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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#15401

Bob Pettit

#15412

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Robert E. Lee Pettit Jr. is an American former professional basketball player. He played 11 seasons in the NBA, all with the Milwaukee/St. Louis Hawks . In 1956, he became the first recipient of the NBA's Most Valuable Player Award and he won the award again in 1959. He also won the NBA All-Star Game MVP award four times. As of the end of 2022-2023 regular season, Pettit is still the only regular season MVP in the history of the Hawks.

#15402

Robert A. Gorman

#15413

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Robert A. Gorman is the Kenneth W. Gemmill Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Biography Gorman was born in New York City. Gorman obtained an A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1958, an LL.B. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1962, where he was on the Harvard Law Review, and attended University College at Oxford University in 1958-59. He was a Law Clerk to Hon. Irving R. Kaufman of the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit in 1962-63, and an associate at Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn in 1963-1964.

#15403

Burn-Jeng Lin

#15414

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Burn-Jeng Lin is a Taiwanese electrical engineer. Education After graduating from National Taiwan University in 1963 with a degree in electrical engineering, Lin earned his doctorate in the same subject from Ohio State University in 1970.

#15404

Egon Krenz

#15415

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Egon Rudi Ernst Krenz is a German former politician who was the last Communist leader of the German Democratic Republic during the Revolutions of 1989. He succeeded Erich Honecker as the General Secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany but was forced to resign only weeks later when the Berlin Wall fell.

#15405

Dave Winfield

#15416

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

David Mark Winfield is an American former Major League Baseball right fielder. He is the special assistant to the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Over his 22-year career, he played for six teams: the San Diego Padres, New York Yankees, California Angels, Toronto Blue Jays, Minnesota Twins, and Cleveland Indians. He had the winning hit in the 1992 World Series with the Blue Jays over the Atlanta Braves.

#15406

Peter McLaughlin

Peter McLaughlin

#15417

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Peter McLaughlin is an Irish academic, historian, and educator. He is the CEO of Max Learning Limited, the educational arm of the Max Group. He was Headmaster of The Doon School. Before joining Doon in 2009, he served as Headmaster of Douai School, and Principal of the British International School in Cairo and of Casterton School in England. McLaughlin retired from Doon in May 2016.

#15407

Tom LeClair

#15418

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Thomas LeClair is a writer, literary critic, and was the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati until 2009. He has been a regular book reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, the Nation, the Barnes & Noble Review, and the Daily Beast.

#15408

Yaacov Hecht

#15419

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Yaacov Hecht , is an Israeli educator and worldwide pioneer of democratic education. In 1987, he founded the first school in the world called a democratic school. Following that, he helped founding around 30 democratic schools in Israel. In 1993 he convened 'in Hadera the first IDEC- International Democratic Education Conference, an annual conference that continues to connect educators, schools, and organizations. That led to the emergence of hundreds of democratic schools all over the world.

#15409

Ichiro Suzuki

#15420

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

, also known mononymously as , is a Japanese former professional baseball outfielder who played professionally for 28 seasons. He played the first nine years of his career with the Orix BlueWave of Nippon Professional Baseball , and the next 12 years with the Seattle Mariners of Major League Baseball . Suzuki then played two and a half seasons with the New York Yankees and three with the Miami Marlins before returning to the Mariners for his final two seasons. He won two World Baseball Classic titles as part of the Japanese national team. He also became the Seattle Mariners special assistant t...

#15410

Nermin Abadan Unat

#15421

Overall Influence

1921 - Present (105 years)

Nermin Abadan Unat is a Turkish academician, lawyer, sociologist, writer, and a professor at Boğaziçi University. She studies Turkish immigration as well as women's rights in Turkey. From 1978 to 1980, she was a member of the Senate of Turkey.

#15411

David Clarke

#15422

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

David Alexander Clarke Jr. is an American former law enforcement official who served as Sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, from 2002 to 2017. In 2002, Clarke was appointed to the position by Republican Governor Scott McCallum and later elected that same year to his first four-year term. He was reelected in November 2006, 2010 and 2014. Although Clarke declared himself as a Democrat after his appointment as sheriff and ran as a Democrat in a heavily Democratic county, many of Clarke's political views align with those of conservative Republicans; he refused to join the Wisconsin Democratic...

#15412

David Seaman

#15423

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

David Andrew Seaman is an English former footballer who played as a goalkeeper. In a career lasting from 1981 to 2004, he is best known for his time playing for Arsenal. He won 75 caps for England, and is the country's second-most capped goalkeeper, after Peter Shilton. In 1997, he was awarded the MBE for services to football.

#15413

Ali Jaber

#15424

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Ali Jaber is a Lebanese journalist, media consultant, TV personality and the Group TV Director of MBC, the Arab world's largest satellite broadcaster. Academic and leadership Mr. Jaber completed a bachelor's degree in business administration at the American University of Beirut in 1984 before going on to earn a master's degree in communications at Syracuse University in the US in 1986.

#15414

George L. Priest

#15425

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

George L. Priest is an American legal scholar specializing in antitrust law. Priest has taught at the Yale Law School since 1981, where he is the Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law and Economics and Director of the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy. Priest is a noted antitrust scholar, and is also the author of a wide number of articles and monographs on the subjects of product liability, tort law, insurance litigation, and settlement. Among his students at Yale was journalist Emily Bazelon.

#15415

Harvey V. Fineberg

Harvey V. Fineberg

#15426

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Harvey Vernon Fineberg is an American physician. A noted researcher in the fields of health policy and medical decision making, his past research has focused on the process of policy development and implementation, assessment of medical technology, evaluation and use of vaccines, and dissemination of medical innovations. Fineberg has held several prominent positions over the course of his career, including Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, Provost of Harvard University, and President of the Institute of Medicine, now the National Academy of Medicine.

#15416

Yuen Yuen Ang

#15427

Overall Influence

Yuen Yuen Ang is a Singaporean-American professor of political science and the author of two books: How China Escaped the Poverty Trap , named one of the "Best Books of 2017" by Foreign Affairs, and China's Gilded Age . She is the Alfred Chandler Chair of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University.

#15417

Thomas Straubhaar

Thomas Straubhaar

#15428

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Thomas Straubhaar is a Swiss economist and migration researcher. He is a professor for international economic relations at the University of Hamburg. Life and career Straubhaar was born on August 2, 1957, in Unterseen, Bern, in Switzerland.

#15418

Shyam Benegal

#15429

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Shyam Benegal is an Indian film director, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker. Often regarded as the pioneer of parallel cinema, he is widely considered as one of the greatest filmmakers post 1970s. He has received several accolades, including eighteen National Film Awards, a Filmfare Award and a Nandi Award. In 2005, he was honoured with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India's highest award in the field of cinema. In 1976, he was honoured by the Government of India with the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian honour of the country, and in 1991, he was awarded Padma Bhushan, the third-high...

#15419

Gerard Toal

#15430

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Gerard Toal is Professor of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Career Toal holds a B.A. in History and Geography from National University of Ireland, Maynooth, an M.A. in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , and a Ph.D. in Political Geography from Syracuse University .

#15420

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

#15431

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a British professor of history and author of several popular works, notably on cultural and environmental history. Life and career He was born in London; his father was the Spanish journalist Felipe Fernández Armesto and his mother was Betty Millan, a British-born journalist and co-founder and editor of The Diplomatist , the in-house journal of the diplomatic corps in London.

#15421

Nancy Spero

#15432

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Nancy Spero was an American visual artist. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She married and collaborated with artist Leon Golub. As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero had a career that spanned fifty years. She is known for her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultural concerns. Spero chronicled wars and apocalyptic violence as well as articulating visions of ecstatic rebirth and the celebratory cycles of life. Her complex network of collective and individual voices was a catalyst for the creation of her figurative lex...

#15422

Adam Jones

#15433

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Adam Jones is a political scientist, writer, and photojournalist based at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction and other books in genocide studies. He is Executive Director of Gendercide Watch. He was chosen as one of "Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide" for the book of that name, which was published in 2010. He is also a published photographer, both in print and online under a Creative Commons license.

#15423

Edward Hirsch

#15434

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Edward M. Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems , which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem , a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called "a masterpiece of sorrow." He has also published five prose books about poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.

#15424

Mahir Domi

#15435

Overall Influence

1915 - 2000 (85 years)

Mahir Domi was an Albanian linguist, professor, and academic. He was one of the organizers and main participants of the Albanian Orthography Congress, and member of the follow-up commission responsible for deploying the orthographic rules of the Standard Albanian language.

#15425

Armin Mohler

#15436

Overall Influence

1920 - 2003 (83 years)

Armin Mohler was a Swiss far-right political philosopher and journalist, known for his works on the Conservative Revolution. He is widely seen as the father of the Neue Rechte , the German branch of the European New Right.

#15426

J. Bowyer Bell

#15437

Overall Influence

1931 - 2003 (72 years)

John Bowyer Bell was an American historian, artist and art critic. He was best known as a terrorism expert. Background and early life Bell was born into an Episcopalian family in 1931 in New York City. The family later moved to Alabama, from where Bell attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, majoring in history. He also studied art, and discovered he had "total visual memory"—the equivalent of perfect pitch in a singer. His first solo art showing was in the college library in his senior year. He considered becoming a professional artist and made frequent visits to New York to visit other artists, including his hero Franz Kline, but committed to academia.

#15427

Keith Laumer

#15438

Overall Influence

1925 - 1993 (68 years)

John Keith Laumer was an American science fiction author. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he was an officer in the United States Air Force and a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service. His older brother March Laumer was also a writer, known for his adult reinterpretations of the Land of Oz . Frank Laumer, their youngest brother, is a historian and writer.

#15428

Michel Temer

#15439

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Michel Miguel Elias Temer Lulia is a Brazilian politician, lawyer and writer who served as the 37th president of Brazil from 31 August 2016 to 31 December 2018. He took office after the impeachment and removal from office of his predecessor Dilma Rousseff. He had been the 24th vice president of Brazil since 2011 and acting president since 12 May 2016, when Rousseff's powers and duties were suspended pending an impeachment trial.

#15429

Nathan Divinsky

#15440

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Nathan Joseph Harry Divinsky was a Canadian mathematician, university professor, chess master, chess writer, and chess official. Divinsky was also known for being the former husband of the 19th prime minister of Canada, Kim Campbell. Divinsky and Campbell were married from 1972 to 1983.

#15430

Lorrie Moore

#15441

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Lorrie Moore is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards. Since 1984, she has also taught creative writing. Biography Marie Lorena Moore was born in Glens Falls, New York, and nicknamed "Lorrie" by her parents. She attended St. Lawrence University. At 19, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest. The story, "Raspberries," was published in January 1977. After graduating from St. Lawrence, she moved to Manhattan and worked as a paralegal for two years.

#15431

Janina Ramirez

#15442

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Janina Sara Maria Ramirez , sometimes credited as Nina Ramirez, is a British art historian, cultural historian, and TV presenter. She specialises in interpreting symbols and examining works of art within their historical context.

#15432

Dick Vermeil

#15443

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Richard Albert Vermeil is an American former football coach who served as a head coach in the National Football League for 15 seasons. He was the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles for seven seasons, the St. Louis Rams for three, and the Kansas City Chiefs for five. Prior to the NFL, he was the head football coach at Hillsdale High School from 1960 to 1962, Napa Junior College in 1964, and UCLA from 1974 to 1975. With UCLA, Vermeil led the team to victory in the 1976 Rose Bowl. Vermeil's NFL tenure would see him improve the fortunes of teams that had a losing record before he arrived and ...

#15433

Kurt Weitzmann

#15444

Overall Influence

1904 - 1993 (89 years)

Kurt Weitzmann was a German turned American art historian who was a leading figure in the study of Late Antique and Byzantine art in particular. He attended the universities of Münster, Würzburg and Vienna before moving to Princeton in 1935, due to Nazi persecution. He is well known for the time he spent researching the icons and architecture at Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1964 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978.

#15434

Satwant Pasricha

#15445

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Satwant Pasricha is the head of Department of Clinical Psychology at NIMHANS, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences at Bangalore. She also worked for a time at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in the USA. Pasricha investigates reincarnation and near-death experiences. Pasricha co-authored the 2011 book Making sense of near-death experiences, which was Highly Commended in the Psychiatry category at the 2012 British Medical Association Book Awards.

#15435

Paul Gochet

#15446

Overall Influence

1932 - 2011 (79 years)

Paul Gochet was a Belgian logician, philosopher, and emeritus professor of the University of Liège. His research was mainly in the fields of logic and analytic philosophy. He is perhaps best known for his works on Quine's philosophy.

#15436

Euan Ashley

#15447

Overall Influence

Euan Angus Ashley is a Scottish physician, scientist, author, and founder based at Stanford University in California where he is Associate Dean in the School of Medicine and holds the Roger and Joelle Burnell Chair of Genomics and Precision Health. He is known for helping establish the field of medical genomics.

#15437

Marye Anne Fox

#15448

Overall Influence

1947 - 2021 (74 years)

Marye Anne Payne Fox was an American physical organic chemist and university administrator. She was the first female chief executive of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. In April 2004, Fox was named chancellor of the University of California, San Diego. In 2010 Fox received the National Medal of Science.

#15438

Steve Parkhouse

#15449

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Steve Parkhouse is a writer, artist and letterer who has worked for many British comics, especially 2000 AD and Doctor Who Magazine. Biography Parkhouse has worked in comics since 1967, when he drew the occasional "Power House Pin-Up" of Marvel superheroes for the back covers of Fantastic and Terrific, two British weeklies published by Odhams. In 1969 his first professional writing assignments appeared when he co-wrote two Marvel Comics stories, one starring the jungle lord Ka-Zar in Marvel Super-Heroes No. 19 , and the other starring the eponymous superspy in Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. No.

#15439

Gordian Fulde

#15450

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Gordian Ward Fulde is an Australian emergency medicine specialist, the founder of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, and was the director of the emergency department of St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney for 35 years, retiring in 2018. He was named Senior Australian of the Year in 2016.

#15440

Jacob Hacker

#15451

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Jacob Stewart Hacker is an American professor and political scientist. He is the director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and a professor of political science at Yale University. Hacker has written works on social policy, health care reform, and economic insecurity in the United States.

#15441

Paul Moser

#15452

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Paul K. Moser is an American philosopher who writes on epistemology and the philosophy of religion. Moser is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and a former editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly.

#15442

Mullah Omar

#15453

Overall Influence

1960 - 2013 (53 years)

Muhammad Umar , known in the West as Mullah Omar, was an Afghan militant who founded the Taliban in 1994. During the Afghan Civil War of 1996–2001, the Taliban fought the Northern Alliance and took control of most of the country, establishing the First Islamic Emirate for which Omar began to serve as Supreme Leader in 1996. Shortly after al-Qaeda carried out the September 11 attacks, the Taliban government was toppled by an American invasion of Afghanistan, prompting Omar to go into hiding. He successfully evaded capture by the American-led coalition before dying in 2013, reportedly from tuber...

#15443

David McNeill

#15454

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Glenn David McNeill is an American psychologist and writer specializing in scientific research into psycholinguistics and especially the relationship of language to thought, and the gestures that accompany discourse.

#15444

Laurent Thévenot

Laurent Thévenot

#15455

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

#15445

Jonathan Wilson

#15456

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Jonathan Mark Wilson is a British sports journalist and author who writes for a number of publications, including The Guardian and Sports Illustrated. He is a columnist for World Soccer and Unibet and founder and editor of The Blizzard. He also appears on The Guardians football podcast, Football Weekly".

#15446

Francisco Rezek

#15457

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

José Francisco Rezek is a Brazilian judge who served as a member of the International Court of Justice, based in The Hague, Netherlands, from 1996 to 2006. His surname "Rezek" comes from Lebanon. He earned his LL.B and D.E.S degrees from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and practised as a lawyer for a few years. He then obtained his PhD degree from Paris-Sorbonne University in the 1970s. He followed his academic career on to England, earning a Diploma in Law at Oxford University in 1979 , after undertaking extension courses and research at Harvard University and at The Hague Academy ...

#15447

Makoto Itoh

#15458

Overall Influence

1936 - 2023 (87 years)

Makoto Itoh was a Japanese economist who was considered internationally to be one of the most important scholars of Karl Marx's theory of value. He taught at Kokugakuin University, Tokyo, and was a professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo.

#15448

Nannerl O. Keohane

Nannerl O. Keohane

#15459

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Nannerl "Nan" Overholser Keohane is an American political theorist and former president of Wellesley College and Duke University. Until September 2014, Keohane was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is now a professor in social sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where she is researching the theory and practice of leadership in democratic societies.

#15449

Nancy Cantor

#15460

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Nancy Ellen Cantor is an American academic administrator and the chancellor of Rutgers University-Newark, in Newark, New Jersey. A social psychologist, Cantor is recognized for her scholarly contributions to the understanding of how individuals perceive and think about their social worlds, pursue personal goals, and how they regulate their behavior to adapt to life's most challenging social environments. Previously, Cantor was the first woman chancellor at Syracuse University. Prior to that she was the first woman chancellor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Earlier, she had ...

#15450

John Patrick Diggins

John Patrick Diggins

#15461

Overall Influence

1935 - 2009 (74 years)

John Patrick Diggins was an American professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, Princeton University, and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He was the author/editor of more than a dozen books and thirty articles on widely varied topics in U.S. intellectual history.

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