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
#17001
A. S. Rao
#17012
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Ayyagari Sambasiva Rao was an Indian scientist and founder of Electronics Corporation of India Limited , Hyderabad, Telangana, India. He completed his M.Sc in physics from Banaras Hindu University and then Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Go to Profile#17002
Rob Lowe
#17013
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Robert Hepler Lowe is an American actor, filmmaker, and podcast host. He made his acting debut at the age of 15 with ABC's short-lived sitcom A New Kind of Family . Following numerous television roles in the early 1980s, he came to prominence as a teen idol and member of the Brat Pack with roles in films like The Outsiders , Class , The Hotel New Hampshire , Oxford Blues , St. Elmo's Fire , About Last Night... , and Square Dance . The success of these films established him as a Hollywood star.
Go to Profile#17003
Alexander Oppenheim
#17014
Overall Influence
1903 - 1997 (94 years)
Sir Alexander Oppenheim, OBE FRSE KT PMN was a British mathematician and university administrator. In Diophantine approximation and the theory of quadratic forms, he proposed the Oppenheim conjecture.
Go to Profile#17004
José Ignacio Hualde
#17015
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
José Ignacio Hualde is a Spanish linguist specialised in Basque linguistics and in Spanish synchronic and diachronic phonology, professor of linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and in the Department of Linguistics, at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is also the current vice president of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Go to Profile#17005
Victor Zue
#17016
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Victor Waito Zue is a Chinese American computer scientist and professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1989 to 2001, he headed the Spoken Language Systems Group at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. The group pioneered the development of many systems enabling interactions between human and computers using spoken language. Then, he served a ten-year tenure as Director of the Lab for Computer Science , and the Co-Director and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab . Since 2001, Victor has returned to teaching and research from the director position in 2011.
Go to Profile#17006
Jim Ottaviani
#17017
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jim Ottaviani is an American writer who is the author of several comic books about the history of science. His best-known work, Two-Fisted Science: Stories About Scientists, features biographical stories about Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Niels Bohr, and several stories about physicist Richard Feynman. He is also a librarian and has worked as a nuclear engineer.
Go to Profile#17007
Richard McLaren
#17018
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Richard Henry McLaren is a law professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, specializing in sports law. In 2015, he was one of the three members of the WADA Commission, an independent panel commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency to investigate allegations of state-sponsored doping in Russian sports. He was awarded the Order of Canada with the grade of officer in 2015.
Go to Profile#17008
Domingo Cavallo
#17019
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Domingo Felipe Cavallo is an Argentine economist and politician. Between 1991 and 1996, he was the Minister of Economy during Carlos Menem's presidency. He is known for implementing the convertibility plan, which established a pseudo-currency board with the United States dollar and allowed the dollar to be used for legal contracts. This brought the inflation rate down from over 1,300% in 1990 to less than 20% in 1992 and nearly to zero during the rest of the 1990s. He implemented pro-market reforms which included privatizations of state enterprises. Productivity per hour worked during his five-years as minister of Menem increased by more than 100%.
Go to Profile#17009
Carson Palmer
#17020
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Carson Hilton Palmer is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 15 seasons, primarily with the Cincinnati Bengals and Arizona Cardinals. He played college football at USC, winning the Heisman Trophy as a senior.
Go to Profile#17010
Mike Shanahan
#17021
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Michael Edward Shanahan is an American former football coach, best known as the head coach of the Denver Broncos of the National Football League from 1995 to 2008. During his fourteen seasons with the Broncos, he led the team to two consecutive Super Bowl victories in XXXII and XXXIII; along with being the first Super Bowl championships in team history, they were the seventh team to win consecutive Super Bowls in NFL history. His head coaching career spanned a total of twenty seasons and also included stints with the Los Angeles Raiders and Washington Redskins. He is the father of San Franci...
Go to Profile#17011
Carlos D. Bustamante
#17022
Overall Influence
Carlos D. Bustamante is an American population geneticist and a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. Early life and education Bustamante is a native of Venezuela who immigrated to the United States at age seven. He attended Harvard University, from which he graduated with a bachelor's and later a doctorate in biology, along with a M.S. in statistics. After completing his Doctoral studies, Bustamante went on to study at Oxford University, focusing in Mathematical Genetics in 2001. From 2002 to 2009, Bustamante was a faculty member at Cornell University, publishing numerous works...
Go to Profile#17012
Nitin Desai
#17023
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Nitin Desai is an Indian economist and international civil servant. He was Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations from 1992 to 2003. Early life and academic career He was born to Dayalji M. and Shantaben Desai in 1941. He studied at St. Xavier's High School and Elphinstone College in Mumbai. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Bombay in 1962 and, in 1965, earned a master's degree in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Go to Profile#17013
Christopher Layne
#17024
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Christopher Layne is an American academic specialising in foreign policy. He is currently Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security at the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He was previously a professor at the University of Miami. His neorealist position in contemporary global politics is discussed in his 2006 book The Peace of Illusions.
Go to Profile#17014
Robert Z. Aliber
#17025
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Robert Zelwin Aliber is a professor emeritus of International Economics and Finance at the University of Chicago. He is best known for his contribution to the theory of foreign direct investment. He has given the concept of foreign exchange rate in foreign direct investment. Aliber argues that a multinational corporation from hard currency area can borrow at lower rates in a soft currency country than can local firms.
Go to Profile#17015
Song Sun
#17026
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Song Sun is a Chinese mathematician whose research concerns geometry and topology. A Sloan Research Fellow, he is a professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been since 2018. In 2019, he was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry.
Go to Profile#17016
Risto Näätänen
#17027
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Risto Kalervo Näätänen was a Finnish psychological scientist, pioneer in the field of cognitive neuroscience, and known worldwide as one of the discoverers of the electrophysiological mismatch negativity. He was a much-cited social scientist and one of the few individuals appointed permanent Academy Professor of the Academy of Finland. He retired in 2007 and retained a title of Academy Professor emeritus of the Academy of Finland. He was a professor at the University of Tartu starting in 2007.
Go to Profile#17017
Richard Roberts
#17028
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Richard Lee Roberts is an American television evangelist and faith healer who serves as the chairman and chief executive officer of the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association. He previously served fifteen years as the president of Oral Roberts University.
Go to Profile#17018
Christopher Yoo
#17029
Overall Influence
Christopher S. Yoo is the John H. Chestnut Professor of Law, Communication, and Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the founding director of the Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition. He is well known for his work on technology law, media law and copyright, and is among the most frequently cited authors in that domain. He is best known for being among the first academics to engage in the debate over network neutrality. He has taken a middle ground between a more restrictive and more permissive approach, animated by the belief that innovation needs room for experimentation if it is to thrive.
Go to Profile#17019
David Stoll
#17030
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
David Matthew Stoll is an American cultural anthropologist. His research has focused on the indigenous peoples of modern Latin America, and especially on the Mayas in Guatemala. He has been a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College since 1997.
Go to Profile#17020
Alicia Puleo
#17031
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Alicia Helda Puleo García is an Argentine-born feminist philosopher based in Spain. She is known for the development of ecofeminist thinking. Among her main publications is Ecofeminismo para otro mundo posible .
Go to Profile#17021
Wojciech Sadurski
#17032
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Wojciech Sadurski is a Polish and Australian scholar of constitutional law. As of 2023, he is Challis Professor in Jurisprudence at the University of Sydney and Professor in the Centre for Europe in the University of Warsaw.
Go to Profile#17022
Friedrich Asinger
#17033
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
Friedrich Asinger was an Austrian chemist and professor for Technical Chemistry. He is well known for his development of a multi-component reaction, the Asinger reaction for the synthesis of 3-thiazolines.
Go to Profile#17023
Yuichi Motai
#17034
Overall Influence
Yuichi Motai is a Japanese researcher, professor, and book author. He serves as director of the Sensory Intelligence Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University and as an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Motai is a past professor at University of Vermont; He was a visiting faculty of Air Force Research Lab at Hanscom MA, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
Go to Profile#17024
Imre Leader
#17035
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Imre Bennett Leader is a British mathematician, a professor in DPMMS at the University of Cambridge working in the field of combinatorics. He is also known as an Othello player. Life He is the son of the physicist Elliot Leader and his first wife Ninon Neményi, previously married to the poet Endre Kövesi; Darian Leader is his brother. Imre Lakatos was a family friend and his godfather.
Go to Profile#17025
Herbert S. Green
#17036
Overall Influence
1920 - 1999 (79 years)
Herbert Sydney Green was a British–Australian physicist. Green was a doctoral student of the Nobel Laureate Max Born at Edinburgh, with whom he was involved in the development of the modern kinetic theory. Green is the letter "G" in the BBGKY hierarchy. He is often credited for the development of parastatistics, one of several alternatives to the better known particle statistics models.
Go to Profile#17026
Xuejia Lai
#17037
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Xuejia Lai is a cryptographer, currently a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His notable work includes the design of the block cipher IDEA based on the Lai-Massey scheme, the theory of Markov ciphers, and the cryptanalysis of a number of cryptographic hash functions. His book On the Design and Security of Block Ciphers is frequently cited in cryptography papers.
Go to Profile#17027
Marimba Ani
#17038
Overall Influence
1994 - Present (32 years)
Marimba Ani is an anthropologist and African Studies scholar best known for her work Yurugu, a comprehensive critique of European thought and culture, and her coining of the term "Maafa" for the African holocaust.
Go to Profile#17028
C. R. Boxer
#17039
Overall Influence
1904 - 2000 (96 years)
Sir Charles Ralph Boxer FBA GCIH was a British historian of Dutch and Portuguese maritime and colonial history, especially in relation to South Asia and the Far East. In Hong Kong he was the chief spy for the British army intelligence in the years leading up to World War II.
Go to Profile#17029
Paul Schnabel
#17040
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Paul Schnabel is a Dutch politician and sociologist who served on the Social and Economic Council from 2013 to 2015 and in the Senate on behalf of Democrats 66 from 2015 until 2019. Schnabel, a professor at Utrecht University, previously served as director of The Netherlands Institute for Social Research, an agency within the Government of the Netherlands, from 1998 to 2013, when he was appointed to the SER by the Crown.
Go to Profile#17030
Micha Brumlik
#17041
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Micha Brumlik is professor of education at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. From October 2000 to 2005 he was director of the Fritz Bauer Institute for the Study and Documentation of the History of the Holocaust.
Go to Profile#17031
Hilary Blumberg
#17042
Overall Influence
Hilary Patricia Blumberg is a medical doctor and the inaugural John and Hope Furth Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She is also a professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, and works in the Child Study Center at Yale where she has been a faculty member since 1998. She attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, and completed medical school at Cornell University Medical College . She completed her medical internship and psychiatry residency at Cornell University Medical College/New York Hospital, and her neuroimaging fellowship training at Cornell University, Weill Medical College.
Go to Profile#17032
Józef Tischner
#17043
Overall Influence
1931 - 2000 (69 years)
Józef Stanisław Tischner was a Polish priest and philosopher. The first chaplain of the trade union, "Solidarity" . Life Tischner was born in Stary Sącz to a Góral family and grew up in the village Łopuszna in the south east of Poland. He studied at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In the 1970s he became an important writer of the opposition movement against the socialist government of the People's Republic of Poland. In 1980s he was considered the semi-official chaplain of the Solidarity movement, and was praised by Pope John Paul II.
Go to Profile#17033
Cyriac Pullapilly
#17044
Overall Influence
Cyriac K. Pullapilly was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a former priest of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church and a professor of history at Saint Mary's College, Indiana. Biography Cyriac Pullapilly was an only child, born in what is now Kerala, India, on June 15, 1932. Raised by his mother, Anna, he was educated at St. Thomas College and St. Joseph's Pontifical Seminary before becoming an ordained priest in the Eastern Rite Syro-Malabar Catholic Church on March 16, 1958. According to some source, the ordination was the culmination of his mother's ambitions for him, although others say that his parents were initially reluctant for him to enter the church.
Go to Profile#17034
Norman Kretzmann
#17045
Overall Influence
1928 - 1998 (70 years)
Norman J. Kretzmann was a professor of philosophy at Cornell University who specialised in the history of medieval philosophy and the philosophy of religion. Biography Kretzmann joined Cornell's Department of Philosophy in 1966. His work as a teacher and scholar was recognized in 1970, when he was appointed Chairman of the Department of Philosophy, and in 1977 when he was elected a Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy by the University Board of Trustees. In 1992, he received a Graduate Teaching Award from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Deans for his excellence and creativity in the teaching of graduate students.
Go to Profile#17035
Carolyn Porco
#17046
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Carolyn C. Porco is an American planetary scientist who explores the outer Solar System, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s. She led the imaging science team on the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn. She is an expert on planetary rings and the Saturnian moon, Enceladus.
Go to Profile#17036
Peter Worsley
#17047
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Peter Maurice Worsley was a noted British sociologist and social anthropologist. He was a major figure in both anthropology and sociology, and is noted for introducing the term Third World into English. He not only made theoretical and ethnographic contributions, but also was regarded as a key founding member of the New Left.
Go to Profile#17037
Michael Fullan
#17048
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Michael Fullan is the Global Leadership Director, New Pedagogies for Deep Learning. Deep Learning, as described by NPDL, is mobilized by four elements that combine to form the new pedagogies. They are: Learning Partnerships, Learning Environments, Pedagogical Practices, and Leveraging Digital.
Go to Profile#17038
Jeff McMahan
#17049
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jefferson Allen McMahan is an American moral philosopher. He has been White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford since 2014. Education and career McMahan completed a B.A. degree in English literature at the University of the South . He completed a second B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, then did graduate work in philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He then earned his M.A. at the University of Oxford. He was offered a research studentship at St. John's College, Cambridge from 1979 to 1983. He studied first under Jonathan Glover an...
Go to Profile#17039
Dag Prawitz
#17050
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Dag Prawitz is a Swedish philosopher and logician. He is best known for his work on proof theory and the foundations of natural deduction. Prawitz is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters and Antiquity and the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.
Go to Profile#17040
Théophile Obenga
#17051
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Théophile Obenga is professor emeritus in the Africana Studies Center at San Francisco State University. He is a politically active proponent of Pan-Africanism and an Afrocentrist. Obenga is an Egyptologist, linguist, and historian.
Go to Profile#17041
Maggie Williams
#17052
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Margaret Ann Williams is a former director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University and is a partner in Griffin Williams, a management-consulting firm. She was the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. Following Clinton's win in the New Hampshire primary in January 2008, Williams was brought onto the Clinton campaign staff as a senior adviser. On February 10, 2008, she replaced Patti Solis Doyle as the campaign's manager.
Go to Profile#17042
Amy Poehler
#17053
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Amy Poehler is an American actress, comedian, writer, producer, and director. After studying improv at Chicago's Second City and ImprovOlympic in the early 1990s, Poehler co-founded the improvisational-comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade. The group moved to New York City in 1996, where their act became a half-hour sketch-comedy series on Comedy Central in 1998. Along with other members of the comedy group, Poehler is a founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.
Go to Profile#17043
Marin Soljačić
#17054
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Marin Soljačić is a Croatian-American physicist and electrical engineer known for wireless non-radiative energy transfer. Biography Marin Soljačić was born in Zagreb in 1974. After graduating from XV Gymnasium in Zagreb he attended MIT, where he got his BSc in physics and electrical engineering in 1996. In 1998 he got his MSc from Princeton University and in 2000 he got his PhD in Physics. In 2005 he became a professor of Physics at MIT. In 2008, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Go to Profile#17044
Ronald R. Yager
#17055
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Ronald Robert Yager is an American researcher in computational intelligence, decision making under uncertainty and fuzzy logic. He is currently Director of the Machine Intelligence Institute and Professor of Information Systems at Iona College.
Go to Profile#17045
Deniz Kandiyoti
#17056
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Deniz Kandiyoti is an author and an academic of research in the fields of gender relations and developmental politics in the Middle East, specifically Turkey. She holds a PhD from London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#17046
Dipak K. Dey
#17057
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Dipak Kumar Dey is an Indian-American statistician best known for his work on Bayesian methodologies. He is currently the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut. Dey has an international reputation as a statistician as well as a data scientist. Since he earned a Ph.D. degree in statistics from Purdue University in 1980, Dey has made tremendous contributions to the development of modern statistics, especially in Bayesian analysis, decision science and model selection. Dey has published more than 10 books and edited volumes, and over 260 research articles in peer-refereed national and international journals.
Go to Profile#17047
James Joll
#17058
Overall Influence
1918 - 1994 (76 years)
James Bysse Joll FBA was a British historian and university lecturer whose works included The Origins of the First World War and Europe Since 1870. He also wrote on the history of anarchism and socialism.
Go to Profile#17048
Aleksander Kwaśniewski
#17059
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Aleksander Kwaśniewski is a Polish politician and journalist. He served as the president of Poland from 1995 to 2005. His tenure as President was marked by modernization of Poland, rapid economic growth , the drafting of a new Polish Constitution , and the accession of Poland to NATO and the European Union . In 2004, he brokered a pro-democratic agreement during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. According to polls, as of 2020 he is considered the best president in Polish history.
Go to Profile#17049
Tom Frieden
#17060
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Thomas R. Frieden is an American infectious disease and public health physician. He serves as president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, a $225million, five-year initiative to prevent epidemics and cardiovascular disease.
Go to Profile#17050
Mark David Hall
#17061
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Mark David Hall Mark David Hall is a Professor in Regent University's Robertson School of Government and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy, an initiative of First Liberty Institute. As well, Mark is Distinguished Scholar of Christianity & Public Life at George Fox University, Associate Faculty at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, and a Senior Fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. In 2022-2023, he was a Garwood Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program and a Visiting Scholar ...
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