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
#1551
Jerry Falwell
#1553
Overall Influence
1933 - 2007 (74 years)
Jerry Laymon Falwell Sr. was an American Independent Baptist pastor, televangelist, and conservative activist. He was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church, a megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia. He founded Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967, founded Liberty University in 1971, and co-founded the Moral Majority in 1979.
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Harold Wilson
#1554
Overall Influence
1916 - 1995 (79 years)
James Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, was a British statesman and Labour politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from October 1964 to June 1970 and again from March 1974 to April 1976. He was the Leader of the Labour Party from 1963 to 1976, and was a Member of Parliament from 1945 to 1983. Wilson is the only Labour leader to have formed administrations following four general elections.
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René Wellek
#1555
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
René Wellek was a Czech-American comparative literary critic. Like Erich Auerbach, Wellek was an eminent product of the Central European philological tradition and was known as a vastly erudite and "fair-minded critic of critics."
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Sophie Wilson
#1556
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Sophie Mary Wilson is a transgender English computer scientist, who helped design the BBC Micro and ARM architecture. Wilson first designed a microcomputer during a break from studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge. She subsequently joined Acorn Computers and was instrumental in designing the BBC Micro, including the BBC BASIC programming language whose development she led for the next 15 years. She first began designing the ARM reduced instruction set computer in 1983, which entered production two years later. It became popular in embedded systems and is now the most widely used processor architecture in smartphones.
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Stephen Walt
#1557
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Stephen Martin Walt is an American political scientist currently serving as the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. A member of the realist school of international relations, Walt has made important contributions to the theory of neorealism and has authored the balance of threat theory. Books that he has authored or coauthored include Origins of Alliances, Revolution and War, and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
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Hilda Ellis Davidson
#1558
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson was an English folklorist. She was a scholar at the University of Cambridge and The Folklore Society, and specialized in the study of Celtic and Germanic religion and folklore.
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Erwin Neher
#1559
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Erwin Neher is a German biophysicist, specializing in the field of cell physiology. For significant contribution in the field, in 1991 he was awarded, along with Bert Sakmann, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells".
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Paul Greengard
#1560
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Paul Greengard was an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the molecular and cellular function of neurons. In 2000, Greengard, Arvid Carlsson and Eric Kandel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system. He was Vincent Astor Professor at Rockefeller University, and served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Cure Alzheimer's Fund, as well as the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. He was married to artist Ursula von Rydingsvard.
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Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon
#1561
Overall Influence
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, was the younger daughter of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. She was the younger sister and only sibling of Queen Elizabeth II. Margaret was born when her parents were the Duke and Duchess of York, and she spent much of her childhood with them and her elder sister. Her life changed at the age of six, when her father ascended the British throne following the abdication of his brother Edward VIII. Margaret's sister became heir presumptive, with Margaret second in line to the throne. Her position in the line of succession diminished over the following decades as Elizabeth's children and grandchildren were born.
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Diego Maradona
#1562
Overall Influence
1960 - 2020 (60 years)
Diego Armando Maradona was an Argentine professional football player and manager. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the sport, he was one of the two joint winners of the FIFA Player of the 20th Century award.
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Norman Podhoretz
#1563
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Norman Podhoretz is an American magazine editor, writer, and conservative political commentator, who identifies his views as "paleo-neoconservative", but only "because been one for so long". He is a writer for Commentary magazine, and previously served as the publication's editor-in-chief from 1960 to 1995.
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Ben Goldacre
#1564
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Ben Michael Goldacre is a British physician, academic and science writer. He is the first Bennett Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford. He is a founder of the AllTrials campaign and OpenTrials to require open science practices in clinical trials.
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Tu Youyou
#1565
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Tu Youyou is a Chinese malariologist and pharmaceutical chemist. She discovered artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, used to treat malaria, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine, saving millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.
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Alistair Cockburn
#1566
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Alistair Cockburn is an American computer scientist, known as one of the initiators of the agile movement in software development. He cosigned the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Life and career Cockburn started studying the methods of object oriented software development for IBM. From 1994, he formed "Humans and Technology" in Salt Lake City. He obtained his degree in computer science at the Case Western Reserve University. In 2003, he received his PhD degree from the University of Oslo.
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Béla Bollobás
#1567
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Béla Bollobás FRS is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul Erdős since the age of 14.
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Paul Nitze
#1568
Overall Influence
1907 - 2004 (97 years)
Paul Henry Nitze was an American businessman and government official who served as United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department. He is best known for being the principal author of NSC 68 and the co-founder of Team B. He helped shape U.S. Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.
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John Eccles
#1569
Overall Influence
1903 - 1997 (94 years)
Sir John Carew Eccles was an Australian neurophysiologist and philosopher who won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the synapse. He shared the prize with Andrew Huxley and Alan Lloyd Hodgkin.
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Louise Arbour
#1570
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Louise Arbour, is a Canadian lawyer, prosecutor and jurist. Arbour was the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and the Court of Appeal for Ontario and a former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. From 2009 until 2014, she served as President and CEO of the International Crisis Group. She made history with the indictment of a sitting head of state, Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević, as well as the first prosecution of sexual assault as a crime against humanity. From March 2017 ...
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Leon Cooper
#1571
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Leon N. Cooper is an American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate who, with John Bardeen and John Robert Schrieffer, developed the BCS theory of superconductivity. His name is also associated with the Cooper pair and the BCM theory of synaptic plasticity.
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Milan Kundera
#1572
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Milan Kundera was a Czech and French novelist. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.
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Clifford Stoll
#1573
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Clifford Paul "Cliff" Stoll is an American astronomer, author and teacher. He is best known for his investigation in 1986, while working as a system administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, that led to the capture of hacker Markus Hess, and for Stoll's subsequent book The Cuckoo's Egg, in which he details the investigation.
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Daniel Quillen
#1574
Overall Influence
1940 - 2011 (71 years)
Daniel Gray "Dan" Quillen was an American mathematician. He is known for being the "prime architect" of higher algebraic K-theory, for which he was awarded the Cole Prize in 1975 and the Fields Medal in 1978.
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Tom M. Mitchell
#1575
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Tom Michael Mitchell is an American computer scientist and the Founders University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University . He is a founder and former Chair of the Machine Learning Department at CMU. Mitchell is known for his contributions to the advancement of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cognitive neuroscience and is the author of the textbook Machine Learning. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering since 2010. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow and past President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
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Lew Grade
#1576
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Lew Grade, Baron Grade was a Russian-born British media proprietor and impresario. Originally a dancer, and later a talent agent, Grade's interest in television production began in 1954 when he founded the Incorporated Television Company to distribute programmes, and following the success of The Adventures of Robin Hood decided to focus on bringing them to the American market. Grade had some success in this field with such series as Gerry Anderson's many Supermarionation series such as Thunderbirds, Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, and Jim Henson's The Muppet Show. Later, Grade invested in...
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Peter J. Denning
#1577
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Peter James Denning is an American computer scientist and writer. He is best known for pioneering work in virtual memory, especially for inventing the working-set model for program behavior, which addressed thrashing in operating systems and became the reference standard for all memory management policies. He is also known for his works on principles of operating systems, operational analysis of queueing network systems, design and implementation of CSNET, the ACM digital library, and codifying the great principles of computing. He has written numerous influential articles and books, includi...
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Malcolm Knowles
#1578
Overall Influence
1913 - 1997 (84 years)
Malcolm Shepherd Knowles was an American adult educator, famous for the adoption of the theory of andragogy—initially a term coined by the German teacher Alexander Kapp. Knowles is credited with being a fundamental influence in the development of the Humanist Learning Theory and the use of learner constructed contracts or plans to guide learning experiences.
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John Esposito
#1579
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John Louis Esposito is an American academic, professor of Middle Eastern and religious studies, and scholar of Islamic studies, who serves as Professor of Religion, International Affairs, and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He is also the founding director of the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim–Christian Understanding at Georgetown.
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Paul Watson
#1580
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Paul Franklin Watson is a Canadian-American conservation and environmental activist, who founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an anti-poaching and direct action group focused on marine conservation activism. The tactics used by Sea Shepherd have attracted opposition, with the group accused of eco-terrorism by both the Japanese government and Greenpeace. Watson is a citizen of Canada and the United States.
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Jack Vance
#1581
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
John Holbrook Vance was an American mystery, fantasy, and science fiction writer. Though most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance, he also wrote several mystery novels under pen names, including Ellery Queen.
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James R. Lewis
#1582
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
James R. Lewis was an American philosophy professor at Wuhan University. Lewis was an academic, scholar of religious studies, sociologist of religion, and writer, specializing in the academic study of new religious movements, astrology, and New Age.
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Michael D. Griffin
#1583
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Michael Douglas Griffin is an American physicist and aerospace engineer who served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering from 2018 to 2020. He previously served as Deputy of Technology for the Strategic Defense Initiative, and as Administrator of NASA from April 13, 2005, to January 20, 2009. As NASA Administrator Griffin oversaw such areas as private spaceflight, future human spaceflight to Mars, and the fate of the Hubble telescope.
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Gordon Brown
#1584
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
James Gordon Brown is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007. He was Member of Parliament for Dunfermline East from 1983 to 2005 and, following boundary changes, Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath from 2005 to 2015. Brown is both the most recent Labour Party politician and the most recent Scottish and non English politician to hold the office of prime minister.
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Yuri Matiyasevich
#1585
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Yuri Vladimirovich Matiyasevich, is a Russian mathematician and computer scientist. He is best known for his negative solution of Hilbert's tenth problem , which was presented in his doctoral thesis at LOMI .
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Rodney Dangerfield
#1586
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Jack Roy , better known by the pseudonym Rodney Dangerfield, was an American stand-up comedian, actor, screenwriter, and producer. He was known for his self-deprecating one-liner humor, his catchphrase "I don't get no respect!" and his monologues on that theme.
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Novak Djokovic
#1587
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Novak Djokovic is a Serbian professional tennis player who is currently ranked world No. 1 in singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals . Djokovic has been ranked No. 1 for a record total of 401 weeks in a record 13 different years, and finished as the year-end No. 1 a record eight times. Djokovic has won an all-time record 24 Grand Slam men's singles titles, including a record ten Australian Open titles. Overall, he has won 98 singles titles, including a record 71 Big Titles: 24 majors, a record 40 Masters, and a record seven ATP Finals. Djokovic is the only man in tennis history to be the reigning champion of all four majors at once across three different surfaces.
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James Cooley
#1588
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
James William Cooley was an American mathematician. Cooley received a B.A. degree in 1949 from Manhattan College, Bronx, NY, an M.A. degree in 1951 from Columbia University, New York, NY, and a Ph.D. degree in 1961 in applied mathematics from Columbia University. He was a programmer on John von Neumann's computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, from 1953 to 1956, where he notably programmed the Blackman–Tukey transformation.
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William Easterly
#1589
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#1588
Daniel Nathans
#1590
Overall Influence
1928 - 1999 (71 years)
Daniel Nathans was an American microbiologist. He shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of restriction enzymes and their application in restriction mapping. Early life and education Nathans was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the last of nine children born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Sarah and Samuel Nathans. During the Great Depression his father lost his small business and was unemployed for a long time.
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Ray Tomlinson
#1591
Overall Influence
1941 - 2016 (75 years)
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was an American computer programmer who implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system, the precursor to the Internet, in 1971; It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET. Previously, mail could be sent only to others who used the same computer. To achieve this, he used the @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine, a scheme which has been used in email addresses ever since. The Internet Hall of Fame in its account of his work commented "Tomlinson's email program brought about a com...
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Cleve Moler
#1592
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Cleve Barry Moler is an American mathematician and computer programmer specializing in numerical analysis. In the mid to late 1970s, he was one of the authors of LINPACK and EISPACK, Fortran libraries for numerical computing. He invented MATLAB, a numerical computing package, to give his students at the University of New Mexico easy access to these libraries without writing Fortran. In 1984, he co-founded MathWorks with Jack Little to commercialize this program.
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Subra Suresh
#1593
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Subra Suresh is an Indian-born American bioengineer, materials scientist, and academic. Between 2018 and 2022, he was the fourth President of Singapore's Nanyang Technological University , where he is also the inaugural Distinguished University Professor. He was the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT from 2007 to 2010 before being appointed as Director of the National Science Foundation by Barack Obama, where he served from 2010 to 2013. He was the president of Carnegie Mellon University from 201...
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Robert W. Floyd
#1594
Overall Influence
1936 - 2001 (65 years)
Robert W Floyd was a computer scientist. His contributions include the design of the Floyd–Warshall algorithm , which efficiently finds all shortest paths in a graph and his work on parsing; Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm for detecting cycles in a sequence was attributed to him as well. In one isolated paper he introduced the important concept of error diffusion for rendering images, also called Floyd–Steinberg dithering . He pioneered in the field of program verification using logical assertions with the 1967 paper Assigning Meanings to Programs. This was a contribution to what later became Hoare logic.
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Nadine Gordimer
#1595
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, recognized as a writer "who through her magnificent epic writing has ... been of very great benefit to humanity".
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Norman O. Brown
#1596
Overall Influence
1913 - 2002 (89 years)
Norman Oliver Brown was an American scholar, writer, and social philosopher. Beginning as a classical scholar, his later work branched into wide-ranging, erudite, and intellectually sophisticated considerations of history, literature, psychoanalysis, culture, and other topics. Brown advanced some novel theses and in his time achieved some general notability.
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Andre Gunder Frank
#1597
Overall Influence
1929 - 2005 (76 years)
Andre Gunder Frank was a German-American sociologist and economic historian who promoted dependency theory after 1970 and world-systems theory after 1984. He employed some Marxian concepts on political economy, but rejected Marx's stages of history, and economic history generally.
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Raymond Firth
#1598
Overall Influence
1901 - 2002 (101 years)
Sir Raymond William Firth was an ethnologist from New Zealand. As a result of Firth's ethnographic work, actual behaviour of societies is separated from the idealized rules of behaviour within the particular society . He was a long serving professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, and is considered to have singlehandedly created a form of British economic anthropology.
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Ali Javan
#1599
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Ali Javan ; December 26, 1926 – September 12, 2016 Life and career Ali Javan was born in Tehran to Azeri parents from Tabriz . He attended a school conducted by Zoroastrians. He graduated from Alborz High School, and started his university studies at the School of Science at the University of Tehran for a year. During a visit to New York in 1948, he attended several graduate courses at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in 1954 under his thesis advisor Charles Townes without having received a bachelor's or master's degree. In 1955, Javan held a position as a Post Doctoral in the Radiat...
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Colonel Tom Parker
#1600
Overall Influence
1909 - 1997 (88 years)
Thomas Andrew Parker , commonly known as Colonel Parker, was a musical entrepreneur, best known for being Elvis Presley's manager. Parker was born in the Netherlands and entered the United States illegally when he was 20 years old. He adopted a new name and claimed to have been born in the U.S. With a background working in carnivals, Parker moved into music promotion in 1938, working with one of the first popular crooners, Gene Austin, and then country music singers Eddy Arnold, Hank Snow, and Tommy Sands. He also assisted Jimmie Davis's campaign to become governor of Louisiana; as a reward, D...
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Toril Moi
#1601
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Philosophy and Theatre Studies at Duke University. Moi is also the Director of the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke. As an undergraduate, she attended University of Bergen, where she studied in the Literature Department. Previously she held positions as a lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and as Director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Bergen, Norway. She lived in Oxford, United Kingdom from 1979 to 1989. Moi lives in North Carolina. She wor...
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Bill McKibben
#1602
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
William Ernest McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of the climate campaign group 350.org. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature , about climate change, and Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? , about the state of the environmental challenges facing humanity and future prospects.
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