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
#17251
William T. Freeman
#17262
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
William T. Freeman is the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for contributions to computer vision.
Go to Profile#17252
Subbiah Arunachalam
#17263
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Subbiah Arunachalam is a Chennai, India-based information consultant known for his campaigns in favour of open access for academic journals in developing countries. He has been associated with the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation.
Go to Profile#17253
Diane Humetewa
#17264
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Diane Joyce Humetewa is a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Arizona and was the United States Attorney for the District of Arizona, serving in that position from December 2007 to August 2009. Confirmed in 2014 as the first Native American woman and enrolled tribal member to serve as a federal judge, Humetewa, a Hopi, is one of six Native Americans in history to serve in this position. Humetewa is also a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. Humetewa has served as counsel to the Senate Committe...
Go to Profile#17254
Alexey Ivakhnenko
#17265
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Alexey Grigoryevich Ivakhnenko was a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician most famous for developing the group method of data handling , a method of inductive statistical learning, for which he is sometimes referred to as the "Father of deep learning".
Go to Profile#17255
E. Howard Hunt
#17266
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was an American intelligence officer and author. From 1949 to 1970, Hunt served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency , particularly in the United States involvement in regime change in Latin America including the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Along with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, and others, Hunt was one of the Nixon administration "plumbers", a team of operatives charged with identifying government sources of national security information "leaks" to outside parties. Hunt and Liddy plotted the Watergate burglaries and other clandestine operations for the Nixon administration.
Go to Profile#17256
Judith Shapiro
#17267
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Judith R. Shapiro is a former President of Barnard College, a liberal arts college for women at Columbia University; as President of Barnard, she was also an academic dean within the university. She was also a professor of anthropology at Barnard. Shapiro became Barnard's 6th president in 1994 after a teaching career at Bryn Mawr College where she was chair of the Department of Anthropology. After serving as Acting Dean of the Undergraduate College in 1985-6, she was Provost, the chief academic officer, from 1986 until 1994. Debora L. Spar was appointed to replace Shapiro, effective July 1...
Go to Profile#17257
Nina Lykke
#17268
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Nina Lykke is a Danish–Swedish gender studies scholar. She is noted for her work on feminist theory, and is distinguished professor of gender studies at Linköping University in Sweden. Biography Nina Lykke was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. She received a mag.art. degree in literature at the University of Copenhagen in 1981 and a dr.phil. in gender studies at Odense University, Denmark in 1992. From 1984 until 1999 she was director of the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies, the first of its kind in Denmark, at the University of Southern Denmark. She was an assistant professor from 1981 and was promoted to associate professor in 1986.
Go to Profile#17258
Helena Bonham Carter
#17269
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Helena Bonham Carter is an English actress. Known for her roles in blockbusters and independent films, particularly period dramas, she has received various awards and nominations, including a British Academy Film Award and an International Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards, four British Academy Television Awards, five Primetime Emmy Awards, and nine Golden Globe Awards.
Go to Profile#17259
Mohammed Ghanbari
#17270
Overall Influence
Mohammed Ghanbari is an emeritus professor in the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering focused in the areas of Video Networking at the University of Essex. He graduated from Aryamehr University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, with a BSc degree in electrical engineering in 1970, an MSc in telecommunications, and a PhD in electronics from the University of Essex, England in 1976 and 1979 respectively. After ten years of work in radio and television broadcasting, he started his academic career in 1986 as a Research Fellow working on video coding for Packet Networks. He was then appointed...
Go to Profile#17260
Janice R. Bellace
#17271
Overall Influence
Janice R. Bellace is a Professor Emeritus of Legal Studies & Business Ethics at the Wharton School of Business. She held the Samuel Blank Chair in Legal Studies from 1996 until 2018. She is the author of numerous academic books, chapters, articles and papers; her research interests are in the field of labor and employment law, particularly international labor law.
Go to Profile#17261
Shankar Balasubramanian
#17272
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sir Shankar Balasubramanian is an Indian-born British chemist and Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is recognised for his contributions in the field of nucleic acids. He is scientific founder of Solexa and Cambridge Epigenetix.
Go to Profile#17262
John Byrne
#17273
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John Lindley Byrne is a British-born American writer and artist of superhero comics. Since the mid-1970s, Byrne has worked on many major superheroes; with noted work on Marvel Comics's X-Men and Fantastic Four. Byrne also facilitated the 1986 relaunch of DC Comics's Superman franchise with the limited series The Man of Steel, the first issue of which featured the comics' first variant cover.
Go to Profile#17263
Jordan Howard Sobel
#17274
Overall Influence
1929 - 2010 (81 years)
Jordan Howard Sobel was a Canadian-American philosopher specializing in ethics, logic, and decision theory. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada. In addition to his areas of specialization, Sobel made notable contributions in the fields of philosophy of religion, and value theory. Before his death, Sobel was considered by Christian apologist William Lane Craig to be the leading philosophical defender of Atheism prior to Graham Oppy.
Go to Profile#17264
Gideon Toury
#17275
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Gideon Toury was an Israeli translation scholar and professor of Poetics, Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Tel Aviv University, where he held the M. Bernstein Chair of Translation Theory. Gideon Toury was a pioneer of Descriptive Translation Studies.
Go to Profile#17265
Herb Boyd
#17276
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Herb Boyd is an American journalist, teacher, author, and activist. His articles appear regularly in the New York Amsterdam News. He teaches black studies at the City College of New York and the College of New Rochelle.
Go to Profile#17266
Louis Michael Seidman
#17277
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Louis Michael Seidman is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., a widely read constitutional law scholar and major proponent of the critical legal studies movement. Seidman's 2012 work is On Constitutional Disobedience, where Seidman challenges the viability of political policy arguments made in reference to constitutional obligation.
Go to Profile#17267
Bikash Sinha
#17278
Overall Influence
1944 - 2023 (79 years)
Bikash Sinha was an Indian physicist who was active in the fields of nuclear physics and high energy physics. Sinha was the director of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre and the chairman of the Board of Governors of the National Institute of Technology, Durgapur in June 2005. He was also a member of scientific advisory board to the Prime Minister of India.
Go to Profile#17268
Sarah Teichmann
#17279
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Sarah Amalia Teichmann is a German scientist who is head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a visiting research group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute . She serves as director of research in the Cavendish Laboratory, at the University of Cambridge and a senior research fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#17269
David Orrell
#17280
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
David John Orrell is a Canadian writer and mathematician. He received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Oxford. His work in the prediction of complex systems such as the weather, genetics and the economy has been featured in New Scientist, the Financial Times, The Economist, Adbusters, BBC Radio, Russia-1, and CBC TV. He now conducts research and writes in the areas of systems biology and economics, and runs a mathematical consultancy Systems Forecasting. He is the son of theatre historian and English professor John Orrell.
Go to Profile#17270
Richard E. Pattis
#17281
Overall Influence
Richard Eric Pattis is an American professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine's Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, where he taught introductory programming and data structures.
Go to Profile#17271
Wallace Terry
#17282
Overall Influence
1938 - 2003 (65 years)
Wallace Houston Terry, II was an African-American journalist and oral historian, best known for his book about black soldiers in Vietnam, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War , which served as a basis for the 1995 crime thriller Dead Presidents and the 2020 Spike Lee movie Da 5 Bloods.
Go to Profile#17272
Harry Brod
#17283
Overall Influence
1951 - 2017 (66 years)
Harry Brod was a professor of sociology at University of Northern Iowa. Education He held a PhD in Philosophy, 1981, from the University of California, San Diego. Men's studies Brod was one of the first academics to specialize in men's studies. Brod became interested in the men's movement in the mid-1960s, as he thought about society's expectations of individuals based on their gender.
Go to Profile#17273
David Ungar
#17284
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David Michael Ungar, an American computer scientist, co-created the Self programming language with Randall Smith. The Self development environment's animated user experience was described in the paper Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface co-written with Bay-Wei Chang, which won a lasting impact award at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 2004.
Go to Profile#17274
Holly Martin Smith
#17285
Overall Influence
Holly Martin Smith is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her publications focus on questions in normative ethics, moral responsibility and structural questions common to normative theories.
Go to Profile#17275
Károly Simonyi
#17286
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Károly Simonyi was a Hungarian physicist and writer. He was professor of electrical engineering at Technical University of Budapest and the author of the popular tabletop book A Cultural History of Physics .
Go to Profile#17276
Tadeusz Mazowiecki
#17287
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Tadeusz Mazowiecki was a Polish author, journalist, philanthropist and Christian-democratic politician, formerly one of the leaders of the Solidarity movement, and the first non-communist Polish prime minister since 1946, having held the post from 1989 to 1991.
Go to Profile#17277
Laurence M. Ball
#17288
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Laurence M. Ball is an American economist, Professor and Chairman of the Economics Department at the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He is a specialist in the field of macroeconomics .
Go to Profile#17278
Mark Monmonier
#17289
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Mark Stephen Monmonier is a Distinguished Professor of Geography and the Environment at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University. He specializes in toponymy, geography, and geographic information systems.
Go to Profile#17279
Ernest Beutler
#17290
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Ernest Beutler was a German-born American hematologist and biomedical scientist. He made important discoveries about the causes of a number of diseases, including anemias, Gaucher disease, disorders of iron metabolism and Tay–Sachs disease. He was also among the first scientists to identify X-inactivation as the genetic basis of tissue mosaicism in female mammals, and pioneered a number of medical treatments, including bone marrow transplantation techniques. Beutler was the Chairman of Medicine at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, CA from 1959 until 1979 and served as a Professor, t...
Go to Profile#17280
Erin K. O'Shea
#17291
Overall Influence
Erin K. O'Shea is an American biologist who is president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute . In 2013, she was named HHMI's vice president and chief scientific officer. Prior to that, she was a professor of molecular and cellular biology and chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. In 2016, her appointment as future, and first woman, president of HHMI was announced. She has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000.
Go to Profile#17281
Wesley Clark
#17292
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Wesley Kanne Clark is a retired United States Army officer. He graduated as valedictorian of the class of 1966 at West Point and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he obtained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He later graduated from the Command and General Staff College with a master's degree in military science. He spent 34 years in the U.S. Army, receiving many military decorations, several honorary knighthoods, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Clark served as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000, commanding Oper...
Go to Profile#17282
Adam Ant
#17293
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Stuart Leslie Goddard, better known as Adam Ant , is an English singer, musician, and actor. He gained popularity as the lead singer of new wave group Adam and the Ants and later as a solo artist, scoring 10 UK top ten hits from 1980 to 1983, including three UK No. 1 singles. He has also worked as an actor, appearing in many films and television episodes.
Go to Profile#17283
Junichiro Itani
#17294
Overall Influence
1926 - 2001 (75 years)
Junichiro Itani was a Japanese anthropologist who served as a professor emeritus at Kyoto University and as president of the Primate Society of Japan. He is considered a founder of the discipline of Japanese primatology. He died at age 75 of pneumonia. As with most Japanese primatologists, his early research was on Japanese macaques , but most of his career focused on African primates, especially chimpanzees . He started research in Africa in 1958. The majority of his work was based around the social structures of primate society.
Go to Profile#17284
Edward Chaney
#17295
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Edward Chaney is a British cultural historian. He is Professor Emeritus at Solent University and Honorary Professor at University College London . He is an authority on the evolution of the Grand Tour, Anglo-Italian cultural relations, the history of collecting, Inigo Jones and the legacy of ancient Egypt. He also publishes on aspects of 20th-century British art. In 2003, he was made a Commendatore of the Italian Republic. He is the biographer of Gerald Basil Edwards, author of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page which he succeeded in publishing following the author's death in 1976. This has since ...
Go to Profile#17285
Ronald Jensen
#17296
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Ronald Björn Jensen is an American mathematician who lives in Germany, primarily known for his work in mathematical logic and set theory. Career Jensen completed a BA in economics at American University in 1959, and a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Bonn in 1964. His supervisor was Gisbert Hasenjaeger. Jensen taught at Rockefeller University, 1969–71, and the University of California, Berkeley, 1971–73. The balance of his academic career was spent in Europe at the University of Bonn, the University of Oslo, the University of Freiburg, the University of Oxford, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, from which he retired in 2001.
Go to Profile#17286
Kern Wildenthal
#17297
Overall Influence
Kern Wildenthal is an American academic and president of the Children's Medical Center Foundation in Dallas, Texas. He also holds honorary appointments as President Emeritus and Professor of Medicine Emeritus at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he served as president from 1986 to 2008.
Go to Profile#17287
Ryan Seacrest
#17298
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Ryan John Seacrest is an American media personality, game show host, and producer. Seacrest co-hosted and served as executive producer of Live with Kelly and Ryan, and has hosted other media shows including American Idol, American Top 40, and On Air with Ryan Seacrest. He became co-host and executive producer of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve in 2006, and stayed on as host and executive producer following Clark's death in 2012.
Go to Profile#17288
Philip Lieberman
#17299
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Philip Lieberman was a cognitive scientist at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Originally trained in phonetics, he wrote a dissertation on intonation. His career focused on topics in the evolution of language, and particularly the relationship between the evolution of the vocal tract, the human brain, and the evolution of speech, cognition and language.
Go to Profile#17289
Esther Figueiredo Ferraz
#17300
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Esther Figueiredo Ferraz was the first female Minister to serve in the government of Brazil. Ferraz served as the Brazilian Minister of Education from 1982 until 1985. Esther Ferraz was born in São Paulo on February 6, 1929. She was a member of the Academia Paulista de Letras. Ferraz earned a law degree and became a lawyer. She went on to become the first woman to chair the Brazilian Bar Association , or OAB, beginning in 1949. Ferraz later became the first woman to teach and lecture at the University of São Paulo .
Go to Profile#17290
Michael Gove
#17301
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Michael Andrew Gove is a British politician serving as Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations since October 2022, having previously held both offices from September 2021 to July 2022. He has been Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath since 2005. A member of the Conservative Party, he has also served in various Cabinet positions under Prime Ministers David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. Gove has twice run to become Leader of the Conservative Party, in 2016 and 2019, finishing in third place on both occasions.
Go to Profile#17291
Hayao Kawai
#17302
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Hayao Kawai was a Japanese Jungian psychologist who has been described as "the founder of Japanese Analytical and Clinical Psychology". He introduced the sandplay therapy concept to Japanese psychology. He participated in Eranos from 1982. Kawai was the director of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies from 1995 to 2001. As chief of the Agency for Cultural Affairs from 2002 to 2007, he oversaw the popular Nihon no Uta Hyakusen song selection, as well as the "Kokoro no Note" ethics textbook now used in all Japanese primary schools. He died in Tenri Hospital following a stro...
Go to Profile#17292
Al Jardine
#17303
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Alan Charles Jardine is an American musician who co-founded the Beach Boys. He is best known as the band's rhythm guitarist, background vocalist, and for occasionally singing lead vocals on singles such as "Help Me, Rhonda" , "Then I Kissed Her" , "Cottonfields" , and "Come Go with Me" . His song "Lady Lynda" was also a UK top 10 hit for the group in 1978. Other Beach Boys songs that feature Jardine on lead include "I Know There's an Answer" , "Vegetables" , and "From There to Back Again" .
Go to Profile#17293
Ramsay MacMullen
#17304
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Ramsay MacMullen was an American historian who was Emeritus Professor of History at Yale University, where he taught from 1967 to his retirement in 1993 as Dunham Professor of History and Classics. His scholarly interests were in the social history of Rome and the replacement of paganism by Christianity.
Go to Profile#17294
Solange Ashby
#17305
Overall Influence
Solange Ashby is an Africanist and archaeologist whose expertise focuses on language, religion and the role of women in ancient Egypt and Nubia. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#17295
Kwik Kian Gie
#17306
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Kwik Kian Gie is an Indonesian economist and politician who served as the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs from 1999 to 2000, the Minister of National Development Planning from 2001 to 2004, as well as briefly serving as the Deputy Speakers of the People's Consultative Assembly in 1999. He is a prominent Indonesian economist who often wrote columns in the newspaper KOMPAS criticizing the policies of the Suharto administration in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Go to Profile#17296
Carlos Eire
#17307
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Carlos M. N. Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. He is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe. Education Eire received his Bachelor of Arts in History and Theology in 1973 from Loyola University, Chicago. He obtained his doctoral degree from Yale University in 1979.
Go to Profile#17297
Richard Popkin
#17308
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Richard Henry Popkin was an American academic philosopher who specialized in the history of enlightenment philosophy and early modern anti-dogmatism. His 1960 work The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes introduced one previously unrecognized influence on Western thought in the seventeenth century, the Pyrrhonian Scepticism of Sextus Empiricus. Popkin also was an internationally acclaimed scholar on Christian millenarianism and Jewish messianism.
Go to Profile#17298
Jean-Pierre Wintenberger
#17309
Overall Influence
1954 - 2019 (65 years)
Jean-Pierre Wintenberger was a French mathematician and a professor of mathematics at the University of Strasbourg. He was corecipient of the 2011 Cole Prize in number theory, along with Chandrashekhar Khare, for his proof of Serre's modularity conjecture.
Go to Profile#17299
Rudy Wiebe
#17310
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Rudy Henry Wiebe is a Canadian author and professor emeritus in the department of English at the University of Alberta since 1992. Rudy Wiebe was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in the year 2000.
Go to Profile#17300
Barney S. Graham
#17311
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Barney S. Graham is an American immunologist, virologist, and clinical trials physician. He is currently Professor of Medicine and Microbiology, Biochemistry, & Immunology and Senior Advisor for Global Health Equity at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. He is the former deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center , part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , National Institutes of Health . During his tenure at the VRC, Graham also served as chief of the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory.
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