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
#16151
Pierre Lévy
#16162
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Pierre Lévy is a Tunisian-born French philosopher, cultural theorist and media scholar who specializes in the understanding of the cultural and cognitive implications of digital technologies and the phenomenon of human collective intelligence.
Go to Profile#16152
Ivan Damgård
#16163
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ivan Bjerre Damgård is a Danish cryptographer and currently a professor at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark. Academic background In 1983, he obtained a master's degree in mathematics at Aarhus University. He began his PhD studies in 1985 at the same university, and was for a period a guest researcher at CWI in Amsterdam in 1987. He earned his PhD degree in May, 1988, with the thesis Ubetinget beskyttelse i kryptografiske protokoller and has been employed at Aarhus University ever since. Damgård became full professor in 2005.
Go to Profile#16153
David Pountney
#16164
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sir David Willoughby Pountney is a British-Polish theatre and opera director and librettist internationally known for his productions of rarely performed operas and new productions of classic works. He has directed over ten world premières, including three by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies for whom he wrote the librettos of The Doctor of Myddfai, Mr Emmet Takes a Walk and Kommilitonen!
Go to Profile#16154
Alan Parsons
#16165
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Alan Parsons is an English audio engineer, songwriter, musician and record producer. Parsons was the sound engineer on albums including the Beatles' Abbey Road and Let It Be , Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon , and the eponymous debut album by Ambrosia in 1975. Parsons's own group, the Alan Parsons Project, as well as his subsequent solo recordings, have also been commercially successful. He has been nominated for 13 Grammy Awards, with his first win occurring in 2019 for Best Immersive Audio Album for Eye in the Sky .
Go to Profile#16155
Ronald Takaki
#16166
Overall Influence
1939 - 2009 (70 years)
Ronald Toshiyuki Takaki was an American academic, historian, ethnographer and author. Born in pre-statehood Hawaii, Takaki studied at the College of Wooster and completed his doctorate in American history at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#16156
Sarah Jessica Parker
#16167
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sarah Jessica Parker is an American actress and television producer. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including six Golden Globe Awards and two Primetime Emmy Awards. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022.
Go to Profile#16157
Michael Laudrup
#16168
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Michael Laudrup is a Danish professional football coach and former player. He is considered to be one of the greatest players of all time. He is the older brother of fellow retired footballer Brian Laudrup.
Go to Profile#16158
Jay Bailey
#16169
Overall Influence
1944 - 2001 (57 years)
James Edward Bailey , generally known as Jay Bailey, was an American pioneer of biochemical engineering, particularly metabolic engineering. He was said to be "the most influential biochemical engineer of modern times". In a special issue of a journal dedicated to his work, the editor said "Jay was one of biochemical engineering's most creative thinkers and spirited advocates, a true innovator who played an enormous role in establishing biochemical engineering as the dynamic discipline it is today". His numerous contributions in biotechnology and metabolic engineering have led to multiple aw...
Go to Profile#16159
Luis Santaló
#16170
Overall Influence
1911 - 2001 (90 years)
Luís Antoni Santaló Sors was a Spanish mathematician. He graduated from the University of Madrid and he studied at the University of Hamburg, where he received his Ph.D. in 1936. His advisor was Wilhelm Blaschke. Because of the Spanish Civil War, he moved to Argentina as a professor in the National University of the Littoral, National University of La Plata and University of Buenos Aires.
Go to Profile#16160
Traian Băsescu
#16171
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Traian Băsescu is a Romanian conservative politician who served as President of Romania from 2004 to 2014. Prior to his presidency, Băsescu served as Romanian Minister of Transport on multiple occasions between 1991 and 2000, and as Mayor of Bucharest from 2000 to 2004. Additionally, he was elected as leader of the Democratic Party in 2001.
Go to Profile#16161
Jean-Pierre Luminet
#16172
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jean-Pierre Luminet is a French astrophysicist, specializing in black holes and cosmology. He is an emeritus research director at the CNRS . Luminet is a member of the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille and Laboratoire Univers et Théories of the Paris-Meudon Observatory, and is a visiting scientist at the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseilles. He is also a writer and poet.
Go to Profile#16162
Julia Lovell
#16173
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Julia Lovell is a British scholar and prize-winning author and translator focusing on China. Life and career Lovell is professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, where her research has been focused principally on the relationship between culture and modern Chinese nation-building.
Go to Profile#16163
Timothy W. Ryback
#16174
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Timothy W. Ryback is a historian and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. He previously served as the Deputy-Secretary General of the Académie Diplomatique Internationale in Paris, and Director and Vice President of the Salzburg Global Seminar. Prior to this, he was a lecturer in the Concentration of History and Literature at Harvard University. Ryback has a doctorate.
Go to Profile#16164
Jun S. Liu
#16175
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Jun S. Liu is a Chinese-American statistician focusing on Bayesian statistical inference, statistical machine learning, and computational biology. He was Assistant Professor of Statistics at Harvard University from 1991 to 1994. From 1994 to 2004, he was Assistant, Associate, and full Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. Since 2000, Liu has been Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University and held a courtesy appointment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#16165
Heather K. Gerken
#16176
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Heather Kristin Gerken is an American legal scholar who serves as the Sol & Lillian Goldman Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches election law and runs the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project. Since 2017, she has also served as the Dean of Yale Law School.
Go to Profile#16166
April DeConick
#16177
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
April D. DeConick is the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She came to Rice University as a full professor in 2006, after receiving tenure at Illinois Wesleyan University in 2004. DeConick is the author of several books in the field of Early Christian Studies and is best known for her work on the Gospel of Thomas and ancient Gnosticism.
Go to Profile#16167
Marvin L. Cohen
#16178
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Marvin Lou Cohen is an American–Canadian theoretical physicist. He is a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Cohen is a leading expert in the field of condensed matter physics. He is widely known for his seminal work on the electronic structure of solids.
Go to Profile#16168
Alex Biryukov
#16179
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Alex Biryukov is a cryptographer, currently a full professor at the University of Luxembourg. His notable work includes the design of the stream cipher LEX, as well as the cryptanalysis of numerous cryptographic primitives. In 1998, he developed impossible differential cryptanalysis together with Eli Biham and Adi Shamir. In 1999, he developed the slide attack together with David Wagner. In 2009 he developed, together with Dmitry Khovratovich, the first cryptanalytic attack on full-round AES-192 and AES-256 that is faster than a brute-force attack. In 2015 he developed the Argon2 key derivation function with Daniel Dinu and Dmitry Khovratovich.
Go to Profile#16169
Boris Casoy
#16180
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Boris Casoy is a Brazilian journalist, the son of Russian Jewish immigrant parents. He has spent most of his professional life in TV journalism and is currently a Brazilian TV news anchorman. Casoy's journalism career started when he worked as a reporter for the now defunct television network TV Tupi in 1961. During the 1960s, in the early phases of the military dictatorship in Brazil, he was charged by the press with belonging to a paramilitary right-wing organization, Commando for Communist Hunting which was aimed at harassing and bullying leftist students.
Go to Profile#16170
Andy Cole
#16181
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Andrew Alexander Cole is an English former professional footballer who played as a striker. His professional career lasted from 1988 to 2008, and is mostly remembered for his time with Manchester United, who paid a British record transfer fee to sign him from Newcastle United. Cole spent six years with Manchester United and won nine trophies, including the Treble of the Premier League, FA Cup and UEFA Champions League in 1999.
Go to Profile#16171
John B. Anderson
#16182
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
John Bayard Anderson was an American lawyer and politician who served in the United States House of Representatives, representing Illinois's 16th congressional district from 1961 to 1981. A member of the Republican Party, he also served as the Chair of the House Republican Conference from 1969 until 1979. In 1980, he ran an independent campaign for president, receiving 6.6% of the popular vote.
Go to Profile#16172
Antonio María Rouco Varela
#16183
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Antonio María Rouco Varela is a Spanish prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Madrid from 1994 to 2014. He was made a cardinal in 1998. Cardinal Rouco Varela was president of the Episcopal Conference of Spain from 1999 to 2005 and again from 2008 to 2014.
Go to Profile#16173
Shlomo Gazit
#16184
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Shlomo Gazit was an Israeli military officer and academic. A Major General in the Israel Defense Forces, he headed Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate. He later served as president of Ben-Gurion University and director general of the Jewish Agency.
Go to Profile#16174
Blair Tindall
#16185
Overall Influence
1960 - 2023 (63 years)
Blair Alston Mercer Tindall was an American oboist, performer, producer, speaker, and journalist. After spending years as a classical musician, she wrote the 2005 memoir Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, which was later adapted into a television series.
Go to Profile#16175
John F. Hartwig
#16186
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
John F. Hartwig is an American organometallic chemist who holds the position of Henry Rapoport Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. His laboratory traditionally focuses on developing transition metal-catalyzed reactions. Hartwig is known for helping develop the Buchwald–Hartwig amination, a chemical reaction used in organic chemistry for the synthesis of carbon–nitrogen bonds via the palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling of amines with aryl halides.
Go to Profile#16176
Michael Bérubé
#16187
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches American literature, disability studies, and cultural studies. He is the author of several books on cultural studies, disability rights, liberal and conservative politics, and debates in higher education. From 2010 to 2017, he was the Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State; from 1997 to 2001 he was the founding director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. He was the 2012 president of the Modern Language Association, and served as vice president from 2010–2011.
Go to Profile#16177
Steven Ozment
#16188
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Steven Edgar Ozment was an American historian of early modern and modern Germany, the European family, and the Protestant Reformation. From 1990 to 2015, he was the McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus until his death on December 12, 2019.
Go to Profile#16178
Keiiti Aki
#16189
Overall Influence
1930 - 2005 (75 years)
Keiiti Aki was a Japanese-American professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and then at the University of Southern California , seismologist, author and mentor. He and Paul G. Richards coauthored "Quantitative Seismology: theory and methods".
Go to Profile#16179
Henry Farrell
#16190
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Henry Farrell is an Irish-born political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. He previously taught at the University of Toronto and earned his PhD from Georgetown University. His research interests include, trust and co-operation; E-commerce; the European Union; and institutional theory.
Go to Profile#16180
Terry Castle
#16191
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Terry Castle is an American literary scholar. Once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today," she has published eight books, including the anthology The Literature of Lesbianism, which won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award. She writes on topics ranging from 18th-century ghost stories to World War I-era lesbianism to the so-called "photographic fringe."
Go to Profile#16181
Tom Byers
#16192
Overall Influence
Tom Byers is a professor at Stanford University in the United States. He concentrates in the area of high-technology ventures and serves as the faculty director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
Go to Profile#16182
Adam Bodnar
#16193
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Adam Piotr Bodnar is a Polish lawyer, educator, human rights activist and politician. He was the Polish Ombudsman for Citizen Rights from 2015 until July 2021. Life and career In 2000, he graduated in law from the University of Warsaw and in 2001 he obtained the Master of Law degree in the field of comparative constitutional law from the Central European University in Budapest. He also completed a course in European Law co-organized with Cambridge University as well as American Law co-organized with the University of Florida at the Faculty of Law and Administration of the University of Warsaw.
Go to Profile#16183
Ronaldo Lemos
#16194
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Ronaldo Lemos is a Brazilian academic, lawyer and commentator on intellectual property, technology, and culture. Lemos is the director of the Institute for Technology & Society of Rio de Janeiro , and professor at the Rio de Janeiro State University's Law School. He is also a partner with the law firm Rennó Penteado Advogados and a board member of various organizations, including the Mozilla Foundation, Accessnow.org, and Stellar. He was nominated a visiting professor of law, Technology and Policy at Columbia University's School of International Public Affairs in 2017 and 2018. He was appointed as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2015.
Go to Profile#16184
Nadrian Seeman
#16195
Overall Influence
1945 - 2021 (76 years)
Nadrian C. "Ned" Seeman was an American nanotechnologist and crystallographer known for inventing the field of DNA nanotechnology. Biography Seeman studied biochemistry at the University of Chicago and crystallography at the University of Pittsburgh. He was a postdoctoral researcher with Alexander Rich at MIT. He became a faculty member at the State University of New York at Albany, and in 1988 moved to the Department of Chemistry at New York University.
Go to Profile#16185
Walter M. Elsasser
#16196
Overall Influence
1904 - 1991 (87 years)
Walter Maurice Elsasser was a German-born American physicist, a developer of the presently accepted dynamo theory as an explanation of the Earth's magnetism. He proposed that this magnetic field resulted from electric currents induced in the fluid outer core of the Earth. He revealed the history of the Earth's magnetic field by the study of the magnetic orientation of minerals in rocks. He was also the first to suggest that the wave-like nature of matter might be investigated by electron scattering experiments using crystalline solids.
Go to Profile#16186
Alejandro Corichi
#16197
Overall Influence
Alejandro Corichi is a theoretical physicist working at the Quantum Gravity group of the National Autonomous University of Mexico . He obtained his bachelor's degree at UNAM and his PhD at Pennsylvania State University . His field of study is General Relativity and Quantum Gravity, where he has contributed to the understanding of classical aspects of black holes, to the non-commutativity and black holes within the approach known as Loop quantum gravity and to loop quantum cosmology.
Go to Profile#16187
Gerhard Doerfer
#16198
Overall Influence
1920 - 2003 (83 years)
Gerhard Doerfer was a German Turkologist, Altaicist, and philologist best known for his studies of the Turkic languages, especially Khalaj. Biography Doerfer was born on March 8, 1920, in Königsberg to postal official Franz Doerfer and Adina Doerfer . In 1928 his family relocated to Berlin.
Go to Profile#16188
André Guinier
#16199
Overall Influence
1911 - 2000 (89 years)
André Guinier was a French physicist who did important work in the field of X-ray diffraction and solid-state physics. Career He worked at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, then taught at the University of Paris and later at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, where he co-founded the Laboratory of Solid State Physics. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1971 and won the Gregori Aminoff Prize in 1985.
Go to Profile#16189
Paul Stanley
#16200
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Paul Stanley is an American musician who is the co-founder, frontman, rhythm guitarist and co-lead vocalist of the hard rock band Kiss. He is the writer or co-writer of many of the band's most popular songs. Stanley established The Starchild character for his Kiss persona. Stanley was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2014 as a member of Kiss.
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Norman D. Newell
#16201
Overall Influence
1909 - 2005 (96 years)
Norman Dennis Newell was a professor of geology at Columbia University, and chairman and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Biography Newell was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Virgil Bingham and Nellie Newell. Shortly after he was born, his family moved to Kansas. Newell's father encouraged his early interest in geology from a young age, often taking him to fossil deposits located in Kansas and Colorado. In 1929, at the age of 20, Newell received his B.S. degree from the University of Kansas, and his M.A. degree in 1931. He received his Ph.D.
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Dana Bash
#16202
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Dana Ruth Bash is an American journalist, news anchor, host of Inside Politics and co-anchor of State of the Union on CNN. Early life and education Bash was born Dana Ruth Schwartz in Manhattan into a Jewish family, to Frances Schwartz, an author and educator in Jewish studies, and Stuart Schwartz, an ABC News producer who served as the senior broadcast producer for Good Morning America. Bash's maternal grandmother, Teri Vidor Weinman, and her family were Hungarian Jews. Weinman escaped to the U.S. with her husband in October 1941, but her parents and sister were murdered at Auschwitz concen...
Go to Profile#16192
Garth L. Nicolson
#16203
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Garth L. Nicolson is an American biochemist who made a landmark scientific model for cell membrane, known as the Fluid Mosaic Model. He is the founder of The Institute for Molecular Medicine at California, and he serves as the president, chief scientific officer and emeritus professor of molecular pathology. He is also Conjoint Professor in the Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Newcastle, Australia. During the outbreak of the Gulf War syndrome, he was the leading authority on the study of the cause, treatment and prevention of the disease. He was appointed chairman of the Medical-Scientific Panel for the Persian Gulf War Veterans Conference.
Go to Profile#16193
Altaf Hussain
#16204
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Altaf Hussain is a British Pakistani politician who is known as the founder of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement. He holds United Kingdom citizenship and has been living in exile in the UK since the start of Operation Clean-up. Since 2015, he has been a fugitive from the Anti Terrorism Court of Pakistan on the charges of murder, targeted killing, treason, inciting violence and hate speech. He went on trial in the UK in January 2022 for promoting terrorism and unrest through hate speech in Pakistan, and was acquitted the next month. He had fled the country in 1992 after a crackdown against his part...
Go to Profile#16194
George Lenczowski
#16205
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
George Lenczowski was a lawyer, diplomat, scholar, and Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. Lenczowski was a pioneer in his field as the founder and first chair of the Committee of Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley. He was among America's first major scholars of the modern Middle East.
Go to Profile#16195
Alexander Animalu
#16206
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Alexander Obiefoka Enukora Animalu is a Nigerian academic, who is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He holds a BSc , M.A. and PhD , FAS, NNOM, IOM A pioneer of solar energy in Nigeria, Animalu is a physicist of international repute, member of the highest advisory body on Science and Technology to the Nigerian government, Honorary Presidential Advisory Council on Science and Technology and former Director National Mathematical Centre, Abuja.
Go to Profile#16196
Eörs Szathmáry
#16207
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Eörs Szathmáry is a Hungarian theoretical evolutionary biologist at the now-defunct Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study and at the Department of Plant Taxonomy and Ecology of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He is the co-author with John Maynard Smith of The Major Transitions in Evolution, a seminal work which continues to contribute to ongoing issues in evolutionary biology. He is a member of the Batthyány Society of Professors.
Go to Profile#16197
Asger Aaboe
#16208
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Asger Hartvig Aaboe was a Danish historian of the exact sciences and mathematics who was best known for his contributions to the history of ancient Babylonian astronomy. In his studies of Babylonian astronomy, he went beyond analyses in terms of modern mathematics to seek to understand how the Babylonians conceived their computational schemes.
Go to Profile#16198
Craig Revel Horwood
#16209
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Craig Revel Horwood is an Australian-British author, dancer, choreographer, conductor, theatre director, and former drag queen in the United Kingdom. He is also a patron of the Royal Osteoporosis Society.
Go to Profile#16199
Moojan Momen
#16210
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Moojan Momen is a retired physician and historian specializing in Baháʼí studies who has published numerous books and articles about the Baháʼí Faith and Islam, especially Shia Islam, including for Encyclopædia Iranica the British Library, and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
Go to Profile#16200
Masayoshi Tomizuka
#16211
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Masayoshi Tomizuka is a professor in Control Theory in Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley. He holds the Cheryl and John Neerhout, Jr., Distinguished Professorship Chair. Tomizuka received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from Keio University, Tokyo, Japan in 1968 and 1970, and his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in February 1974. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022.
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