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
#16251
Viola Davis
#16262
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Viola Davis is an American actress and producer. Davis is one of the few performers to have been awarded an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony . She is the sole African-American to achieve the Triple Crown of Acting as well as the third person to achieve both statuses. Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2012 and 2017, and in 2020, The New York Times ranked her ninth on its list of the greatest actors of the 21st century.
Go to Profile#16252
Paul Hollander
#16263
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Paul Hollander was a Hungarian-born political sociologist, communist-studies scholar, and non-fiction author. He is known for his criticisms of communism and left-wing politics in general. Background Born in 1932 in Budapest, he lived in Hungary with his Jewish family. When the Nazis persecuted Jews throughout the city, he had to hide from them when he was 12. His family was deported to work, after the communists came to power.
Go to Profile#16253
Giacomo Marramao
#16264
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Giacomo Marramao is an Italian philosopher who teaches theoretical philosophy and political philosophy at the Roma Tre University in Rome. Education Marramao studied at the University of Florence where he graduated in philosophy under Eugenio Garin's guidance in 1969, and he was Fellow Scholar on behalf of the Italian CNR and the Humboldt Foundation at the Goethe University Frankfurt .
Go to Profile#16254
Barton Bernstein
#16265
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Barton J. Bernstein is Professor emeritus of History at Stanford University and co-chair of the International Relations Program and the International Policy Studies Program. He has published about early Cold War history, as well as about the history of nuclear weapons development and strategy during the 1940s and 1950s.
Go to Profile#16255
John Burns
#16266
Overall Influence
John Burns is a British recording engineer best known for his credits with noted bands of the 1970s including Jethro Tull, Clouds, Genesis, John Martyn and reggae acts Burning Spear, Delroy Washington, Jimmy Cliff and Toots & The Maytals.
Go to Profile#16256
Jay Cutler
#16267
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Jay Christopher Cutler is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 12 seasons. A member of the Chicago Bears for most of his career, he is the franchise leader in passing yards, passing touchdowns, attempts, and completions.
Go to Profile#16257
Kakuei Tanaka
#16268
Overall Influence
1918 - 1993 (75 years)
was a Japanese politician who served in the House of Representatives from 1947 to 1990, and was Prime Minister of Japan from 1972 to 1974. After a power struggle with Takeo Fukuda, he became the most influential member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party from the mid-1960s until the mid-1980s. He was a central figure in several political scandals, culminating in the Lockheed bribery scandals of 1976 which led to his arrest and trial; he was found guilty by two lower courts, but his case remained open before the Supreme Court through his death. The scandals, coupled with a debilitating strok...
Go to Profile#16258
Anil Kumar Gupta
#16269
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Anil Kumar Gupta is an Indian scholar in the area of grassroots innovations. He is the founder of the Honey Bee Network. He retired as a full-time professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 2017, where he served for about 36 years.
Go to Profile#16259
Brooke Shields
#16270
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Brooke Christa Shields is an American actress. A child model starting at the age of 11 months, Shields gained widespread notoriety at age 12 for her leading role in Louis Malle's film Pretty Baby , in which she appeared in nude scenes shot when she was 11 years old. She continued to model into her late teenage years and starred in several dramas in the 1980s, including The Blue Lagoon , and Franco Zeffirelli's Endless Love .
Go to Profile#16260
Yehuda Hiss
#16271
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Yehuda Hiss is a retired Israeli pathologist. He served as the Chief Pathologist at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine between 1988 and possibly as late as 2005. Hiss has also served as part of the faculty for the Terrorism and Medicine Program at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at IDC Herzliya and in the Department of Pathology for the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University.
Go to Profile#16261
Gabriel Rockhill
#16272
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Gabriel Rockhill is a French-American philosopher, writer, cultural critic, and activist. He is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique, and former Directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie.
Go to Profile#16262
Mark Wrathall
#16273
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Mark Wrathall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is considered a leading interpreter of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Wrathall is featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World. According to a recent reviewer of Wrathall's latest book, "Wrathall's writing is clear and comprehensive, ranging across virtually all of Heidegger's collected works.... Wrathall's overall interpretation of Heidegger's work is crystal clear, compelling, and relevant."
Go to Profile#16263
Marti G. Subrahmanyam
#16274
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marti G. Subrahmanyam is the Charles E. Merrill Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Biography Professor Subrahmanyam holds a Ph.D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management and a BTech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras.
Go to Profile#16264
David Cooperrider
#16275
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David Cooperrider , is the Fairmount Minerals Chair and Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, and Faculty Director at the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Case.
Go to Profile#16265
Marcia Citron
#16276
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Marcia Judith Citron is an American professor of musicology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is a leading musicologist specializing in issues regarding women and gender, opera and film. Life and career Marcia Citron graduated from Brooklyn College with a BA in 1966 and from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with an MA in 1968 and a PhD in 1971. She has been recognized with the Martha and Henry Malcolm Lovett Distinguished Service Professor of Musicology award, and has received grants from National Endowment for the Humanities, the German Academic and Exchange Service and Rice University.
Go to Profile#16266
Richard von Weizsäcker
#16277
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Richard Karl Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German politician , who served as President of Germany from 1984 to 1994. Born into the aristocratic Weizsäcker family, who were part of the German nobility, he took his first public offices in the Protestant Church in Germany.
Go to Profile#16267
Adam Phillips
#16278
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Adam Phillips is a British psychoanalytic psychotherapist and essayist. Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
Go to Profile#16268
Hartmut Neven
#16279
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Hartmut Neven is a scientist working in quantum computing, computer vision, robotics and computational neuroscience. He is best known for his work in face and object recognition and his contributions to quantum machine learning. He is currently Vice President of Engineering at Google where he is leading the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab which he founded in 2012.
Go to Profile#16269
Alice M. Isen
#16280
Overall Influence
Alice M. Isen was an American psychologist and Professor of Psychology and of Marketing at Cornell University. A prominent and widely published scholar, her research concerned the influence of "positive affect" on social interaction, thought processes, and decision making, including applications to organizational behavior, medical decision making, doctor-patient interaction, issues in services marketing, and issues related to brand equity and loyalty.
Go to Profile#16270
Martin Yarmush
#16281
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Martin L. Yarmush is an American scientist, physician, and engineer known for his work in biotechnology and bioengineering. After spending 4 years as a Principal Research Associate in Chemical Engineering at MIT, in 1988 he joined Rutgers University, where he currently holds the Paul and Mary Monroe Endowed Chair in Science and Engineering and serves as Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering. Yarmush is the founding director of the Center for Engineering in Medicine & Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also a Lecturer in Surgery and Bioengineering at Harvard Medical...
Go to Profile#16271
Paul Mijksenaar
#16282
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Paul Mijksenaar is a designer of visual information and founder and director of the international design Bureau Mijksenaar, based in Amsterdam and New York City. In 1965, he graduated from the Institute for Applied Arts Education Amsterdam in product design. He started off as a freelance product designer in 1966, then as a senior designer and team leader for the Associatie voor Total Design NV in 1978 before establishing Bureau Mijksenaar in 1986.
Go to Profile#16272
Bruno Nettl
#16283
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Bruno Nettl was an ethnomusicologist who was central in defining ethnomusicology as a discipline. His research focused on folk and traditional music, specifically Native American music, the music of Iran and numerous topics surrounding ethnomusicology as a discipline.
Go to Profile#16273
Salimullah Khan
#16284
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Salimullah Khan is a Bangladeshi writer, academic, teacher and public intellectual. Khan explores national and international politics and culture using Marxist and Lacanian theories. Informed and influenced by Ahmed Sofa's thoughts, his exploration of Bangladesh's politics and culture has a significant following among the country's young generation of writers and thinkers. Khan translated the works of Plato, James Rennell, Charles Baudelaire, Frantz Fanon, Dorothee Sölle into Bengali. In Bangladesh, he is a regular guest in talk shows on national and international political issues.
Go to Profile#16274
Ivan Wilhelm
#16285
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ivan Wilhelm is a Czech nuclear physicist and former rector of the Charles University in Prague. Wilhelm graduated from the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of Czech Technical University in Prague with a degree in nuclear physics. Until 1967, he also lectured there. In 1967, Wilhelm was sent to study in the United States. Since 1971, Wilhelm has been a part of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague.
Go to Profile#16275
Clemens August Andreae
#16286
Overall Influence
1929 - 1991 (62 years)
Clemens August Andreae was an Austrian economist who served as a professor of political economics and the dean of law and political sciences for the University of Innsbruck. He wrote a book called Der größere Markt – Wirtschaftsintegration vom Atlantik bis zum Ural . Andreae was scheduled to give the opening speech for the 1986 Salzburg Festival; the opening speech is typically given by a prominent scientist or artist. Andreae replaced Ralf Dahrendorf, a West German sociologist and professor, who withdrew the pledge because he did not want to speak to an audience that included Kurt Waldheim, ...
Go to Profile#16276
Lev M. Bregman
#16287
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Lev M. Bregman was a Soviet and Israeli mathematician, most known for the Bregman divergence named after him. Bregman received his M. Sc. in mathematics in 1963 at Leningrad University and his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1966 at the same institution, under the direction of his advisor Prof. J. V. Romanovsky, for his thesis about relaxation methods for finding a common point of convex sets, which led to one of his most well-known publications.
Go to Profile#16277
Donald Kerr
#16288
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Donald MacLean Kerr, Jr. served as the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence from 2007 to 2009. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday, October 4, 2007. In March 2009, he received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal.
Go to Profile#16278
Regina Schwartz
#16289
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Regina Schwartz is a scholar of English literature and elements of Jewish and Christian religion. A Professor of English and Religion at Northwestern University, she has been known historically for her research and teaching on 17th-century literature , on the Hebrew Bible, and on the interface of literature with the subjects of philosophy, law, and religion.
Go to Profile#16279
Mauricio Lasansky
#16290
Overall Influence
1914 - 2012 (98 years)
Mauricio Leib Lasansky was an Argentine artist and educator known both for his advanced techniques in intaglio printmaking and for a series of 33 pencil drawings from the 1960s titled "The Nazi Drawings." Lasansky, who migrated to and became a citizen of the United States, established the school of printmaking at the University of Iowa, which offered the first Master of Fine Arts program in the field in the United States. Sotheby's identifies him as one of the fathers of modern printmaking.
Go to Profile#16280
Cary Fowler
#16291
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Morgan Carrington "Cary" Fowler Jr. is an American agriculturalist and the former executive director of the Crop Trust, currently serving as U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security. Background Fowler was born in 1949 to Morgan, a General Sessions judge, and Betty, a dietician. He graduated from White Station High School in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1967, and attended Rhodes College in Memphis, but transferred in his junior year to Simon Fraser University in Canada, earning his B.A. Honors degree in 1971. He received a Ph.D. degree in Sociology from Uppsala University in Sweden.
Go to Profile#16281
Drew Barrymore
#16292
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Drew Blythe Barrymore is an American actress, producer, talk show host and author. A member of the Barrymore family of actors, she has received several awards and nominations, including a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, in addition to nominations for nine Emmy Awards and a British Academy Film Award. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004.
Go to Profile#16282
Larry Baer
#16293
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Laurence Monroe Baer is an American businessman. He is best known as the president and chief executive officer of the San Francisco Giants of Major League Baseball. He succeeded Bill Neukom on January 1, 2012.
Go to Profile#16283
Herbert W. Marsh
#16294
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Herbert W. Marsh is an educational psychologist who has published influential research on self-concept, motivation and university students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness. The website of Oxford University, where he is currently a faculty member, notes the following. Professor Marsh was recognised as the most productive educational psychologist in the world, one of the top 10 international researchers in Higher Education and in Social Psychology, and the 11th most productive researcher in the world across all disciplines of psychology. He is a highly cited researcher on ISI’s list of th...
Go to Profile#16284
Donna Nelson
#16295
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Donna J. Nelson is an American chemist and professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. Nelson specializes in organic chemistry, which she both researches and teaches. Nelson served as a science advisor to the AMC television show Breaking Bad. She was the 2016 President of the American Chemical Society with her presidential activities focusing on and guided by communities in chemistry. Nelson's research focused on five primary topics, generally categorized in two areas, Scientific Research and America's Scientific Readiness. Within Scientific Research, Nelson's topics have been on ...
Go to Profile#16285
Frederick Luis Aldama
#16296
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Frederick Luis Aldama is an American author, editor, and academic. He is the Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and founder and director of the Latinx Pop Lab at the University of Texas, Austin. At UT Austin is also affiliate faculty in Latino Media Arts & Studies and LGBTQ Studies. He continues to hold the title Distinguished University Professor as Adjunct Professor at The Ohio State University. He teaches courses on Latinx pop culture, especially focused on the areas of comics, tv, film, animation, and video games in the departments of English and Radio-Television-Film at UT Austin.
Go to Profile#16286
Theodore Sider
#16297
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Theodore "Ted" Sider is an American philosopher specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of language. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Family Sider is the son of theologian Ronald Sider. He is the partner of Jill North, who is also hired by Rutgers' philosophy faculty.
Go to Profile#16287
Anthony Cerami
#16298
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Anthony Cerami is an American entrepreneur and medical research scientist. Biography Anthony Cerami received his undergraduate degree from Rutgers University and received a Ph.D. in 1967 from Rockefeller University, New York, completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Medical School and at the Jackson Laboratory and served for 20 years as Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Medical Biochemistry, and Dean of Graduate and Postgraduate Studies at Rockefeller.
Go to Profile#16288
Igor Rivin
#16299
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Igor Rivin is a Russian-Canadian mathematician, working in various fields of pure and applied mathematics, computer science, and materials science. He was the Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St. Andrews from 2015 to 2017, and was the chief research officer at Cryptos Fund until 2019. He is doing research for Edgestream LP, in addition to his academic work.
Go to Profile#16289
Jamie Carragher
#16300
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
James Lee Duncan Carragher is an English football pundit and former footballer who played as a defender for Premier League club Liverpool during a career which spanned 17 years. A one-club man, he was Liverpool's vice-captain for 10 years, and is the club's second-longest ever serving player, making his 737th appearance for Liverpool in all competitions on 19 May 2013. Carragher also holds the record for the most appearances in European competition for Liverpool with 149.
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Edward E. Baptist
#16301
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Edward E. Baptist is an American academic and writer. He is a professor of history at Cornell University, located in Ithaca, New York, where he specializes in the history of the 19th-century United States, particularly the South. Thematically, he has been interested in the history of capitalism and has also been interested in digital humanities methodologies. He is the author of numerous books.
Go to Profile#16291
Barney Pell
#16302
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Barney Pell is an American entrepreneur, angel investor and computer scientist. He was co-founder and CEO of Powerset, a pioneering natural language search startup, search strategist and architect for Microsoft's Bing search engine, a pioneer in the field of general game playing in artificial intelligence, and the architect of the first intelligent agent to fly onboard and control a spacecraft. He was co-founder, Vice Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of Moon Express; co-founder and chairman of LocoMobi; and Associate Founder of Singularity University.
Go to Profile#16292
A. O. Scott
#16303
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Anthony Oliver Scott is an American journalist and cultural critic, known for his film and literary criticism. After starting his career at The New York Review of Books, Variety, and Slate, he began writing film reviews for The New York Times in 2000, and became the paper's chief film critic in 2004, a title he shared with Manohla Dargis. In 2023, he moved to The New York Times Book Review.
Go to Profile#16293
Carl Hart
#16304
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Carl L. Hart is an American psychologist and neuroscientist, working as the Mamie Phipps Clark Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. Hart is known for his research on drug abuse and drug addiction, his advocacy for the legalization of recreational drugs, and his recreational use of drugs. Hart became the first tenured African American professor of sciences at Columbia University. He is the author of two books for the general public, High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery that Challenges Everything You Know about Drugs and Society and Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chas...
Go to Profile#16294
Eugene Wong
#16305
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Eugene Wong is a Chinese-American computer scientist and mathematician. Wong's career has spanned academia, university administration, government and the private sector. Together with Michael Stonebraker and a group of scientists at IBM, Wong is credited with pioneering database research in the 1970s from which software developed by IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle descends. Wong retired in 1994, since then holding the title of Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#16295
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
#16306
Overall Influence
1913 - 1994 (81 years)
Nicolás Gómez Dávila was a Colombian conservative philosopher and aphorist. Gómez Dávila's fame began to spread only in the last few years before his death, particularly by way of German translations of his works. He was one of the most radical critics of modernity whose work consists almost entirely of aphorisms which he called "escolios" .
Go to Profile#16296
Renato Balduzzi
#16307
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Renato Balduzzi is an Italian academic and politician. He served as the Italian minister of health under Prime Minister Mario Monti from November 2011 to April 2013. Early life Renato Balduzzi was born on 12 February 1955 in Voghera, Italy.
Go to Profile#16297
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
#16308
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall was an American historian who focused on the history of slavery in the Caribbean, Latin America, Louisiana , Africa, and the African Diaspora in the Americas. Discovering extensive French and Spanish colonial documents related to the slave trade in Louisiana, she wrote Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century , studied the ethnic origins of enslaved Africans brought to Louisiana, as well as the process of creolization, which created new cultures. She changed the way in which several related disciplines are researched...
Go to Profile#16298
Neil Sedaka
#16309
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Neil Sedaka is an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Since his music career began in 1957, he has sold millions of records worldwide and has written or co-written over 500 songs for himself and other artists, collaborating mostly with lyricists Howard "Howie" Greenfield and Phil Cody.
Go to Profile#16299
Victor Margolin
#16310
Overall Influence
1941 - 2019 (78 years)
Victor Margolin was an American design historian, researcher and educator. He was a Professor of design history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he taught from 1982 until 2006. Margolin published widely and was the founding editor and co-editor of the academic design journal, Design Issues. A major work was his comprehensive World History of Design.
Go to Profile#16300
Gordon Foster
#16311
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Frederic Gordon Foster was an Irish computational engineer, statistician, professor, and college dean who is widely known for devising, in 1965, a nine-digit code upon which the International Standard Book Number is based.
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