The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people
#1601
David Bloor
#1603
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
David Bloor is a British sociologist. He is a professor in, and a former director of, the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh. He is a key figure in the Edinburgh school and played a major role in the development of the field of science and technology studies. He is best known for advocating the strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge, most notably in his book Knowledge and Social Imagery.
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Vasudeva
#1604
Overall Influence
According to Hindu scriptures, Vasudeva , also called Anakadundubhi , is the father of the Hindu deities Krishna , Balarama, and Subhadra. He was a king of the Vrishnis, and a Yadava prince. The son of the Yadava king Shurasena, he was also the second cousin of Nanda, the foster-father of Krishna. His sister Kunti was married to Pandu.
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Carlos Castaneda
#1605
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Carlos Castañeda was an American writer. Starting in 1968, Castaneda published a series of books that describe a training in shamanism that he received under the tutelage of a Yaqui "Man of Knowledge" named don Juan Matus. While Castaneda's work was accepted as factual by many when the books were first published, the training he described is now generally considered to be fictional.
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Langdon Winner
#1606
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Langdon Winner is Thomas Phelan Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. Langdon Winner was born in San Luis Obispo, California on August 7, 1944. He received his B.A. in 1966, M.A. in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1973, all in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His primary focus was political theory.
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Winston W. Royce
#1607
Overall Influence
1929 - 1995 (66 years)
Winston Walker Royce was an American computer scientist, director at Lockheed Software Technology Center in Austin, Texas. He was a pioneer in the field of software development, known for his 1970 paper from which the Waterfall model for software development was mistakenly drawn.
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David Sloan Wilson
#1608
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David Sloan Wilson is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He is a son of author Sloan Wilson, and co-founder of the Evolution Institute, and co-founder of the spinoff nonprofit Prosocial World.
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Elaine Showalter
#1609
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers".
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Douglas Coupland
#1610
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the terms Generation X and McJob. He has published 13 novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for the Financial Times, as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, DIS Magazine, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything, which was...
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Yang Chen-Ning
#1611
Overall Influence
1922 - Present (102 years)
Yang Chen-Ning or Chen-Ning Yang , also known as C. N. Yang or by the English name Frank Yang, is a Chinese theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to statistical mechanics, integrable systems, gauge theory, and both particle physics and condensed matter physics. He and Tsung-Dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on parity non-conservation of weak interaction. The two proposed that one of the basic quantum-mechanics laws, the conservation of parity, is violated in the so-called weak nuclear reactions, those nuclear processes that result in the emission of beta or alpha particles.
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Henry Louis Gates Jr.
#1612
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
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Stanley Mazor
#1613
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Stanley Mazor is an American microelectronics engineer who was born on 22 October 1941 in Chicago, Illinois. He is one of the co-inventors of the world's first microprocessor architecture, the Intel 4004, together with Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima, and Federico Faggin.
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Eve Ensler
#1614
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
V, formerly Eve Ensler , is an American playwright, author, performer, feminist, and activist. V is best known for her play The Vagina Monologues. In 2006 Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called The Vagina Monologues "probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade."
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Jane Mayer
#1615
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Jane Meredith Mayer is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1995. She has written for the publication about money in politics; government prosecution of whistleblowers; the United States Predator drone program; Donald Trump's ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz; and Trump's financial backer, Robert Mercer. In 2016, Mayer's book Dark Money—in which she investigated the history of the conservative fundraising Koch brothers—was published to critical acclaim.
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Carol Ann Duffy
#1616
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
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Stephen Marcussen
#1617
Overall Influence
Stephen Marcussen is the founder and chief mastering engineer at Marcussen Mastering in Hollywood, California, United States. He has been mastering music since 1979. Biography Marcussen's introduction to music recording happened in 1976 when, at the age of 19, he was offered a janitor position at Studio 55, record producer Richard Perry's Los Angeles recording studio. At Studio 55, Marcussen received an education in all facets of music recording and sound production. By the end of his Studio 55 tenure, he had earned his first album credits as an assistant engineer, working on The Manhattan T...
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Edward Fredkin
#1618
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
Edward Fredkin was an American computer scientist, physicist and businessman who was an early pioneer of digital physics. Fredkin's primary contributions included work on reversible computing and cellular automata. While Konrad Zuse's book, Calculating Space , mentioned the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin gate represented the essential breakthrough. In more recent work, he used the term digital philosophy .
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Riccardo Giacconi
#1619
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Riccardo Giacconi was an Italian-American Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist who laid down the foundations of X-ray astronomy. He was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University. Biography Born in Genoa, Italy, Giacconi received his Laurea from the Physics Department of University of Milan before moving to the US to pursue a career in astrophysics research. In 1956, his Fulbright Fellowship led him to go to the United States to collaborate with physics professor R. W. Thompson at Indiana University.
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Steven Strogatz
#1620
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Steven Henry Strogatz , born August 13, 1959, is an American mathematician and the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for his work on nonlinear systems, including contributions to the study of synchronization in dynamical systems, and for his research in a variety of areas of applied mathematics, including mathematical biology and complex network theory.
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Steven Holl
#1621
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Steven Holl is a New York–based American architect and watercolorist. His work includes the 2022 Rubenstein Commons at the Institute for Advanced Study; the 2020 Campus expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston including the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building and Glassell School of Art; the 2019 REACH expansion of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; the 2019 Hunters Point Library in Queens, New York; the 2007 Bloch Building addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri; and the 2009 Linked Hybrid mixed-use complex in Beijing, China.
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Norm Macdonald
#1622
Overall Influence
1959 - 2021 (62 years)
Norman Gene Macdonald was a Canadian stand-up comedian, actor, and writer whose style was characterized by deadpan delivery and the use of folksy, old-fashioned turns of phrase. He appeared in many films and was a regular guest on late-night talk shows, where he became known for his chaotic, yet understated style of comedy. Many critics and fellow comedians considered him to be the ultimate talk show guest, while prominent late-night figure David Letterman regarded him as "the best" of stand-up comedians.
Go to Profile#1621
Brian Josephson
#1623
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Brian David Josephson is a Welsh theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Cambridge. Best known for his pioneering work on superconductivity and quantum tunnelling, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his prediction of the Josephson effect, made in 1962 when he was a 22-year-old PhD student at Cambridge University. Josephson is the first Welshman to have won a Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared the prize with physicists Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever, who jointly received half the award for their own work on quantum tunnelling.
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Herbert Kroemer
#1624
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Herbert Kroemer is a German-American physicist who, along with Zhores Alferov, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for "developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics". Kroemer is professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, having received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1952 from the University of Göttingen, Germany, with a dissertation on hot electron effects in the then-new transistor. His research into transistors was a stepping stone to the later development of mobile phone techn...
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Alain Finkielkraut
#1625
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Alain Luc Finkielkraut is a French essayist and public intellectual. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics, many on the ideas of tradition and identitary nonviolence, including Jewish identity and antisemitism, French colonialism, the mission of the French education system in immigrant assimilation, and the Yugoslav Wars. He often appears on French television.
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Brenda Milner
#1626
Overall Influence
1918 - Present (106 years)
Brenda Milner is a British-Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the research literature on various topics in the field of clinical neuropsychology. Milner is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. , she holds more than 25 honorary degrees and she continued to work in her nineties. Her current work covers many aspects of neuropsychology including her lifelong interest in the involvement of the temporal lobes in episodic memory. She is sometimes referred to as the founder of neuropsychology and has been essential in its development.
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Red Skelton
#1627
Overall Influence
1913 - 1997 (84 years)
Richard Red Skelton was an American entertainer best known for his national radio and television shows between 1937 and 1971, especially as host of the television program The Red Skelton Show. He has stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in radio and television, and also appeared in burlesque, vaudeville, films, nightclubs, and casinos, all while he pursued an entirely separate career as an artist.
Go to Profile#1626
Jerry Siegel
#1628
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
Jerome Siegel was an American comic book writer. He is the co-creator of Superman, in collaboration with his friend Joe Shuster, published by DC Comics. They also created Doctor Occult, who was later featured in The Books of Magic. Siegel and Shuster were inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1993. With Bernard Baily, Siegel also co-created the long-running DC character The Spectre. Siegel created ten of the earliest members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, one of DC's most popular team books, which is set in the 30th Century.
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Howard Rheingold
#1629
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Howard Rheingold is an American critic, writer, and teacher, known for his specialties on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities.
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Carlo Ginzburg
#1630
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Carlo Ginzburg is an Italian historian and a proponent of the field of microhistory. He is best known for Il formaggio e i vermi , which examined the beliefs of an Italian heretic, Menocchio, from Montereale Valcellina.
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Alexander Wendt
#1631
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Alexander Wendt is an American political scientist who is one of the core social constructivist researchers in the field of international relations, and a key contributor to quantum social science. Wendt and academics such as Nicholas Onuf, Peter J. Katzenstein, Emanuel Adler, Michael Barnett, Kathryn Sikkink, John Ruggie, Martha Finnemore, and others have, within a relatively short period, established constructivism as one of the major schools of thought in the field.
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Syukuro Manabe
#1632
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
is a Japanese–American meteorologist and climatologist who pioneered the use of computers to simulate global climate change and natural climate variations. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi, for his contributions to the physical modeling of earth's climate, quantifying its variability, and predictions of climate change.
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B. Alan Wallace
#1633
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bruce Alan Wallace is an American author and expert on Tibetan Buddhism. His books discuss Eastern and Western scientific, philosophical, and contemplative modes of inquiry, often focusing on the relationships between science and Buddhism. He is founder of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies.
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Vladimir Bukovsky
#1634
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky was a Russian-born British human rights activist and writer. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, he was a prominent figure in the Soviet dissident movement, well known at home and abroad. He spent a total of twelve years in the psychiatric prison-hospitals, labour camps, and prisons of the Soviet Union during Brezhnev rule.
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Julius Schwartz
#1635
Overall Influence
1915 - 2004 (89 years)
Julius "Julie" Schwartz was an American comic book editor, and a science fiction agent and prominent fan. He was born in The Bronx, New York. He is best known as a longtime editor at DC Comics, where at various times he was primary editor over the company's flagship superheroes, Superman and Batman.
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Anne Applebaum
#1636
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum is an American and naturalized-Polish journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe.
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Rodolfo Llinás
#1637
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Rodolfo Llinás Riascos is a Colombian and American neuroscientist. He is currently the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the NYU School of Medicine. Llinás has published over 800 scientific articles.
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Saddam Hussein
#1638
Overall Influence
1937 - 2006 (69 years)
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. He also served as prime minister of Iraq from 1979 to 1991 and later from 1994 to 2003. He was a leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organization, the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, which espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism.
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Adam Michnik
#1639
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Adam Michnik is a Polish historian, essayist, former dissident, public intellectual, as well as co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Polish newspaper, . Reared in a family of committed communists, Michnik became an opponent of Poland's communist regime at the time of the party's anti-Jewish purges. He was imprisoned after the 1968 March Events and again after the imposition of martial law in 1981. He has been called "one of Poland's most famous political prisoners".
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Wang Yi
#1640
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Wang Yi is a Chinese diplomat and politician who has been serving as Director of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission Office since January 2023, and as Minister of Foreign Affairs of China since July 2023 .
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James Rumbaugh
#1641
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
James E. Rumbaugh is an American computer scientist and object-oriented methodologist who is best known for his work in creating the Object Modeling Technique and the Unified Modeling Language . Biography Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Rumbaugh received a B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , an M.S. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology , and received a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT under Professor Jack Dennis.
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W. T. Tutte
#1642
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
William Thomas Tutte OC FRS FRSC was an English and Canadian codebreaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system which was used for top-secret communications within the Wehrmacht High Command. The high-level, strategic nature of the intelligence obtained from Tutte's crucial breakthrough, in the bulk decrypting of Lorenz-enciphered messages specifically, contributed greatly, and perhaps even decisively, to the defeat of Nazi Germany. He also had a number of significant ...
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Empress Michiko
#1643
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
is a member of the Imperial House of Japan who served as the empress consort of Japan as the wife of Akihito, the 125th Emperor of Japan reigning from 7 January 1989 to 30 April 2019. Michiko married Crown Prince Akihito and became the Crown Princess of Japan in 1959. She was the first commoner to marry into the Japanese Imperial Family. She has had three children with her husband. Her elder son, Naruhito, is the current emperor to the Chrysanthemum Throne. As crown princess and later as empress consort, she has become the most visible and widely travelled imperial consort in Japanese history....
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Abraham Foxman
#1644
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Abraham Henry Foxman is an American lawyer and activist. He served as the national director of the Anti-Defamation League from 1987 to 2015, and is currently the League's national director emeritus. From 2016 to 2021 he served as vice chair of the board of trustees at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City in order to lead its efforts on antisemitism.
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Paul Watzlawick
#1645
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Paul Watzlawick was an Austrian-American family therapist, psychologist, communication theorist, and philosopher. A theoretician in communication theory and radical constructivism, he commented in the fields of family therapy and general psychotherapy. Watzlawick believed that people create their own suffering in the very act of trying to fix their emotional problems. He was one of the most influential figures at the Mental Research Institute and lived and worked in Palo Alto, California.
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Harrison White
#1646
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
#1645
J. Philippe Rushton
#1647
Overall Influence
1943 - 2012 (69 years)
John Philippe Rushton was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.
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Robert A. M. Stern
#1648
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Arthur Morton Stern , is a New York City–based architect, educator, and author. He is the founding partner of the architecture firm, Robert A. M. Stern Architects, also known as RAMSA. From 1998 to 2016, he was the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture.
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Persi Diaconis
#1649
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Persi Warren Diaconis is an American mathematician of Greek descent and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University. He is particularly known for tackling mathematical problems involving randomness and randomization, such as coin flipping and shuffling playing cards.
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Ingrid Daubechies
#1650
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#1649
Franco Rasetti
#1651
Overall Influence
1901 - 2001 (100 years)
Franco Dino Rasetti was an Italian physicist, paleontologist and botanist. Together with Enrico Fermi, he discovered key processes leading to nuclear fission. Rasetti refused to work on the Manhattan Project on moral grounds.
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Lars Hörmander
#1652
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Lars Valter Hörmander was a Swedish mathematician who has been called "the foremost contributor to the modern theory of linear partial differential equations". Hörmander was awarded the Fields Medal in 1962 and the Wolf Prize in 1988. In 2006 he was awarded the Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition for his four-volume textbook Analysis of Linear Partial Differential Operators, which is considered a foundational work on the subject.
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