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
#16201
Antonio Vidal-Puig
#16212
Overall Influence
Antonio Vidal-Puig is a Spanish medical doctor and scientist who works as a Professor of Molecular Nutrition and Metabolism at the University of Cambridge , best known for advancing the concept that pharmacological targeting of brown fat may serve to treat overweight and obesity in affected individuals, as well as for introducing the concept of adipose tissue "expandability" as an important factor in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance in the context of positive energy balance. His published work focuses on areas such as adipose tissue metabolism and lipotoxicity, regulation of insulin ...
Go to Profile#16202
Birger Hjørland
#16213
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Birger Hjørland is a professor of knowledge organization at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen. His main areas of study pertain to theory of library and information science and of knowledge organization. Hjørland has contributed important developments to domain analysis and concept theory. He has been cited as an anchor of North American knowledge organization studies, as well as an information science pioneer.
Go to Profile#16203
Tao Lin
#16214
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Tao Lin is an American novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer, and artist. He has published four novels, a novella, two books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a memoir, as well as an extensive assortment of online content. His third novel, Taipei, was published by Vintage on June 4, 2013. His nonfiction book Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change was published by Vintage on May 1, 2018. His fourth novel, Leave Society, was published by Vintage on August 3, 2021.
Go to Profile#16204
Daniel Shanks
#16215
Overall Influence
1917 - 1996 (79 years)
Daniel Charles Shanks was an American mathematician who worked primarily in numerical analysis and number theory. He was the first person to compute π to 100,000 decimal places. Life and education Shanks was born on January 17, 1917, in Chicago, Illinois. He is not related to the English mathematician William Shanks, who was also known for his computation of π. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of Chicago in 1937, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Maryland in 1954. Prior to obtaining his PhD, Shanks worked at the Aberdeen Proving Ground and the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, first as a physicist and then as a mathematician.
Go to Profile#16205
Shannon Forrest
#16216
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Shannon Forrest is an American drummer and percussionist known primarily for his session work. As a session drummer, he has contributed to the work of many well-known artists, and he is also a producer and engineer. Additionally, he was the touring drummer of Toto from 2014 to 2019.
Go to Profile#16206
Klaus Schroeder
#16217
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Klaus Schroeder is a German political scientist and historian. He teaches at the Free University of Berlin and the Otto Suhr Institute. He is prolific as an author and commentator on the history of the German Democratic Republic and on the enduring post-German reunification conflicts and tensions in Germany.
Go to Profile#16207
Annie Baker
#16218
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Annie Baker is an American playwright and teacher who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her play The Flick. Among her works are the Shirley, Vermont plays, which take place in the fictional town of Shirley: Circle Mirror Transformation, Nocturama, Body Awareness, and The Aliens. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.
Go to Profile#16208
Larry Squire
#16219
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Larry Ryan Squire is a professor of psychiatry, neurosciences, and psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and a Senior Research Career Scientist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Diego. He is a leading investigator of the neurological bases of memory, which he studies using animal models and human patients with memory impairment.
Go to Profile#16209
Masahiko Fujiwara
#16220
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Masahiko Fujiwara is a Japanese mathematician and writer who is known for his book The Dignity of the Nation. He is a professor emeritus at Ochanomizu University. Biography Masahiko Fujiwara is the son of Jirō Nitta and Tei Fujiwara, who were both popular authors. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1966.
Go to Profile#16210
Astrid van Oyen
#16221
Overall Influence
Astrid van Oyen is currently professor of archaeology at Radboud University, Nijmegen. She is a leading archaeologist studying the social, economic and cultural aspects of empire, rural economies, craft production, and storage in Italy and the western provinces.
Go to Profile#16211
Martin Charnin
#16222
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Martin Charnin was an American lyricist, writer, and theatre director. Charnin's best-known work is as conceiver, director, and lyricist of the musical Annie. Life and career Charnin was born in New York City, the son of Birdie and William Charnin, an opera singer. His family was Jewish. Charnin graduated from The High School of Music & Art and then from The Cooper Union, where he earned a BFA. Charnin began his theatrical career as a performer, appearing as "Big Deal", one of the Jets in the original production of West Side Story. He played the role for 1,000 performances on Broadway and on...
Go to Profile#16212
Owen Astrachan
#16223
Overall Influence
Owen Astrachan is an American computer scientist and professor of the practice of computer science at Duke University, where he is also the department's director of undergraduate studies. He is known for his work in curriculum development and methods of teaching computer science. He was one of the first National Science Foundation CISE Distinguished Education Fellows, and is a recipient of the ACM Outstanding Educator Award. He was the principal investigator on the multi-year NSF/College Board project that led to the release of the AP Computer Science Principles course and exam.
Go to Profile#16213
Bruce Thornton
#16224
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Bruce S. Thornton is an American classicist at California State University, Fresno, and research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Biography Thornton received a Bachelor of Arts in Latin from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1975, and a PhD in Comparative Literature in 1983. He had studied Greek, Latin, and English literature for his doctorate.
Go to Profile#16214
Nathan Oliveira
#16225
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to immigrant Portuguese parents. Since the late 1950s, Oliveira has been the subject of nearly one hundred solo exhibitions, in addition to having been included in hundreds of group exhibitions in important museums and galleries worldwide. He taught studio art for several decades in California, beginning in the early 1950s, when he taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. After serving as a Visiting Artist at several universities, he became a Professor of Studio Art at Stanfo...
Go to Profile#16215
Cliff Goddard
#16226
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Cliff Goddard is a professor of linguistics at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He is, with Anna Wierzbicka, a leading proponent of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to linguistic analysis. Goddard's research has explored cognitive and cultural aspects of everyday language and language use. He is considered a leading scholar in the fields of semantics and cross-cultural pragmatics. His work spans English , indigenous Australian languages , and South East Asian languages .
Go to Profile#16216
Rudolf Kippenhahn
#16227
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Rudolf Kippenhahn was a German astrophysicist and science author. Biography Rudolf Kippenhahn was born in Pernink, Czechoslovakia. He originally studied mathematics and physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg before changing to Astronomy. From 1975 to 1991, Kippenhahn was director of the Max Planck Institute For Astrophysics in Garching, Munich, Germany. After 1991, Kippenhahn was an active published author in Göttingen, trying to popularise astronomical science research, in the same vein as Stephen Hawking's writing, for which he won the Bruno H. Bürgel prize. His books covered such diverse topics as astronomy, cryptology and atomic physics.
Go to Profile#16217
Omid Safi
#16228
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Omid Safi is a Shia, Iranian-American Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He served as the Director of Duke Islamic Studies Center from July 2014 to June 2019 and was a columnist for On Being. Safi specializes in Islamic mysticism , contemporary Islamic thought and medieval Islamic history. He has served on the board of the Pluralism project at Harvard University and served as the co-chair of the steering committee for the Study of Islam and the Islamic Mysticism Group at the American Academy of Religion. Before joining Duke University, Safi was a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Go to Profile#16218
Martin M. Wattenberg
#16229
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Martin M. Wattenberg is an American scientist and artist known for his work with data visualization. He is currently the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Go to Profile#16219
Mihaela Cardei
#16230
Overall Influence
Mihaela Cardei is a Romanian-American computer scientist known for her research on wireless ad hoc networks. She is a professor in the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University, where she is also associate dean for graduate studies.
Go to Profile#16220
Kamran Eshraghian
#16231
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Kamran Eshraghian is an electronics engineer notable for working on VLSI in Australia. He has worked on CMOS VLSI design. Personal life Kamran Eshraghian was born in Tehran on 13 June 1945, in a Baha'i family. On his father side, he is related to the Afnan families through his grandmother. In 1957, his parents decided to leave Iran for Indonesia and Singapore as Baha'i pioneers. On 5 May 1959, he left Singapore to do his schooling in Adelaide, South Australia arriving in Perth on 6 May 1959 and Adelaide the next day 7 May 1959. He was married on 13 May 1967 to Deidre Lynett Eyers, who died due to prolonged illness on 2 January 1989.
Go to Profile#16221
Shelby D. Hunt
#16232
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Shelby D. Hunt was an American organizational theorist, the Jerry S. Rawls and P. W. Horn Professor of Marketing at the Texas Tech University, and a highly cited marketing researcher. He is noted for his contributions to competition theory and the resource-advantage view.
Go to Profile#16222
Wolfgang Ullmann
#16233
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
Wolfgang Ullmann was a German journalist, theologian, politician. Life Wolfgang Ullmann was born in Bad Gottleuba near Dresden. From 1948 to 1954 he studied Protestant theology and also philosophy, first in Berlin and then at the University of Göttingen.
Go to Profile#16223
Sarah Dunant
#16234
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Sarah Dunant is a British novelist, journalist, broadcaster, and critic. She is married with two daughters, and lives in London and Florence. Early life Dunant was born in 1950 and raised in London. She is the daughter of David Dunant, a former Welsh airline steward who later became a manager at British Airways, and his French wife Estelle, who grew up in Bangalore, India.
Go to Profile#16224
Sam Shepard
#16235
Overall Influence
1943 - 2017 (74 years)
Samuel Shepard Rogers III was an American actor, playwright, author, director and screenwriter whose career spanned half a century. He won 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most by any writer or director. He wrote 58 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in the 1983 film The Right Stuff. He received the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009.
Go to Profile#16225
Alex Zettl
#16236
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Alex K. Zettl is an American experimental physicist, educator, and inventor. He is a Professor of the Graduate School in Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Zettl is a leading expert in the synthesis, characterization, and application of low dimensional materials. He has synthesized and studied new materials, notably those based on carbon, boron and nitrogen, and has made numerous inventions in the field of electronic materials and nano-electromechanical systems. Zettl and his research team were the first to synthesize boron nitride nanotubes, and created carbon nanotube chemical sensors.
Go to Profile#16226
Milton Wainwright
#16237
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Milton Wainwright is a British microbiologist who is known for his research into what he claims could be extraterrestrial life found in the stratosphere. Biography Wainwright graduated from the University of Nottingham in the field of botany. He obtained a PhD from the same university in the field of mycology. From 1974-1975 he went to the National Research Council of Canada as postdoctoral fellow, where he obtained a qualification in environmental microbiology. From 1975-1986, he was a Lecturer in Microbiology at the University of Sheffield.
Go to Profile#16227
Ellis L. Johnson
#16238
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Ellis Lane Johnson is the Professor Emeritus and the Coca-Cola Chaired Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.
Go to Profile#16228
Geoffrey Garrett
#16239
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Geoffrey Garrett is an Australian political scientist, academic administrator, and the current dean of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. He has served as a professor of political science at the University of Oxford, Stanford University, Yale University, the University of California, Los Angeles , the University of Southern California and the University of Sydney. He was also the dean of the University of Sydney Business School and the University of New South Wales Business School . He was the dean of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from Ju...
Go to Profile#16229
John Crank
#16240
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
John Crank was a mathematical physicist, best known for his work on the numerical solution of partial differential equations. Crank was born in Hindley in Lancashire, England. His father was a carpenter's pattern-maker. Crank studied at Manchester University from 1934 to 1938, where he was awarded a BSc and MSc as a student of Lawrence Bragg and Douglas Hartree. In 1953, Manchester University awarded him a DSc.
Go to Profile#16230
Keith Moffatt
#16241
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Henry Keith Moffatt, FRS FRSE is a British mathematician with research interests in the field of fluid dynamics, particularly magnetohydrodynamics and the theory of turbulence. He was Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge from 1980 to 2002.
Go to Profile#16231
Anatole Katok
#16242
Overall Influence
1944 - 2018 (74 years)
Anatoly Borisovich Katok was an American mathematician with Russian-Jewish origins. Katok was the director of the Center for Dynamics and Geometry at the Pennsylvania State University. His field of research was the theory of dynamical systems.
Go to Profile#16232
Marilyn Booth
#16243
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Marilyn Louise Booth is an author, scholar and translator of Arabic literature. Since 2015, she has been the Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#16233
Sarah Thornton
#16244
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sarah L. Thornton is a writer, ethnographer and sociologist of culture. Thornton has authored three books and many articles about artists, the art market, technology and design, the history of music technology, dance clubs, raves, cultural hierarchies, subcultures, and ethnographic research methods.
Go to Profile#16234
Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert
#16245
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert is a professor of philosophy at the university of Hagen, Germany. Biography Gethmann-Siefert was born in 1945, studied philosophy, art history and theology in Münster, Bonn, Innsbruck and Bochum. She earned her PhD in philosophy 1973 from the Ruhr University Bochum writing her dissertation about Heidegger and her habilitation 1982 about Hegel's Aesthetics. She taught since 1991 at the Fernuniversität Hagen.
Go to Profile#16235
Marta Cartabia
#16246
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Marta Cartabia is an Italian jurist and academic who served as Minister of Justice in the government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi. Cartabia previously was Judge of the Constitutional Court of Italy between 2011 and 2020, Vice President from 12 November 2014 to 11 December 2019 and President from 11 December 2019 to 13 September 2020. She is a professor of constitutional law. She was the first woman to hold the office of President of the Constitutional Court.
Go to Profile#16236
Luca Trevisan
#16247
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Luca Trevisan is an Italian professor of computer science at Bocconi University in Milan. His research area is theoretical computer science, focusing on randomness, cryptography, probabilistically checkable proofss, approximation, property testing, spectral graph theory, and sublinear algorithms. He also runs a blog, in theory, about theoretical computer science.
Go to Profile#16237
Thomas Homer-Dixon
#16248
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Thomas Homer-Dixon is a Canadian political scientist and author who researches threats to global security. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. He is the author of seven books, the most recent being Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril.
Go to Profile#16238
Frank-Walter Steinmeier
#16249
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Frank-Walter Steinmeier is a German politician who became president of Germany on 19 March 2017. He was previously federal minister of foreign affairs from 2005 to 2009 and again from 2013 to 2017, as well as vice chancellor of Germany from 2007 to 2009. Steinmeier was chairman-in-office of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2016.
Go to Profile#16239
W. T. Martin
#16250
Overall Influence
1911 - 2004 (93 years)
William Ted Martin was an American mathematician, who worked on mathematical analysis, several complex variables, and probability theory. He is known for the Cameron–Martin theorem and for his 1948 book Several complex variables, co-authored with Salomon Bochner.
Go to Profile#16240
Patricia Nelson Limerick
#16251
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Patricia Nelson Limerick is an American historian, author, lecturer and teacher, considered to be one of the leading historians of the American West. Early life and education Limerick is the daughter of Grant and Patricia Nelson and was born and raised in Banning, California. She received a B.A. in American studies in 1972 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in American studies in 1980 at Yale University.
Go to Profile#16241
Michael Shellenberger
#16252
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Michael D. Shellenberger is an American author and former public relations professional who writes about politics, the environment, climate change, and nuclear power. In his book San Fransicko, Shellenberger makes the argument that progressivism is linked to homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness. He is a co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute and the California Peace Coalition. Shellenberger founded the pro-nuclear non-profit Environmental Progress in 2016.
Go to Profile#16242
Ross Noble
#16253
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Ross Markham Noble is an English stand-up comedian and actor. Noble rose to mainstream popularity through making appearances on British television, particularly interviews and on panel shows such as Have I Got News for You. He has also released DVDs of several of his tours.
Go to Profile#16243
T. C. Boyle
#16254
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Thomas Coraghessan Boyle is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published nineteen novels and more than 150 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York.
Go to Profile#16244
Robert A. Frosch
#16255
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Robert Alan Frosch FREng was an American scientist who was the fifth administrator of NASA. He was the administrator from 1977 to 1981 during the Carter administration. Biography Born in New York City, Frosch was educated in the public school system in The Bronx. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in theoretical physics at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#16245
Kate Soper
#16256
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Kate Soper is a British philosopher. She is currently Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton. Background Soper was educated at the University of Oxford and worked as a translator and journalist. Her PhD was from Sussex University titled Marxism and the Theory of Needs. She taught at Sussex university before moving to the University of North London in 1987 . She taught a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in European Studies and Literature and Modernity. She retired c.2009, becoming Emeritus Professor.
Go to Profile#16246
Gerhard Vollmer
#16257
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Gerhard Vollmer is a German physicist and philosopher. He is perhaps best known for his development of an evolutionary theory of knowledge. Life Vollmer was born in Speyer. He studied in Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and Freiburg. After finishing his degree in physics in 1968 he studied philosophy and linguistics in Freiburg. He worked as a trainee in Deutschen Elektronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg. In Freiburg he attained a doctorate in theoretical physics. He stayed here after completing a year's stint as a research assistant in Montreal in 1975. In 1974, Vollmer attained an additional doctorate in...
Go to Profile#16247
Abraham Sinkov
#16258
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Abraham Sinkov was a US cryptanalyst. An early employee of the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, he held several leadership positions during World War II, transitioning to the new National Security Agency after the war, where he became a deputy director. After retiring in 1962, he taught mathematics at Arizona State University.
Go to Profile#16248
Rachel Owen
#16259
Overall Influence
1968 - 2016 (48 years)
Rachel Mary Owen was a Welsh photographer, printmaker and lecturer on medieval Italian literature. She was married to the Radiohead singer Thom Yorke; they announced their separation in 2015. Life and career Owen was born in Cardiff, Wales. She received a B.A. in Italian and Fine Art , specialising in Printmaking, from the University of Exeter. In the 1990s, she lived in Florence with two students and studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Florence, where she fell in love with Dante's work. In 2001, Owen received a PhD from the University of London, where her research was on the ...
Go to Profile#16249
Henry Friedlander
#16260
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Henry Egon Friedlander was a German-American Jewish historian of the Holocaust who was noted for his arguments in favor of broadening the scope of casualties of the Holocaust. Born in Berlin, Germany, to a Jewish family, Friedlander moved to the United States in 1947 as a survivor of Auschwitz, obtaining his BA in history at Temple University in 1953 and his MA and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954 and 1968.
Go to Profile#16250
Lorna Simpson
#16261
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Lorna Simpson is an American photographer and multimedia artist whose works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 1990, she became the first African-American woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with photo-text installations such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal that questioned the nature of identity, gender, race, history and representation. Simpson continues to explore these themes in relation to memory and history using photography, film, video, painting, drawing, audio, and sculpture.
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