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
#16701
Ash Sarkar
#16712
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Ashna Sarkar is a British journalist and libertarian communist political activist. She is a senior editor at Novara Media and teaches at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Sarkar is a contributor to The Guardian and The Independent.
Go to Profile#16702
Brian Follett
#16713
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Sir Brian Keith Follett is a British biologist, academic administrator, and policy maker. His research focused upon how the environment, particularly the annual change in day-length , controls breeding in birds and mammals. Knighted in 1992, he won the Frink Medal and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1984, and served as the chair of the UK government's teacher training agency and Arts and Humanities Research Council, and was Vice-Chancellor of University of Warwick.
Go to Profile#16703
Mihail Zervos
#16714
Overall Influence
Mihail Zervos is a Greek financial mathematician. He is Professor of Financial Mathematics at the London School of Economics. Curriculum Zervos received his MSc and PhD degrees from Imperial College London in 1995. After completing his PhD, he was a lecturer at the Department of Statistics, University of Newcastle, where he stayed until 2000. He then joined King's College London, initially as a lecturer and then as a reader in the Department of Mathematics. In 2006 he was appointed to the Chair in Financial Mathematics at the London School of Economics where he was tasked with founding a new R...
Go to Profile#16704
Norman Allinger
#16715
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Norman "Lou" Allinger was an American organic and computational chemist and Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Georgia in Athens. Lou Allinger was the elder of two children of Norman Clark Allinger and Florence Helen . He was born in Alameda, California.
Go to Profile#16705
John R. Adler
#16716
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
John R. Adler is an American neurosurgeon. He was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1954. He graduated at Harvard College in 1976 and at Harvard Medical School in 1980. From 1980 to 1987 he did a neurosurgical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital and a radiosurgery fellowship at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, where he worked with Lars Leksell. He joined the faculty of Stanford University School of Medicine in 1987 as an assistant professor in the department of neurosurgery in 1987, was also, made an assistant professor in radiation oncology in 1992, wa...
Go to Profile#16706
James McKernan
#16717
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
James McKernan is a mathematician, and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. He was a professor at MIT from 2007 until 2013. Education McKernan was educated at the Campion School, Hornchurch, and Trinity College, Cambridge, before going on to earn his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991. His dissertation, On the Hyperplane Sections of a Variety in Projective Space, was supervised by Joe Harris.
Go to Profile#16707
Manuel Felguérez
#16718
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Manuel Felguérez Barra was a Mexican abstract artist, part of the Generación de la Ruptura that broke with the muralist movement of Diego Rivera and others in the mid 20th century. Early life Felguérez was born in the state of Zacatecas in 1928, but political instability caused his family to lose their land there and move to Mexico City. In 1947, he had the chance to travel to Europe and, impressed with the art there, decided to dedicate himself to the vocation. Unhappy with the education at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico, he did most of his studies in France, where he specialized in abstract art .
Go to Profile#16708
Rüdiger Wolfrum
#16719
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Rüdiger Wolfrum is German jurist and the current professor of international law at the Heidelberg University Faculty of Law and director emeritus of the Heidelberg Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. Wolfrum was a judge at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea from 1996 to 2017, serving as president of the court from 2005 to 2008.
Go to Profile#16709
Dave Raggett
#16720
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Dave Raggett is an English computer specialist who has played a major role in implementing the World Wide Web since 1992. He has been a W3C Fellow at the World Wide Web Consortium since 1995 and worked on many of the key web protocols, including HTTP, HTML, XHTML, MathML, XForms, and VoiceXML. Raggett also wrote HTML Tidy and is currently pioneering W3C's work on the Web of Things. He lives in the west of England.
Go to Profile#16710
Marshall Goldman
#16721
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Marshall Irwin Goldman was an American economist and writer. He was an expert on the economy of the former Soviet Union. Goldman was a professor of economics at Wellesley College and associate director of the Harvard Russian Research Center. Goldman received his Ph.D. in Russian studies from Harvard University in 1961. Goldman was well known for his study of the career of Mikhail Gorbachev. His books on the former Soviet Union include The USSR in Crisis: The Failure of an Economic System, Lost Opportunity: What Has Made Economic Reform in Russia So Difficult, and Petrostate.
Go to Profile#16711
Thomas Fararo
#16722
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Thomas J. Fararo was Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. After earning a Ph.D. in sociology at Syracuse University in 1963, he received a three-year postdoctoral fellowship for studies in pure and applied mathematics at Stanford University . In 1967, he joined the faculty of University of Pittsburgh; during 1972-1973, he was visiting professor at the University of York in England.
Go to Profile#16712
Bryan Cranston
#16723
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Bryan Lee Cranston is an American actor, producer, and director. He is mainly known for portraying Walter White in the AMC crime drama series Breaking Bad and Hal in the Fox sitcom Malcolm in the Middle . He has received a number of awards, including six Primetime Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, and a Golden Globe, in addition to a nomination for an Academy Award.
Go to Profile#16713
Joseph DeRisi
#16724
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Joseph Lyman DeRisi is an American biochemist, specializing in molecular biology, parasitology, genomics, virology, and computational biology. Early life and education DeRisi was raised in Carmichael, California, where he graduated from Del Campo High School. He received a B.A. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1992 from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Go to Profile#16714
Imre Simon
#16725
Overall Influence
1943 - 2009 (66 years)
Imre Simon was a Hungarian-born Brazilian mathematician and computer scientist. His research mainly focused on theoretical computer science, automata theory, and tropical mathematics, a subject he founded, and which was so named because he lived in Brazil. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He was also actively interested in questions of intellectual property and collaborative work, and was an enthusiastic advocate for open collaborative information systems, of which Wikipedia is an example.
Go to Profile#16715
Michael Karin
#16726
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael Karin is an Israeli-American Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology, Ben and Wanda Hildyard Chair for Mitochondrial and Metabolic Diseases, and American Cancer Society Research Professor at the University of California, San Diego.
Go to Profile#16716
Kim Chi-ha
#16727
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Kim Jiha or Kim Chi-ha was a South Korean poet and playwright. Biography Kim Jiha was born Kim Yeongil on 4 February 1941 in Mokpo, Jeollanam-do. As a university student, Kim took part in April Revolution demonstrations that toppled the regime of South Korean President Syngman Rhee in April 1960. In March 1963, under the pen name Kim Jiha, he published the poem "Evening Story" in the journal Mokpo Literature. In 1964, Kim took part in the demonstrations against the normalization treaty establishing diplomatic relations with Japan, for which he was briefly arrested. In 1966, he graduated with a degree in Aesthetics from Seoul National University.
Go to Profile#16717
John Honnold
#16728
Overall Influence
John Otis Honnold Jr. was the William A. Schnader Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Biography Honnold was born in Kansas, Illinois, to John Otis and Louretta Honnold, and lived in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#16718
David Wallace
#16729
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sir David James Wallace, CBE, FRS, FRSE, FREng is a British physicist and academic. He was the Vice-Chancellor of Loughborough University from 1994 to 2005, and the Master of Churchill College, Cambridge from 2006 to 2014.
Go to Profile#16719
Roberta Sinatra
#16730
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Roberta Sinatra is an Italian scientist and associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. She is known for her work in network science and conducts research on quantifying success in science.
Go to Profile#16720
Alexander Spirkin
#16731
Overall Influence
1918 - 2004 (86 years)
Alexander Georgyevich Spirkin was a Soviet and Russian philosopher and psychologist. He was born in Saratov Governorate and graduated from the Moscow State Pedagogical University. In 1959 he received his doctorate in philosophy for a dissertation on the origin of consciousness.
Go to Profile#16721
Daniel Chamovitz
#16732
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Daniel Chamovitz is an American-born plant geneticist and the 7th President of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel. Previously he was Dean of the George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and the director of the multidisciplinary Manna Center Program in Food Safety and Security.
Go to Profile#16722
Nwando Achebe
#16733
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Nwando Achebe is a Nigerian-American academic, academic administrator, feminist scholar, and multi-award-winning historian. She is the Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History and the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the College of Social Science at Michigan State University. She is also founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of West African History. 19th Century, 20th Century, Cultural, Political, Religious, Social, Women & Gender
Go to Profile#16723
Vi Hart
#16734
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Victoria Hart , commonly known as Vi Hart , is an American mathematician and YouTuber. They describe themself as a "recreational mathemusician" and are well-known for creating mathematical videos on YouTube and popularizing mathematics. Hart founded the virtual reality research group eleVR and has co-authored several research papers on computational geometry and the mathematics of paper folding.
Go to Profile#16724
John H. Herz
#16735
Overall Influence
1908 - 2005 (97 years)
Hans Hermann Herz was an American scholar of international relations and law. He coined the concept of the security dilemma. Early life He was born in Düsseldorf, Germany to Carl and Elizabeth Aschaffenburg Herz. In 1935, he fled Germany because he was Jewish and emigrated to Switzerland where he received a diploma from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in 1938. In 1938, he emigrated to the United States.
Go to Profile#16725
Marco Aurélio Mello
#16736
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Marco Aurélio Mendes de Farias Mello is a Brazilian former justice of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil, appointed to the position by his cousin, former President of Brazil Fernando Collor de Mello.
Go to Profile#16726
Peter J. Stang
#16737
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Peter John Stang is a German American chemist and Distinguished Professor of chemistry at the University of Utah. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Chemical Society from 2002 to 2020.
Go to Profile#16727
Drew Casper
#16738
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Joseph Andrew "Drew" Casper is a Professor of Critical Studies who previously worked at the School of Cinematic Arts as part of the University of Southern California and is considered by many to be an authority on American film from World War II to the present. While a Ph.D. student at USC, Dr. Casper's mentor, Irwin Blacker, died suddenly and the Cinema department offered Dr. Casper a position. Casper rose to become the third-highest-paid person at USC. In the fall of 1997, the estate of Alfred Hitchcock and USC made Dr. Casper the first Alma and Alfred Hitchcock Professor for the Study of American Film.
Go to Profile#16728
George Smith
#16739
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
George Pearson Smith is an American biologist and Nobel laureate. He is a Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, US. Career Born in Norwalk, Connecticut, he earned his A.B. degree from Haverford College in biology, was a high school teacher and lab technician for a year, and earned his PhD degree in bacteriology and immunology from Harvard University. He was a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin before moving to Columbia, Missouri and joining the University of Missouri faculty in 1975. He spent the 1983–1984 a...
Go to Profile#16729
Rubén Bonifaz Nuño
#16740
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Rubén Bonifaz Nuño was a Mexican poet and classical scholar. Born in Córdoba, Veracruz, he studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 1934 to 1947. In 1960, he began lecturing in Latin at the UNAM's Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and received a doctorate in Classics in 1970. Among his publications are translations of works by Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, Lucretius and others into Spanish; his translation of Vergil's Aeneid was particularly well received.
Go to Profile#16730
Allan G. Johnson
#16741
Overall Influence
1946 - 2017 (71 years)
Allan G. Johnson was an American writer and public speaker who worked in the fields of sociology and gender studies. One of his nonfiction works is The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal Legacy, about the detrimental effects of the patriarchy. He died of lymphoma.
Go to Profile#16731
Eduardo Catalano
#16742
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
Eduardo Fernando Catalano was an Argentine architect. Life and career Born in Buenos Aires, Catalano went to the United States on a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1945, after earning his second master's degree in architecture returned to Buenos Aires where he taught at the University of Buenos Aires and ran a private practice. Catalano then taught at the Architectural Association in London from 1950 to 1951, when he came back to the United States as a Professor of Architecture at the School of Design in Raleigh, North Carolina State University.
Go to Profile#16732
Utsa Patnaik
#16743
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Utsa Patnaik is an Indian Marxian economist. She taught at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, from 1973 until her retirement in 2010. Her husband is the Marxian economist Prabhat Patnaik.
Go to Profile#16733
Scott Reuben
#16744
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Scott S. Reuben is an American anesthesiologist who falsified data heralding the benefits of the Pfizer pain medication Celebrex while downplaying its negative side effects. He was Professor of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts and chief of acute pain at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts from February 1991 until 2009 when he was sentenced to prison for healthcare fraud. Reuben was considered to be a prolific and influential researcher in pain management, and his purported findings altered the way millions of patients are treated for pain during and after orthopedic surgeries.
Go to Profile#16734
Alessio Figalli
#16745
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Alessio Figalli is an Italian mathematician working primarily on calculus of variations and partial differential equations. He was awarded the Peccot-Vimont Prize and the Peccot Lectures in 2012, the EMS Prize in 2012, the Stampacchia Medal in 2015, the Feltrinelli Prize in 2017, and the Fields Medal in 2018. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians 2014. In 2016 he was awarded a European Research Council grant, and in 2018 he received the Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Université Côte d'Azur. In 2019, he received the Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Polyte...
Go to Profile#16735
Jet Li
#16746
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Li Lianjie , better known by his stage name Jet Li, is a Chinese-born Singaporean martial artist, former Wushu champion, film actor, film producer, and philanthropist. He is widely regarded as one of the most iconic Chinese film stars and one of the most renowned martial arts stars of his generation.
Go to Profile#16736
Melvin Tumin
#16747
Overall Influence
1919 - 1994 (75 years)
Melvin Marvin Tumin was an American sociologist who specialized in race relations. He taught at Princeton University for much of his career. Early life Tumin was born and grew up in Newark, New Jersey. His mother, Rose Yawitz Tumin, raised him and his two brothers on her own after the death of his father when Tumin was in his very early teens. He was the middle brother; Edward Tumin was his younger brother, and Israel Tumin was his older brother. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1939. He received his Ph.D. in sociology and anthropology from Northwestern University in 1944.
Go to Profile#16737
Warren Ambrose
#16748
Overall Influence
1914 - 1995 (81 years)
Warren Arthur Ambrose was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of Buenos Aires. He was born in Virden, Illinois in 1914. He received his bachelor of science degree in 1935, his master's in 1936 and his Ph.D. in 1939, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Go to Profile#16738
András Frank
#16749
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
András Frank is a Hungarian mathematician, working in combinatorics, especially in graph theory, and combinatorial optimisation. He is director of the Institute of Mathematics of the Faculty of Sciences of the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
Go to Profile#16739
Linda Harasim
#16750
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Linda Marie Harasim, is a "leading teacher, scholar and speaker on the theories and practices of online education, contributing knowledge, technologies, and practices to the field of technology-enabled learning," is a pioneer leading theorist of online education. She is a professor emerita in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her six books and hundreds of articles about Computer-supported collaborative learning have been acknowledged as seminal works in the field.
Go to Profile#16740
Douglas Holtz-Eakin
#16751
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Douglas James "Doug" Holtz-Eakin is an American economist. He was formerly an economics professor at Syracuse University, director of the Congressional Budget Office, and chief economic policy adviser to Senator John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. Holtz-Eakin is currently president of the American Action Forum policy institute, a conservative think tank.
Go to Profile#16741
Dan Roth
#16752
Overall Influence
Dan Roth is the Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Biography Roth got his B.A summa cum laude in Mathematics from the Technion, Israel and his Ph.D in Computer Science from Harvard University in 1995. He taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1998 to 2017 before moving to the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#16742
Uwe Schöning
#16753
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Uwe Schöning is a retired German computer scientist, known for his research in computational complexity theory. Education and career Schöning earned his Ph.D. from the University of Stuttgart in 1981, under the supervision of Wolfram Schwabhäuser. He was a professor in the Institute for Theoretical Informatics at the University of Ulm until his retirement in 2021.
Go to Profile#16743
Eve Marder
#16754
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Eve Marder is a University Professor and the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience at Brandeis University. At Brandeis, Marder is also a member of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems. Dr. Marder is known for her pioneering work on small neuronal networks which her team has interrogated via a combination of complementary experimental and theoretical techniques.
Go to Profile#16744
David Barker
#16755
Overall Influence
1938 - 2013 (75 years)
David James Purslove Barker was an English physician and epidemiologist and originator of the Barker Hypothesis that foetal and early infant conditions have a permanent conditioning effect on the body's metabolism and chronic conditions later in life.
Go to Profile#16745
Florence Ashley
#16756
Overall Influence
Florence Ashley is a transfeminine academic, activist and law professor at the University of Alberta. They specialise in trans law and bioethics. They have numerous academic publications, including a book on the law and policy of banning transgender conversion practices. Florence served as the first openly transfeminine clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada. They are a winner of the Canadian Bar Association SOGIC Hero Award.
Go to Profile#16746
Bill Cowher
#16757
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
William Laird Cowher is an American sports analyst, former football player and coach. Following a six-year playing career as a linebacker in the National Football League , he served as a head coach in the NFL for 15 seasons with the Pittsburgh Steelers. He began his coaching career as an assistant under Marty Schottenheimer for the Cleveland Browns and Kansas City Chiefs, serving as the latter's defensive coordinator from 1989 to 1991. Cowher was named head coach of the Steelers in 1992, whom he led until his retirement following the 2006 season. After retiring, he joined The NFL Today as a s...
Go to Profile#16747
Chris Patten
#16758
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Christopher Francis Patten, Baron Patten of Barnes, is a British politician who was the 28th and last Governor of Hong Kong from 1992 to 1997 and Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1992. He was made a life peer in 2005 and has been Chancellor of the University of Oxford since 2003.
Go to Profile#16748
Enya
#16759
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin , known mononymously as Enya, is an Irish singer and composer. She is noted for her modern Celtic music, and is the best-selling Irish solo artist . Enya was raised in the Irish-speaking region of Gweedore. In 1980, Enya began her musical career playing alongside her family's Celtic folk band Clannad. She left Clannad in 1982 to pursue a solo career, working with the former Clannad manager and producer, Nicky Ryan, and his partner Roma, as their lyricist. Over the following four years, Enya developed her sound by combining multitracked vocals and keyboards with e...
Go to Profile#16749
Richard C. Dorf
#16760
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Richard C. Dorf was a professor emeritus of management and electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis. He received his Ph.D. from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Dorf was a Life Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to engineering education and control theory, and was a fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education.
Go to Profile#16750
Shi Zhecun
#16761
Overall Influence
1905 - 2003 (98 years)
Shi Zhecun was a Chinese essayist, poet, short story writer, and translator in Shanghai during the 1930s. He was known for his poetry and essays, but is most known for his modernist short stories exploring the psychological conditions of Shanghai urbanites . From the 1940s onwards, he translated western novels into Chinese and worked as a scholar of classical Chinese literature.
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