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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List of the most influential people

#15601

Andrew Herbert

#15612

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Andrew James Herbert, OBE, FREng is a British computer scientist, formerly Chairman of Microsoft Research, for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Biography Herbert received a bachelor's of science degree in computational science from the Leeds University in 1975, and a PhD degree in computer science from Cambridge University in 1978 for his work on "A Microprogrammed Operating System Kernel".

#15602

R. W. Southern

#15613

Overall Influence

1912 - 2001 (89 years)

Sir Richard William Southern , who published under the name R. W. Southern, was a noted English medieval historian based at the University of Oxford. Biography Southern was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 8 February 1912, and educated at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in history. At Oxford, Southern's mentors were Sir Maurice Powicke and Vivian Hunter Galbraith. He was a fellow of Balliol from 1937 to 1961 , Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1961 to 1969, and president of St John's College, Oxford, from 1969 to 1981.

#15603

Dolf Zillmann

#15614

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Dolf Zillmann is dean emeritus, and professor of information sciences, communication and psychology at the University of Alabama . Zillmann predominantly conducted research in media psychology, a branch of psychology focused on the effects of media consumption on human affect, developing and expanding a range of theories within media psychology and communication. His work centred on the relation between aggression, emotion, and arousal through media consumption, predominantly in pornography and violent genres of movie and television. His research also includes the effects of music consumption...

#15604

Jaan Einasto

#15615

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Jaan Einasto is an Estonian astrophysicist and one of the discoverers of the large-scale structure of the Universe. Born Jaan Eisenschmidt in Tartu, the name "Einasto" is an anagram of "Estonia" . He attended the University of Tartu, where he received the Ph.D. equivalent in 1955 and a senior research doctorate in 1972. From 1952, he has worked as a scientist at the Tartu Observatory Head of the Department of Cosmology; from 1992–1995, he was Professor of Cosmology at the University of Tartu. For a long time, he was Head of the Division of Astronomy and Physics of the Estonian Academy of Sciences in Tallinn.

#15605

Kurt Krenn

#15616

Overall Influence

1936 - 2014 (78 years)

Kurt Krenn was an Austrian Roman Catholic prelate and Bishop of Sankt Pölten, near Vienna, from 1991 to 2004. Childhood and youth Kurt Krenn was born in Rannariedl, in the municipality of Neustift im Mühlkreis in Upper Austria, the second of six children of Karl and Leopoldine Krenn. Krenn's parents had left the church in 1941. Two of their children were unbaptized at the end of World War II. Krenn's father was a teacher and was killed in World War II. After the war, the family rejoined the Catholic Church. Krenn attended elementary school in Oberkappel and graduated from high school at the S...

#15606

Duff McKagan

#15617

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Michael Andrew "Duff" McKagan is an American musician. He played bass in the hard rock band Guns N' Roses for twelve years, with whom he achieved worldwide success in the late 1980s and early 1990s. McKagan rejoined the band in 2016, following their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

#15607

Sadiq Khan

#15618

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Sadiq Aman Khan is a British politician serving as Mayor of London since 2016. He was previously Member of Parliament for Tooting from 2005 until 2016. A member of the Labour Party, Khan is on the party's soft left and has been ideologically characterised as a social democrat.

#15608

Frances Stewart

#15619

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Frances Julia Stewart is professor emeritus of development economics and director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity , University of Oxford. A pre-eminent development economist, she was named one of fifty outstanding technological leaders for 2003 by Scientific American. She was president of the Human Development and Capability Association from 2008 to 2010.

#15609

Linda Lear

#15620

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Linda Jane Lear is an American historian of science and biographer. Life and career A native of Pittsburgh, Lear received her A.B. from Connecticut College in 1962, following with an A.M. from Columbia University in 1964; she received a Ph.D. in history from George Washington University in 1974. From 1963 until 1965 she chaired the history department of the Vail Deane School, and from 1965 until 1968 held a similar position at the National Cathedral School. An assistant professor at New Mexico State University from 1974 until 1976, she next worked at the American Association of Retired Persons, remaining there until 1978.

#15610

Michael Fortescue

#15621

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Michael David Fortescue is a British-born linguist specializing in Arctic and native North American languages, including Kalaallisut, Inuktun, Chukchi and Nitinaht. Fortescue is known for his reconstructions of the Eskimo–Aleut, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Nivkh, and Wakashan proto-languages.

#15611

Paul Bew

#15622

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Paul Anthony Elliott Bew, Baron Bew , is a British historian from Northern Ireland and a life peer. He has worked at Queen's University Belfast since 1979, and is currently Professor of Irish Politics, a position he has held since 1991.

#15612

David de Kretser

#15623

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

David Morritz de Kretser, is an Australian medical researcher who served as the 27th Governor of Victoria, from 2006 to 2011. Early life and medical career David de Kretser was born in British Ceylon . He was educated at St. Paul's Milagiriya and Royal College Primary, before migrating to Australia with his family when he was aged nine. He studied at Camberwell Grammar School, Melbourne , received his Bachelors of Medicine and Surgery degrees from the University of Melbourne in 1962, and his Doctor of Medicine degree from Monash University in 1969.

#15613

Klaus Hepp

#15624

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Klaus Hepp is a German-born Swiss theoretical physicist working mainly in quantum field theory. Hepp studied mathematics and physics at Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität in Münster and at the Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule in Zurich, where, in 1962, with Res Jost as thesis first advisor and Markus Fierz as thesis second advisor, he received a doctorate for the thesis and at ETH in 1963 attained the rank of Privatdozent. From 1966 until his retirement in 2002 he was professor of theoretical physics there. From 1964 to 1966 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He...

#15614

Cyrus H. Gordon

#15625

Overall Influence

1908 - 2001 (93 years)

Cyrus Herzl Gordon was an American scholar of Near Eastern cultures and ancient languages. Biography Gordon was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Lithuanian emigrant and physician Benjamin Gordon. He was raised in an upper class Jewish family with a particular emphasis on devotion to Jewish learning, rational thinking, as well as an openness to secular learning. As a scholar he followed an education track typical of elite European philological scholars: Gordon began studying Hebrew at age five and became interested in both Greek and Latin as a young child.

#15615

Rafael Sorkin

#15626

Overall Influence

Rafael Dolnick Sorkin is an American physicist. He is professor emeritus of physics at Syracuse University and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is best known as initiator and main proponent of the causal sets approach to quantum gravity.

#15616

Mick McCarthy

#15627

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Michael Joseph McCarthy is a professional football manager, pundit and former player. He was most recently the head coach of Blackpool. McCarthy began his playing career at Barnsley in 1977, and he later had spells at Manchester City, Celtic, Lyon, and finally Millwall, retiring in 1992. Born and raised in England, he represented the Republic of Ireland, for whom he earned 57 caps and played at UEFA Euro 1988 and the 1990 FIFA World Cup.

#15617

Jerry Saltzer

#15628

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Jerome Howard "Jerry" Saltzer is an American computer scientist. Career Jerry Saltzer received an ScD in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1966. His dissertation 'Traffic Control in a Multiplexed System was advised by Fernando Corbató. In 1966, he joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

#15618

Connie Francis

#15629

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero , known professionally as Connie Francis, is an American pop singer, actress, and top-charting female vocalist of the late 1950s and early 1960s. She is estimated to have sold more than 100 million records worldwide.

#15619

Joseph Kerman

#15630

Overall Influence

1924 - 2014 (90 years)

Joseph Wilfred Kerman was an American musicologist and music critic. Among the leading musicologists of his generation, his 1985 book Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology was described by Philip Brett in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as "a defining moment in the field". He was Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley.

#15620

Bobby Hull

#15631

Overall Influence

1939 - 2023 (84 years)

Robert Marvin Hull was a Canadian professional ice hockey player who is widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time. His blonde hair, skating speed, end-to-end rushes, and ability to shoot the puck at very high velocity all earned him the nickname "the Golden Jet". His talents were such that an opposing player was often assigned just to shadow him.

#15621

Jim Coplien

#15632

Overall Influence

James O. Coplien, also known as Cope, is a writer, lecturer, and researcher in the field of computer science. He held the 2003–4 Vloeberghs Leerstoel at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and has been a visiting professor at University of Manchester.

#15622

Juraj Hromkovič

Juraj Hromkovič

#15633

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Juraj Hromkovič is a Slovak Computer Scientist and Professor at ETH Zürich. He is the author of numerous monographs and scientific publications in the field of algorithmics, computational complexity theory, and randomization.

#15623

Jorge Nocedal

#15634

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Jorge Nocedal is an applied mathematician, computer scientist and the Walter P. Murphy professor at Northwestern University who in 2017 received the John Von Neumann Theory Prize. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2020.

#15624

Camilo José Cela Conde

#15635

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Camilo José Arcadio Cela Conde, 2nd Marquess of Iria Flavia , is a Spanish writer. He is the son of Nobel Prize winning writer Camilo José Cela and is currently a Professor of Philosophy of law, Morality and Politics at the University of the Balearic Islands.

#15625

Blake Clark

#15636

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Blake Clark is an American actor and stand-up comedian. He is best known as Chet Hunter on Boy Meets World and Harry "The Hardware Store Guy" on Home Improvement. Clark has voiced Slinky Dog in the Toy Story franchise starting with 2008's Toy Story: The Musical, having inherited the role from his friend Jim Varney, who died of lung cancer in 2000.

#15626

Klaus-Robert Müller

#15637

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Klaus-Robert Müller is a German computer scientist and physicist, most noted for his work in machine learning and brain–computer interfaces. Career Klaus-Robert Müller received his Diplom in mathematical physics and PhD in theoretical computer science from the University of Karlsruhe. Following his Ph.D. he went to Berlin as a postdoctoral fellow at GMD Berlin , where he started building up the Intelligent Data Analysis group.

#15627

Peter Davies

#15638

Overall Influence

1927 - 2020 (93 years)

Peter N. Davies was a British economic historian with interests in the port of Liverpool, sea-based trade with West Africa, the Canary Islands and Japan, the international fruit trade and the military history of the River Kwai campaign in World War II. He was an Emeritus Professor in the School of History at the University of Liverpool, England.

#15628

Sharadchandra Shankar Shrikhande

#15639

Overall Influence

1917 - 2020 (103 years)

Sharadchandra Shankar Shrikhande was an Indian mathematician with notable achievements in combinatorial mathematics. He was notable for his breakthrough work along with R. C. Bose and E. T. Parker in their disproof of the famous conjecture made by Leonhard Euler dated 1782 that there do not exist two mutually orthogonal latin squares of order 4n + 2 for any n. Shrikhande's specialties were combinatorics and statistical designs. The Shrikhande graph is used in statistical design.

#15629

Rinus Michels

#15640

Overall Influence

1928 - 2005 (77 years)

Marinus Jacobus Hendricus Michels was a Dutch football player and coach. He played his entire career for AFC Ajax, which he later managed, and played for and later managed the Netherlands national team for four spells. He is regarded as one of the greatest managers of all-time.

#15630

Otto Kandler

#15641

Overall Influence

1920 - 2017 (97 years)

Otto Kandler was a German botanist and microbiologist. Until his retirement in 1986 he was professor of botany at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His most important research topics were photosynthesis, plant carbohydrate metabolism, analysis of the structure of bacterial cell walls , the systematics of Lactobacillus, and the chemotaxonomy of plants and microorganisms. He presented the first experimental evidence for the existence of photophosphorylation in vivo. His discovery of the basic differences between the cell walls of bacteria and archaea convinced him that archaea represent an autonomous group of organisms distinct from bacteria.

#15631

Terry Teachout

#15642

Overall Influence

1956 - 2022 (66 years)

Terrance Alan Teachout was an American author, critic, biographer, playwright, stage director, and librettist. He was the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the author of "Sightings", a column about the arts in the U.S. that was published biweekly in The Wall Street Journal. He weblogged at About Last Night and wrote about the arts for many other magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times and National Review. He was a co-host on Three on the Aisle, a monthly podcast about theater in the United States, hosted by American Theatre magazine...

#15632

Sture Allén

#15643

Overall Influence

1928 - 2022 (94 years)

Sture Allén was a Swedish professor of computational linguistics at the University of Gothenburg, who was the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy between 1986 and 1999. Born in Gothenburg, he was elected to chair 3 of the Swedish Academy in 1980. He was also a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters.

#15633

Dennis Brutus

#15644

Overall Influence

1924 - 2009 (85 years)

Dennis Vincent Brutus was a South African activist, educator, journalist and poet best known for his campaign to have South Africa banned from the Olympic Games due to its racial policy of apartheid.

#15634

Brian Moriarty

#15645

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Brian Moriarty is an American video game developer who authored three of the original Infocom interactive fiction titles, Wishbringer , Trinity , and Beyond Zork , as well as Loom for LucasArts. Career Prior to joining Infocom, Moriarty was a Technical Editor for the Atari 8-bit computer magazine ANALOG Computing. He wrote two text adventures for ANALOG: Adventure in the 5th Dimension and Crash Dive! . He also worked on Tachyon , an adaptation of Atari's Quantum arcade game, which was previewed but never published.

#15635

Russell Earl Marker

#15646

Overall Influence

1902 - 1995 (93 years)

Russell Earl Marker was an American chemist who invented the octane rating system when he was working at the Ethyl Corporation. Later in his career, he went on to found a steroid industry in Mexico when he successfully made semisynthetic progesterone from chemical constituents found in Mexican yams in a process known as Marker degradation. This eventually led to the development at Syntex of the combined oral contraceptive pill and synthetic cortisone – and to the development of the Mexican barbasco trade.

#15636

Berti Vogts

#15647

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Hans-Hubert "Berti" Vogts is a German former professional footballer who played as a defender. He played for Borussia Mönchengladbach in the Bundesliga his whole professional club career and won the FIFA World Cup with West Germany in 1974. He later managed the national teams of Germany , Scotland, Nigeria and Azerbaijan.

#15637

Juan Villoro

#15648

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Juan Villoro is a Mexican writer and journalist and the son of philosopher Luis Villoro. He has been well known among intellectual circles in Mexico, Latin America and Spain for years, but his success among a wider readership has grown since receiving the Herralde Prize for his novel El testigo.

#15638

Mujahid Kamran

#15649

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Syed Mujahid Kamran is a Pakistani theoretical physicist and a former vice-chancellor of the University of the Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan. He is a professor of Physics and previously served as the chairman of the Physics Department at the University of the Punjab and . From 2004–2007, he served as the dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the same institution. In January 2008, he was appointed as vice-chancellor of the Punjab University by the Governor of Punjab, Lieutenant General Khalid Maqbool, on the recommendation of a search committee.

#15639

Anthony Oettinger

Anthony Oettinger

#15650

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (97 years)

Anthony "Tony" Gervin Oettinger was a German-born American linguist and computer scientist best known for his work on information resources policy. Oettinger coined the term “compunications” in the late 1970s to describe the combination of computer and telecommunications technologies that would take place as digital technologies replaced analog forms. In 1973 he co-founded, with John LeGates, the Program on Information Resources Policy at Harvard University. He served as a consultant to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and the National Security Council and NASA’s Apollo moon-landing program.

#15640

Alexander, Crown Prince of Yugoslavia

#15651

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Alexander, Crown Prince of Yugoslavia , is the head of the House of Karađorđević, the former royal house of the defunct Kingdom of Yugoslavia and its predecessor the Kingdom of Serbia. Alexander is the only child of King Peter II and his wife, Princess Alexandra of Greece and Denmark. He held the position of crown prince in the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia for the first four-and-a-half months of his life, until the declaration of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia later in November 1945, when the monarchy was abolished. In public he claims the crowned royal title of "Alexander II Kar...

#15641

Melba Pattillo Beals

Melba Pattillo Beals

#15652

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Melba Joy Patillo Beals is an American journalist and educator who was a member of the Little Rock Nine, a group of black students who were the first to racially integrate Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

#15642

Christiane Floyd

Christiane Floyd

#15653

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Christiane Floyd is an Austrian computer scientist. In 1978, she became the first female professor of computer science in Germany, and was a pioneer of evolutionary participatory software design—a precursor to open-source software development.

#15643

Tracy Hall

#15654

Overall Influence

1919 - 2008 (89 years)

Howard Tracy Hall was an American physical chemist and one of the early pioneers in the research of synthetic diamonds, using a press of his own design. Early life Howard Tracy Hall was born in Ogden, Utah in 1919. He often used the name H. Tracy Hall or, simply, Tracy Hall. He was a descendant of Mormon pioneers and grew up on a farm in Marriott, Utah. When still in the fourth grade, he announced his intention to work for General Electric. Hall attended Weber College for two years, and married Ida-Rose Langford in 1941. He went to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he received his BSc in 1942 and his MSc in the following year.

#15644

Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl

#15655

Overall Influence

1902 - 2003 (101 years)

Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl was a German director, producer, screenwriter, editor, photographer and actress known for producing Nazi propaganda. A talented swimmer and an artist, Riefenstahl became interested in dancing during her childhood, taking lessons and performing across Europe. After seeing a promotional poster for the 1924 film Mountain of Destiny, she was inspired to move into acting and between 1925 and 1929 starred in five successful motion pictures. Riefenstahl became one of the few women in Germany to direct a film during the Weimar era when, in 1932, she decided to try dir...

#15645

Lester Maddox

#15656

Overall Influence

1915 - 2003 (88 years)

Lester Garfield Maddox Sr. was an American politician who served as the 75th governor of Georgia from 1967 to 1971. A populist Southern Democrat, Maddox came to prominence as a staunch segregationist when he refused to serve black customers in his Atlanta restaurant, the Pickrick, in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As he was ineligible to run for a second consecutive gubernatorial term, he sought and won election as lieutenant governor, serving alongside his successor as governor, Jimmy Carter.

#15646

Soonja Choi

#15657

Overall Influence

Soonja Choi is an Austria-based linguist from South Korea. She specializes in language acquisition, semantics, and the linguistics of Korean. Biography Choi initially studied French language and literature, receiving her BA at Sacred Heart Women's College in Seoul in 1972 and her MA at Seoul National University in 1976. After this she went to study in France, and received a master’s degree in applied linguistics from Paris-Sorbonne University in 1980. Her PhD in linguistics was awarded in 1986 by SUNY Buffalo.

#15647

Jean Coulomb

#15658

Overall Influence

1904 - 1999 (95 years)

Jean Coulomb was a French geophysicist and mathematician, and one of the early members of the Bourbaki group of mathematicians. Biography From April 1935 to 1937, he was a member of the Bourbaki group of mathematicians.

#15648

Patrick Cramer

#15659

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Patrick Cramer is a German chemist, structural biologist, and molecular systems biologist. In 2020, he was honoured to be an international member of the National Academy of Sciences. He became president of the Max Planck Society in June 2023.

#15649

Mary Alice Williams

#15660

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Mary Alice Williams is a pioneering journalist and broadcast executive who broke gender barriers by becoming the first female Prime Time anchor of a network news division and first woman to hold the rank of Vice President of a news division. Her work and visibility put her in the vanguard, whether at the birth of CNN or later at the dawn of the revolution in information technology. In addition to CNN, she has also served as anchor at many prominent networks, including PBS, Discovery, and NBC.

#15650

Beatrix of the Netherlands

Beatrix of the Netherlands

#15661

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Beatrix is a member of the Dutch royal house who reigned as Queen of the Netherlands from 1980 until her abdication in 2013. Beatrix is the eldest daughter of Queen Juliana and her husband, Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld. Upon her mother's accession in 1948, she became heir presumptive. Beatrix attended a public primary school in Canada during World War II, and then finished her primary and secondary education in the Netherlands in the post-war period. In 1961, she received her law degree from Leiden University. In 1966, Beatrix married Claus von Amsberg, a German diplomat, with whom she had three children.

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