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
#15851
Suzanne Bachelard
#15862
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Suzanne Bachelard was a French philosopher and academic. In 1958, she published La Conscience de la rationalité. She was the daughter of philosopher Gaston Bachelard whose posthumous book Fragments d'une Poétique du Feu she edited. She taught at the Sorbonne, where she also had Jacques Derrida as her assistant. She was the first translator to French of Edmund Husserl Formal and Transcendental Logic.
Go to Profile#15852
Nir Friedman
#15863
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Nir Friedman is an Israeli Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research combines Machine Learning and Statistical Learning with Systems Biology, specifically in the fields of Gene Regulation, Transcription and Chromatin.
Go to Profile#15853
Darryl Pinckney
#15864
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Darryl Pinckney is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist. Early life Pinckney grew up in a middle-class African-American family in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended local public schools. He was educated at Columbia University in New York City.
Go to Profile#15854
Pyotr Ufimtsev
#15865
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Pyotr Yakovlevich Ufimtsev is a Soviet/Russian physicist and mathematician, considered the seminal force behind modern stealth aircraft technology. In the 1960s he began developing equations for predicting the reflection of electromagnetic waves from simple two-dimensional and three-dimensional objects.
Go to Profile#15855
Kerry S. Walters
#15866
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Kerry S. Walters is Professor emeritus of Philosophy at Gettysburg College and author of numerous books on philosophy, religion, and American history as well as over 200 articles in academic journals, trade magazines, and newspapers. His special fields of interests include Christian mysticism, atheism, the ethics of diet, Christian pacifism, critical thinking, deism in early America, and the history of the early republic.
Go to Profile#15856
Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock
#15867
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Helen Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock, was an English philosopher of morality, education, and mind, and a writer on existentialism. She is best known for chairing an inquiry whose report formed the basis of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. She served as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge from 1984 to 1991.
Go to Profile#15857
Jim Steyer
#15868
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
James Pearson Steyer is an American civil rights attorney, professor, and author. He founded Common Sense Media, an organization that "provides education and advocacy to families to promote safe technology and media for children."
Go to Profile#15858
Gary Yohe
#15869
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Gary Wynn Yohe is the Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. He holds a PhD from Yale University. Yohe specializes in Microeconomic theory, Natural Resources, and Environmental Economics. He is a researcher on the economics of climate change and integrated assessment modelling. Among other works, he is an editor of the book "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" and co-author of "Microeconomics| Microeconomics: Theory and Applications". He is a senior member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was awarded a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.
Go to Profile#15859
Miklós Ajtai
#15870
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Miklós Ajtai is a computer scientist at the IBM Almaden Research Center, United States. In 2003, he received the Knuth Prize for his numerous contributions to the field, including a classic sorting network algorithm , exponential lower bounds, superlinear time-space tradeoffs for branching programs, and other "unique and spectacular" results. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#15860
Herbert Gleiter
#15871
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Herbert Gleiter is a German researcher in physics and nanotechnology. In 1966, he received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Stuttgart in Germany. He received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 1988 for contributions to the field of nanotechnology. He became the Chair Professor of the Institute of Material Science at Saarland University, Germany in 1979. He has also held positions at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Bochum.
Go to Profile#15861
Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli
#15872
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Alberto Luigi Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is an Italian-American computer scientist. He currently sits on the board of directors of Cadence Design Systems, an EDA company he co-founded in 1988. Biography Born in Milan, Italy, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli received his master of science degree in engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1971. In 1976, he moved to University of California at Berkeley, where he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, and holds the position of Edgar L. and Harold H. Buttner Chair and serves as a full professor.
Go to Profile#15862
Paul C. Yang
#15873
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Paul C. Yang is a Taiwanese-American mathematician specializing in differential geometry, partial differential equations and CR manifolds. He is best known for his work in Conformal geometry for his study of extremal metrics and his research on scalar curvature and Q-curvature. In CR Geometry he is known for his work on the CR embedding problem, the CR Paneitz operator and for introducing the Q' curvature in CR Geometry.
Go to Profile#15863
Lauren Alloy
#15874
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Lauren B. Alloy is an American psychologist, recognized for her research on mood disorders. Along with colleagues Lyn Abramson and Gerald Metalsky, she developed the hopelessness theory of depression. With Abramson, she also developed the depressive realism hypothesis. Alloy is a professor of psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#15864
Goldie Hawn
#15875
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Goldie Jeanne Hawn is an American actress. She rose to fame on the NBC sketch comedy program Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In , before going on to receive the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Cactus Flower .
Go to Profile#15865
Yasuhiro Nakasone
#15876
Overall Influence
1918 - 2019 (101 years)
was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party from 1982 to 1987. He was a member of the House of Representatives for more than 50 years. His political term was best known for pushing through the privatization of state-owned companies and pursuing a hawkish and pro-U.S. foreign policy.
Go to Profile#15866
William Hsiao
#15877
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
William C. Hsiao , an American economist, is the K.T. Li Research Professor of Economics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. He is internationally recognized for his work on health care financing and social insurance.
Go to Profile#15867
R. Joseph Hoffmann
#15878
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Raymond Joseph Hoffmann is a historian whose work has focused on the early social and intellectual development of Christianity. His work includes an extensive study of the role and dating of Marcion in the history of the New Testament, as well the reconstruction and translation of the writings of early pagan opponents of Christianity: Celsus, Porphyry and Julian the Apostate. As a senior vice president for the Center for Inquiry, he chaired the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, CSER, where he initiated the Jesus Project, a scholarly investigation into the historicity of Jesus.
Go to Profile#15868
Stephen F. Williams
#15879
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Stephen Fain Williams was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit until his death from complications of COVID-19 on August 7, 2020. Early life and career Born in New York City, Williams was the son of prominent lawyer C. Dickerman Williams. He received a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude in 1958 from Yale University, where he was a member of the Manuscript Society. He then received a Juris Doctor magna cum laude in 1961 from Harvard Law School. He was in the United States Army Reserve as a Private E-2 from 1961 to 1962. He engage...
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George Benson
#15880
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
George Washington Benson is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He began his professional career at the age of 19 as a jazz guitarist. A former child prodigy, Benson first came to prominence in the 1960s, playing soul jazz with Jack McDuff and others. He then launched a successful solo career, alternating between jazz, pop, R&B singing, and scat singing. His album Breezin' was certified triple-platinum, hitting no. 1 on the Billboard album chart in 1976. His concerts were well attended through the 1980s, and he still has a large following. Benson has won ten Grammy Awards and has b...
Go to Profile#15870
Richard English
#15881
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Richard Ludlow English is a Northern Irish historian and political scientist from Northern Ireland. He was born in Belfast. He studied as an undergraduate at Keble College, Oxford, and subsequently at Keele University, where he was awarded a PhD in History. He was first employed by the Politics Department at Queen's University Belfast in 1990 and became a professor in 1999. In 2011, he took up an appointment at the University of St Andrews but five years later returned as pro-vice chancellor for internationalisation and engagement.
Go to Profile#15871
Gerard J. Milburn
#15882
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Gerard James Milburn is an Australian theoretical quantum physicist notable for his work on quantum feedback control, quantum measurements, quantum information, open quantum systems, and Linear optical quantum computing .
Go to Profile#15872
Konrad Ott
#15883
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Konrad Ott is a German philosopher with a special interest in discourse ethics and environmental ethics. Biography Konrad Ott was born 1959 in Bergkamen, Germany. From 1981 to 1986, he studied philosophy, history and German philology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. He is regarded as a representative of the 'Third Generation' of the Frankfurt School.
Go to Profile#15873
Aïssata Issoufou Mahamadou
#15884
Overall Influence
Aissata Issoufou Mahamadou is a Nigerien chemist, chemical engineer, mining specialist, and healthcare advocate who served as First Lady of the Republic of Niger from 7 April 2011 to 2 April 2021. She is the first wife of former President Mahamadou Issoufou and shared the title of First Lady with Issoufou's second wife, Lalla Malika Issoufou. Issoufou Mahamadou is president of the Guri-Vie Meilleure Foundation.
Go to Profile#15874
Hristo Stoichkov
#15885
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Hristo Stoichkov Stoichkov is a Bulgarian former professional footballer who is a football commentator for TUDN. A prolific forward, he is regarded as one of the best forwards of all time, and as the greatest Bulgarian footballer of all time. He was runner-up for the FIFA World Player of the Year award in 1992 and 1994, and received the Ballon d'Or in 1994. In 2004, Stoichkov was named by Pelé in the FIFA 100 list of the world's greatest living players.
Go to Profile#15875
Karolína Plíšková
#15886
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Karolína Plíšková is a Czech professional tennis player. She is a former world No. 1 in singles, reaching the top of the Women's Tennis Association rankings on 17 July 2017 and holding the position for eight weeks. On 31 October 2016, she peaked at world No. 11 in the doubles rankings. Known for her powerful serve and forehand, Plíšková has won 16 singles and five doubles titles on the WTA tour, 10 singles and six doubles titles on the ITF Circuit, and over $20 million in prize money. She has reached two Grand Slam singles finals at the 2016 US Open and the 2021 Wimbledon Championships. As a junior, Plíšková won the girls' singles event at the 2010 Australian Open.
Go to Profile#15876
Allen C. Guelzo
#15887
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Allen Carl Guelzo is an American historian who serves as the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar and Director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He formerly was a professor of History at Gettysburg College.
Go to Profile#15877
Kuno Lorenz
#15888
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Kuno Lorenz is a German philosopher. He developed a philosophy of dialogue, in connection with the pragmatic theory of action of the Erlangen constructivist school. Lorenz is married to the literary scholar Karin Lorenz-Lindemann.
Go to Profile#15878
Albert J. Reiss
#15889
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Albert John Reiss Jr. was an American sociologist and criminologist. Career He served as the William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology at Yale University from 1970 until his retirement in 1993. He is recognized for his contributions to social control theory, as well as for his research on police violence. He has been credited with coining the term "proactive" while researching violent incidents between police and private citizens as a research director for Lyndon B. Johnson's President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. This research led Reiss to conclude that t...
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Susumu Ōno
#15890
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Susumu Ōno was a Tokyo-born linguist, specializing in the early history of the Japanese language. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1943, where he studied under Shinkichi Hashimoto. He was professor emeritus at Gakushuin University.
Go to Profile#15880
Helen Nissenbaum
#15891
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Helen Nissenbaum is professor of information science at Cornell Tech. She is best known for the concept of "contextual integrity" and her work on privacy, privacy law, trust, and security in the online world. Specifically, contextual integrity has influenced the United States government's thinking about privacy issues.
Go to Profile#15881
Aimé Césaire
#15892
Overall Influence
1913 - 2008 (95 years)
Aimé Fernand David Césaire was a Francophone Martinican poet, author, and politician. He was "one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature" and coined the word in French. He founded the Parti progressiste martiniquais in 1958, and served in the French National Assembly from 1945 to 1993 and as President of the Regional Council of Martinique from 1983 to 1988.
Go to Profile#15882
William Twining
#15893
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
William Lawrence Twining is the Emeritus Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, having held the post until 1996. He is a leading member of the Law in Context movement, and has contributed especially to jurisprudence, evidence and proof, legal method, legal education, and intellectual history. He has focused recently on "globalization" and legal theory.
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Eden Hazard
#15894
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Eden Michael Walter Hazard is a Belgian former professional footballer who played as a winger or attacking midfielder for Lille, Chelsea, Real Madrid, and the Belgium national team. Known for his creativity, dribbling, passing and vision, Hazard is regarded as one of the best players of his generation.
Go to Profile#15884
Wilfried Brauer
#15895
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Wilfried Brauer was a German computer scientist and professor emeritus at Technical University of Munich. Life and work Brauer studied Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. He received a PhD in Mathematics 1966 from the University of Bonn for a dissertation on the theory of profinite groups.
Go to Profile#15885
Frederick Ferré
#15896
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Frederick Pond Ferré was Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at The University of Georgia. He was a past president of the Metaphysical Society of America. Much of his work concerned how metaphysics is entwined with practical questions about how we live our life, including the ethical dimensions of life.
Go to Profile#15886
Shiraz Shivji
#15897
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Shiraz Shivji was the primary designer of the 1985 Atari ST computer, and one of the engineers of the Commodore 64. Biography Shiraz Shivji, born 1947 in what is now Tanzania, was of Indian Ismaili heritage. He was interested in electronics from an early age in what is now Tanzania. He was educated in the United Kingdom, where he obtained a first-class honours degree at the University of Southampton. He then moved to the United States, where he obtained a master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University during 1969–1973.
Go to Profile#15887
Deborah Dash Moore
#15898
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Deborah Dash Moore is the former director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and a Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
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Leon Eisenberg
#15899
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Leon Eisenberg was an American child psychiatrist, social psychiatrist and medical educator who "transformed child psychiatry by advocating research into developmental problems". He is credited with a number of "firsts" in medicine and psychiatry – in child psychiatry, autism, and the controversies around autism, randomized clinical trials , social medicine, global health, affirmative action, and evidence-based psychiatry.
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Karl Heinz Bohrer
#15900
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Karl Heinz Bohrer was a German literary scholar and essayist. He worked as chief editor for literature of the daily FAZ, and became co-publisher and author of the cultural magazine Merkur. He taught at the Bielefeld University for decades, and also at Stanford University, California. His autobiography appeared in two volumes in 2012 and 2017. Bohrer is regarded as a disputative intellectual thinker and critic, reflecting his time. He received notable awards for criticism, German language and literature, including the Johann Heinrich Merck Prize and the Heinrich Mann Prize. For his extensive w...
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Tony Cicoria
#15901
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Antony Cicoria , is a man who is famous for having developed an obsession for piano after being struck by lightning. He is a doctor specializing in orthopedic medicine, orthopedic surgery, orthotics, prosthetic supplies, and sports medicine. He is best known for acquiring an unusual affinity for music after being struck by lightning. He was profiled in neurologist Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain .
Go to Profile#15891
Rattan Lal
#15902
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Rattan Lal is a soil scientist. His work focuses on regenerative agriculture through which soil can help resolve global issues such as climate change, food security and water quality. He has received the Japan Prize, and the World Food Prize, among others, for his work.
Go to Profile#15892
Donald W. Fiske
#15903
Overall Influence
1917 - 2003 (86 years)
Donald Winslow Fiske was an American psychologist. Early life Fiske was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. He grew up in Medford, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University and, in 1948, earned a PhD from the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#15893
John Joseph Gibbons
#15904
Overall Influence
1924 - 2018 (94 years)
John Joseph Gibbons was an American jurist who served as an appellate judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from 1969 to 1990, during which period he was its chief judge. After service in the US Navy he began his legal career at Crummy & Consodine and later became a partner of the firm, which incorporated his name into its title.
Go to Profile#15894
Todd Boyd
#15905
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Todd Boyd, aka "Notorious Ph.D.", is the Katherine and Frank Price Endowed Chair for the Study of Race & Popular Culture and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Boyd is a media commentator, author, producer, consultant and scholar. He is considered an expert on American popular culture and is known for his pioneering work on cinema, media, hip hop culture, fashion, art and sports. Boyd received his PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa in 1991 and began his professorial career at USC in the fall of 1992.
Go to Profile#15895
Stephen Wurm
#15906
Overall Influence
1922 - 2001 (79 years)
Stephen Adolphe Wurm was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist. Early life Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and the Hungarian-speaking Anna Novroczky. He was christened Istvan Adolphe Wurm. His father died before Stephen was born.
Go to Profile#15896
Yo-Yo Ma
#15907
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Yo-Yo Ma is an American cellist. Born and partially raised in Paris to Chinese parents and educated in New York City, he was a child prodigy, performing from the age of four and a half. He graduated from the Juilliard School and Harvard University, attended Columbia University, and has performed as a soloist with orchestras around the world. He has recorded more than 90 albums and received 19 Grammy Awards.
Go to Profile#15897
Badr Hari
#15908
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Badr Hari is a Moroccan-Dutch kickboxer. He is a former K-1 Heavyweight World Champion , It's Showtime Heavyweight World Champion and K-1 World Grand Prix 2008 and 2009 finalist. He is widely considered one of the greatest kickboxers of all time.
Go to Profile#15898
Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz
#15909
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz was an American physicist. Biography He was born in Bryan, Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma. His father was an agricultural chemist and named his son after the Italian socialist Giovanni Rossi, who had founded an agricultural commune in Brazil in the 1890s. Lomanitz graduated from high school at age 14 and went on to earn his bachelor of science degree in physics from the University of Oklahoma and his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1951 from Cornell University under Richard Feynman.
Go to Profile#15899
Robert M. Townsend
#15910
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Robert Morris Townsend is an American economist and professor; he is the Elizabeth & James Killian Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining MIT, he was the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago where he remained a research associate until 2018.
Go to Profile#15900
Ari Melber
#15911
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Ari Naftali Melber is an American attorney and Emmy-winning journalist who is the chief legal correspondent for MSNBC and host of The Beat with Ari Melber. In 2023, The A.P. reported "The Beat" is "often the most-watched show on MSNBC," as the Emmy-winning NBC News legal analyst... brings a methodical, 'follow the facts' style to the issues he addresses.
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