Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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Person Name

School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#17151

Tomas Hökfelt

#17162

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Tomas Hökfelt is a Swedish physician and former professor in histology at the Karolinska Institutet from 1979 until 2006, when he got his emeritate. He was linked to the Department of Neuroscience and is specialized in cell biology.

#17152

Bruce D. Perry

#17163

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Bruce D. Perry is an American psychiatrist, currently the senior fellow of the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas and an adjunct professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. A clinician and researcher in children's mental health and the neurosciences, from 1993 to 2001 he was the Thomas S. Trammell Research Professor of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and chief of psychiatry at Texas Children's Hospital. He is also the author of several books.

#17153

Helen Longino

#17164

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Helen Elizabeth Longino is an American philosopher of science who has argued for the significance of values and social interactions to scientific inquiry. She has written about the role of women in science and is a central figure in feminist epistemology and social epistemology. She is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. In 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#17154

Ricardo Piglia

#17165

Overall Influence

1941 - 2017 (76 years)

Ricardo Piglia was an Argentine author, critic, and scholar best known for introducing hard-boiled fiction to the Argentine public. Biography Born in Adrogué, Piglia was raised in Mar del Plata. He studied history in 1961-1962 at the National University of La Plata.

#17155

Tom Kennedy

#17166

Overall Influence

1927 - 2020 (93 years)

James Edward Narz , known professionally as Tom Kennedy, was an American television host best known for his work in game shows. Game shows Kennedy hosted included Password Plus, Split Second, Name That Tune, and You Don't Say!

#17156

Michael Strahan

Michael Strahan

#17167

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Michael Anthony Strahan is an American television personality, journalist, and former professional football player. He played his entire 15-year professional career as a defensive end for the New York Giants of the National Football League . A dominant pass rusher, Strahan is currently tied with T. J. Watt for the most NFL single-season quarterback sacks, and helped the Giants win Super Bowl XLII over the New England Patriots in his final season in 2007.

#17157

Hilary Charlesworth

#17168

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Hilary Christiane Mary Charlesworth is an Australian international lawyer. She has been a Judge of the International Court of Justice since 5 November 2021, and is Harrison Moore Professor of Law and Melbourne Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, and Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University.

#17158

Edward Brooke

#17169

Overall Influence

1919 - 2015 (96 years)

Edward William Brooke III was an American lawyer and politician who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1967 to 1979. A member of the Republican Party, he was the first African American elected to the United States Senate by popular vote. Prior to serving in the Senate, he served as the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 1963 until 1967.

#17159

Erik Larson

#17170

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Erik Larson is an American journalist and author of mostly nonfiction books. He has written a number of bestsellers, including The Devil in the White City , about the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and a series of murders by H. H. Holmes that were committed in the city around the time of the Fair. The Devil in the White City won the 2004 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category, among other awards. Larson released his first novel in audiobook format only, titled No One Goes Alone, on September 28, 2021.

#17160

Susan Waltz

#17171

Overall Influence

Susan E. Waltz is an American political scientist and faculty member at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy. Waltz is also involved with Amnesty International, having served as chair of its International Executive Committee from 1996 to 1998. From 2009 to 2013 she served as a board member at Amnesty's U.S. branch.

#17161

Bernard T. Ferrari

#17172

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Bernard T. Ferrari is the second and former dean of the Carey Business School of the Johns Hopkins University. Early life and education Ferrari is a cum laude graduate of the University of Rochester from which he also received his M.D. He earned a J.D. magna cum laude from Loyola University School of Law and an M.B.A. from Tulane University Freeman School of Business.

#17162

Peter Milner

#17173

Overall Influence

1919 - 2018 (99 years)

Peter Milner was a British-born Canadian neuroscientist. Biography Milner was born in Silkstone Common and grew up in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England. His father was David William Milner, a research chemist, and his mother was Edith Anne Marshall, an ex-schoolteacher.

#17163

Emma Bunton

#17174

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Emma Lee Bunton is an English singer, songwriter, actress, and media personality. She rose to fame in the 1990s as a member of the girl group Spice Girls, in which she was nicknamed Baby Spice, reflecting the fact that she was the youngest member. With over 100 million records sold worldwide, the group became the best-selling female group of all time.

#17164

John M. Culkin

#17175

Overall Influence

1928 - 1993 (65 years)

John M. Culkin, Jr. was an American academic and former priest who was a leading media scholar and critic, educator, writer and consultant. Early life and education He was born in 1928 to an Irish-Catholic family from Brooklyn. He and his brother Gerald attended Xavier High School, an elite Jesuit College Preparatory High School, in Manhattan, where he was on the basketball team. He graduated from there in 1950 and then entered the Society of Jesus. He attended Bellarmine College, was ordained at Fordham University, and received a doctorate in education from Harvard University.

#17165

Bowie Kuhn

#17176

Overall Influence

1926 - 2007 (81 years)

Bowie Kent Kuhn was an American lawyer and sports administrator who served as the fifth Commissioner of Major League Baseball from February 4, 1969, to September 30, 1984. He served as legal counsel for Major League Baseball owners for almost 20 years prior to his election as commissioner.

#17166

Alan Herries Wilson

#17177

Overall Influence

1906 - 1995 (89 years)

Sir Alan Herries Wilson , was a British mathematician and industrialist. He was educated at Wallasey Grammar School and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, obtaining a BA degree in mathematics in 1926. His graduate work was under the supervision of R. H. Fowler working on problems in quantum mechanics. There is now an Alan Wilson Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College.

#17167

Emanuel Parzen

#17178

Overall Influence

1929 - 2016 (87 years)

Emanuel Parzen was an American statistician. He worked and published on signal detection theory and time series analysis, where he pioneered the use of kernel density estimation . Parzen was the recipient of the 1994 Samuel S. Wilks Memorial Medal of the American Statistical Association.

#17168

Fazle Hussain

#17179

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

A. K. M. Fazle Hussain is a professor of mechanical engineering at Texas Tech University. Education Hussain graduated with a BS in mechanical engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 1963. He went on to attend Stanford University, where he studied under William Craig Reynolds, and received his MS and PhD in mechanical engineering in 1966 and 1969.

#17169

Mary J. Gregor

#17180

Overall Influence

1928 - 1994 (66 years)

Mary J. Gregor was an American author, translator, and professor. She was a Kant scholar and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at San Diego State University, best known for translating the works of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

#17170

Jeffrey Angles

#17181

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

is a poet who writes free verse in his second language, Japanese. He is also an American scholar of modern Japanese literature and an award-winning literary translator of modern Japanese poetry and fiction into English. He is a professor of Japanese language and Japanese literature at Western Michigan University.

#17171

Tom Sanders

#17182

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Tom Sanders is an English mathematician, working on problems in additive combinatorics at the interface of harmonic analysis and analytic number theory. Education Sanders studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in 2007 for research on arithmetic combinatorics supervised by Timothy Gowers.

#17172

Michael Cates

#17183

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Michael Elmhirst Cates is a British physicist. He is the 19th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and has held this position since 1 July 2015. He was previously Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and has held a Royal Society Research Professorship since 2007.

#17173

Rosalind Wiseman

Rosalind Wiseman

#17184

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Rosalind Wiseman is an American author and public speaker. She is a multiple New York Times bestselling author, including Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence—that was the basis for Mean Girls.

#17174

Sacha Baron Cohen

Sacha Baron Cohen

#17185

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Sacha Noam Baron Cohen is an English comedian, actor, writer and producer. He is best known for his creation and portrayal of the fictional satirical characters Ali G, Borat Sagdiyev, Brüno Gehard, and Admiral General Haffaz Aladeen. His characters interact with unsuspecting subjects who do not realise they have been set up. At the 2012 British Comedy Awards, Baron Cohen received the Outstanding Achievement Award and accepted the award in-character as Ali G. In 2013, he received the BAFTA Charlie Chaplin Britannia Award for Excellence in Comedy. In 2018, The Times named him among the 30 best ...

#17175

Craig B. Thompson

Craig B. Thompson

#17186

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Craig B. Thompson is an American cell biologist and a former president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Education and career Thompson received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and went on to earn his medical degree in 1977 from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He received clinical training in internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and in medical oncology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center at the University of Washington. After completing his training, Thompson became a physician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and an assistant professor of medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

#17176

Arthur L. Horwich

#17187

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Arthur L. Horwich is an American biologist and Sterling Professor of Genetics and Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine. Horwich has also been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 1990. His research into protein folding uncovered the action of chaperonins, protein complexes that assist the folding of other proteins; Horwich first published this work in 1989.

#17177

Jânio Quadros

#17188

Overall Influence

1917 - 1992 (75 years)

Jânio da Silva Quadros was a Brazilian lawyer and politician who served as the 22nd president of Brazil from January 31 to August 25, 1961, when he resigned from office. He also served as the 24th and 36th mayor of São Paulo, and the 18th governor of the state of São Paulo. Quadros was known for his populist style of government, honesty, and eccentric behavior.

#17178

Alexander Ollongren

Alexander Ollongren

#17189

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

Alexander Ollongren is a professor emeritus at Leiden University. He serves on the Advisory Council of METI . Personal life Alexander Ollongren was born on November 9, 1928, on a coffee plantation in Kepahiang, in the southwestern part of Sumatra, Netherlands East Indies. His father, Alexander Ollongren , was born in Kyiv in Kiev Governorate, and was of mixed Finnish and Swedish descent. He was a member of the Finnish noble family Ållongren. His mother, Selma Hedwig Adèle Jaeger , was of Dutch and German heritage. The family moved to Java in early 1932 and lived in Yogyakarta, while the Japanese army occupied the Netherlands East Indies in 1942.

#17179

Jean Baubérot

#17190

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Jean Baubérot , is a French historian and sociologist specializing in sociology of religions. He is the founder of the sociology of secularism. After holding the chair of "History and Sociology of Protestantism" , he held the chair of "History and Sociology of secularism " at the École pratique des hautes études, where he was the honorary president. He wrote twenty books, including a historical novel. He is coauthor of the Déclaration internationale sur la laïcité, signed by 250 scholars from 30 countries.

#17180

Anne Moody

#17191

Overall Influence

1940 - 2015 (75 years)

Anne Moody was an American author who wrote about her experiences growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi, and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement through the NAACP, CORE and SNCC. Moody began fighting racism and segregation as a young girl growing up in Centreville, Mississippi.

#17181

Michael Schroeder

#17192

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Michael Schroeder is an American computer scientist. His areas of research include computer security, distributed systems and operating systems and he is perhaps best known as the co-inventor of the Needham–Schroeder protocol. In 2001 he co-founded the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley lab and was the assistant managing director until the lab was disbanded in 2014.

#17182

Nader Engheta

#17193

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Nader Engheta is an Iranian-American scientist. He has made pioneering contributions to the fields of metamaterials, transformation optics, plasmonic optics, nanophotonics, graphene photonics, nano-materials, nanoscale optics, nano-antennas and miniaturized antennas, physics and reverse-engineering of polarization vision in nature, bio-inspired optical imaging, fractional paradigm in electrodynamics, and electromagnetics and microwaves.

#17183

Tom Friedman

#17194

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Tom Friedman is an American conceptual sculptor. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri and received a BFA in graphic illustration from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago . As a conceptual artist he works in diverse media including sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and installation.

#17184

Rondo Cameron

#17195

Overall Influence

1925 - 2001 (76 years)

Rondo Emmett Cameron was an American professor of economic history. He was a native of Texas. He graduated from Yale and received a Ph.D. degree at the University of Chicago . He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 1952. In 1969, he went to Emory University where he was Kenan University Professor until his retirement as emeritus professor in 1993. He was president of the International Economic History Association . He is well known for his book A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present . According to the preface, the book was many year...

#17185

Edward Robert Harrison

Edward Robert Harrison

#17196

Overall Influence

1919 - 2007 (88 years)

Edward R. Harrison was a British astronomer and cosmologist, noted for his work about the increase of fluctuations in the expanding universe, for his explanation of Olbers's paradox, and for his books on cosmology for lay readers. He spent much of his career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and University of Arizona, both in the United States.

#17186

Beverly Berger

#17197

Overall Influence

Beverly K. Berger is an American physicist known for her work on gravitational physics, especially gravitational waves, gravitons, and gravitational singularities. Alongside Berger's more serious physics research, she is also known for noticing that vibrational patterns caused by local ravens were interfering with observations at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

#17187

Jacob Israelachvili

#17198

Overall Influence

1944 - 2018 (74 years)

Jacob Nissim Israelachvili, was an Israeli physicist who was a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara . Personal life He was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and sent to an English boarding school at the age of 7. After completing his secondary education he returned to Israel to carry out his military service before moving back to England to study the Natural Sciences Tripos at the University of Cambridge. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1972 under the supervision of Professor David Tabor. He then became a Research Fellow at the Biophysics Insti...

#17188

Nicholas Evans

#17199

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Nicholas "Nick" Evans is an Australian linguist and a leading expert on endangered languages. He was born in Los Angeles, USA. Holding a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Australian National University , he is Head of the Department of Linguistics and Distinguished Professor in the School of Culture, History and Language at the College of Asia and the Pacific at ANU. Formerly, he held a personal chair in the Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne.

#17189

Pascal Mayer

#17200

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Pascal Mayer is a french scientist who was awarded Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2022 for researching paved way for inexpensive and rapid DNA sequencing around the world.

#17190

David Garlan

#17201

Overall Influence

David Garlan from the Carnegie Mellon University was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for contributions to software architecture.

#17191

Alan O. Ebenstein

#17202

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Alan Oliver Ebenstein is an American political scientist, educator and author, known from his biographical works on Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Biography Born in Princeton, New Jersey, to William Ebenstein , a noted political scientist, and Ruth Ebenstein. He obtained his BA at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1982, and his PhD at the London School of Economics in 1988.

#17192

István Deák

#17203

Overall Influence

1926 - 2023 (97 years)

István Deák was a Hungarian-born American historian, author and academic. He was a specialist in modern Europe, with special attention to Germany and Hungary. Life and work Deák was born at Székesfehérvár, Hungary into an assimilated Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism. His parents were Istvan and Anna Deák. He was educated at a Catholic gymnasium in Budapest and began his university studies in 1945 at the University of Budapest. His studies were disrupted by the war and postwar chaos, and he left Hungary in 1948, following the communist takeover. He then studied history at the Sorbonne in Paris and worked as a journalist in France and for Radio Free Europe in West Germany.

#17193

Alan Bundy

#17204

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Alan Richard Bundy is a professor at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, known for his contributions to automated reasoning, especially to proof planning, the use of meta-level reasoning to guide proof search.

#17194

Arne Bjerhammar

#17205

Overall Influence

1917 - 2011 (94 years)

Arne Bjerhammar was a Swedish geodesist. He was professor at Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He was born in Båstad, Scania in the south of Sweden. He developed a method used to determine the geoid in gravimetric data, as well as a system for electro-optical measuring of distances. He also did research about the Fennoscandian post-glacial rebound.

#17195

Julius B. Richmond

#17206

Overall Influence

1916 - 2008 (92 years)

Julius Benjamin Richmond was an American pediatrician and public health administrator. He was a vice admiral in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and served as the United States Surgeon General and the United States Assistant Secretary for Health during the Carter Administration, from 1977 to 1981. Richmond is noted for his role in the creation of the Head Start program for disadvantaged children, serving as its first national director.

#17196

Bernard Wood

#17207

Overall Influence

Bernard Wood is a British geologist, and professor of mineralogy and senior research fellow at the University of Oxford. He specializes in the thermodynamics of geological systems, using experimental techniques. He is a prominent figure in the field of experimental petrology, having received multiple awards throughout his career and taught at several universities worldwide.

#17197

Shearer West

#17208

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Shearer Carroll West is a British-American art-historian, academic and university administrator. West is currently the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham since October 2017 and formerly deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield.

#17198

Chauncey Billups

Chauncey Billups

#17209

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Chauncey Ray Billups is an American professional basketball coach and former player who is the head coach for the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association . He played 17 seasons in the NBA. After playing college basketball with the Colorado Buffaloes, he was selected third overall in the 1997 NBA draft by the Boston Celtics. A five-time NBA All-Star, a three-time All-NBA selection and two-time NBA All-Defensive selection, Billups played for the Celtics, Toronto Raptors, Denver Nuggets, Minnesota Timberwolves, Detroit Pistons, New York Knicks, and Los Angeles Clippers during his NBA career.

#17199

Wolfgang Leonhard

Wolfgang Leonhard

#17210

Overall Influence

1921 - 2014 (93 years)

Wolfgang Leonhard was a German political author and historian of the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and Communism. A German Communist whose family had fled Hitler's Germany and who was educated in the Soviet Union, after World War II Leonhard became one of the founders and leaders of the German Democratic Republic until he became disillusioned and fled in 1949, first defecting to Yugoslavia and then moving to West Germany in 1950 and later to the United Kingdom. In 1956 he moved to the United States, where he was a popular and influential professor at Yale University from 1966...

#17200

Prayut Chan-o-cha

#17211

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Prayut Chan-o-cha is a Thai retired politician and army officer Privy Council, the 29th Prime Minister of Thailand from 2014, when he seized power in a military coup, to 2023. He also served as the minister of defence, a position he held in his own government from 2019 to 2023. Prayut served as Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Thai Army from 2010 to 2014 and led the 2014 Thai coup d'état which installed the National Council for Peace and Order , the military junta which governed Thailand between 22 May 2014 and 10 July 2019.

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