Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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School

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Ranking

List of the most influential people

#16001

Elizabeth Jolley

Elizabeth Jolley

#16012

Overall Influence

1923 - 2007 (84 years)

Monica Elizabeth Jolley AO was an English-born Australian writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s and forged an illustrious literary career there. She was 53 when her first book was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels , four short story collections and three non-fiction books, publishing well into her 70s and achieving significant critical acclaim. She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well-known writers such as Tim Winton among her students at Curtin University.

#16002

Lubomír Doležel

#16013

Overall Influence

1922 - 2017 (95 years)

Lubomír Doležel was a Czech literary theorist and one of the founders of the so-called fictional worlds theory. Life, work, and academic career Doležel was born in 1922 in Lesnice in Czechoslovakia. He was educated at Charles University in Prague and received his CSc in Slavic philology from the Institute of the Czech Language of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Many of his teachers and mentors were representatives of the so-called Prague School, an internationally recognized and influential centre of inter-war structuralist and semiotic thought. The influence of the Prague School is ev...

#16003

Martha Chen

#16014

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Martha Chen is an American academic, scholar and social worker, who is presently a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and senior advisor of the global research-policy-action network WIEGO and a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research . Martha is a development practitioner and scholar who has worked with the working poor in India, South Asia, and around the world. Her areas of specialization are employment, poverty alleviation, informal economy, and gender. She lived in Bangladesh working with BRAC, ...

#16004

Roy McWeeny

#16015

Overall Influence

1924 - 2021 (97 years)

Roy McWeeny was a British academic physicist and chemist. McWeeny was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in May 1924. His first degree was in physics from the University of Leeds. He then obtained a D.Phil. in mathematical physics and quantum theory under the supervision of Charles Coulson at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford.

#16005

Thomas P. Doyle

#16016

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Thomas Patrick Doyle is an American inactive Catholic priest, formerly of the Dominican Order. Biography Doyle attended the Aquinas Institute of Philosophy, the University of Wisconsin, Aquinas Institute of Theology, the Catholic University of America, and the University of Ottawa. He holds a Pontifical Licentiate in Canon Law from St. Paul University, and a Pontifical Doctorate in Canon Law from Catholic University of America. He also served as an officer in the United States Air Force from 1986 to 2004.

#16006

Madeleine Bunting

#16017

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Madeleine Clare J. Bunting is an English writer. She was formerly an associate editor and columnist at The Guardian newspaper. She has written five works of non-fiction and two novels . She is a regular broadcaster for the BBC. Her most recent series of essays for BBC Radio 3 was on the idea of Home, and broadcast in March 2020. Previous series of essays include 'Are You Paying Attention?' 'The Crisis of Care' and 'The Retreating Roar' on the loss of faith.

#16007

John T. Noonan Jr.

John T. Noonan Jr.

#16018

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

John Thomas Noonan Jr. was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Personal and education Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Noonan attended the John D. Runkle School and the Rivers School. Noonan entered Harvard University in 1944 and graduated summa cum laude two years later with a Bachelor of Arts in English. While at Harvard he wrote for the Harvard Crimson and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After a year at St. John's College, Cambridge, Noonan matriculated at Catholic University of America, from which he received a Master of Arts in 1949 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1951, both in philosophy.

#16008

Humayun Azad

#16019

Overall Influence

1947 - 2004 (57 years)

Hasin Ahmed was a Bangladeshi poet, novelist, short-story writer, critic, linguist, columnist and professor of Dhaka University. He wrote more than sixty titles. He was awarded the Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1986 for his contributions to Bengali linguistics. In 2012, the Government of Bangladesh honored him with Ekushey Padak posthumously for his contributions to Bengali literature.

#16009

David Henige

#16020

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

David Patrick Henige is an American historian, bibliographer, academic librarian and Africanist scholar. The majority of Henige's academic career has been spent in affiliation with the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where for over three decades he held the position of bibliographer in African studies at UW–Madison's Memorial Library.

#16010

Daniel Weihs

#16021

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Daniel Weihs is the Israeli Louis and Lyra Richmond Chair of Life Sciences and Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Aeronautical Engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and the Head of its Autonomous Systems Program.

#16011

Burt Kaliski

#16022

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Burton S. "Burt" Kaliski, Jr. is a cryptographer, who is currently the chief technology officer and senior vice president at Verisign. Before joining Verisign in 2011, he was the founding director of the EMC Innovation Network at EMC Corporation since its 2006 acquisition of RSA Security where he was Chief Scientist for RSA Laboratories. His notable work includes the development of such public key cryptography standards as PKCS and IEEE P1363, the extension of linear cryptanalysis to use multiple approximations, and the design of the block cipher Crab.

#16012

Stephan Pastis

#16023

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Stephan Thomas Pastis is an American cartoonist and former lawyer who is the creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine. He also writes children's chapter books, commencing with the release of Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made. The seventh book, It's the End When I Say It's the End, debuted at #4 on The New York Times Best Seller list for Children's Middle Grade Books.

#16013

Yiyun Li

#16024

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.

#16014

Dorothy Emmet

#16025

Overall Influence

1904 - 2000 (96 years)

Dorothy Mary Emmet was a British philosopher and head of Manchester University's philosophy department for over twenty years. With Margaret Masterman and Richard Braithwaite she was a founder member of the Epiphany Philosophers. She was the doctoral advisor of Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Austin Markus. Emmet was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, where she took first-class honours in 1927.

#16015

Greg Maddux

#16026

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Gregory Alan Maddux , also known as "Mad Dog" and "the Professor," is an American former professional baseball pitcher who played 23 seasons in Major League Baseball , primarily with the Atlanta Braves and Chicago Cubs, whom he achieved his greatest success with. With the Braves, he won the 1995 World Series over the Cleveland Indians. The first to achieve a number of feats and records, Maddux was the first pitcher in major league history to win the Cy Young Award four consecutive years , matched by only one other pitcher, Randy Johnson. During those four seasons, Maddux had a 75–29 record wi...

#16016

Pamela Anderson

Pamela Anderson

#16027

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Pamela Denise Anderson is a Canadian-American actress, model and media personality. She is best known for her modelling work in Playboy magazine and for her role as "C.J." Parker on the television series Baywatch .

#16017

Gary S. May

#16028

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Gary Stephen May is the chancellor of the University of California, Davis. From May 2005 to June 2011, he was the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He served as the Dean of the Georgia Tech College of Engineering from July 2011 until June 2017.

#16018

Werner De Bondt

#16029

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Werner F.M. De Bondt is one of the founders in the field of behavioral finance. He is also the founding director of Richard H. Driehaus Center for Behavioral Finance at DePaul University in Chicago. Previously, he was the Frank Graner Professor of Investment Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Thomas F. Gleed Chair of Business Administration at Albers School of Business and Economics at the Seattle University.

#16019

Brenda Dervin

#16030

Overall Influence

1938 - 2022 (84 years)

Brenda Dervin, was a professor of communication at Ohio State University, working in the fields communication and library and information science. Her research about information seeking and information use led to the development of the sense-making methodology . Dervin received a bachelor's degree in journalism and home economics from Cornell University, with a minor in philosophy of religion, and her M.S. and PhD degrees in communication research from Michigan State University. In 1986 she acted as the first president of the International Communication Association. Dervin reviews articles...

#16020

Oscar Nunez

#16031

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Oscar Nunez , sometimes credited as Oscar Nuñez, is a Cuban-American actor and comedian. He is best known for his role as the Dunder Mifflin accountant Oscar Martinez on NBC's The Office. He was a member of The Groundlings and later became a regular cast member on The Office. He also created and co-starred in the Comedy Central series Halfway Home in 2007, and in 2014 co-starred in the short-lived USA Network comedy series Benched. Since 2018, he has appeared in a series of State Farm commercials.

#16021

David F. Noble

#16032

Overall Influence

1945 - 2010 (65 years)

David Franklin Noble was a historian and critic of technology, science and education, best known for his seminal work on the social history of automation. In his final years he taught in the Division of Social Science and the department of Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada. Noble held positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Smithsonian Institution, and Drexel University, as well as many visiting professorships.

#16022

Bob Hale

#16033

Overall Influence

1945 - 2017 (72 years)

Bob Hale, FRSE was a British philosopher, known for his contributions to the development of the neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics in collaboration with Crispin Wright, and for his works in modality and philosophy of language.

#16023

Kelly Oliver

#16034

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Kelly Oliver is an American philosopher specializing in feminism, political philosophy and ethics. She is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. She is also a founder of the feminist philosophy journal philoSOPHIA.

#16024

Heinrich Popitz

#16035

Overall Influence

1925 - 2002 (77 years)

Heinrich Popitz was a German sociologist who worked towards a general sociological theory. Alongside thinkers like Helmut Schelsky, Hans Paul Bahrdt, Dieter Claessens, and others he was one of those sociologists in post-war Germany who founded their sociological reflections on insights from Philosophical Anthropology, thus creating an alternative to the then dominant paradigms of the Frankfurt School and Cologne School . His work revolves around the four central concepts power, normss, technology, and creativity.

#16025

Robert Middlekauff

#16036

Overall Influence

1929 - 2021 (92 years)

Robert Lawrence Middlekauff was a professor of colonial and early United States history at the University of California, Berkeley. Career In 1983, Middlekauff became the President of Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, until 1987. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984. In 1987, Middlekauff became a professor at UC Berkeley.

#16026

Manu Ginóbili

#16037

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Emanuel David Ginóbili Maccari is an Argentine former professional basketball player. Widely credited for changing the game of basketball by popularizing the Euro step move in the NBA, he is regarded as one of the greatest shooting guards and sixth men in the league's history and as the greatest Latin American player of all time. He notably led Argentina to a gold medal in the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics. Over a 23-year professional career, he became one of only two players to have won a EuroLeague title, an NBA championship, and an Olympic gold medal. A four-time NBA champion, Ginóbili was a member of the San Antonio Spurs for his entire 16-year NBA career.

#16027

J. D. McClatchy

#16038

Overall Influence

1945 - 2018 (73 years)

J. D. "Sandy" McClatchy was an American poet, opera librettist and literary critic. He was editor of the Yale Review and president of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Life McClatchy was born Joseph Donald McClatchy Jr., in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1945. He was educated at Georgetown and Yale, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1974. He lived in Stonington, Connecticut, and New York. His husband was graphic designer Chip Kidd. His partner from 1977 to 1989 was poet Alfred Corn.

#16028

Michael Wesch

#16039

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Michael Lee Wesch is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Kansas State University. Wesch's work also includes media ecology and the emerging field of digital ethnography, where he studies the effect of new media on human interaction.

#16029

Ralph S. Phillips

#16040

Overall Influence

1913 - 1998 (85 years)

Ralph Saul Phillips was an American mathematician and academic known for his contributions to functional analysis, scattering theory, and servomechanisms. He served as a Professor of mathematics at Stanford University. He made major contributions to acoustical scattering theory in collaboration with Peter Lax, proving remarkable results on local energy decay and the connections between poles of the scattering matrix and the analytic properties of the resolvent. With Lax, he coauthored the widely referred book on scattering theory titled Scattering Theory for Automorphic Functions. Phillips received the 1997 Leroy P.

#16030

Terry Hands

#16041

Overall Influence

1941 - 2020 (79 years)

Terence David Hands was a multi-award English theatre director. He founded the Liverpool Everyman Theatre and ran the Royal Shakespeare Company for thirteen years during one of the company's most successful periods; he spent 25 years in all with the RSC. He also saved Clwyd Theatr Cymru from closure and turned it into the most successful theatre in Wales in his seventeen years as Artistic Director. He received several Olivier, Tony and Molière awards and nominations for directing and lighting.

#16031

George Karl

#16042

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

George Matthew Karl is an American former professional basketball coach and player. After spending five years as a player for the San Antonio Spurs, Karl became an assistant with the team before getting the chance to become a head coach in 1981 with the Continental Basketball Association. Three years later, he became one of the youngest NBA head coaches in history when he was named coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers at age 33. By the time his coaching career came to an end in 2016, Karl coached nine different teams in three different leagues , which included being named Coach of the Year three combined times with one championship in the FIBA Saporta Cup.

#16032

Andrzej Trautman

Andrzej Trautman

#16043

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Andrzej Mariusz Trautman is a Polish mathematical physicist who has made contributions to classical gravitation in general and to general relativity in particular. He made contributions to gravitation as early as 1958. The "Trautman-Bondi mass" is named after him.

#16033

Michael Henry Heim

#16044

Overall Influence

1943 - 2012 (69 years)

Michael Henry Heim was an American literary translator and scholar. He translated literature from eight languages , including works by Anton Chekhov, Milan Kundera, and Günter Grass. He received his doctorate in Slavic languages and literature from Harvard in 1971, and joined the faculty of UCLA the following year. In 2003, he and his wife used their life savings to establish the PEN Translation Fund.

#16034

Charles Sibley

#16045

Overall Influence

1917 - 1998 (81 years)

Charles Gald Sibley was an American ornithologist and molecular biologist. He had an immense influence on the scientific classification of birds, and the work that Sibley initiated has substantially altered our understanding of the evolutionary history of modern birds.

#16035

Rose Tremain

#16046

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Dame Rose Tremain is an English novelist, short story writer, and former Chancellor of the University of East Anglia. Life Rose Tremain was born Rosemary Jane Thomson on 2 August 1943 in London to Viola Mabel Thomson and Keith Nicholas Home Thomson. Her paternal great-grandfather is William Thomson, who was Archbishop of York from 1862 to 1890.

#16036

Andrew E. Lange

#16047

Overall Influence

1957 - 2010 (53 years)

Andrew E. Lange was an astrophysicist and Goldberger Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Lange came to Caltech in 1993 and was most recently the chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. Caltech's president Jean-Lou Chameau called him "a truly great physicist and astronomer who had made seminal discoveries in observational cosmology".

#16037

Vicente del Bosque

#16048

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Vicente del Bosque González, 1st Marquess of Del Bosque is a Spanish retired football manager and former player. He is regarded as one of the greatest managers of all time and is to date the only football manager to have won the World Cup, the Champions League, the European Championship and the Intercontinental Cup.

#16038

Hiroshi Nakajima

#16049

Overall Influence

1928 - 2013 (85 years)

Hiroshi Nakajima was a Japanese doctor known chiefly for his tenure as Director-General of the World Health Organization. Early life and education He was born in Chiba, Japan, on 16 May 1928. In 1955 Nakajima received his M.D. from Tokyo Medical University, Japan. He then studied in Paris.

#16039

Linda McCartney

Linda McCartney

#16050

Overall Influence

1941 - 1998 (57 years)

Linda Louise McCartney, Lady McCartney was an American photographer, musician, animal rights activist, vegetarian cookbook author and advocate, and entrepreneur. She was the keyboardist in the band Wings, which also featured her husband, Paul McCartney of the Beatles.

#16040

Fiorella Kostoris

#16051

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Fiorella Kostoris Padoa-Schioppa is an Italian economist who is Professor at the University of Rome . She is also a professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. She has published approximately a hundred articles and twenty books in various languages on topics concerning macroeconomics, labor, public finance, unemployment, pension reform and other topics. She was president of ISAE, the Italian independent but government-funded economic think tank until March 2003. She is working on a book on European economic policies and institutions.

#16041

Carlo Becchi

#16052

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Carlo Maria Becchi is an Italian theoretical physicist. Becchi studied at the University of Genoa, where he received his university degree in physics in 1962. In 1976, he became full professor for theoretical physics at the University of Genoa. Twice , he was chairman of the physics faculty there. From 1997 to 2003 he was the chairman of the theory committee of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare .

#16042

Jack Silver

#16053

Overall Influence

1942 - 2016 (74 years)

Jack Howard Silver was a set theorist and logician at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Montana, he earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Berkeley in 1966 under Robert Vaught before taking a position at the same institution the following year. He held an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship from 1970 to 1972. Silver made several contributions to set theory in the areas of large cardinals and the constructible universe L.

#16043

Fernando Alonso

Fernando Alonso

#16054

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Fernando Alonso Díaz is a Spanish racing driver currently competing for Aston Martin in Formula One. He won the series' World Drivers' Championship in and with Renault, and has also driven for McLaren, Ferrari, and Minardi. With Toyota, Alonso won the 24 Hours of Le Mans twice, in and , and the FIA World Endurance Championship in 2018–19. He also won the 24 Hours of Daytona with Wayne Taylor Racing in 2019. As of 2023, Alonso is the only driver to win both the F1 World Drivers' Championship and the World Endurance Championship, even if the World Sportscar Championship is included in WEC.

#16044

Lou DiBella

#16055

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Louis John DiBella Jr. is an American boxing promoter and television/film producer. Education DiBella is a graduate of Regis High School . He then continued his education at Tufts University before pursuing a Juris Doctor degree at Harvard Law School.

#16045

Faith Hill

#16056

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Audrey Faith McGraw , known professionally as Faith Hill, is an American country singer. She is one of the most successful country music artists of all time, having sold almost 50 million albums worldwide.

#16046

Gilbert Sorrentino

Gilbert Sorrentino

#16057

Overall Influence

1929 - 2006 (77 years)

Gilbert Sorrentino was an American novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, professor, and editor. In over twenty-five works of fiction and poetry, Sorrentino explored the comic and formal possibilities of language and literature. His insistence on the primacy of language and his forays into metafiction mark him as a postmodernist, but he is also known for his ear for American speech and his attention to the particularities of place, especially of his native Brooklyn.

#16047

Betsy Levy Paluck

#16058

Overall Influence

Elizabeth Levy Paluck is a professor in the department of psychology and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she also serves as deputy director of the Center for Behavioral Science & Policy. She is known for her work on prejudice, social norms and conflict reduction. She is best known for creating large-scale field experiments utilizing theoretical social psychology strategies and tools to formulate effective and practical methods for reducing conflict and discrimination. Due to her extensive work investigating the influences of the Rwandan ...

#16048

Edmund Bacon

#16059

Overall Influence

1910 - 2005 (95 years)

Edmund Norwood Bacon was an American urban planner, architect, educator, and author. During his tenure as the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, his visions shaped today's Philadelphia, the city of his birth, to the extent that he is sometimes described as "The Father of Modern Philadelphia". He authored the seminal urban planning book Design of Cities.

#16049

Hermann Bottenbruch

#16060

Overall Influence

1928 - 2019 (91 years)

Hermann Bottenbruch was a German mathematician and computer scientist. Bottenbruch grew up in . Toward the end of World War II, he served as a . In 1947, he began the study of mathematics at the where he graduated in 1951. Following graduation, he joined the staff of the Institute for Applied Mathematics at the . The institute was founded by Alwin Walther. Bottenbruch earned his doctorate there in 1957.

#16050

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

#16061

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Ricardo A. Baeza-Yates is a Chilean-Catalan-American computer scientist that currently is the Director of Research of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University in the Silicon Valley campus. He is also part-time professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Universidad de Chile in Santiago. He is an expert member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, a member of the Association for Computing Machinery's US Technology Policy Committee as well as IEEE's Ethics Committee.

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