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
#15951
Norman A. Phillips
#15962
Overall Influence
1923 - 2019 (96 years)
Norman A. Phillips was an American meteorologist notable for his contributions to geophysical fluid dynamics. In 1956, he developed a mathematical model that could realistically depict monthly and seasonal patterns in the troposphere, which became the first successful general circulation model of climate.
Go to Profile#15952
Lurma Rackley
#15963
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Lurma M. Rackley is an American author, journalist and publicist. The daughter of a civil rights activist, she participated in civil rights demonstrations and was arrested 16 times before she was 13 years old. After college, she became a journalist and later, a publicist with the Washington, D.C. city government. In 1981, Petey Greene asked her to collaborate with him on his autobiography, recording audiotaped interviews with her shortly before his death. Rackley published her book about Greene in 2004.
Go to Profile#15953
Dirk ter Haar
#15964
Overall Influence
1919 - 2002 (83 years)
Dirk ter Haar FRSE FIP DSc was an Anglo-Dutch physicist. Life Dirk ter Haar was born at Oosterwolde in the province Friesland in the north of the Netherlands on 19 April 1919. He studied physics as an undergraduate at the University of Leiden. In 1946 he was a research fellow of Niels Bohr at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen , and returned to Leiden in 1948 to obtain his PhD. His supervisor was the renowned Hendrik Kramers and his PhD dissertation was on the origin of the Solar System. From 1947 to 1950 he was a visiting associate professor of physics at Purdue University.
Go to Profile#15954
J. Lee Rankin
#15965
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
James Lee Rankin was the 31st United States Solicitor General. Early life Rankin was born in Hartington, Nebraska, the son of Herman P. and Lois Gable Rankin. He attended public schools and earned his undergraduate and law degree from the University of Nebraska College of Law. In 1930 Rankin was admitted to the Nebraska bar and began practicing law in Lincoln. In 1935, he became a partner at his firm, where he worked for more than 20 years.
Go to Profile#15955
Hans G. Furth
#15966
Overall Influence
1920 - 1999 (79 years)
Hans Gerhard Fürth or Hans G. Furth was a Professor emeritus in the Faculty of Psychology of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Early life in Europe Hans Gerhard Fürth was born to Jewish parents, Hugo and Jula Fürth, in Austria and baptized into the Catholic Church at the age of 16. As a child, he was trained in classical piano and active in Austrian Boy Scouts. Shortly after the 1938 Anschluss of Austria into Germany, Furth fled the Nazis; first to Croatia, as a dependent of his mother who had married an elderly Croatian acquaintance to gain entry into that country. Upon ...
Go to Profile#15956
Michael Anton
#15967
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Michael Anton is an American conservative essayist, speechwriter and former private-equity executive who was a senior national security official in the Trump administration. Under a pseudonym he wrote "The Flight 93 Election", an influential essay in support of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Go to Profile#15957
Galen D. Stucky
#15968
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Galen D. Stucky is an American inorganic materials chemist who is a Distinguished Professor and the Essam Khashoggi Chair In Materials Chemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is noted for his work with porous ordered mesoporous materials such as SBA-15. He won the Prince of Asturias Award in 2014, in the Scientific and Technological Research area. Stucky was elected a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1994, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2013.
Go to Profile#15958
Rae Armantrout
#15969
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published more than two dozen books, including poetry and prose. Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Versed which was also nominated for the National Book Award. Versed later received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Go to Profile#15959
Edith Heard
#15970
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Edith Heard is a British-French researcher in epigenetics and since January 2019 has been the Director General of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory . She is also Professor at the Collège de France, holding the Chair of Epigenetics and Cellular Memory. From 2010 to 2018, Heard was the Director of the Genetics and Developmental Biology department at the Curie Institute , France. Heard is noted for her studies of X-chromosome-inactivation.
Go to Profile#15960
Henri B. Kagan
#15971
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Henri Boris Kagan is currently an emeritus professor at the Université Paris-Sud in France. He is widely recognized as a pioneer in the field of asymmetric catalysis. His discoveries have had far-reaching impacts on the pharmaceutical industry.
Go to Profile#15961
Florian Luca
#15972
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Florian Luca is a Romanian mathematician who specializes in number theory with emphasis on Diophantine equations, linear recurrences and the distribution of values of arithmetic functions. He has made notable contributions to the proof that irrational automatic numbers are transcendental and the proof of a conjecture of Erdős on the intersection of the Euler Totient function and the sum of divisors function.
Go to Profile#15962
Albert Wass
#15973
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Count Albert Wass de Szentegyed et Czege was a Hungarian nobleman, forest engineer, novelist, poet, member of the Wass de Czege family. Wass was born in Válaszút, Austria-Hungary in 1908. In 1944 he fled from Hungary, and then joined the fleeing forces of the Third Reich and ended up in Germany, then emigrated to the U.S. after World War II. He was condemned as a war criminal by the Romanian People's Tribunals, however, United States authorities refused to extradite Wass to Romania claiming the lack of solid evidence.
Go to Profile#15963
H. Ian Macdonald
#15974
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Hugh Ian Macdonald, OC, KLJ is a Canadian economist, civil servant, and was President of York University from 1974 to 1984. Biography Born in Toronto, Ontario, Macdonald received a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Toronto in 1952. A Rhodes scholar, he received a Master of Arts degree in 1954 and a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1955. In 1955, he started teaching at the University of Toronto and became an assistant professor of economics in 1962.
Go to Profile#15964
Lisa Delpit
#15975
Overall Influence
Lisa D. Delpit is an American educationalist, researcher, and author. She is the former executive director and Eminent Scholar at the Center for Urban Educational Excellence at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, Benjamin E. Mays Chair of Urban Educational Leadership at Georgia State University, and the first Felton G. Clark Distinguished Professor of Education at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She earned the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship for her research on school-community relations and cross-cultural communication.
Go to Profile#15965
Pentti Aalto
#15976
Overall Influence
1917 - 1998 (81 years)
Pentti Aalto was a Finnish linguist who was the University of Helsinki Docent of Comparative Linguistics 1958–1980. Aalto was a student of G. J. Ramstedt. He defended his doctoral dissertation in 1949 in Helsinki.
Go to Profile#15966
Nick Srnicek
#15977
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Nick Srnicek is a Canadian writer and academic. He is currently a lecturer in Digital Economy in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. Srnicek is associated with the political theory of accelerationism and a post-scarcity economy.
Go to Profile#15967
Morris West
#15978
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Morris Langlo West was an Australian novelist and playwright, best known for his novels The Devil's Advocate , The Shoes of the Fisherman and The Clowns of God . His books were published in 27 languages and sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than one million copies.
Go to Profile#15968
Peter Beardsley
#15979
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Peter Andrew Beardsley MBE is an English football coach and former footballer who played as a forward or midfielder between 1979 and 1999. In 1987, he set a record transfer fee in the English game and represented his country 59 times between 1986 and 1996, once as captain, taking part in two FIFA World Cups and UEFA Euro 1988. At club level, he played for Newcastle United, Liverpool and Everton with stints with the Toffees and Magpies resulting in over 200 Premier League appearances. Over the course of his career he also had spells with Carlisle United, Manchester United, Vancouver Whitecaps...
Go to Profile#15969
Sven Beckert
#15980
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
#15970
John A. Jane
#15981
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
John A. Jane, Sr. was an American neurosurgeon, and Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Virginia. He was Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Virginia from 1969 to 2006.
Go to Profile#15971
David Roediger
#15982
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
David R. Roediger is the Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas, where he has been since the fall of 2014. Previously, he was an American Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . His research interests include the construction of racial identity, class structures, labor studies, and the history of American radicalism. He writes from a Marxist theoretical framework.
Go to Profile#15972
Necmettin Erbakan
#15983
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Necmettin Erbakan was a Turkish politician, engineer, and academic who was the Prime Minister of Turkey from 1996 to 1997. He was pressured by the military to step down as prime minister and was later banned from politics by the Constitutional Court of Turkey for allegedly violating the separation of religion and state as mandated by the constitution.
Go to Profile#15973
Cliff Jones
#15984
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Clifford "Cliff" B. Jones is a British computer scientist, specializing in research into formal methods. He undertook a late DPhil at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory under Tony Hoare, awarded in 1981. Jones' thesis proposed an extension to Hoare logic for handling concurrent programs, rely/guarantee.
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Jerzy Szacki
#15985
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Jerzy Ryszard Szacki was a Polish sociologist and historian of ideas. From 1973 he was a professor at the University of Warsaw, and in 1991 became a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is considered one of the most prominent representatives of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas.
Go to Profile#15975
Arthur Gossard
#15986
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
#15976
Claudette Colbert
#15987
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
Émilie Chauchoin , professionally known as Claudette Colbert , was an American actress. Colbert began her career in Broadway productions during the late 1920s and progressed to films with the advent of talking pictures. Initially contracted to Paramount Pictures, Colbert became one of the few major actresses of the period who worked freelance, independent of the studio system.
Go to Profile#15977
Rajan Saxena
#15988
Overall Influence
Rajan Saxena is an Indian management expert, academic & writer. He is a former Vice-Chancellor of the SVKM's NMIMS, a deemed university in Mumbai, a former Director of Indian Institute of Management, Indore, S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research and ICFAI Business School, Gurgaon. He is also a recipient of the BERG Education Award for 2014.
Go to Profile#15978
Donald B. Redford
#15989
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Donald Bruce Redford is a Canadian Egyptologist and archaeologist, currently Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is married to Susan Redford, who is also an Egyptologist currently teaching classes at the university. Professor Redford has directed a number of important excavations in Egypt, notably at Karnak and Mendes.
Go to Profile#15979
Michael Bay
#15990
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Michael Benjamin Bay is an American film director and producer. He is best known for making big-budget, high-concept action films characterized by fast cutting, stylistic cinematography and visuals, and extensive use of special effects, including frequent depictions of explosions. The films he has produced and directed, which include Armageddon , Pearl Harbor and the Transformers film series , have grossed over worldwide, making him one of the most commercially successful directors in history.
Go to Profile#15980
Bonnie Bassler
#15991
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Bonnie Lynn Bassler is an American molecular biologist; the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology and chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University; and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She has researched cell-to-cell chemical communication in bacteria and discovered key insights into the mechanism by which bacteria communicate, known as quorum sensing. She has contributed to the idea that disruption of chemical signaling can be used as an antimicrobial therapy.
Go to Profile#15981
Maya Wiley
#15992
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Maya D. Wiley is an American lawyer, professor, and civil rights activist. She has served as president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights since May 2022. Wiley served as counsel to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. She chaired the Civilian Complaint Review Board from 2016 to 2017. She was an MSNBC legal analyst from August 2018 to January 2021. Wiley ran in the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary, placing third.
Go to Profile#15982
Paul Williams
#15993
Overall Influence
1948 - 2013 (65 years)
Paul S. Williams was an American music journalist, writer, and publisher who created Crawdaddy!, the first national US magazine of rock music criticism, in January 1966. He was a leading authority on the works of musicians Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Neil Young, and science fiction writers Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon.
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Jean-Pierre Kahane
#15994
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Jean-Pierre Kahane was a French mathematician with contributions to harmonic analysis. Career Kahane attended the École normale supérieure and obtained the agrégation of mathematics in 1949. He then worked for the CNRS from 1949 to 1954, first as an intern and then as a research assistant. He defended his PhD in 1954; his advisor was Szolem Mandelbrojt.
Go to Profile#15984
M. Madan Babu
#15995
Overall Influence
M. Madan Babu is an Indian-American computational biologist and bioinformatician. He is the endowed chair in biological data science and director of the center of excellence for data-driven discovery at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Previously, he served as a programme leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology .
Go to Profile#15985
Lawrence Rauchwerger
#15996
Overall Influence
Lawrence Rauchwerger is an American computer scientist noted for his research in parallel computing, compilers, and computer architecture. He is a speaker in the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program and the deputy director of the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences at Texas A&M University. He is the co-director of the Parasol Lab and manages the lab's software and systems group.
Go to Profile#15986
Hanna Batatu
#15997
Overall Influence
1926 - 2000 (74 years)
Hanna Batatu was a Palestinian Marxist historian specialising in the history of Iraq and the modern Arab east. His work on Iraq is widely considered the preeminent study of modern Iraqi history. Born in Jerusalem in 1926 to a Palestinian Arab Christian family, Hanna Batatu emigrated to the United States in 1948, the year of the Nakba - a series of events surrounding the establishment of the state of Israel in most of British Mandate Palestine, as well as the creation of a large Palestinian refugee population barred by the new state from returning to their homes. From 1951 to 1953, he studied at Georgetown University's Edmund A.
Go to Profile#15987
Rhea Seddon
#15998
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Margaret Rhea Seddon is an American surgeon and retired NASA astronaut. After being selected as part of the first group of astronauts to include women in 1978, she flew on three Space Shuttle flights: as a mission specialist on STS-51-D and STS-40, and as a payload commander for STS-58, accumulating over 722 hours in space. On these flights, she built repair tools for a US Navy satellite and performed medical experiments.
Go to Profile#15988
Kevin MacDonald
#15999
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Kevin B. MacDonald is an American antisemitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist, and retired professor of evolutionary psychology at California State University, Long Beach . In 2008, the CSULB academic senate voted to disassociate itself from MacDonald's work.
Go to Profile#15989
Paola Sapienza
#16000
Overall Influence
Paola Sapienza is an American and Italian economist. She is a member of the Kellogg School of Management faculty at Northwestern University. She is also a research associate at the NBER and CEPR. Her fields of interest include financial economics, cultural economics, and political economy.
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Kaveh Madani
#16001
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Kaveh Madani is a scientist, activist, and former Iranian politician. He previously served as the Deputy Head of Iran's Department of Environment . He also served as the Vice President of the United Nations Environmental Assembly Bureau from 2017 to 2018.
Go to Profile#15991
Edward L. Ayers
#16002
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Edward Lynn "Ed" Ayers is an American historian, professor, administrator, and university president. In July 2013, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama at a White House ceremony for Ayers's commitment "to making our history as widely available and accessible as possible." He served as the president of the Organization of American Historians in 2017–18.
Go to Profile#15992
Dr. John
#16003
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Malcolm John Rebennack Jr. , better known by his stage name Dr. John, was an American singer and songwriter. His music combined New Orleans blues, jazz, funk, and R&B. Active as a session musician from the late 1950s until his death, he gained a following in the late 1960s after the release of his album Gris-Gris and his appearance at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music. He typically performed a lively, theatrical stage show inspired by medicine shows, Mardi Gras costumes, and voodoo ceremonies. Rebennack recorded thirty studio albums and nine live albums, as well as contributing to thousands of other musicians' recordings.
Go to Profile#15993
Janet Thornton
#16004
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Dame Janet Maureen Thornton, is a senior scientist and director emeritus at the European Bioinformatics Institute , part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory . She is one of the world's leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function. She served as director of the EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a key role in ELIXIR.
Go to Profile#15994
Edward Khantzian
#16005
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Edward Khantzian was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Beginning in the 1970s, he developed a progressively more coherent and empirically-grounded self-medication hypothesis of drug abuse, which states that individuals use drugs in an attempt to self-medicate states of distress and suffering.
Go to Profile#15995
Federico Sturzenegger
#16006
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Federico Sturzenegger is an Argentine economist who was President of the Central Bank between 2015 and 2018. Sturzenegger has a PhD in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a professor of economics at University of California, Los Angeles, Torcuato di Tella University , and Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. Currently he teaches at University of San Andres and is Honoris Causa Professor at HEC Paris.
Go to Profile#15996
Eva Kittay
#16007
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Eva Feder Kittay is an American philosopher. She is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. Her primary interests include feminist philosophy, ethics, social and political theory, metaphor, and the application of these disciplines to disability studies. Kittay has also attempted to bring philosophical concerns into the public spotlight, including leading The Women's Committee of One Hundred in 1995, an organization that opposed the perceived punitive nature of the social welfare reforms taking place in the United States at the time.
Go to Profile#15997
Mary-Ann Ochota
#16008
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Mary-Ann Ochota is a British broadcaster and anthropologist specialising in anthropology, archaeology, social history and adventure factual television. Biography Ochota was born and grew up in Wincham, Northwich, Cheshire, to an Indian mother and a Polish father. She studied at the sixth-form college of Sir John Deane's College.
Go to Profile#15998
Daniel Stokols
#16009
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Stokols is Research Professor and Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Social Ecology in the Departments of Psychology and Social Behavior and Planning, Policy, and Design, and founding dean of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. He also holds appointments in Public Health, Epidemiology, and Nursing Science at UCI. His recent research has examined factors that influence the success of transdisciplinary research and training programs. Additional areas of Stokols' research include the design and evaluation of community and work site health promotion pro...
Go to Profile#15999
Seiji Shinkai
#16010
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
is a Japanese chemist and professor of Kyushu University, and emeritus professor. Early life Shinkai was born in Fukuoka prefecture, Japan, in 1944. He completed his B.S. in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1972 from Kyushu University.
Go to Profile#16000
Günther Uecker
#16011
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Günther Uecker is a German sculptor, op artist and installation artist. Biography Uecker was born in Wendorf, Mecklenburg. Uecker began his artistic education in 1949 when he took up studies at Wismar. He then went to the art school in Berlin-Weißensee and in 1955 to Düsseldorf, where he studied under Otto Pankok at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 1956 he began using nails in his art.
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