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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List of the most influential people

#16651

Eugene Aserinsky

#16662

Overall Influence

1921 - 1998 (77 years)

Eugene Aserinsky , a pioneer in sleep research, was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1953 when he discovered REM sleep. He was the son of a dentist of Russian–Jewish descent. He made the discovery after hours spent studying the eyelids of sleeping subjects. While the phenomenon was in the beginning more interesting for a fellow of PhD student Aserinsky, William Charles Dement, both Aserinsky and their PhD adviser, Nathaniel Kleitman, went on to demonstrate that this "rapid-eye movement" was correlated with dreaming and a general increase in brain activity. Aserinsky and Klei...

#16652

Jean-Toussaint Desanti

#16663

Overall Influence

1914 - 2002 (88 years)

Jean-Toussaint Desanti was a French educator and philosopher known for his work on both the philosophy of mathematics and phenomenology. Biography The son of Jean-François Desanti and Marie-Paule Colonna, he was born in Ajaccio and studied the philosophy of mathematics with Jean Cavaillès. During World War II, he was a member of the French Resistance, associating with Jean-Paul Sartre and André Malraux. He joined the French Communist Party in 1943 with his wife Dominique, remaining a member until 1956.

#16653

Sol Campbell

#16664

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Sulzeer Jeremiah Campbell is an English professional football manager and former player who was most recently the manager of club Southend United. A centre-back, he spent 20 years playing in the Premier League and had an 11-year international career with the England national team.

#16654

Daniel Deudney

#16665

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Daniel Horace Deudney is an American political scientist and Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His published work is mainly in the fields of international relations and political theory, with an emphasis on geopolitics and republicanism.

#16655

John Swales

#16666

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

John Malcolm Swales is a linguist best known for his work on genre analysis, particularly with regard to its application to the fields of rhetoric, discourse analysis, English for Academic Purposes and, more recently, information science.

#16656

Ulrich Luz

#16667

Overall Influence

1938 - 2019 (81 years)

Ulrich Luz was a Swiss theologian and professor emeritus at the University of Bern. Early life He was born on 23 February 1938 in Männedorf. He studied Protestant theology in Zurich, Göttingen and Basel under Hans Conzelmann, Eduard Schweizer and Gerhard Ebeling.

#16657

V. Narry Kim

#16668

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

V. Narry Kim is a South Korean biochemist and microbiologist, best known for her work on microRNA biogenesis. Her pioneering studies have laid the groundwork for the biology of microRNA and contributed to the improvement of RNA interference technologies.

#16658

Herman te Riele

#16669

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Hermanus Johannes Joseph te Riele is a Dutch mathematician at CWI in Amsterdam with a specialization in computational number theory. He is known for proving the correctness of the Riemann hypothesis for the first 1.5 billion non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function with Jan van de Lune and Dik Winter, for disproving the Mertens conjecture with Andrew Odlyzko, and for factoring large numbers of world record size. In 1987, he found a new upper bound for π − Li.

#16659

Yogendra Singh

#16670

Overall Influence

1932 - 2020 (88 years)

Yogendra Singh was an Indian sociologist. He was one of the founders of the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, where he was a professor emeritus of Sociology, and where he has been a professor since 1971. Prior to that, he went to Stanford University, USA in 1967–68 on a Fulbright Fellowship and was Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, Jodhpur University.

#16660

Gavin Turk

#16671

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Gavin Turk is a British artist from Guildford in Surrey, and was considered to be one of the Young British Artists. Turk's oeuvre deals with issues of authenticity and identity, engaged with modernist and avant-garde debates surrounding the 'myth' of the artist and the 'authorship' of a work of art.

#16661

Janet Albrechtsen

#16672

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Janet Kim Albrechtsen is an Australian opinion columnist with The Australian. From 2005 until 2010, she was a member of the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia's public broadcaster.

#16662

Rafael Caldera

#16673

Overall Influence

1916 - 2009 (93 years)

Rafael Antonio Caldera Rodríguez , twice elected the president of Venezuela, served for two five-year terms , becoming the longest serving democratically elected leader to govern the country in the twentieth century. His first term marked the first peaceful transfer of power to the opposition in Venezuela's history.

#16663

John W. Cahn

#16674

Overall Influence

1928 - 2016 (88 years)

John Werner Cahn was an American scientist and recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science. Born in Cologne, Weimar Germany, he was a professor in the department of metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1964 to 1978. From 1977, he held a position at the National Institute of Standards and Technology . Cahn had a profound influence on the course of materials research during his career. One of the foremost authorities on thermodynamics, Cahn applied the basic laws of thermodynamics to describe and predict a wide range of physical phenomena.

#16664

Antonio Inoki

#16675

Overall Influence

1943 - 2022 (79 years)

Muhammad Hussain Inoki was a Japanese professional wrestler, martial artist, politician, and promoter of professional wrestling and mixed martial arts. He was best known by the ring name Antonio Inoki, a homage to fellow professional wrestler Antonino Rocca. Inoki was a twelve-time professional wrestling world champion, notably being the first IWGP Heavyweight Champion and the first Asian WWF Heavyweight Champion – a reign not officially recognized by WWE.

#16665

Roy Radner

#16676

Overall Influence

1927 - 2022 (95 years)

Roy Radner was Leonard N. Stern School Professor of Business at New York University. He was a micro-economic theorist. Radner's research interests included strategic analysis of climate change, bounded rationality, game-theoretic models of corruption, pricing of information goods and statistical theory of data mining. Previously he was a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

#16666

Aleida Assmann

#16677

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Aleida Assmann is a German professor of English and Literary Studies, who studied Egyptology and whose work has focused on cultural anthropology and Cultural and Communicative Memory. Life Born Aleida Bornkamm in , North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, she is the daughter of the New Testament scholar Günther Bornkamm and his wife, Elisabeth. She studied English and Egyptology at the universities of Heidelberg and Tübingen from 1966 to 1972. In 1977 she wrote her dissertation in Heidelberg about The Legitimacy of Fiction . She had to take her minor field examination in Egyptology in Tübingen becaus...

#16667

Bernard Wasserstein

#16678

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Bernard Wasserstein is a British and American historian. Early life Bernard Wasserstein was born in London on 22 January 1948. Wasserstein's father, Abraham Wasserstein , born in Frankfurt, was Professor of Classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His mother, Margaret , was born in Budapest. He was educated at the High School of Glasgow and Wyggeston Boys' Grammar School, Leicester. He earned a BA in Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford in 1969 and a DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford in 1974. In 2001 he was awarded the 'advanced research degree' of DLitt by Oxford University. His brother, David J.

#16668

Johannes Agnoli

#16679

Overall Influence

1925 - 2003 (78 years)

Johannes Agnoli was an Italian Marxist political scientist, though he rejected the label Marxist, preferring instead - somewhat ironically - to call himself an Agnolist. Biography Agnoli grew up in Belluno, northern Italy. As a pupil, he became an admirer of Benito Mussolini's fascism and a member of the fascist youth organization, because this was considered a type of rebellion or non-bourgeois behavior. Graduating from school in 1943, he then volunteered for the Wehrmacht, the German military, and was sent to Yugoslavia to combat Partisans. In May 1945 he was captured by the British near Trieste and became a prisoner of war in the Moascar camp in Egypt.

#16669

R. Kent Hughes

#16680

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

R. Kent Hughes is the former senior pastor of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, United States. Hughes is the author of numerous books, including the best-selling Disciplines of a Godly Man. He is also editor and contributor for the projected 50-volume Preaching the Word series, including Mark: Jesus, Servant and Savior, which received the ECPA Gold Medallion Book Award for best commentary in 1990. Hughes served as senior pastor of College Church for 27 years and retired at the end of 2006. He moved to Wheaton from California, where he pastored two churches. He holds a BA from Whittier College, an M.Div.

#16670

Robert Powell

#16681

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Robert ″Bob″ Powell is an American herpetologist. His main research interest is in the herpetofauna of the Caribbean. Career Powell was born in Germany but raised in Missouri. He received his Bachelor of Arts in 1970 from the University of Missouri and his Master of Arts in 1971 from the University of Missouri–Kansas City. In 1984, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri with the thesis ″Variation in Spotted Salamanders from Missouri". In 1989, he became professor and coordinator in the biology department at the Avila College in Kansas City. From 1994 until 2018 he was professor for biology at the Avila University in Kansas City.

#16671

M. Frederick Hawthorne

#16682

Overall Influence

1928 - 2021 (93 years)

Marion Frederick Hawthorne was an inorganic chemist who made contributions to the chemistry of boron hydrides, especially their clusters. Early life and education Hawthorne was born on August 24, 1928, in Fort Scott, Kansas. He received his elementary and secondary education in Kansas and Missouri. Prior to high school graduation, he entered the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy, Rolla, Missouri through examination as a chemical engineering student. He then transferred to Pomona College, where he received a B.A. degree in chemistry in 1949. While there he conducted research with Corwin Hansch.

#16672

Ahmad Kamyabi Mask

Ahmad Kamyabi Mask

#16683

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Ahmad Kamyabi Mask is a writer, translator, publisher, and current Professor Emeritus of Modern Drama and Theater of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran. He is a prominent scholar of French Avant-garde theater and influential in the study of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.

#16673

Morton Horwitz

#16684

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Morton J. Horwitz is an American legal historian and law professor at Harvard Law School. The recent past dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, relates that during her time at law school, students often nicknamed him as "Mort the Tort" since he taught the first-year subject Torts.

#16674

Paul Horwich

#16685

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Paul Gordon Horwich is a British analytic philosopher at New York University, noted for his contributions to philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, the philosophy of language and the interpretation of Wittgenstein's later philosophy.

#16675

Michael Aschbacher

Michael Aschbacher

#16686

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Michael George Aschbacher is an American mathematician best known for his work on finite groups. He was a leading figure in the completion of the classification of finite simple groups in the 1970s and 1980s. It later turned out that the classification was incomplete, because the case of quasithin groups had not been finished. This gap was fixed by Aschbacher and Stephen D. Smith in 2004, in a pair of books comprising about 1300 pages. Aschbacher is currently the Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology.

#16676

Claudine Tiercelin

#16687

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Claudine Tiercelin is a French philosopher, working on metaphysics and philosophy of science. She is professor of philosophy at the Collège de France, after having been professor at the Paris 12 Val de Marne University.

#16677

Charles Spencer

#16688

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Charles Spencer is a British journalist. He was the chief drama critic of The Daily Telegraph from 1991 to 2014, having joined the paper in 1988. On 1 September 2014, it was announced that he had decided to take early retirement, and his final review for the paper appeared on the same day.

#16678

Tariq Modood

#16689

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Tariq Modood, is a British Pakistani Professor of Sociology, Politics, and Public Policy at the University of Bristol . Modood is the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship and one of the leading authorities on ethnic minorities in Britain.

#16679

Keith Campbell

#16690

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Keith Campbell is an Australian philosopher working in metaphysics. Biography With D. M. Armstrong, Campbell is one of the founders of so-called Australian materialism and, within it, of a variety of trope theory. He also has a distinctive view of concrete and abstract objects: the former can exist by themselves, and the latter are incapable of independent existence.

#16680

John Kekes

#16691

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

John Kekes is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University at Albany, SUNY. Education Kekes received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Australian National University. Work Kekes is the author of a number of books on ethics, including The Examined Life , The Morality of Pluralism , Moral Wisdom and Good Lives , The Art of Life , The Roots of Evil , Enjoyment , and The Enlargement of Life: Moral Imagination at Work .

#16681

John Taylor

#16692

Overall Influence

John Taylor was a pirate active in the Indian Ocean, best known for participating in two of the richest pirate captures of all time. History Taylor began his piratical career in 1718 as a crewman aboard the trading sloop Buck when Howell Davis staged a mutiny, took over the ship, and convinced the crew to take up piracy. After attempting to oust Davis from command, Taylor transferred to a prize ship commanded by Jeremiah Cocklyn, who soon split with Davis to sail alongside Olivier Levasseur.

#16682

Julie Ahringer

#16693

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Julie Ann Ahringer is an American/British Professor of Genetics and Genomics, Director of the Gurdon Institute and a member of the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. She leads a research lab investigating the control of gene expression.

#16683

Moshé Machover

#16694

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Moshé Machover is a mathematician, philosopher, and socialist activist, noted for his writings against Zionism. Born to a Jewish family in Tel Aviv, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine, Machover moved to Britain in 1968 where he became a naturalised citizen. He was a founder of Matzpen, the Israeli Socialist Organisation, in 1962.

#16684

Adam Carolla

#16695

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Adam Carolla is an American radio personality, comedian, actor and podcaster. He hosts The Adam Carolla Show, a talk show distributed as a podcast which set the record as the "most downloaded podcast" as judged by Guinness World Records in 2011.

#16685

Jeffrey A. Barrett

#16696

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Jeffrey A. Barrett is Chancellor's Professor in Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he specializes in philosophy of physics. Education and career He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia University.

#16686

Daniel D. Joseph

#16697

Overall Influence

1929 - 2011 (82 years)

Daniel Donald Joseph was an American mechanical engineer. He was the Regents Professor Emeritus and Russell J. Penrose Professor Emeritus of Department of Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Minnesota. He was widely known for his research in fluid dynamics.

#16687

Gary Siuzdak

#16698

Overall Influence

Gary Siuzdak is an American chemist best known for his work in the field of metabolomics, activity metabolomics , and mass spectrometry. His lab discovered indole-3-propionic acid as a gut bacteria derived metabolite in 2009. He is currently the Professor and Director of The Center for Metabolomics and Mass Spectrometry at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. Siuzdak has also made contributions to virus analysis, viral structural dynamics, as well as developing mass spectrometry imaging technology using nanostructured surfaces. The Siuzdak lab is also responsible for creating the research tools eXtensible Computational Mass Spectrometry , METLIN, METLIN Neutral Loss and Q-MRM.

#16688

Beatriz Magaloni

#16699

Overall Influence

Beatriz Magaloni is a political scientist. She is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, Professor of Political Science, and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Since 2021, Magaloni is also a Non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

#16689

Elleke Boehmer

#16700

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Elleke Boehmer, FRSL, FRHistS is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. She is an acclaimed novelist and a founding figure in the field of Postcolonial Studies, internationally recognised for her research in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory. Her main areas of interest include the literature of empire and resistance to empire; sub-Saharan African and South Asian literatures; modernism; migration and diaspora; feminism, masculinity, and identity; nationalism; terrorism; J. M. Coetzee, Ka...

#16690

Ernest Kirkendall

#16701

Overall Influence

1914 - 2005 (91 years)

Ernest Oliver Kirkendall was an American chemist and metallurgist. He is known for his 1947 discovery of the Kirkendall effect. Life and works He was raised in Highland Park, Michigan and received his bachelor's from Wayne State University. His master's and PhD came from the University of Michigan, but he returned to Wayne to teach chemical engineering. In 1984 he was inducted into the College of Engineering's Hall of Fame. He died in a nursing home in Alexandria, Virginia.

#16691

Yulian Semyonov

Yulian Semyonov

#16702

Overall Influence

1931 - 1993 (62 years)

Yulian Semyonovich Semyonov , pen-name of Yulian Semyonovich Lyandres , was a Soviet and Russian writer of spy fiction and detective fiction, also scriptwriter and poet. He is well known for creating the fictional spy Stierlitz.

#16692

Mehdi Behzad

#16703

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Mehdi Behzad is an Iranian mathematician specializing in graph theory. He introduced his total coloring theory during his Ph.D. studies in 1965. Despite the active work during the last 50 years this conjecture remains as challenging as it is open. In fact, Behzad's conjecture now belongs to mathematics’ classic open problems.

#16693

Anne H. Ehrlich

#16704

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Anne Howland Ehrlich is an American scientist and author who is best known for the wildly inaccurate predictions she made as a co-author of The Population Bomb with her colleague and husband, Paul R. Ehrlich. She has written or co-written more than thirty books on overpopulation and ecology, including The Stork and the Plow , with Gretchen Daily, and The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment , among many other works. She also has written extensively on issues of public concern such as population control, environmental protection, and environmental consequences of nuclear war.

#16694

Wallace Chafe

#16705

Overall Influence

1927 - 2019 (92 years)

Wallace Chafe was an American linguist. He was Professor Emeritus and research professor at The University of California, Santa Barbara. Biography Chafe was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a student of Bernard Bloch and Floyd Lounsbury at Yale University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1958. From 1975 to 1986 he was the director of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley. He later moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, and became professor emeritus at UCSB in 1991.

#16695

Jim Sciutto

#16706

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

James Ernest Sciutto is an American news anchor and former government official who has been the chief national security correspondent for CNN since September 2013. In this role he provides analysis on a variety of topics concerning United States national security, including foreign policy, the military, terrorism, and the intelligence community. From 2011 to 2013, he served as chief of staff to U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Prior to his appointment as chief of staff, he was senior foreign correspondent for ABC News, based in London. He is the author of Against Us: The New Face of America's Enemies in the Muslim World among other books.

#16696

Jeffrey K. Tulis

#16707

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jeffrey K. Tulis is an American political scientist known for work that conjoins the fields of American politics, political theory, and public law. Early life and education Tulis was born in Long Branch, New Jersey and grew up on the Jersey Shore in the Oakhurst section of Ocean Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey. He spent his high school years at the New Hampton School, a boarding school in New Hampshire. He attended Bates College where he received a B.A. in 1972, Magna Cum Laude and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He spent his junior year abroad at Harris Manchester College, Oxford. He earned an M.A.

#16697

Carrie Fisher

#16708

Overall Influence

1956 - 2016 (60 years)

Carrie Frances Fisher was an American actress and writer. Fisher played Princess Leia in the original Star Wars films . She reprised the role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens , The Last Jedi — a posthumous release that was dedicated to her — and appeared in The Rise of Skywalker , through the use of unreleased footage from The Force Awakens.

#16698

Nasser Fakouhi

#16709

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Nasser Fakouhi is an Iranian anthropologist, writer and translator. Fakouhi was born to a middle-class family in Tehran. He is a professor of anthropology of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tehran and the president of a scientific and multidisciplinary website called Anthropology and Culture . He is also a member of International Association of Sociology and International Society of Iranian Studies.

#16699

Ruy Pérez Tamayo

Ruy Pérez Tamayo

#16710

Overall Influence

1924 - 2022 (98 years)

Ruy Pérez Tamayo was a Mexican medical pathologist, immunologist, researcher, science communicator and academic. Life and career Born in Tampico, Pérez Tamayo graduated in medicine and specialised in pathology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and then got a doctorate in immunology from the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico City. He was the founder and director of the pathology unit at the General Hospital of Mexico, and the director of the Department of Pathology at the National Institute of Nutrition for ten years. He was professor in his alma mater for 58 years, and w...

#16700

Abraham Edel

#16711

Overall Influence

1908 - 2007 (99 years)

Abraham Edel was a North American philosopher and ethicist. He was the younger brother of the North American literary critic and biographer Leon Edel, and the uncle of the composer Joel Mandelbaum. He was married three times; his first two wives were fellow academics and co-authors, the anthropologist May Mandelbaum Edel, the philosopher Elizabeth Flower, and Sima Szaluta respectively.

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