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
#16851
Samuel Beer
#16862
Overall Influence
1911 - 2009 (98 years)
Samuel Hutchison Beer was an American political scientist who specialized in the government and politics of the United Kingdom. He was a longtime professor at Harvard University and served as president of the Americans for Democratic Action in the early 1960s.
Go to Profile#16852
Tony Levin
#16863
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Anthony Frederick Levin is an American musician and composer, specializing in electric bass guitars, Chapman Stick and upright bass. He also sings and plays synthesizer. Levin is best known for his work with King Crimson and Peter Gabriel . He is also a member of Liquid Tension Experiment , Bruford Levin Upper Extremities and HoBoLeMa . He has led his own band, Stick Men, since 2010.
Go to Profile#16853
J. Peter Neary
#16864
Overall Influence
1950 - 2021 (71 years)
J. Peter Neary was an economist specialising in international trade. He was professor of economics at Oxford University, and a professorial fellow of Merton College, Oxford, as well as associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford. He was previously professor of political economy at University College Dublin, from 1980 to 2006. He was also a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
Go to Profile#16854
Helen Murray Free
#16865
Overall Influence
1923 - 2021 (98 years)
Helen Murray Free was an American chemist and educator. She is most known for revolutionizing many in vitro self-testing systems for diabetes and other diseases while working at Miles Laboratories. The tests are still marketed today with blood tests as Ascensia Diabetes Care, and urine tests under Siemens Healthineers. The pioneering dip-and-read strips, allowed for testing to be more convenient and efficient, enabling doctors and patients to be less reliable to laboratories for results.
Go to Profile#16855
Patsy Reddy
#16866
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Dame Patricia Lee Reddy is a New Zealand lawyer and businesswoman who served as the 21st governor-general of New Zealand from 2016 to 2021. Before becoming governor-general, Reddy was a partner of a law firm, headed a major review of intelligence agencies, held multiple directorships, chaired the New Zealand Film Commission and worked as a chief negotiator on Treaty of Waitangi settlements. Prime Minister John Key advised the Queen to appoint Reddy to succeed Sir Jerry Mateparae as the Queen's representative, and Reddy was sworn in for a five-year term on 28 September 2016.
Go to Profile#16856
S. Barry Cooper
#16867
Overall Influence
1943 - 2015 (72 years)
S. Barry Cooper was an English mathematician and computability theorist. He was a professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leeds. Early life and education Cooper grew up in Bognor Regis and attended Chichester High School for Boys, during which time he played scrum-half for the under-15s England rugby team.
Go to Profile#16857
Neil F. Johnson
#16868
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Neil Fraser Johnson is an English physicist who is notable for his work in complexity theory and complex systems, spanning quantum information, econophysics, and condensed matter physics. He is currently Professor of Physics at George Washington University in Washington D.C. where he heads up a new initiative in Complexity and Data Science which combines cross-disciplinary fundamental research with data science, with a view to resolving complex real-world problems.
Go to Profile#16858
Giovanni Maria Flick
#16869
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Giovanni Maria Flick is an Italian journalist, politician, and jurist. Career Flick was born in Cirié, Piedmont, to a Catholic, half-ethnic German family, as the fifth of seven children. He began his education at the Jesuit liceo, and gained a diploma in law at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. He then practiced at the Rome tribunal, as a judge, then as a prosecutor, was a professor at the University of Perugia, the University of Messina, and, from 1980, the LUISS University of Rome, and also started a career as a lawyer. He contributed editorials to Il Sole 24 Ore and La St...
Go to Profile#16859
Samuel Martin
#16870
Overall Influence
1924 - 2009 (85 years)
Samuel Elmo Martin was a linguist known for seminal work on the languages of East Asia, a professor at Yale University, and the author of many works on the Korean and Japanese languages. Biography Martin was born in Pittsburg, Kansas on 29 January 1924, and grew up in Emporia, Kansas. During World War II he was trained as a Japanese Language Officer, and was stationed in Japan at the end of the war.
Go to Profile#16860
I. Kathleen Hagen
#16871
Overall Influence
1945 - 2015 (70 years)
Idella Kathleen Hagen was a former medical doctor who gained notoriety for being accused of murder by asphyxia of her parents, Idella Hagen, aged 92, and James Hagen, aged 86, with a plastic bag and a pillow as they slept in their home in Chatham Township, New Jersey, in August 2000. A month earlier, she had returned to her parents' house from her home in the Virgin Islands because of their age and deteriorating health. Hagen, a woman of considerable means, had previously cut short a medical career in urology in 1987 to move to the Virgin Islands to operate an inn with her second husband.
Go to Profile#16861
Fred Sommers
#16872
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Frederic Tamler Sommers , better known as Fred Sommers, was an American philosopher who, after an initial focus on ontology generally, turned his attention specifically to a revival of classical logic. He is the father of the philosopher Tamler Sommers.
Go to Profile#16862
Denis Serre
#16873
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Denis Serre is a French mathematician who works as a professor at the École normale supérieure de Lyon, where he has chaired the mathematics department since 2012. His research concerns partial differential equations, hydrodynamics, and conservation laws.
Go to Profile#16863
Walter Brandmüller
#16874
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Walter Brandmüller is a German prelate of the Catholic Church, a cardinal since 2010. He was president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences from 1998 to 2009. Early life Brandmüller was born in 1929 in Ansbach, Germany. His father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant. Brandmüller was baptized as a Protestant and converted to Catholicism from Lutheranism in his adolescence. He studied at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich in 1963, he earned a doctorate in history ; and he obtained the "habilitation" in 1967 with the dissertation "Das Konzil von Pavia-Siena " .
Go to Profile#16864
Ollanta Humala
#16875
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ollanta Moisés Humala Tasso is a Peruvian politician and former military officer who served as President of Peru from 2011 to 2016. Originally a socialist and left-wing nationalist, he is considered to have shifted towards neoliberalism and the political centre during his presidency.
Go to Profile#16865
Robin Jeffrey
#16876
Overall Influence
Robin Bannerman Jeffrey is a Canadian-born professor. His primary research interest is the modern history and politics of India, especially with reference the northern area of Punjab and Kerala in the south. He is also interested in Indian media studies and development studies.
Go to Profile#16866
Andreas Dorschel
#16877
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Andreas Dorschel is a German philosopher. Since 2002, he has been professor of aesthetics and head of the Institute for Music Aesthetics at the University of the Arts Graz . Background Andreas Dorschel was born in 1962 in Wiesbaden, West Germany. He is a cousin of the modernist visual artist Gesine Probst-Bösch . From 1983 on, Dorschel studied philosophy, musicology and linguistics at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Vienna . In 2002, the University of Bern awarded him the Habilitation degree . Dorschel has taught at universities in Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the UK. At University of East Anglia Norwich , he was a colleague of writer W.G.
Go to Profile#16867
Tim Henman
#16878
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Timothy Henry Henman is a British former professional tennis player. Henman played a serve-and-volley style of tennis. He was the first British man to reach the singles semifinals of Wimbledon since Roger Taylor in the 1970s. Henman reached six major semifinals and won 15 career ATP Tour titles , including the 2003 Paris Masters. He also earned a 40–14 win-loss record with the Great Britain Davis Cup team.
Go to Profile#16868
Siva Vaidhyanathan
#16879
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Siva Vaidhyanathan is an American cultural historian and media scholar, and the Robertson professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Vaidhyanathan is a permanent columnist at The Guardian and Slate; he is also a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Slate, and The Baffler. He directs the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, which produces a television show, a radio program, several podcasts, and the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Go to Profile#16869
Tom O'Carroll
#16880
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Thomas Victor O'Carroll is a British writer and pro-paedophile advocate. O'Carroll is a former chairman of the now disbanded Paedophile Information Exchange and was at one time a prominent member of the International Paedophile and Child Emancipation .
Go to Profile#16870
Minhyong Kim
#16881
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Minhyong Kim is a South Korean mathematician who specialises in arithmetic geometry and anabelian geometry. Biography Kim received his PhD at Yale University in 1990 under the supervision of Serge Lang and Barry Mazur, going on to work in a number of universities, including M.I.T., Columbia, Arizona, Purdue, the Korea Institute for Advanced Study, UCL and the University of Oxford. He is currently the Christopher Zeeman Professor of Algebra, Geometry, and Public Understanding of Mathematics at University of Warwick.
Go to Profile#16871
Larry Smarr
#16882
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Larry Lee Smarr is a physicist and leader in scientific computing, supercomputer applications, and Internet infrastructure from Missouri. He currently works at the University of California, San Diego. Smarr has been among the most important synthesizers and conductors of innovation, discovery, and commercialization of new technologies – including areas as disparate as the Web browser and personalized medicine. In his career, Smarr has made pioneering breakthroughs in research on black holes, spearheaded the use of supercomputers for academic research, and presided over some of the major innovations that created the modern Internet.
Go to Profile#16872
Jerry Norman
#16883
Overall Influence
1936 - 2012 (76 years)
Jerry Lee Norman was an American sinologist and linguist known for his studies of Chinese dialects and historical phonology, particularly on the Min Chinese dialects, and also of the Manchu language. Norman had a large impact on Chinese linguistics, and was largely responsible for the identification of the importance of the Min Chinese dialects in linguistic research into Old Chinese.
Go to Profile#16873
Enda Walsh
#16884
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Enda Walsh is an Irish playwright. Biography Enda Walsh was born in Kilbarrack, North Dublin on 7 February 1967. His father ran a furniture shop and his mother had been an actress. He is the second youngest of six children. Walsh states that he saw his father, a salesman, as the 'lead actor' in the business, but as Ireland's economy fluctuated, so did furniture sales. Notably during the recession in the 1980s, when profits were low, Walsh says that he was earning more money managing his own newspaper round enterprise than his father was bringing home from the shop. Life in the large family...
Go to Profile#16874
Alain Enthoven
#16885
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Alain C. Enthoven is an American economist. He was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1965, and from 1965 to 1969, he was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis. Currently, he is Marriner S. Eccles Professor of Public and Private Management, Emeritus, at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Go to Profile#16875
Daniela Witten
#16886
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Daniela M. Witten is an American biostatistician. She is a professor and the Dorothy Gilford Endowed Chair of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Washington. Her research investigates the use of machine learning to understand high-dimensional data.
Go to Profile#16876
Adam Lambert
#16887
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Adam Mitchel Lambert is an American singer, songwriter and actor. Since 2009, he has sold over 3 million albums and 5 million singles worldwide. Lambert is known for his dynamic vocal performances that combine his theatrical training with modern and classic genres.
Go to Profile#16877
Alan Trounson
#16888
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Alan Osborne Trounson is an Australian embryologist with expertise in stem cell research. Trounson was the President of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine between 2007 and 2014, a former Professor of Stem Cell Sciences and the Director of the Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories at Monash University, and retains the title of emeritus professor.
Go to Profile#16878
Patrick Weil
#16889
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Patrick Weil is a political scientist. He is a senior research fellow at CNRS, at the Centre for the social history of the 20th century at the University of Paris 1. His research focuses on comparative citizenship, immigration law and constitutional law.
Go to Profile#16879
Joseph T. Collins
#16890
Overall Influence
1938 - 2012 (74 years)
Joseph Thomas Collins, Jr. was an American herpetologist. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati, Collins authored 27 books and over 300 articles on wildlife, of which about 250 were on amphibians and reptiles. He was the founder of the Center for North American Herpetology . He died while studying amphibians and reptiles on St. George Island, Florida on 14 January 2012. "For 60 years I was obsessed with herpetology," Joe Collins claimed.
Go to Profile#16880
Carl Yastrzemski
#16891
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Carl Michael Yastrzemski Sr. , nicknamed "Yaz", is an American former professional baseball player who played his entire career with the Boston Red Sox of Major League Baseball . He started his career primarily as a left fielder, but also played 33 games as a third baseman. Later in his career, he was mainly a first baseman and designated hitter.
Go to Profile#16881
Michael Tooley
#16892
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Michael Tooley is an American philosopher, now emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, best known for his contributions to metaphysics. Education and career He has a BA from the University of Toronto and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University in 1968. He taught at Stanford University and the Australian National University and since 1992 at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Go to Profile#16882
Owen Davies
#16893
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Owen Davies is a British historian who specialises in the history of magic, witchcraft, ghosts, and popular medicine. He is currently Professor in History at the University of Hertfordshire and has been described as Britain's "foremost academic expert on the history of magic".
Go to Profile#16883
Bogar
#16894
Overall Influence
Bogar, Bhogar, or Boganathar was a Tamil Shaivite Siddhar. He was a disciple of Kalangi Nathar. He was born in Vaigavur near Palani Hills. He received his education from his mother and his grand father described in several traditions and texts. Bogar himself describes his native roots in his book "Bogar 7000". Bogar went from Tamil Nadu to China and taught about enlightenment, this is also mentioned in his book Bogar 7000. Bogar is said to be in "nirvikalpa samadhi" below the sanctorum of Palani Murugan hill temple. The Tamraparniyan sea route was adopted by Bogar in his travels from South Ind...
Go to Profile#16884
Akira Hasegawa
#16895
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
is a Japanese theoretical physicist and engineer who has worked in the U.S. and Japan. He is known for his work in the derivation of the Hasegawa–Mima equation, which describes fundamental plasma turbulence and the consequent generation of zonal flow that controls plasma diffusion. Hasegawa also made the discovery of optical solitonss in glass fibers, a concept that is essential for high speed optical communications.
Go to Profile#16885
Winona Ryder
#16896
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Winona Laura Horowitz , known professionally as Winona Ryder, is an American actress. Originally playing quirky roles, she rose to prominence for her more diverse performances in various genres in the 1990s. She has received many accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, in addition to nominations for a Grammy Award, a BAFTA Award, and two Academy Awards.
Go to Profile#16886
Yuz Aleshkovsky
#16897
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Iosif Efimovich Aleshkovsky , known as Yuz Aleshkovsky was a modern Russian writer, poet, screenwriter, and performer of his own songs. Biography Yuz Aleshkovsky was born in Krasnoyarsk in 1929, when his Russian Jewish family resided there briefly for his father's business. Three months later his family returned to Moscow. His high school studies were interrupted due to his family's evacuation during the Second World War.
Go to Profile#16887
Edward James
#16898
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Edward Frederick James is a British scholar of medieval history and science fiction. He is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at University College, Dublin. James received the Hugo Award for his non-fiction book The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction , and the Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to SF and fantasy scholarship.
Go to Profile#16888
Kenneth G. Elzinga
#16899
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Kenneth G. Elzinga is the Robert C. Taylor Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia. He is an antitrust expert and co-authored a highly successful quartet of murder mystery novels in which the sleuth, dubbed Henry Spearman, solves the murder using principles of economics.
Go to Profile#16889
David Owen
#16900
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
David Anthony Llewellyn Owen, Baron Owen, is a British politician and physician who served as Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs as a Labour Party MP under James Callaghan from 1977 to 1979, and later led the Social Democratic Party . He was a Member of Parliament for 26 years, from 1966 to 1992.
Go to Profile#16890
Rudolf Ahlswede
#16901
Overall Influence
1938 - 2010 (72 years)
Rudolf F. Ahlswede was a German mathematician. Born in Dielmissen, Germany, he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1966, at the University of Göttingen, with the topic "Contributions to the Shannon information theory in case of non-stationary channels". He dedicated himself in his further career to information theory and became one of the leading representatives of this area worldwide.
Go to Profile#16891
Paul Olum
#16902
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Paul Olum was an American mathematician , professor of mathematics, and university administrator. Early years Born in Binghamton, New York to a father who was a Russian Jew who immigrated at age of nine to escape persecution, Olum took an interest in mathematics at an early age. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1940. In 1942 he married Vivian Goldstein, completed an MA in physics at Princeton University, and joined the scientific staff of the Manhattan Project. During his time at Los Alamos, Olum was among the Los Alamos scientists who questioned the implications of the...
Go to Profile#16892
Alan M. Leslie
#16903
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Alan M. Leslie is a Scottish psychologist and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive science at Rutgers University, where he directs the Cognitive Development Laboratory and is co-director of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science along with Ernest Lepore.
Go to Profile#16893
Heiner Rindermann
#16904
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Heiner Rindermann is a German psychologist and educational researcher. Academic career Rindermann received a Ph.D. in psychology in 1995 on the subject of teacher evaluations from Heidelberg University and completed a Habilitation in 2005 on the topic of teacher quality at University of Koblenz and Landau. In September 2007 he was appointed professor for evaluation and methodology of developmental psychology at the University of Graz. Since April 2010, Rindermann holds the Chair of Educational and Developmental Psychology at the Technical University of Chemnitz.
Go to Profile#16894
Norman Shapiro
#16905
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Norman Zalmon Shapiro was an American mathematician, who was the co-author of the Rice–Shapiro theorem. Education Shapiro obtained a BS in Mathematics at University of Illinois in 1952. Shapiro spent the summer of 1954 at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey where, in collaboration with Karel de Leeuw, Ed Moore, and Claude Shannon, he investigated the question of whether providing a Turing machine augmented with an oracle machine producing an infinite sequence of random events would enable the machine to output a non-computable sequence. The well-known efficacy of Monte Carlo methods might have led one to think otherwise, but the result was negative.
Go to Profile#16895
Leonard A. Jason
#16906
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Leonard A. Jason is a professor of psychology at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, where he also directs the Center for Community Research. His chief professional interests include the study of chronic fatigue syndrome , violence prevention, smoking cessation, and Oxford House recovery homes for substance abuse. Jason's interest in chronic fatigue syndrome began when he was diagnosed with the condition in 1990 after having mononucleosis.
Go to Profile#16896
John Dabiri
#16907
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
#16897
Jean Gottmann
#16908
Overall Influence
1915 - 1994 (79 years)
Jean Gottmann was a French geographer who was best known for his seminal study on the urban region of the Northeast megalopolis. His main contributions to human geography were in the sub-fields of urban, political, economic, historical and regional geography. His regional specializations ranged from France and the Mediterranean to the United States, Israel, and Japan.
Go to Profile#16898
Boris Struminsky
#16909
Overall Influence
1939 - 2003 (64 years)
Boris Vladimirovich Struminsky was a Russian and Ukrainian physicist known for his contribution to theoretical elementary particle physics. Biography Boris Struminsky was born on 14 August 1939 in Malakhovka, a settlement in Ukhtomsky District , Moscow Oblast, RSFSR, USSR. His father was academician Vladimir Vasilyevich Struminsky .
Go to Profile#16899
John Leland
#16910
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
John Leland is an author and has been a journalist for The New York Times since 2000. he began covering retirement and religion in January 2004. During 1994, Leland was for a stint editor-in-chief of Details magazine. He was also a senior editor at Newsweek, an editor and columnist at Spin magazine, and a reviewer for Trouser Press.
Go to Profile#16900
Ruth Padel
#16911
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Ruth Sophia Padel FRSL FZS is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her poetic explorations of migration, both animal and human, and her involvement with classical music, wildlife conservation and Greece, ancient and modern. She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature, has served on the board of the Zoological Society of London and was Professor of Poetry at King's College London from 2013 to 2022.
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