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
#15901
Jane S. Richardson
#15912
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jane Shelby Richardson is an American biophysicist best known for developing the Richardson diagram, or ribbon diagram, a method of representing the 3D structure of proteins. Ribbon diagrams have become a standard representation of protein structures that has facilitated further investigation of protein structure and function globally. With interests in astronomy, math, physics, botany, and philosophy, Richardson took an unconventional route to establishing a science career. Today Richardson is a professor in biochemistry at Duke University.
Go to Profile#15902
Elena Vesnina
#15913
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Elena Sergeyevna Vesnina is a Russian former professional tennis player and a former world No. 1 in doubles. She is a four-time Grand Slam champion, having won the 2013 French Open, 2014 US Open, and 2017 Wimbledon Championships in women's doubles with compatriot Ekaterina Makarova, and the 2016 Australian Open in mixed doubles, partnering Bruno Soares. Vesnina also reached eight further major finals in women's doubles, and four in mixed doubles. She became world No. 1 for the first time in June 2018, alongside Makarova, with the pair jointly holding the top ranking for the next five weeks. ...
Go to Profile#15903
Richard W. Tsien
#15914
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Richard Winyu Tsien , is a Chinese-born American electrical engineer and neurobiologist. He is the Druckenmiller Professor of Neuroscience, Chair of the Department of Physiology and Neuroscience, and Director of the NYU Neuroscience Institute at New York University Medical Center, and also an emeritus faculty member of Stanford University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#15904
Frederic Wakeman
#15915
Overall Influence
1937 - 2006 (69 years)
Frederic Evans Wakeman Jr. was an American scholar of East Asian history and Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley. He served as president of the American Historical Association and of the Social Science Research Council. Jonathan D. Spence said of Wakeman that he was an evocative writer who chose, "like the novelist he really wanted to be, stories that split into different currents and swept the reader along," adding that he was "quite simply the best modern Chinese historian of the last 30 years."
Go to Profile#15905
Henri H. Stahl
#15916
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Henri H. Stahl was a Romanian Marxist cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, sociologist, and social historian. Biography Born in Bucharest to a family of Alsatian and French-Swiss ancestry, he was the son of Henri Stahl , as well as the younger brother of the sociologist and Social Democratic Party activist Şerban Voinea, and of the novelist Henriette Yvonne Stahl. He was married to Margareta, a known painter.
Go to Profile#15906
Liza Featherstone
#15917
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Liza Featherstone is an American journalist and journalism professor who writes frequently on labor and student activism for The Nation and Jacobin. Early life and education Featherstone was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in greater Boston. She graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1991 with honors and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2008. Featherstone was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia for 2007–08.
Go to Profile#15907
Satish K. Tripathi
#15918
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Satish K. Tripathi is an Indian-American academic, a computer scientist and academic administrator. He is the first foreign-born president of the University at Buffalo , the flagship of the State University of New York system. Previously, he served as provost of University at Buffalo from 2004 to 2011. From 1997-2004, Tripathi served as dean of the Bourns College of Engineering at University of California, Riverside.
Go to Profile#15908
Nathan Brody
#15919
Overall Influence
Nathan Brody is an American psychology professor Emeritus known for his work on intelligence and personality. Brody received his BA from University of New Hampshire and his MA and PhD from University of Michigan. He taught at Wesleyan University and is currently an emeritus professor there.
Go to Profile#15909
William J. Ripple
#15920
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
William J. Ripple is a professor of ecology at Oregon State University in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society. He is best known for his research on terrestrial trophic cascades, particularly the role of the gray wolf in North America as an apex predator and a keystone species that shapes food webs and landscape structures via “top-down” pressures.
Go to Profile#15910
Mary W. Gray
#15921
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Mary Lee Wheat Gray is an American mathematician, statistician, and lawyer. She is the author of books and papers in the fields of mathematics, mathematics education, computer science, applied statistics, economic equity, discrimination law, and academic freedom. She is currently on the Board of Advisers for POMED and is the chair of the Board of Directors of AMIDEAST .
Go to Profile#15911
Aaron Edlin
#15922
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Aaron S. Edlin is an American economist and lawyer specializing in antitrust and competition policy. In 1997–1998, he served in the Clinton White House as Senior Economist within the Council of Economic Advisers focusing on the areas of industrial organization, regulation and antitrust. In 1999, he co-founded the Berkeley Electronic Press, an electronic publishing company that assists with scholarly communication.
Go to Profile#15912
Douglas Schoen
#15923
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Douglas Schoen is an American lawyer, political analyst, author, lobbyist, and commentator. In 1977, he co-founded the political consulting firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, and was hired by President Bill Clinton and Ukrainian steel oligarch Victor Pinchuk. From 2009-2021 he worked for Fox News, and since 2021 for Newsmax TV.
Go to Profile#15913
Jacques Gernet
#15924
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Jacques Gernet was an eminent French sinologist of the second half of the 20th century. His best-known work is The Chinese Civilization, a 900-page summary of Chinese history and civilization which has been translated into many languages.
Go to Profile#15914
Ute Frevert
#15925
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Ute Frevert is a German historian. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary German history, as well as social and gender history. In January 2008, she was appointed managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and director of the Institute's Center for History of Emotions in Berlin.
Go to Profile#15915
Larry Heck
#15926
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Larry Paul Heck is currently the Rhesa Screven Farmer, Jr., Advanced Computing Concepts Chair, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His career spans many of the sub-disciplines of artificial intelligence, including conversational AI, speech recognition and speaker recognition, natural language processing, web search, online advertising and acoustics. He is probably best known for his role as the founder of the Microsoft Cortana Personal Assistant and his early work in deep learning for speech processing.
Go to Profile#15916
Francisco Goldman
#15927
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Francisco Goldman is an American novelist, journalist, and Allen K. Smith Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, Trinity College. His most recent novel, Monkey Boy , was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Go to Profile#15917
Tamron Hall
#15928
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Tamron Hall is an American broadcast journalist and television talk show host. In September 2019, Hall debuted her self-titled syndicated daytime talk show, which has earned her two Daytime Emmy Awards. Hall was formerly a national news correspondent for NBC News, daytime anchor for MSNBC, host of the program MSNBC Live with Tamron Hall, and a co-host of Today's Take, the third hour of Today. She hosts Deadline: Crime on Investigation Discovery channel. In summer 2016, Investigation Discovery premiered the TV special Guns on Campus: Tamron Hall Investigates, which commemorated the 50th annive...
Go to Profile#15918
Kim Young-sam
#15929
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Kim Young-sam , often referred to by his initials YS, was a South Korean politician and activist who served as the seventh president of South Korea from 1993 to 1998. From 1961, he spent almost 30 years as one of the leaders of the South Korean opposition, and one of the most powerful rivals to the authoritarian regimes of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan. Elected as president in the 1992 presidential election, Kim became the first civilian to hold the office in over 30 years. He was inaugurated on 25 February 1993, and served a single five-year term, presiding over a massive anti-corruption c...
Go to Profile#15919
Izumi Tabata
#15930
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
is dean of the Ritsumeikan University Graduate School of Sport and Health Science. His name became famous in relation to the "Tabata Protocol", one form of high-intensity interval training, although Tabata credits Olympic speed skating coach Koichi Irisawa with pioneering the technique.
Go to Profile#15920
Charles Butterworth
#15931
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Charles E. Butterworth is a philosopher of the Straussian school and currently an emeritus professor of political philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Butterworth is also a translator and editor of numerous books about the philosophers Rousseau, Alfarabi, and Averroes.
Go to Profile#15921
John Halamka
#15932
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
John D. Halamka, M.D., M.S., is an American business executive and physician. He is president of the Mayo Clinic Platform, a group of digital and long-distance health care initiatives. Trained in emergency medicine and medical informatics, Halamka has been developing and implementing health care information strategy and policy for more than 25 years. He specializes in artificial intelligence, the adoption of electronic health records and the secure sharing of healthcare data for care coordination, population health, and quality improvement.
Go to Profile#15922
Morris Berman
#15933
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Morris Berman is an American historian and social critic. He earned a BA in mathematics at Cornell University in 1966 and a PhD in the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in 1971. Berman is an academic humanist cultural critic who specializes in Western cultural and intellectual history.
Go to Profile#15923
Helen Wallace
#15934
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Dame Helen Sarah Wallace, Lady Wallace of Saltaire, DBE, CMG, FBA, MAE, FAcSS , née Rushworth, is a British expert in European studies and, by marriage to William Wallace, Baron Wallace of Saltaire, a peeress. She was Foreign Secretary of the British Academy from 2011 to 2015.
Go to Profile#15924
Clay Regazzoni
#15935
Overall Influence
1939 - 2006 (67 years)
Gianclaudio Giuseppe "Clay" Regazzoni was a Swiss racing driver. He competed in Formula One races from 1970 to 1980, winning five Grands Prix. His first win was the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in his debut season, driving for Ferrari. He remained with the Italian team until . After a single season with BRM, Regazzoni returned to Ferrari for a further three years, to . After finally leaving Ferrari at the end of 1976, Regazzoni joined the Ensign and Shadow teams, before moving to Williams in , where he took the British team's first ever Grand Prix victory, the 1979 British Grand Prix at Silve...
Go to Profile#15925
Jonathan Weiner
#15936
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jonathan Weiner is an American writer of non-fiction books based on his biological observations, focusing particularly on evolution in the Galápagos Islands, genetics, and the environment. His latest book is Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality a look at the scientific search for the Fountain of Youth.
Go to Profile#15926
Ken Tyrrell
#15937
Overall Influence
1924 - 2001 (77 years)
Robert Kenneth Tyrrell was a British Formula Two racing driver and the founder of the Tyrrell Formula One constructor. Biography Born in East Horsley, Surrey, Tyrrell served in the Royal Air Force during World War II. After the war he became a timber merchant; as a result, he was sometimes known as "Chopper". In 1952, at 28, he began racing a Norton-powered Cooper in Formula 3. In 1958, he advanced to Formula Two in a Cooper-Climax, joining Cecil Libowitz and Alan Brown. He achieved a number of good placings and the occasional win.
Go to Profile#15927
Feng Kang
#15938
Overall Influence
1920 - 1993 (73 years)
Feng Kang was a Chinese mathematician. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980. After his death, the Chinese Academy of Sciences established the Feng Kang Prize in 1994 to reward young Chinese researchers who made outstanding contributions to computational mathematics.
Go to Profile#15928
William Gibson
#15939
Overall Influence
1914 - 2008 (94 years)
William Gibson was an American playwright and novelist. He won the Tony Award for Best Play for The Miracle Worker in 1959, which he later adapted for the film version in 1962. Early life and education Gibson graduated from the City College of New York in 1938, and he was of Irish, French, German, Dutch, Russian, and Greek ancestry.
Go to Profile#15929
Richard S. Ward
#15940
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Richard Samuel Ward FRS is a British mathematical physicist. He is a Professor of Mathematical & Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Durham. Work Ward earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1977, under the supervision of Roger Penrose. He is most famous for his extension of Penrose's twistor theory to nonlinear cases, which he with Michael Atiyah used to describe instantons by vector bundles on the three-dimensional complex projective space. He has related interests in the theory of monopoles, topological solitons and skyrmions.
Go to Profile#15930
Daniel Goldston
#15941
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Daniel Alan Goldston is an American mathematician who specializes in number theory. He is currently a professor of mathematics at San Jose State University. Early life and education Daniel Alan Goldston was born on January 4, 1954, in Oakland, California. In 1972, he matriculated to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his bachelor's degree and, in 1981, a Ph.D. in mathematics. His doctoral advisor at Berkeley was Russell Sherman Lehman; his dissertation was entitled "Large Differences between Consecutive Prime Numbers".
Go to Profile#15931
Marko Rupnik
#15942
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Marko Ivan Rupnik is a Slovenian Catholic priest, theologian, mosaic artist, and former Jesuit. Among the churches he has decorated around the world are the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington D.C., the Redemptoris Mater Chapel in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, the Sanctuary of Fátima, the Sanctuary of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid. He was the director of Centro Aletti in Rome and was a theological student of Tomáš Špidlík.
Go to Profile#15932
Josh Wardle
#15943
Overall Influence
Josh Wardle is a Welsh software engineer who developed the viral web-based word game Wordle. The New York Times Company acquired Wordle from Wardle in late January 2022. Wardle lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Go to Profile#15933
G. David Tilman
#15944
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
George David Tilman , ForMemRS, is an American ecologist. He is Regents Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology at the University of Minnesota, as well as an instructor in Conservation Biology; Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior; and Microbial Ecology. He is director of the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve long-term ecological research station. Tilman is also a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.
Go to Profile#15934
Dan Fagin
#15945
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Dan Fagin is an American journalist who specializes in environmental science. He won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his best-selling book Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation. Toms River also won the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, the National Academies Communication Award, and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award of the Society of Environmental Journalists, among other literary prizes.
Go to Profile#15935
Peter Marcuse
#15946
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Peter Marcuse was a German-born American lawyer and professor of urban planning. Early life and education Marcuse was the older son of Sophie Wertheim and philosopher and critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. He was born in Berlin, left Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1934.
Go to Profile#15936
Matthew O. Jackson
#15947
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Matthew Owen Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and a fellow of CIFAR. Jackson's research concerns game theory, microeconomic theory, and the study of social and economic networks. Jackson was one of the founders of the study of networks in economics. His work has analyzed the formation of networks and the sources and effects of homophily in social relationships. He has also made important contributions to the study of how networks mediate access to jobs and information as well as the contagion ...
Go to Profile#15937
Ryan Reynolds
#15948
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Ryan Rodney Reynolds is a Canadian and American actor, producer and businessman. He began his career starring in the Canadian teen soap opera Hillside , and had minor roles before landing the lead role on the sitcom Two Guys and a Girl between 1998 and 2001. Reynolds then starred in a range of films, including comedies such as National Lampoon's Van Wilder , Waiting... , and The Proposal . He also performed in dramatic roles in Buried , Woman in Gold , and Life , starred in action films such as Blade: Trinity , Green Lantern , 6 Underground , and Free Guy , and provided voice acting in the a...
Go to Profile#15938
Seanan McGuire
#15949
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Seanan McGuire is an American author and filker. McGuire is known for her urban fantasy novels. She uses the pseudonym Mira Grant to write science fiction/horror and the pseudonym A. Deborah Baker to write the "Up-and-Under" children's portal fantasy series.
Go to Profile#15939
Luvvie Ajayi
#15950
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Luvvie Ajayi , also known as Luvvie Ajayi Jones, is a Nigerian–American author, speaker, and digital strategist. Her book, I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual, was a New York Times best-seller. Early life Ajayi was born in Nigeria; she moved to Chicago with her family when she was nine. She attended Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in Chicago, then the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying psychology.
Go to Profile#15940
Jan Vanthienen
#15951
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jan Vanthienen is a Belgian Information systems scientist and Professor of Information systems engineering at Leuven University , known for his contributions to Business Process Modeling, Process mining and Business Engineering.
Go to Profile#15941
Walter Allen
#15952
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
Walter Ernest Allen was an English literary critic and novelist and one of the Birmingham Group of authors. He is best known for his classic study The English Novel: a Short Critical History . Life and career Allen was born in Aston, Birmingham; he drew on his working-class roots for All in a Lifetime , generally considered his best novel. He was educated at King Edward's Grammar School and the University of Birmingham, graduating in 1932—his friends at that period included Henry Reed and Louis MacNeice.
Go to Profile#15942
Annie Cohen-Solal
#15953
Overall Influence
Annie Cohen-Solal is a writer, historian, cultural diplomat and public intellectual in a trajectory that spans more than four decades. Born in Algiers, in a Jewish family from multiple Mediterranean origins , she faced numerous geographical displacements and devoted her entire career to issues of migration and creation. For ever, she has been tracking down interactions between art, literature and society with an intercultural twist. An award-winning writer from Sartre: 1905-1980 to Leo & His Circle: the Life of Leo Castelli and A Foreigner Called Picasso , her books, exhibitions, and lectures have been widely covered both by academic reviews and by the press at large.
Go to Profile#15943
David Dean Shulman
#15954
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David Dean Shulman is an Israeli Indologist, poet and peace activist, known for his work on the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Carnatic music. Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi, and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam. He was formerly Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and professor in the now defunct Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies. Presently he holds a chair as Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#15944
Earl B. Hunt
#15955
Overall Influence
1933 - 2016 (83 years)
Earl B. Hunt was an American psychologist specializing in the study of human and artificial intelligence. Within these fields he focused on individual differences in intelligence and the implications of these differences within a high-technology society. He was in partial retirement as emeritus professor of psychology and adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Washington at the time of his death. His book Will We Be Smart Enough? discussed demographic projections and psychometric research as they relate to predictions of possible future workplaces.
Go to Profile#15945
Barry Komisaruk
#15956
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Barry R. Komisaruk is an American psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University. He is known for his works on sexology and sex therapy. Books The Orgasm Answer Guide with Beverly Whipple, Sara Nasserzadeh and Carlos Beyer-FloresThe Science of Orgasm with Beverly Whipple and Carlos Beyer-Flores
Go to Profile#15946
Louis Godart
#15957
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Louis Godart is an Italian archaeologist of Belgian origins. He is a specialist in Mycenaean archaeology and philology and holds the chair of philology at the University of Naples Federico II. He is also currently Director for the Conservation of Artistic Heritage of the Italian President.
Go to Profile#15947
Samira Islam
#15958
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Samira Ibrahim Islam is a Saudi Arabian pharmacologist and scholar. She heads King Fahd Medical Research Center's Drug Monitoring Unit at King Abdulaziz University. She was instrumental in securing formal university education for women in Saudi Arabia.
Go to Profile#15948
Julian Lombardi
#15959
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Julian Lombardi is an American inventor, author, educator, and computer scientist known for his work with socio-computational systems, scalable virtual world technologies, and in the design and deployment of deeply collaborative virtual learning environments.
Go to Profile#15949
Jonny Kim
#15960
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Jonathan Yong Kim , is an American U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, former SEAL, naval aviator, physician, and NASA astronaut. Born and raised in California, Kim enlisted in the U.S. Navy in the early 2000s before earning a Silver Star and his commission. While a U.S. sailor, Kim also received his Bachelor of Arts in mathematics with distinction, his Doctor of Medicine, and an acceptance to NASA Astronaut Group 22 in 2017. He completed his astronaut training in 2020 and was awaiting a flight assignment with the Artemis program .
Go to Profile#15950
Charles Schultze
#15961
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Charles Louis Schultze was an American economist and public policy analyst. He served as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the President Carter Administration. Schultze was appointed the Assistant Director of the Bureau of the Budget by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, and was the director from 1965 until 1968 during President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society agenda. He was also a veteran of World War II, during which he served in the army.
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