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
#17101
Dominique Briquel
#17112
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Dominique Briquel is a French scholar, a specialist of archaeology and etruscology. Briquel studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1964 to 1969 and was a member of the École française de Rome from 1971 to 1974. Since 1974 he taught Latin at the École Normale Supérieure. From 1984 to 1996 he was a professor of Latin at the University of Burgundy in Dijon. Since 1992, he has been Director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études, in the department of historical and philological sciences and since 1996, professor of Latin at the Université de Paris-Sorbonne.
Go to Profile#17102
Abdel Rahman Badawi
#17113
Overall Influence
1917 - 2002 (85 years)
Abdel Rahman Badawi was an Egyptian existentialist philosopher, professor of philosophy and poet. He has been called the "foremost master of Arab existentialism." He published more than 150 works, mostly rendering of Arabic philosophical manuscripts.
Go to Profile#17103
John Berman
#17114
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
John Berman is an American news anchor who currently serves as a co-anchor of the morning edition of CNN News Central and a regular relief presenter of Anderson Cooper 360°. Berman is the former co-anchor of CNN's New Day with Brianna Keilar on CNN.
Go to Profile#17104
Tang Yijie
#17115
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Tang Yijie was a Chinese scholar and professor at Peking University, who has been described as China's top scholar on philosophy and Chinese studies. He spearheaded the Confucian Canon project, seeking to compile all known classical works on Confucianism, and was the first director of the Institute of Confucian Studies at Peking University.
Go to Profile#17105
Agha Shahid Ali
#17116
Overall Influence
1949 - 2001 (52 years)
Agha Shahid Ali was an Indian-born American poet, from Jammu and Kashmir, who immigrated to the United States, and became affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry. His collections include A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, and Rooms Are Never Finished, the latter a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001.
Go to Profile#17106
Jonathan Rosenberg
#17117
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jonathan Micah Rosenberg is an American mathematician, working in algebraic topology, operator algebras, K-theory and representation theory, with applications to string theory in physics. Rosenberg received his Ph.D. in 1976, under the supervision of Marc Rieffel, from the University of California, Berkeley . From 1977 to 1981 he was an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1981, he has been at the University of Maryland at College Park where he is the Ruth M. Davis Professor of Mathematics. He is also a fellow of the American Mathematical Society .
Go to Profile#17107
Malcolm Allison
#17118
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Malcolm Alexander Allison was an English football player and manager. Nicknamed "Big Mal", he was one of English football's most flamboyant and intriguing characters because of his panache, fedora and cigar, controversies off the pitch and outspoken nature.
Go to Profile#17108
Theodore Woodward
#17119
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
Theodore Englar Woodward was an American medical researcher in the field of medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. In 1948, he received a Nobel Prize nomination for his role in finding cures for typhus and typhoid fever.
Go to Profile#17109
George A. Bray
#17120
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
George A. Bray is an American obesity researcher. As of 2016, he is a University Professor emeritus and formerly the chief of the division of clinical obesity and metabolism at Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. He is also a Boyd Professor emeritus at the Pennington Center, and a professor of medicine emeritus at the Louisiana State University Medical Center.
Go to Profile#17110
Ahmet Davutoğlu
#17121
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ahmet Davutoğlu is a Turkish academic, politician and former diplomat who served as the 26th Prime Minister of Turkey and Leader of the Justice and Development Party from 2014 to 2016. He previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2009 to 2014 and chief advisor to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan from 2003 to 2009. He was elected as an AKP Member of Parliament for Konya in the 2011 general election and was reelected as an MP in both the June and November 2015 general elections. He resigned as Prime Minister on 22 May 2016.
Go to Profile#17111
Gloria Lim
#17122
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Gloria Lim BBM is a retired Singaporean mycologist whose research focused on tropical fungi and who built up a fungal repository of regional samples. Lim was twice appointed as Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Singapore , the first woman to hold that position. After her retirement, she became the first Director of Singapore's National Institute of Education and helped it launch a university degree program. She served on the Public Service Commission as its first woman commissioner for 14 years, and then served as general manager of the Community Mediation Unit for 8 years. ...
Go to Profile#17112
Art Garfunkel
#17123
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Arthur Ira Garfunkel is an American singer, actor and poet who is best known for his partnership with Paul Simon in the folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel. Born in Forest Hills, Queens, New York, Garfunkel became acquainted with Simon through an elementary school play of Alice in Wonderland and sought a partnership. Their combined presence in music began in the 1950s, and throughout the 1960s, the duo of Simon & Garfunkel achieved great chart success with tracks such as "The Sound of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson" , "Scarborough Fair", "The Boxer" and "Bridge over Troubled Water", whose title also served as the name of Simon & Garfunkel's final album in 1970.
Go to Profile#17113
James Kelman
#17124
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
James Kelman is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright and essayist. His fiction and short stories feature accounts of internal mental processes of usually, but not exclusively, working class narrators and their labyrinthine struggles with authority or social interactions, mostly set in his home city of Glasgow. Frequently employing stream of consciousness experimentation, Kelman's stories typically feature "an atmosphere of gnarling paranoia, imprisoned minimalism, the boredom of survival.".
Go to Profile#17114
Roger Rosenblatt
#17125
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Roger Rosenblatt is an American memoirist, essayist, and novelist. He was a long-time essayist for Time magazine and PBS NewsHour. Career Roger Rosenblatt began writing professionally in his mid-30s, when he became literary editor and a columnist for The New Republic. Before that, he taught at Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. In 1965–66 he was a Fulbright Scholar in Ireland, where he played on the Irish international basketball team. At age 25, he became the director of Harvard's freshman writing department. At age 28, he held the Briggs–Copeland appointment in the teaching of writing, and was Allston–Burr Senior Tutor, and later, Master of Dunster House.
Go to Profile#17115
Guy Beiner
#17126
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Guy Beiner is an Israeli-born historian of the late-modern period with particular expertise in Irish history. Academic career Guy Beiner was born and raised in Jerusalem and later moved to kibbutz Glil Yam. After traveling abroad, he relocated to the Negev region. Beiner is a graduate of Tel Aviv University and holds a PhD from the University College Dublin . He was a Government of Ireland Scholar at UCD, an Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish S...
Go to Profile#17116
Gerald Reaven
#17127
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Gerald M. "Jerry" Reaven was an American endocrinologist and professor emeritus in medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California, United States. Reaven's work on insulin resistance and diabetes mellitus with John W. Farquhar goes back at least to 1965.
Go to Profile#17117
Dave Brubeck
#17128
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
David Warren Brubeck was an American jazz pianist and composer. Often regarded as a foremost exponent of cool jazz, Brubeck's work is characterized by unusual time signatures and superimposing contrasting rhythms, meters, and tonalities.
Go to Profile#17118
Lloyd Geering
#17129
Overall Influence
1918 - Present (108 years)
Sir Lloyd George Geering is a New Zealand theologian who faced charges of heresy in 1967 for teaching that the Bible's record of Jesus' death and resurrection is not true. He considers Christian and Muslim fundamentalism to be "social evils". Geering is emeritus professor of religious studies at Victoria University of Wellington. In 2007, he was appointed a Member of the Order of New Zealand, New Zealand's highest civilian honour, limited to 20 living people. Geering turned 100 in February 2018.
Go to Profile#17119
George Sterman
#17130
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
George Franklin Sterman is an American theoretical physicist and the Director of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University where he holds the rank Distinguished Professor.
Go to Profile#17120
Megan Terry
#17131
Overall Influence
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
Marguerite Duffy , known professionally as Megan Terry, was an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre artist. Terry produced over fifty works for theater, radio, and television, and is best known for her avant-garde theatrical work from the 1960s. As a founding member of The Open Theater, she developed an actor-training and character-creation technique known as "transformation". She used this technique to create her 1966 work Viet Rock, which was both the first rock musical and the first play to address the war in Vietnam.
Go to Profile#17121
Omar Sharif
#17132
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Omar Sharif was an Egyptian actor, generally regarded as one of his country's greatest male film stars. He began his career in his native country in the 1950s. He is best known for his appearances in American, British, French, and Italian productions. His career encompassed over 100 films spanning 50 years, and brought him many accolades including three Golden Globe Awards and a César Award for Best Actor.
Go to Profile#17122
John Entwistle
#17133
Overall Influence
1944 - 2002 (58 years)
John Alec Entwistle was an English musician who was the bassist for the rock band the Who. Entwistle's music career spanned over four decades. Nicknamed "The Ox" and "Thunderfingers", he was the band's only member with formal musical training and also provided backing and occasional lead vocals. Entwistle was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Who in 1990.
Go to Profile#17123
Willem Albert Wagenaar
#17134
Overall Influence
1941 - 2011 (70 years)
Willem Albert Wagenaar was a Dutch psychologist noted for his work on the reliability of memory. He gained fame as an expert witness in some high-profile legal cases. Life and work Wagenaar studied experimental psychology at Utrecht University, where he obtained his doctorandus degree cum laude in Social Sciences in 1965. On 19 January 1972, he obtained a PhD degree in Social Sciences at the Leiden University. His thesis at Leiden, called "Sequential Response Bias. A study on choice and chance", was sponsored by Professor John P. van de Geer. From 1973 to 1974 Wagenaar received a Fulbright gr...
Go to Profile#17124
Patrick Minford
#17135
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Anthony Patrick Leslie Minford is a British macroeconomist who is professor of applied economics at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, a position he has held since 1997. He was Edward Gonner Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Liverpool from 1976 to 1997. In 2016, Minford was a notable member of the Economists for Brexit group which, in opposition to the consensus view of economists, advocated the UK leaving the European Union and claimed large economic benefits, which did not occur.
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Tavi Murray
#17136
Overall Influence
Tavi Murray, FLSW is a glaciologist, the eighth woman to be awarded the Polar Medal. Education After school in Twickenham Murray gained a BSc degree with first class honours in Physics and Computer Science from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. In 1990 she was awarded a PhD in geophysics from the University of Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute.
Go to Profile#17126
Toshiko Mori
#17137
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Toshiko Mori is a Japanese architect and the founder and principal of New York–based Toshiko Mori Architect, PLLC and Vision Arc. She is also the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In 1995, she became the first female faculty member to receive tenure at the GSD.
Go to Profile#17127
Eli Salzberger
#17138
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Eli Mordechai Salzberger , is a Law Professor at the University of Haifa Faculty of Law and former Dean of the faculty. From 2008 to 2011, he served as President of the European Association for Law and Economics.
Go to Profile#17128
Svetlana Alpers
#17139
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Svetlana Leontief Alpers is an American art historian, also a professor, writer and critic. Her specialty is Dutch Golden Age painting, a field she revolutionized with her 1984 book The Art of Describing. She has also written on Tiepolo, Rubens, Bruegel, and Velázquez, among others.
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Victor Ginsburgh
#17140
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Victor Alexandre Ginsburgh is a Belgian economist. Biography Ginsburgh was born in 1939 into an expatriate family: "My father was only a white Russian, and my mother an Austrian Jew". Victor Ginsburgh studied at the Free University of Brussels and mastered in econometrics. He earned an economics PhD in 1972. He has been an Economics professor at Université Libre de Bruxelles since 1975.
Go to Profile#17130
Derek S. Pugh
#17141
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Derek Salman Pugh was a British psychologist, business theorist and Emeritus Professor of International Management at the Open University, known for his work in the field of organisational development , and particularly the Pugh Matrix, a tool within OD.
Go to Profile#17131
Herbert Blau
#17142
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Herbert Blau was an American director and theoretician of performance. He was named the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. Early life and career Blau earned his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from New York University . Later, he earned his master of arts in drama and doctorate in English and American literature , both from Stanford University.
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Bob Brier
#17143
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert Brier is an American Egyptologist specializing in paleopathology. A senior research fellow at Long Island University/LIU Post, he has researched and published on mummies and the mummification process and has appeared in many Discovery Civilization, TLC Network, and National Geographic documentaries, primarily on ancient Egypt.
Go to Profile#17133
Jeremy C. Stein
#17144
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Jeremy Chaim Stein is an American economist and the Moise Y. Safra Professor of Economics at Harvard University; he also chaired Harvard's economics department. He served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2012 to 2014. Stein served as president of the American Finance Association in 2008.
Go to Profile#17134
Jim Dunnigan
#17145
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
James F. Dunnigan is an author, military-political analyst, Defense and State Department consultant, and wargame designer currently living in New York City. Career Dunnigan was born in Rockland County, New York. After high school, he volunteered for the military instead of waiting to be drafted. From 1961 to 1964, he worked as a repair technician for the Sergeant ballistic missile; his service included a tour in Korea. Afterwards, he attended Pace University studying accounting, then transferred to Columbia University, graduating with a degree in history in 1970.
Go to Profile#17135
M. M. McCabe
#17146
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Mary Margaret Anne McCabe , known as M. M. McCabe, is emerita professor of ancient philosophy at King's College London. She has written books on Plato and other ancient philosophers, including the pre-Socratics, Socrates and Aristotle.
Go to Profile#17136
John Minor Wisdom
#17147
Overall Influence
1905 - 1999 (94 years)
John Minor Wisdom , one of the "Fifth Circuit Four", and a Republican from Louisiana, was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit during the 1950s and 1960s, when that court became known for a series of crucial decisions that advanced the goals of the Civil Rights Movement. At that time, the Fifth Circuit included not only Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas , but also Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and the Panama Canal Zone.
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Wayne Hendrickson
#17148
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Wayne A. Hendrickson is an American biophysicist and university professor at Columbia. Dr. Hendrickson is a university professor at Columbia University in the department of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and Violin Family Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics. He is also Chief Life Scientist in the Photon Sciences Directorate at Brookhaven National Laboratory and scientific director of the New York Structural Biology Center. Hendrickson has a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin at River Falls, a Ph.D. in biophysics at Johns Hopkins University with Warner Love, and postdoctoral research experience with Jerome Karle at the Naval Research Laboratory .
Go to Profile#17138
Brendan McKay
#17149
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Brendan Damien McKay is an Australian computer scientist and mathematician. He is currently an Emeritus Professor in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University . He has published extensively in combinatorics.
Go to Profile#17139
Kevin Blackistone
#17150
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Kevin Blackistone is an American sports journalist and professor for Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, as well as a frequent panelist for ESPN's Around the Horn. On radio, he appears as a frequent guest co-host on the Sports Reporters on DC's ESPN980. As of May 6, 2019, Blackistone has 301 wins on Around the Horn.
Go to Profile#17140
Barry Switzer
#17151
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Barry Layne Switzer is an American former football coach. He served for 16 years as head football coach at the University of Oklahoma and four years as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League . He won three national championships at Oklahoma, and led the Cowboys to win Super Bowl XXX against the Pittsburgh Steelers. He has one of the highest winning percentages of any college football coach in history, and is one of only three head coaches to win both a college football national championship and a Super Bowl, the others being Jimmy Johnson and Pete Carroll.
Go to Profile#17141
Robert C. Randall
#17152
Overall Influence
1948 - 2001 (53 years)
Robert C. Randall was an American advocate for medical marijuana and the founder of Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics. Life and activism Robert Randall was the first legal medical marijuana smoker in the United States since 1937. Randall successfully used a medical necessity defense when he was charged with illegal possession of cannabis to treat his glaucoma. The case, United States v. Randall, is "The first successful articulation of the medical necessity defense in the history of the common law, and indeed, the first case to extend the necessity defense to the crimes of possession or cult...
Go to Profile#17142
Qiang Yang
#17153
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Qiang Yang is the Chair Professor, Department Head of CSE, HKUST in Hong Kong and University New Bright Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor from 2015. He was the founding head of Noah's Ark Lab. He had taught at the University of Waterloo and Simon Fraser University. His research interests are data mining and artificial intelligence.
Go to Profile#17143
Carla Gomes
#17154
Overall Influence
Carla Pedro Gomes is a Portuguese-American computer scientist and professor at Cornell University. She is the founding Director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability and is noted for her pioneering work in developing computational methods to address challenges in sustainability. She has conducted research in a variety of areas of artificial intelligence and computer science, including constraint reasoning, mathematical optimization, and randomization techniques for exact search methods, algorithm selection, multi-agent systems, and game theory. Her work in computational sustainabil...
Go to Profile#17144
Andrzej Duda
#17155
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Andrzej Sebastian Duda is a Polish lawyer and politician who has served as president of Poland since 6 August 2015. Before becoming president, Andrzej Duda was a member of the Polish Lower House from 2011 to 2014 and the European Parliament from 2014 to 2015.
Go to Profile#17145
Ross Terrill
#17156
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Ross Terrill is an Australian-born American political scientist and historian. He specializes in the history of China, especially the history of the People's Republic of China. He has made several public appearances in order to testify in front of the United States Congress, and he has also written numerous articles and nine books. For many years he has been a research associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and recently, he was a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin as well as a visiting professor at Monash University in Australia.
Go to Profile#17146
Digby Tantam
#17157
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Digby Tantam is a British psychiatrist, psychologist and psychotherapist. He is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Sheffield., and a director of the Septimus group. His main research interests are social and emotional wellbeing, emotional contagion, nonverbal communication, applied philosophy and autism spectrum disorders.
Go to Profile#17147
Eran Segal
#17158
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Eran Segal is a computational biologist professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He works on developing quantitative models for all levels of gene regulation, including transcription, chromatin, and translation. Segal also works as an epidemiologist.
Go to Profile#17148
David J. Schneider
#17159
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
David J. Schneider is an American psychologist. He is a professor of psychology and the director of the cognitive sciences program at Rice University. Career and work Schneider's most important published work deals chiefly with cognitive psychology and organizational psychology, especially bias, prejudice, and discrimination.
Go to Profile#17149
Elizabeth Edwards
#17160
Overall Influence
1949 - 2010 (61 years)
Mary Elizabeth Anania Edwards was an American attorney, author, and health care activist. She was married to John Edwards, the former U.S. Senator from North Carolina who was the 2004 United States Democratic vice-presidential nominee.
Go to Profile#17150
Henry S. Taylor
#17161
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Henry Splawn Taylor is an American poet, academic, and translator. The author of more than 15 books of poems, translation, and nonfiction, he is the recipient of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Early life and education Taylor was born in Lincoln, Virginia, in rural Loudoun County, where he was raised as a Quaker. He went to high school at George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Virginia in 1965 and a Master of Arts from Hollins University in 1966.
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