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Brian G. Marsden
#15394
Overall Influence
1937 - 2010 (73 years)
Brian Geoffrey Marsden was a British astronomer and the longtime director of the Minor Planet Center at the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian . Education Marsden was educated at The Perse School in Cambridge, New College, Oxford and Yale University . His thesis advisor was Dirk Brouwer.
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Patrick Leahy
#15395
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Patrick Joseph Leahy, is an American politician and attorney who represented Vermont in the United States Senate from 1975 to 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he also was the president pro tempore of the United States Senate from 2012 to 2015 and from 2021 to 2023. During his tenure he chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Agriculture Committee. At 48 years, Leahy is the third-longest-serving U.S. senator in history, and is the longest-serving member of the United States Congress to serve solely as a senator.
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David Neumark
#15396
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
David Neumark is an American economist and a Chancellor's Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine, where he also directs the Economic Self-Sufficiency Policy Research Institute.
Go to Profile#15386
J. Heinrich Matthaei
#15397
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Johannes Heinrich Matthaei is a German biochemist. He is best known for his unique contribution to solving the genetic code on 15 May 1961. Career Whilst a post-doctoral visitor in the laboratory of Marshall Warren Nirenberg at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, he discovered that a synthetic RNA polynucleotide, composed of a repeating uridylic acid residue , coded for a polypeptide chain encoding just one kind of amino acid, phenylalanine. In scientific terms, he discovered that polyU codes for polyphenylalanine and hence the coding unit for this amino acid is composed of a series of Us or, as we now know the genetic code is read in triplets, the codon for phenylalanine is UUU.
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Angelo Bagnasco
#15398
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Angelo Bagnasco is an Italian Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He was Archbishop of Genoa from 2006 to 2020. He was President of the Italian Episcopal Conference from 2007 to 2017 and was elevated to the rank of cardinal in 2007. He was President of the Council of the Bishops' Conferences of Europe from 2016 to 2021.
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Bernard Devauchelle
#15399
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Bernard Devauchelle is a French oral and maxillofacial surgeon, best known for successfully completing the first face transplant in November 2005 at Amiens University Hospital.
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Lyudmila Verbitskaya
#15400
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Lyudmila Verbitskaya was a Russian linguist and teacher. She served as president of Saint Petersburg State University. Career Lyudmila Alekseevna Verbitskaya was born in Leningrad on 17 October 1936.
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Mick Fleetwood
#15401
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Michael John Kells Fleetwood is a British musician, songwriter and actor. He is the drummer, co-founder, and leader of the rock band Fleetwood Mac. Fleetwood, whose surname was merged with that of the group's bassist John "Mac" McVie to form the name of the band, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Fleetwood Mac in 1998.
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Laura Bohannan
#15402
Overall Influence
1922 - 2002 (80 years)
Laura Bohannan , pen name Elenore Smith Bowen, was an American cultural anthropologist best known for her 1966 article, "Shakespeare in the Bush." Bohannan also wrote two books during the 1960s, Tiv Economy, with her husband, and Return to Laughter, a novel. These works were based on her travels and work in Africa between 1949 and 1953.
Go to Profile#15392
Robbie Keane
#15403
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Robert David Keane is an Irish professional football coach and former player who played as a striker. Keane served as captain of the Republic of Ireland from March 2006 until his international retirement in August 2016. Keane is the most capped player and is the top goalscorer in the team's history. He is the head coach of Maccabi Tel Aviv.
Go to Profile#15393
Jeremy Lin
#15404
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Jeremy Shu-How Lin is a Taiwanese-American professional basketball player for the New Taipei Kings of the P. League+ . He unexpectedly led a winning turnaround with the New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association during the 2011–12 season, sparking a cultural phenomenon known as "Linsanity". Lin was the first American of Chinese or Taiwanese descent to play in the NBA, and is one of the few Asian Americans to have played in the league. He is the first Asian American player to win an NBA championship, having done so with the Toronto Raptors in 2019.
Go to Profile#15394
Svante Cornell
#15405
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Svante E. Cornell is a Swedish scholar specializing on politics and security issues in Eurasia, especially the South Caucasus, Turkey, and Central Asia. He is a director and co-founder of the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy , and Research Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program , and joined the American Foreign Policy Council as a Senior Fellow for Eurasia in January 2017.
Go to Profile#15395
Kevin Anderson
#15406
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Kevin Michael Anderson is a South African professional tennis player. He achieved his career-high Association of Tennis Professionals ranking of world No. 5 on 16 July 2018. He was the first South African to be ranked in the top 5 since Kevin Curren was No. 5 on 23 September 1985.
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Hilary Beckles
#15407
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Sir Hilary McDonald Beckles KA is a Barbadian historian. He is the current vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies and chairman of the CARICOM Reparations Commission. Educated at the University of Hull in England, Beckles began his academic career at UWI, and was granted a personal professorship at the age of 37, becoming the youngest in the university's history. He was named pro-vice-chancellor and chairman of UWI's Board for Undergraduate Studies in 1998, and in 2002 was named principal of the university's Cave Hill campus. Although his focus has mainly been on Afro-Caribbean ...
Go to Profile#15397
Jack Bridger Chalker
#15408
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Jack Bridger Chalker , was a British artist and teacher best known for his work recording the lives of the prisoners of war building the Burma Railway during World War II. Biography Chalker was born in London, the son of a railway stationmaster who had been awarded the MBE for his work in World War I. After attending Alleyn's School in Dulwich and training in graphics and painting at Goldsmiths College, Chalker won a scholarship to the Painting School of the Royal College of Art in London. However, Chalker was conscripted into the British Army before he could take up his scholarship. While s...
Go to Profile#15398
Gianluca Vialli
#15409
Overall Influence
1964 - 2023 (59 years)
Gianluca Vialli was an Italian football player and manager who played as a striker. Vialli started his club career at his hometown club Cremonese in 1980, where he made 105 league appearances and scored 23 goals. His performances impressed Sampdoria who signed him in 1984, and with whom he scored 85 league goals, won three Italian cups, Serie A and the European Cup Winners Cup.
Go to Profile#15399
François Vernadat
#15410
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
François B. Vernadat is a French and Canadian computer scientist, who has contributed to Enterprise Modelling, Enterprise Integration and Networking over the last 40 years specialising in Enterprise Architectures, business process modelling, information systems design and analysis, systems integration and interoperability and systems analysis using Petri nets.
Go to Profile#15400
Claude Vigée
#15411
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Claude Vigée was a French poet who wrote in French and Alsatian. He described himself as a "Jew and an Alsatian, thus doubly Alsatian and doubly Jewish". Life Vigée was born in Bischwiller, Bas-Rhin, the son of Germaine , a homemaker, and Robert Schwartz, who worked in business. He was descended from an old family of Alsatian cloth merchants. He spent his youth in Bischwiller, then attended secondary school in Strasbourg. Displaced from Alsace by the invasion of the Germans in 1940, he began to study medicine in Toulouse before joining the Résistance. In 1942, he published his first poems in the underground magazine "Poésie 42".
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