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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#15801
Timothy Montler
#15812
Overall Influence
Timothy Montler is an American academic and linguist. Montler is a professor of linguistics at the University of North Texas, as of 2013. He has worked to preserve the Klallam language since 1990. Montler collaborated with Adeline Smith, a Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe elder, to create the first Klallam language alphabet. He and Smith also composed the world's first Klallam language dictionary, which was published in December 2012 by the University of Washington Press. Montler and Smith had collaborated on the Klallam lexicon throughout the 1990s, 2000–02, and early 2010s. Adeline Smith added 12,000 words and phrases, the largest single contribution to the dictionary.
Go to Profile#15802
Keith Topping
#15813
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Keith Andrew Topping is an author, journalist and broadcaster. He is most well known for his work relating to the BBC Television series Doctor Who and for writing numerous official and unofficial guide books to a wide variety of television and film series, particularly Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Go to Profile#15803
Piers Blaikie
#15814
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Piers Macleod Blaikie is a Scottish geographer and scholar of international development and natural resources, who worked until 2003 at the School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia. His contribution to development has been in four areas:EnvironmentAgrarian changeAIDS and family planningPolitical ecology
Go to Profile#15804
Alexander Theroux
#15815
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Alexander Louis Theroux is an American novelist and poet. He is known for his novel Darconville's Cat , which was selected by Anthony Burgess for his book-length essay Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 – A Personal Choice in 1984 and by Larry McCaffery for his 20th Century's Greatest Hits list.
Go to Profile#15805
Sonny Rollins
#15816
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Walter Theodore "Sonny" Rollins is an American jazz tenor saxophonist who is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians. In a seven-decade career, he has recorded over sixty albums as a leader. A number of his compositions, including "St. Thomas", "Oleo", "Doxy", and "Airegin", have become jazz standards. Rollins has been called "the greatest living improviser".
Go to Profile#15806
Pat Boone
#15817
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Patrick Charles Eugene Boone is an American singer, actor and composer. He was a successful pop singer in the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s. He sold more than 45 million records, had 38 Top 40 hits, and appeared in more than 12 Hollywood films.
Go to Profile#15807
Joel S. Migdal
#15818
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Joel S. Migdal is the Robert F. Philip Professor of International Studies in the University of Washington's Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. He is a political scientist specializing in comparative politics.
Go to Profile#15808
Keith Brueckner
#15819
Overall Influence
1924 - 2014 (90 years)
Keith Allen Brueckner was an American theoretical physicist who made important contributions in several areas of physics, including many-body theory in condensed matter physics, and laser fusion. Biography Brueckner was born in Minneapolis on March 19, 1924. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1945 and 1947 and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950. He died on September 19, 2014, at the age of 90.
Go to Profile#15809
Albert Ziegler
#15820
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Albert Ziegler was a Swiss Roman-Catholic theologian, ethicist and author. Early life and education Ziegler was born 11 July 1927, in Zürich, Switzerland to Albert Gebhard and Bertha Amalia . His father was employed by the Swiss Postal Service and originally hailed from Gaiserwald near St. Gallen. Ziegler's maternal great-uncle was Anton Rohner. Ziegler's great-grandfather was Gebhard Rohner. His mother was from Einsiedeln. He had two sisters. His elder sister, Bertha , was married to Liechtensteiner artist, sculptor and councilor Georg Malin . Ziegler completed his Matura at the Disentis Abbey School.
Go to Profile#15810
Tim O'Brien
#15821
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam, and his later work often explores the postwar lives of its veterans. O’Brien is perhaps best known for his book The Things They Carried , a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories inspired by O'Brien's wartime experiences. In 2010, The New York Times described the latter as “ a classic of contemporary war fiction.” In addition, O’Brien is acclaimed for his war novel, Going After Cacciato , which received the National Book Award.
Go to Profile#15811
Ernest Wamba dia Wamba
#15822
Overall Influence
1942 - 2020 (78 years)
Ernest Wamba dia Wamba was a prominent Congolese academic and political theorist who became a commander of the Kisangani faction of the rebel Rally for Congolese Democracy during the Second Congo War.
Go to Profile#15812
Edward Creutz
#15823
Overall Influence
1913 - 2009 (96 years)
Edward Creutz was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. After the war he became a professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He was Vice President of Research at General Atomics from 1955 to 1970. He published over 65 papers on botany, physics, mathematics, metallurgy and science policy, and held 18 patents relating to nuclear energy.
Go to Profile#15813
Steven Wilson
#15824
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Steven John Wilson is an English musician. He is the founder, guitarist, lead vocalist and songwriter of the rock band Porcupine Tree, as well as being a member of several other bands, including Blackfield, Storm Corrosion and No-Man. He is also a solo artist, having released seven solo albums since his solo debut Insurgentes in 2008. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Wilson has made music prolifically and earned critical acclaim. His honours include six nominations for Grammy Awards: twice with Porcupine Tree, once with his collaborative band Storm Corrosion and three times as a solo artist.
Go to Profile#15814
Krist Novoselic
#15825
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Krist Anthony Novoselic is an American musician and activist. He was the bassist and a co-founder of the rock band Nirvana. Novoselic and Kurt Cobain formed the band Nirvana in 1987 along with drummer Aaron Burckhard, whom they recruited. Through the late 1980s, Nirvana established themselves as part of the Seattle grunge scene and in 1989 they released their debut album Bleach. Nirvana went through a succession of drummers until 1990, when Dave Grohl joined after his former band Scream broke up. After signing with major record label DGC Records, Nirvana released their second studio album Nevermind in 1991.
Go to Profile#15815
Larissa Behrendt
#15826
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Larissa Yasmin Behrendt is an Australian legal academic, writer, filmmaker and Indigenous rights advocate. she is a professor of law and director of research and academic programs at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at the University of Technology Sydney, and holds the inaugural Chair in Indigenous Research at UTS.
Go to Profile#15816
Marta Catellani
#15827
Overall Influence
Marta Catellani is an Italian chemist known for her discovery of the eponymous Catellani reaction in 1997. She was elected to the European Academy of Sciences in 2016. Catellani earned her Ph.D. in chemistry in 1971 from the University of Parma, where, as of 2019, she is a professor and chairs the Department of Organic Chemistry.
Go to Profile#15817
Emery N. Brown
#15828
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Emery Neal Brown is an American statistician, neuroscientist, and anesthesiologist. He is the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital , and a practicing anesthesiologist at MGH. At MIT he is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and professor of computational neuroscience, the associate director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the Director of the Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.
Go to Profile#15818
Robert Fourer
#15829
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Robert Fourer is a scientist working in the area of operations research and management science. He is currently President of AMPL Optimization, Inc and is Professor Emeritus of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University. Robert Fourer is recognized as being the designer of the popular modeling language for mathematical programming called AMPL.
Go to Profile#15819
Timothy Endicott
#15830
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Timothy Endicott is a Canadian legal scholar and philosopher specializing in constitutional law and language and law. He is the Vinerian Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#15820
Emmanuel Lubezki
#15831
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Emmanuel Lubezki Morgenstern is a Mexican cinematographer. He sometimes goes by the nickname Chivo, which means "goat" in Spanish. Lubezki has worked with many acclaimed directors, including Mike Nichols, Tim Burton, Michael Mann, Joel and Ethan Coen, David O. Russell, and frequent collaborators Terrence Malick, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Go to Profile#15821
David K. Wyatt
#15832
Overall Influence
1937 - 2006 (69 years)
David Kent Wyatt was an American historian and author who studied Thailand. He taught at Cornell University from 1969 to 2002, and also served as Chair of the Cornell University Department of History and as the president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1993. His book Thailand: A Short History has become a standard text on Thai history in the English language.
Go to Profile#15822
Herman Carr
#15833
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Herman Y. Carr , who published as H. Y. Carr, was an American physicist and pioneer of magnetic resonance imaging. Carr was born in Alliance, Ohio, where he was an Alliance High School graduate in January 1943; he later was inducted into their Hall of Fame. He served in the army as a sergeant in the 12th Weather Squadron Air Corps during World War II in Italy.
Go to Profile#15823
Robert Bazell
#15834
Overall Influence
Robert Bazell is adjunct professor of Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. He is the former chief science and health correspondent for NBC News. Biography Education Bazell graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, USA, in 1967 with a B.A. in biochemistry and Phi Beta Kappa honors. As an undergraduate, he wrote a science column called "Science for the People" for the Daily Californian. Afterwards, Bazell traveled to England, where he studied biology at the University of Sussex in 1969 as part of his graduate work, before returning to Berkeley to complet...
Go to Profile#15824
Bron Taylor
#15835
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Bron Raymond Taylor is an American scholar and conservationist. He is professor of religion and nature at the University of Florida and has also been an affiliated scholar with the Center for Environment and Development at the University of Oslo. Taylor works principally in the areas of religion and ecology, environmental ethics and environmental philosophy. He is also a prominent historian and ethnographer of environmentalism and especially radical environmentalist movements, surfing culture and nature-based spiritualities. Taylor is also editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Religion and N...
Go to Profile#15825
Amir Hussain
#15836
Overall Influence
Amir Hussain is a scholar of religion who specializes in the study of Islam. Currently, he is a professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. In November 2022 he became President of the American Academy of Religion. He has done significant publishing work with Oxford University Press, including editing the fifth editions of two of their main textbooks, World Religions: Western Traditions and World Religions: Eastern Traditions, and the third edition of A Concise Introduction to World Religions.
Go to Profile#15826
Heinz-Harald Frentzen
#15837
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Heinz-Harald Frentzen also known as H-HF, is a German former racing driver. He competed in multiple disciplines including Sportscars, Formula One and DTM. He had his most success in Formula One, entering over 150 Grands Prix and winning three. He finished runner-up in the 1997 Formula One World Championship.
Go to Profile#15827
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
#15838
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is an Afghan politician, former mujahideen leader and drug trafficker. He is the founder and current leader of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin political party, so called after Mohammad Yunus Khalis split from Hezbi Islami in 1979 to found Hezb-i Islami Khalis. He has twice served as Prime Minister during the 1990s.
Go to Profile#15828
Robert I. Rotberg
#15839
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Robert Irwin Rotberg is an academic from the United States who served as President of the World Peace Foundation . A professor in governance and foreign affairs, he was director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government , and has served in administrative positions at Tufts University and Lafayette College.
Go to Profile#15829
David Coverdale
#15840
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
David Coverdale is an English singer and songwriter, he is best known as the founder and lead singer of hard rock band Whitesnake. Coverdale was the lead singer of Deep Purple from 1973 to 1976, after which he released two solo studio albums White Snake and Northwinds before forming Whitesnake in 1978.
Go to Profile#15830
Mykhailo Zghurovskyi
#15841
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mykhailo Zakharovych Zghurovskyi, also spelled as Mykhailo Zgurovsky, , Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine . Today he is a rector of the National Technical University of Ukraine "Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute".
Go to Profile#15831
Antoine Berman
#15842
Overall Influence
1942 - 1991 (49 years)
Antoine Berman was a French translator, philosopher, historian and theorist of translation. Life Antoine Berman was born in the small town of Argenton-sur-Creuse, near Limoges, to a Polish-Jewish father and a French-Yugoslav mother. After living in hiding during the Second World War, the family settled near Paris. Berman attended the Lycée Montmorency. Later he studied philosophy at the University of Paris, where he met his wife Isabelle. In 1968, they moved to Argentina where they remained for five years. On their return to Paris, Berman directed a research program and taught several seminar...
Go to Profile#15832
Mandy Cohen
#15843
Overall Influence
Mandy Krauthamer Cohen is an American internist, public health official, and healthcare executive serving as the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since July 10, 2023. She was previously the executive vice president at Aledade and chief executive officer of Aledade Care Solution, a healthcare company.
Go to Profile#15833
Michael Suess
#15844
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Michael Suess is a German manager. He currently serves as Executive Chairman of OC Oerlikon, a global technology Group listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange, and as First Deputy Chairman of the supervisory board of the Austrian electricity company, Verbund AG. From 2015 to 2016, he held the position as CEO of the GMH Group.
Go to Profile#15834
Robert E. Ornstein
#15845
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
Robert Evan Ornstein was an American psychologist, researcher and author. He taught at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, based at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, and was professor at Stanford University and founder and chairman of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge .
Go to Profile#15835
John Frederick Dewey
#15846
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
John Frederick Dewey is a British structural geologist and a strong proponent of the theory of plate tectonics, building upon the early work undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s. He is widely regarded as an authority on the development and evolution of mountain ranges.
Go to Profile#15836
Brian Rotman
#15847
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Brian Rotman is a British-born professor who works in the United States. Trained as a mathematician and now an established philosopher, Rotman has blended semiotics, mathematics and the history of writing in his work and teaching throughout his career.
Go to Profile#15837
Thomas R. Schreiner
#15848
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Thomas R. Schreiner is an American Reformed Baptist New Testament scholar. He is the James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament Interpretation at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He previously taught at Bethel University and Azusa Pacific University. He is also co-chairman of the Christian Standard Bible's Translation Oversight Committee and is the New Testament editor of the ESV Study Bible. Schreiner has degrees from Western Oregon University, Western Seminary, and Fuller Theological Seminary.
Go to Profile#15838
Gilbert Baumslag
#15849
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Gilbert Baumslag was a Distinguished Professor at the City College of New York, with joint appointments in mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering. He was director of the Center for Algorithms and Interactive Scientific Software, which grew out of the MAGNUS computational group theory project he also headed. Baumslag was also the organizer of the New York Group Theory Seminar.
Go to Profile#15839
Paul Wexler
#15850
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Paul Wexler is an American-born Israeli linguist, and Professor Emeritus of linguistics at Tel Aviv University. His research fields include historical linguistics, bilingualism, Slavic linguistics, creole linguistics, Romani and Jewish languages.
Go to Profile#15840
Janice Stein
#15851
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Janice Gross Stein is a Canadian political scientist and international relations expert. Stein is a specialist in Middle East area studies; negotiation theory; foreign policy decision-making; and international conflict management.
Go to Profile#15841
John C. Sheehan
#15852
Overall Influence
1915 - 1992 (77 years)
John Clark Sheehan was an American organic chemist whose work on synthetic penicillin led to tailor-made forms of the drug. After nine years of hard work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he became the first to discover a practical method for synthesizing penicillin V. While achieving total synthesis, Sheehan also produced an intermediate compound, 6-aminopenicillanic acid, which turned out to be the foundation of hundreds of kinds of synthetic penicillin. Dr. Sheehan's research on synthetic penicillin paved the way for the development of customized forms of the lifesaving antibiotic that target specific bacteria.
Go to Profile#15842
David Hand
#15853
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David John Hand is a British statistician. His research interests include multivariate statistics, classification methods, pattern recognition, computational statistics and the foundations of statistics. He has written technical books on statistics, data mining, finance, classification methods, and measuring wellbeing, as well as science popularisation books including The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day; Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters; and Statistics: A Very Short Introduction. In 1991 he launched the journal Statistics and Co...
Go to Profile#15843
Dava Newman
#15854
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Dava J. Newman is an American aerospace engineer. She is the director of the MIT Media Lab and a former deputy administrator of NASA. Newman is the Apollo Program Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been a faculty member in the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and MIT's School of Engineering since 1993.
Go to Profile#15844
Steven Schafersman
#15855
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Steven Dale Schafersman is an American geologist and current president of Texas Citizens for Science, an advocacy group that opposes teaching creationism as science in the public schools. He is also known for his blog BadGeology.com.
Go to Profile#15845
Tunku Varadarajan
#15856
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Tunku Varadarajan is a India-born naturalised British writer and journalist, formerly editor of Newsweek Global and Newsweek International. He is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Research Fellow in Journalism at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a contributing editor at Politico Europe.
Go to Profile#15846
Sharafuddin of Selangor
#15857
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah Al-Haj Ibni Almarhum Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah Al-Haj is the ninth and current Sultan of the Malaysian state of Selangor. He ascended the throne on 22 November 2001, succeeding his father, Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah.
Go to Profile#15847
Richard Rosenfeld
#15858
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Richard Rosenfeld is an American criminologist and Founders Professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Education Rosenfeld received his B.A. in 1972 and his Ph.D. in sociology in 1984, both from the University of Oregon.
Go to Profile#15848
Michael S. Turner
#15859
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Michael S. Turner is an American theoretical cosmologist who coined the term dark energy in 1998. He is the Rauner Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Chicago, having previously served as the Bruce V. & Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor, and as the assistant director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences for the US National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#15849
Françoise Vergès
#15860
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Françoise Vergès is a French political scientist, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist and public educator. Her work focuses on postcolonial studies and decolonial feminism. Vergès was born in Paris, grew up in Réunion and Algeria before returning to Paris to study and become a journalist.
Go to Profile#15850
Rumer Godden
#15861
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Margaret Rumer Godden was an English author of more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books. Nine of her works have been made into films, most notably Black Narcissus in 1947 and The River in 1951. A few of her works were co-written with her elder sister, novelist Jon Godden, including Two Under the Indian Sun, a memoir of the Goddens' childhood in a region of India now part of Bangladesh.
Go to Profile