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).
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List of the most influential people
#15701
Richard Rosecrance
#15712
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Richard Newton Rosecrance is an American political scientist. His research and teaching is focused on international relations, in particular the link between economics and international relations. His research and writing has also touched upon the study of history. Rosecrance is considered an adherent of liberal international relations theory.
Go to Profile#15702
Aaron Friedberg
#15713
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Aaron Louis Friedberg is an American political scientist. He served from 2003 to 2005 in the office of the Vice President of the United States as deputy assistant for national-security affairs and director of policy planning.
Go to Profile#15703
Dennis Lambert
#15714
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Dennis Earle Lambert is an American musician, songwriter and record producer. Career Lambert began his music career in 1960 when he signed to Capitol Records as a recording artist. By the mid-1960s, he was writing and producing for other artists. Among his earliest work with his first main collaborator Lou Courtney were songs for Freddie & the Dreamers, Lorraine Ellison, Jerry Butler and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Go to Profile#15704
Thomas McEvilley
#15715
Overall Influence
1939 - 2013 (74 years)
Thomas McEvilley was an American art critic, poet, novelist, and scholar. He was a Distinguished Lecturer in Art History at Rice University and founder and former chair of the Department of Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Go to Profile#15705
David Dacko
#15716
Overall Influence
1930 - 2003 (73 years)
David Dacko was a Central African politician who served as the first President of the Central African Republic from 14 August 1960 to 1 January 1966 and as the third President of the Central African Republic from 21 September 1979 to 1 September 1981. He also served as Prime Minister of the Central African Republic from 1 May 1959 to 14 August 1960. After his second removal from power in a coup d'état led by General André Kolingba, he pursued an active career as an opposition politician and presidential candidate with many loyal supporters; Dacko was an important political figure in the count...
Go to Profile#15706
Karen Ter-Martirosian
#15717
Overall Influence
1922 - 2005 (83 years)
Karen Avetovich Ter-Martirosyan was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist of Armenian descent. He is known for his contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory and the author of several hundred articles in his area.
Go to Profile#15707
He Weifang
#15718
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
He Weifang is a former professor at Peking University of China and an activist striving to reform the Chinese judicial system, who has argued that the Chinese Communist Party is an unregistered and therefore an illegal organization in China.
Go to Profile#15708
Walter Smith
#15719
Overall Influence
1948 - 2021 (73 years)
Walter Ferguson Smith was a Scottish football player, manager and director, primarily associated with his two spells as manager of Glasgow club Rangers. A defender, Smith's playing career consisted of two spells with Dundee United, split by a short time at Dumbarton. A pelvic injury caused his retirement from playing and Smith moved into coaching at Dundee United, working for manager Jim McLean. Smith also took charge of the Scotland under-18 and under-21 teams, and assisted Scotland manager Alex Ferguson at the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico, after it had been announced that he would be movi...
Go to Profile#15709
Anthony Monaco
#15720
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Anthony P. Monaco is an American geneticist and university administrator. He was the 13th president of Tufts University from 2011 to 2023. Life Monaco was born in Wilmington, Delaware and graduated from the Salesianum School in 1977. He earned an undergraduate degree as an independent concentrator in neuroscience and behavior at Princeton University in 1981 and played goalie on their men's water polo team.
Go to Profile#15710
François Hartog
#15721
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
François Hartog is a French historian. He is noted for his "regimes of historicity" theory as well as his analyses of presentism and the contemporary experience of time. Hartog is also an academic and author of several works including The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History.
Go to Profile#15711
Rudolph Leibel
#15722
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Rudolph Leibel is the Christopher J. Murphy Professor of Diabetes Research, Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, and Director of the Division of Molecular Genetics in the Department of Pediatrics. He is also co-director of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center and executive director of the Russell and Angelica Berrie Program in Cellular Therapy, Co-director of the New York Obesity Research Center and the Columbia University Diabetes and Endocrinology Research Center.
Go to Profile#15712
Kazuo Hiramatsu
#15723
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
Kazuo Hiramatsu was a Japanese scholar of international accounting, who served as the 17th President of Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan from 2002 to 2008. He graduated from Kwansei Gakuin University and received his Ph.D. in International Accounting. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Washington in 1977-1979, and a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow in 1991. His research interests are in financial accounting and international accounting.
Go to Profile#15713
Bahram Akasheh
#15724
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Bahram Akasheh is an Iranian geophysicist and seismologist and Professor of Geophysics at University of Tehran. He is considered one of Iran's leading experts on earthquakes and seismic activity. Dr. Akasheh has done much work in Iran to encourage scientific research and study into earthquakes and possible mitigation measures as a response. He is a strong advocate of urban development which is coordinated with the tight regulations imposed in the 1989 seismic code in Iran by the International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology. He has also expressed a disagreement and disappro...
Go to Profile#15714
Naomi Shihab Nye
#15725
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Naomi Shihab Nye is an Arab American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poetry at the age of six. In total, she has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels. Nye received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in honor of her entire body of work as a writer, and in 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term.
Go to Profile#15715
William J. Mitchell
#15726
Overall Influence
1944 - 2010 (66 years)
William John Mitchell was an Australian-born author, educator, architect and urban designer, best known for leading the integration of architectural and related design arts practice with computing and other technologies.
Go to Profile#15716
Louis Witten
#15727
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (105 years)
Louis Witten is an American theoretical physicist and the father of the physicist Edward Witten. Witten's research has centered on classical gravitation, including the discovery of certain exact electrovacuum solutions to the Einstein field equation. He edited a book which contains papers by contributors such as ADM , Choquet-Bruhat, Ehlers and Kundt, Goldberg, and Pirani which are used by researchers after the passage of more than 40 years. His most recent paper was published in 2020.
Go to Profile#15717
Jamal Badawi
#15728
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Jamal A. Badawi is an Egyptian-Canadian author, preacher and speaker on Islam. Life Badawi completed his undergraduate studies at Ain Shams University in Cairo. He left for the United States in the 1960s and completed his Masters and doctorate, both in the department of Business Administration, at Indiana University Bloomington. He has been serving as a volunteer imam of the local Muslim community in the Halifax Regional Municipality since 1970. He cites Hassan al-Banna as an influence.
Go to Profile#15718
Javad Tabatabai
#15729
Overall Influence
1945 - 2023 (78 years)
Seyyed Javad Tabatabai was an Iranian philosopher and political scientist. He was Professor and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Tehran. Biography Tabatabai, an Iranian Azeri, was born on 14 December 1945 in Tabriz, Iran. His father was a merchant in Bazaar of Tabriz. After pursuing studies in theology, law and philosophy in Tabriz and Tehran, he earned his PhD in political philosophy from the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, with a dissertation on Hegel's political philosophy.
Go to Profile#15719
Ric Holt
#15730
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Richard Craig Holt was an American-Canadian computer scientist. Early life Holt was born on in 1941 in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to Vashti Young and C.P. Holt, but later moved to Toronto, Canada. As a teenager, he competed in track and field. He graduated from Cornell University in 1964 in engineering physics. He spent a year in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, and then worked for IBM. He went back to Cornell and obtained a PhD in computer science in 1970 under Alan Shaw.
Go to Profile#15720
Glenn Frey
#15731
Overall Influence
1948 - 2016 (68 years)
Glenn Lewis Frey was an American musician. He was a founding member of the rock band Eagles. Frey was the co-lead singer and frontman for the Eagles, roles he came to share with fellow member Don Henley, with whom he wrote most of the Eagles' material. Frey played guitar and keyboards as well as singing lead vocals on songs such as "Take It Easy", "Peaceful Easy Feeling", "Tequila Sunrise", "Already Gone", "James Dean", "Lyin' Eyes", "New Kid in Town", and "Heartache Tonight".
Go to Profile#15721
Miloš Forman
#15732
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Jan Tomáš "Miloš" Forman was a Czech-American film director, screenwriter, actor, and professor who rose to fame in his native Czechoslovakia before emigrating to the United States in 1968. Throughout Forman's career he won two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, three Golden Globe Awards, a Golden Bear, a César Award, and the Czech Lion.
Go to Profile#15722
Jon Lord
#15733
Overall Influence
1941 - 2012 (71 years)
John Douglas Lord was an English keyboardist and composer. In 1968, Lord co-founded the hard rock band Deep Purple, and he became regarded as its leader in the early years. Lord performed on most of the band's most popular songs; he and drummer Ian Paice were the only continuous members in the band between 1968 and 1976, and also from when it was re-established in 1984 until Lord's retirement in 2002. He also spent time in the bands Whitesnake, Paice Ashton Lord, the Artwoods, the Flower Pot Men and Santa Barbara Machine Head.
Go to Profile#15723
Edward Mendelson
#15734
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Edward Mendelson is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden and the author or editor of several books about Auden's work, including Early Auden and Later Auden . He is also the author of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life , about nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, and Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers .
Go to Profile#15724
Peter Brooks
#15735
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Peter Preston Brooks is an American literary theorist who is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale University and Andrew W. Mellon Scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He has been Professor in the Department of English and School of Law at the University of Virginia. Among his many accomplishments is the founding of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2003. Brooks is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work cuts across French and English literature, law, and psychoanalysis.
Go to Profile#15725
William John Cox
#15736
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
William John "Billy Jack" Cox is an American public interest lawyer and author. Biography Early career Employed in 1962 by the El Cajon Police Department, he attended the nearby San Diego Police Department Academy. In 1968, Cox transferred to the Los Angeles Police Department where he graduated from the Police Academy. He received an associate degree in Police Administration from Rio Hondo College.
Go to Profile#15726
Gary Saul Morson
#15737
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Gary Saul Morson is an American literary critic and Slavist. He is particularly known for his scholarly work on the great Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Morson is Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Prior to this he was chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania for many years.
Go to Profile#15727
Robert Gallucci
#15738
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert L. Gallucci is an American academic and diplomat, who formerly worked as president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He previously served as dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, from 1996 to June 2009. Prior to his appointment in 1996, for over two decades he had served in various governmental and international agencies, including the Department of State and the United Nations.
Go to Profile#15728
Nobutaka Hirokawa
#15739
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Nobutaka Hirokawa is a Japanese neuroscientist and cell biologist famous for research on the kinesin superfamily of motor proteins. He has been President and Chair of the Board of Trustees at the Human Frontier Science Program since 2012.
Go to Profile#15729
Nicole Marthe Le Douarin
#15740
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Nicole Marthe Le Douarin is a developmental biologist known for her studies of chimeras, which have led to critical insights regarding higher animal nervous and immune systems. Le Douarin invented an embryo manipulation technology to produce chimeric embryos, from chicken and quails. Her research has shed light on the development of higher animal nervous and immune systems. She showed that precursor cells within the neural crest were multipotent. Her technique has also permitted her to shed light on the development of the blood and immune systems. Her work on antero-posterior patterning of th...
Go to Profile#15730
Nicholas Pegg
#15741
Overall Influence
Nicholas Pegg is a British actor, writer and director. Educated at Nottingham High School and graduating with a Master of Arts in English Literature from the University of Exeter, Pegg subsequently trained at the Guildford School of Acting.
Go to Profile#15731
Alexandre Quintanilha
#15742
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Alexandre Tiedtke Quintanilha, GOSE is a Portuguese scientist, former director of the Instituto de Biologia Molecular e Celular of the University of Porto and Professor at ICBAS - Abel Salazar Institute of Biomedical Sciences.
Go to Profile#15732
Hilary Rose
#15743
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Hilary Ann Rose is a British sociologist. Biography During World War II, she was evacuated from London with her mother and brother. In 1940, they were sent to Weymouth, Dorset. The same year, the French army was defeated, and many evacuated troops took shelter in Weymouth. Exhausted soldiers slept on the pavements and the luckier ones on straw in the requisitioned schools. The children, with no school to attend, mostly watched the war, fascinated but sometimes terrified. The authorities soon despatched the evacuees to safer places. Eventually, her mother found a home in Framlingham, her family home.
Go to Profile#15733
János Pach
#15744
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
János Pach is a mathematician and computer scientist working in the fields of combinatorics and discrete and computational geometry. Biography Pach was born and grew up in Hungary. He comes from a noted academic family: his father, was a well-known historian, and his mother Klára was a university mathematics teacher; his maternal aunt Vera T. Sós and her husband Pál Turán are two of the best-known Hungarian mathematicians.
Go to Profile#15734
David Daube
#15745
Overall Influence
1909 - 1999 (90 years)
David Daube was the twentieth century's preeminent scholar of ancient law. He combined a familiarity with many legal systems, particularly Roman law and biblical law, with an expertise in Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian literature, and used literary, religious, and legal texts to illuminate each other and, among other things, to "transform the position of Roman law" and to launch a "revolution" or "near revolution" in New Testament studies.
Go to Profile#15735
George Mikan
#15746
Overall Influence
1924 - 2005 (81 years)
George Lawrence Mikan Jr. , nicknamed "Mr. Basketball", was an American professional basketball player for the Chicago American Gears of the National Basketball League and the Minneapolis Lakers of the NBL, the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball Association . Invariably playing with thick, round spectacles, the , Mikan was one of the pioneers of professional basketball. Through his size and play, he redefined basketball as a game dominated in his day by "big men". His prolific rebounding, shot blocking, and ability to shoot over smaller defenders with his ambidextrous hook shot all helped to change the game.
Go to Profile#15736
Fred Luthans
#15747
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Fred Luthans is a management professor specializing in organizational behavior. He is the University and George Holmes Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Go to Profile#15737
Shiraz Minwalla
#15748
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Shiraz Naval Minwalla is an Indian theoretical physicist and string theorist. He is a faculty member in the Department of Theoretical Physics at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. Prior to his present position, Minwalla was a Harvard Junior Fellow and subsequently an assistant professor at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#15738
Reggie Bush
#15749
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Reginald Alfred Bush Jr. is an American former football running back who was an on-air college football analyst for Fox Sports. He played college football at USC, where he earned consensus All-American honors twice and won the Heisman Trophy as the most outstanding player in the nation. Bush is widely regarded as one of the greatest college football players of all-time. He was selected by the New Orleans Saints second overall in the 2006 NFL Draft. While with the Saints, Bush was named an All-Pro punt returner in 2008 and won Super Bowl XLIV in 2010 over the Indianapolis Colts. He also played...
Go to Profile#15739
Dianna Cowern
#15750
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Dianna Leilani Cowern is an American science communicator. She is a YouTuber; she uploads videos to her YouTube channel Physics Girl explaining various physical phenomena. She worked in partnership with the PBS Digital Studios from 2015 until 2020, when she discontinued her partnership. She has collaborations with other YouTube personalities, including fellow science communicator Derek Muller of the channel Veritasium, maker Simone Giertz, and mathematics animator Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown.
Go to Profile#15740
Jay Hartzell
#15751
Overall Influence
Jay C. Hartzell is an American economist and the 30th President of The University of Texas at Austin. Additionally, he holds the Centennial Chair in Business Education Leadership and the Trammell Crow Regents Professor in Business at UT Austin.
Go to Profile#15741
John Pardon
#15752
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
John Vincent Pardon is an American mathematician who works on geometry and topology. He is primarily known for having solved Gromov's problem on distortion of knots, for which he was awarded the 2012 Morgan Prize. He is currently a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and a full professor of mathematics at Princeton University.
Go to Profile#15742
Gail J. McGovern
#15753
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Gail J. McGovern is an American businessperson, who became president and CEO of the American Red Cross on June 23, 2008. McGovern held top management positions at AT&T Corporation and Fidelity Investments. She is a member of the board of trustees of Johns Hopkins University and the board of directors of DTE Energy.
Go to Profile#15743
Gabriel Felbermayr
#15754
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Gabriel Felbermayr is an Austrian economist who has been serving as president of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research since 2021. He specializes in international economics, international trade agreements, economic policy, and environmental economics. Considered a leading economist in the field of international economics, he is cited in the top 5% of all economists and has been referred to as "Germany's Chief Economist of the North" .
Go to Profile#15744
Chris Adami
#15755
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Christoph Carl Herbert "Chris" Adami is a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, as well as professor of physics and astronomy, at Michigan State University. Education Adami was born in Brussels, Belgium, and graduated from the European School of Brussels I. He obtained a Diplom in physics from the University of Bonn and an MA and a Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics from Stony Brook University in 1991. Adami was a Division Prize Fellow in the lab of Steven E. Koonin at the California Institute of Technology from 1992-1995, and was subsequently on the Caltech faculty as a senior ...
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Alejandro Rossi
#15756
Overall Influence
1932 - 2009 (77 years)
Alejandro Rossi was born in Florence, Italy of Venezuelan mother and Italian father Alejandro Rossi wrote philosophical essays, short stories and the following books: Lenguaje y significado ; Manual del Distraído Manual of the Absent-minded ; Sueños de Occam ; La fábula de Las Regiones , Edén: Vida imaginada . Ortega y Gasset in collaboration ; he edited José Gaos' Anthology: Filosofía de la Filosofía . Rossi won the Premio Nacional de Lingüística y Literatura in 1999.
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Richard Fateman
#15757
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Richard J Fateman is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a BS in Physics and Mathematics from Union College in June, 1966, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in June, 1971. He was a major contributor to the Macsyma computer algebra system at MIT and later to the Franz Lisp system. His current interests include scientific programming environments; computer algebra systems; distributed computing; analysis of algorithms; programming and measurement of large systems; design and implementation of programming languages; and optical character recognition.
Go to Profile#15747
Brian Wynne
#15758
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Brian Wynne is Professor Emeritus of Science Studies and a former Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change at the Lancaster University. His education includes an MA , PhD , MPhil . His work has covered technology and risk assessment, public risk perceptions, and public understanding of science, focusing on the relations between expert and lay knowledge and policy decision-making.
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Dalton Conley
#15759
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Dalton Clark Conley is an American sociologist. Conley is a professor at Princeton University and has written eight books, including a memoir and a sociology textbook. Education Conley attended Stuyvesant High School. He subsequently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in humanities and from Columbia University with an M.P.A. in public policy and a Ph.D. in sociology. He also holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in biology from NYU.
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Erazim Kohák
#15760
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Erazim Kohák was a Czech philosopher and writer. His early education was in Prague. After communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, his family escaped to the United States. He died in February 2020 at the age of 86.
Go to Profile#15750
Carlos Pacheco
#15761
Overall Influence
1961 - 2022 (61 years)
Carlos Pacheco Perujo was a Spanish comics penciller. After breaking into the European market doing cover work for Planeta De Agostini, he gained recognition doing work for Marvel UK, the England-based branch of Marvel Comics, for his work on the Spider-Man magazine Dark Guard. He then began doing work for the American-based Marvel and DC Comics, where he was one of the first Spanish-born artists to make a major impact in that country, attaining popularity for his work on Avengers Forever, JLA/JSA: Virtue and Vice, X-Men: Legacy, Fantastic Four, Green Lantern, and Captain America. He contribu...
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