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
#17351
Linda Tuhiwai Smith
#17362
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina Smith , previously a professor of indigenous education at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, is now Distinguished Professor at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi. Smith's academic contribution is about decolonising knowledge and systems. The Royal Society Te Apārangi describes Smith’s influence on education as creating "intellectual spaces for students and researchers to embrace their identities and transcend dominant narratives".
Go to Profile#17352
Sarah Cleaveland
#17363
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Sarah Cleaveland is a veterinary surgeon and Professor of Comparative Epidemiology at the University of Glasgow. Education Cleaveland obtained a Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine degree from the University of Cambridge in 1988 followed by a PhD from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 1996 for research on canine distemper and rabies in the Serengeti of Tanzania. During this time she was a postgraduate student at the Institute of Zoology in Regent's Park supervised by Chris Dye, Steve Albon and James Kirkwood.
Go to Profile#17353
Jack Bruce
#17364
Overall Influence
1943 - 2014 (71 years)
John Symon Asher Bruce was a Scottish musician. He gained popularity as the primary lead vocalist and bassist of rock band Cream. After the group disbanded in 1968, he pursued a solo career and also played with several bands.
Go to Profile#17354
Richard B. Hays
#17365
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Richard Bevan Hays is an American New Testament scholar and George Washington Ivey Professor Emeritus of New Testament Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. He is an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.
Go to Profile#17355
Luc Soete
#17366
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Luc Soete is a Belgian economist. He is a Professor and the Dean of the Brussels School of Governance. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the University of Sussex Business School and of the Advisory Board of the UNU Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies in Bruges, Belgium. He is a former Rector Magnificus and professor of International Economic Relations at the School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, and former director of UNU-MERIT, a joint research institute of the United Nations University and Maastricht University. Luc Soete is a member of the Dutch scientific advisory body and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2010.
Go to Profile#17356
Thomas Zacharia
#17367
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Thomas Zacharia is an Indian-born American computer scientist. He received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from National Institute of Technology, Karnataka in 1980 and a master's degree in Materials Science from the University of Mississippi in 1984. He obtained his doctoral degree from Clarkson University in 1987.
Go to Profile#17357
Jamie Lee Curtis
#17368
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Jamie Lee Curtis is an American actress, producer, and children's author. Known for her performances in the horror and slasher genres, she is regarded as a scream queen, in addition to roles in comedies. Curtis has received multiple accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two Golden Globes, as well as nominations for a Primetime Emmy and a Grammy.
Go to Profile#17358
George Edwards
#17369
Overall Influence
1908 - 2003 (95 years)
Sir George Robert Freeman Edwards , was a British aircraft designer and industrialist. Early life George Edwards was born in 1902 at Highams Park, on the north side of London, England. He attended Walthamstow Technical Institute Engineering and Trade School, after which he took an engineering course at the University of London and in 1926 acquired a Batchelor of Science degree.
Go to Profile#17359
Kim Novak
#17370
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Marilyn Pauline "Kim" Novak is an American retired film and television actress and painter. Her contributions to cinema have been honored with two Golden Globe Awards, an Honorary Golden Bear, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Go to Profile#17360
Gisela Striker
#17371
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Gisela Striker is a German classical scholar. She is Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Classics at Harvard University and a specialist in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Education and career Striker was born and educated in Germany, earning her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Göttingen under the supervision of Günther Patzig in 1969 and her Habilitation, also from Göttingen in 1978. She taught philosophy at Göttingen from 1971–1986, and then was professor of philosophy at Columbia University from 1986–1989, and then at Harvard from 1989–1997. In 1997, she became the sixt...
Go to Profile#17361
Norman Jewison
#17372
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Norman Frederick Jewison is a Canadian retired film and television director, producer, and founder of the Canadian Film Centre. Jewison has directed numerous feature films and has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director three times in three separate decades for In the Heat of the Night , Fiddler on the Roof and Moonstruck . Other highlights of his directing career include 40 Pounds of Trouble , The Cincinnati Kid , The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming , The Thomas Crown Affair , Jesus Christ Superstar , Rollerball , F.I.S.T. , ...And Justice for All , Best Friends...
Go to Profile#17362
Peter van Emde Boas
#17373
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Peter van Emde Boas is a Dutch computer scientist and professor at the University of Amsterdam. He gained his doctorate in 1974 under Adriaan van Wijngaarden. The Van Emde Boas tree is named after him.
Go to Profile#17363
Graham Ward
#17374
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Graham John Ward is an English theologian and Anglican priest who has been Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford since 2012. Early life Ward was educated at Salford Grammar School and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he studied English and French literature, and then at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he studied theology while training for ordination at Westcott House.
Go to Profile#17364
Ramzi Yousef
#17375
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Ramzi Ahmed Yousef is a Kuwait-born Pakistani convicted terrorist who was one of the main perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434; he was also a co-conspirator in the Bojinka plot. In 1995, he was arrested by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and U.S. Diplomatic Security Service at a guest house in Islamabad, Pakistan, while trying to set a bomb in a doll, then extradited to the United States.
Go to Profile#17365
Manfred Mayrhofer
#17376
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Manfred Mayrhofer was an Austrian Indo-Europeanist who specialized in Indo-Iranian languages. Mayrhofer served as professor emeritus at the University of Vienna. He is noted for his etymological dictionary of Sanskrit.
Go to Profile#17366
Unai Emery
#17377
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Unai Emery Etxegoien is a Spanish football manager and former player who is the manager of the Premier League club Aston Villa. After a career spent playing mostly in Spain's Segunda División, Emery transitioned into coaching after retiring in 2004. He began at Lorca Deportiva, where he achieved promotion to the Segunda División in his first season. He then joined Almería, whom he led to promotion to La Liga for the first time in the club's history. He subsequently moved to Valencia, leading the team to top-three finishes. After leaving Valencia, he coached Spartak Moscow for six months, befo...
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Paul Vojta
#17378
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Paul Alan Vojta is an American mathematician, known for his work in number theory on Diophantine geometry and Diophantine approximation. Contributions In formulating Vojta's conjecture, he pointed out the possible existence of parallels between the Nevanlinna theory of complex analysis, and diophantine analysis in the circle of ideas around the Mordell conjecture and abc conjecture. This suggested the importance of the integer solutions aspect of diophantine equations.
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Shiv K. Kumar
#17379
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Shiv K. Kumar was an Indian English-language poet, playwright, novelist, and short story writer. His grandfather late Tulsi Das Kumar was a school teacher and his father Bishan Das Kumar, was a retired headmaster. The letter 'K' stands for Krishna, i.e. Shiv Krishna Kumar.
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Paul R. Bartrop
#17380
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Paul R. Bartrop is an Australian historian of the Holocaust and genocide. From August 2012 until December 2020 he was Professor of History and Director of the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, Florida. Between 2020 and 2021 he was an honorary Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Canberra . In April 2021 he became Professor Emeritus of History at Florida Gulf Coast University, and in 2022 he became an honorary Principal Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne. During the academic year of 2011-2012 he was the Ida E.
Go to Profile#17370
Hadley Wickham
#17381
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Hadley Alexander Wickham is a New Zealand statistician known for his work on open-source software for the R statistical programming environment. He is the chief scientist at Posit, PBC and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University. His work includes the data visualisation system ggplot2 and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages for data science based on the concept of tidy data.
Go to Profile#17371
Andrei Zelevinsky
#17382
Overall Influence
1953 - 2013 (60 years)
Andrei Vladlenovich Zelevinsky was a Russian-American mathematician who made important contributions to algebra, combinatorics, and representation theory, among other areas. Biography Zelevinsky graduated in 1969 from the Moscow Mathematical School No. 2. After winning a silver medal as a member of the USSR team at the International Mathematical Olympiad he was admitted without examination to the mathematics department of Moscow State University where he obtained his PhD in 1978 under the mentorship of Joseph Bernstein, Alexandre Kirillov and Israel Gelfand.
Go to Profile#17372
Victor S. Miller
#17383
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Victor Saul Miller is an American mathematician as a Principal Computer Scientist in the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International. He received his B.A. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1968, and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1975. He was an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department of the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1973 to 1978. In 1978 he joined the IBM 801 project in the Computer Science Department of the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and moved to the Mathematics Department in 1984. From 1993-2...
Go to Profile#17373
David L. Downie
#17384
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
David Leonard Downie is an American scholar focusing on international environmental politics and policy. He currently writes and teaches at Fairfield University. Research and writings Downie's research focuses on factors that can promote or impede the creation, implementation and effectiveness of international environmental policy. This includes frameworks of scientific knowledge, patterns of economic interests, extant institutions and regime development as well as obstacles that stem from: the structures and interaction of the international political, legal, ecological and economic systems; ...
Go to Profile#17374
Emanuel Adler
#17385
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Emanuel Adler, is a Uruguayan professor of political science and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Chair in Israel Studies at the University of Toronto. He is also the editor of International Organization and an honorary professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen.
Go to Profile#17375
Les Parrott
#17386
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Les Parrott is an American author of Christian self-help books, a professor of psychology at Northwest University, and an ordained Nazarene minister. He is the creator of the SYMBIS Assessment, and founder of the Parrott Institute for Healthy Relationships at Olivet Nazarene University. He and his wife, Leslie Parrott, are the founders of the Center for Relationship Development at Seattle Pacific University where they taught courses out of the Marriage and Family Therapy and psychology departments.
Go to Profile#17376
Herbert Wilson
#17387
Overall Influence
1929 - 2008 (79 years)
Herbert Rees Wilson FRSE was a physicist, who was one of the team who worked on the structure of DNA at King's College London, under the direction of Sir John Randall. Biography Early life He was born the son of a sea captain at Nefyn on the Llŷn Peninsula and educated at Nefyn school and Pwllheli Grammar School. He entered Bangor University, where he gained a first class honours degree in physics in 1949 and a PhD in 1952 under the supervision of professor Edwin Owen.
Go to Profile#17377
Ellen Dissanayake
#17388
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ellen Dissanayake , an American author and scholar focusing on "the anthropological exploration of art and culture". She lives in Seattle, Washington, and is affiliated with the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#17378
Marvin Meyer
#17389
Overall Influence
1948 - 2012 (64 years)
Marvin W. Meyer was a scholar of religion and a tenured professor at Chapman University, in Orange, California. He was the Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University and Director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute. He was also Director of the Coptic Magical Texts Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. Dr. Meyer authored numerous books and articles on Greco-Roman and Christian religions in antiquity and late antiquity, and on Albert Schweitzer's ethic of reverence for life. He had been interviewed on television programs that aired on ABC, BBC, CNN,...
Go to Profile#17379
Ralph Sampson
#17390
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ralph Lee Sampson Jr. is an American former professional basketball player. He is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. A phenom, three-time college national player of the year, and first overall selection in the 1983 NBA draft, Sampson brought heavy expectations with him to the National Basketball Association .
Go to Profile#17380
Ada Palmer
#17391
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Ada Palmer is an American historian and writer and winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her first novel, Too Like the Lightning, was published in May 2016. The work has been well received by critics and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.
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Merrill J. Bateman
#17392
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Merrill Joseph Bateman is an American religious leader who served as the 11th president of Brigham Young University from 1996 to 2003. He is an emeritus general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served as the LDS Church's 12th presiding bishop in 1994 and 1995. Bateman served as the Sunday School General President of the LDS Church from 2003 to 2004, a member of the Church's Presidency of the Seventy from 2003 to 2007, and the president of the Provo Utah Temple from 2007 to 2010.
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Jeremy Thorpe
#17393
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
John Jeremy Thorpe was a British politician who served as the Member of Parliament for North Devon from 1959 to 1979, and as leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 to 1976. In May 1979 he was tried at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend Norman Scott, a former model. Thorpe was acquitted on all charges, but the case, and the furore surrounding it, ended his political career.
Go to Profile#17383
James White
#17394
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
James Robert White is a Baptist theologian, the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, an evangelical Reformed Baptist Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona and a Christian scholar. He is the author of several books.
Go to Profile#17384
Frédéric Martel
#17395
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Frédéric Martel is a French writer, researcher and journalist. His most famous books are The Pink and the Black, Homosexuals in France since 1968 , Mainstream and In the Closet of the Vatican , a New York Times bestseller.
Go to Profile#17385
Felicia Pratto
#17396
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Felicia Pratto is a social psychologist known for her work on intergroup relations, dynamics of power, and social cognition. She is Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut. Pratto is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Ray Ellis
#17397
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Ray Ellis was an American record producer, arranger, conductor, and saxophonist. He was responsible for the orchestration in Billie Holiday's Lady in Satin . Biography Raymond Spencer Ellis was born in Philadelphia. He arranged many hit records in the 1950s and 1960s. Included are classics such as "A Certain Smile" and "Wild is the Wind" by Johnny Mathis, "Broken Hearted Melody" by Sarah Vaughan, and "Standing on the Corner" by the Four Lads. In 1970, he produced Emmylou Harris' debut LP Gliding Bird.
Go to Profile#17387
Jake Gyllenhaal
#17398
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Jacob Benjamin Gyllenhaal is an American actor. Born into the Gyllenhaal family, he is the son of director Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter Naomi Foner, and his older sister is actress Maggie Gyllenhaal. He began acting as a child, making his acting debut in City Slickers , followed by roles in his father's films A Dangerous Woman and Homegrown . His breakthrough roles were as Homer Hickam in October Sky and as a psychologically troubled teenager in Donnie Darko .
Go to Profile#17388
Roberto González Echevarría
#17399
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Roberto González Echevarría is a Cuban-born critic of Latin American literature and culture. He is the Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Early life, education, and career González Echevarría was born in Sagua La Grande in 1943; his family moved to Havana when he was 13, and after the Cuban Revolution, his family emigrated to Tampa in the US, where relatives on his father's side had already moved. His mother was a PhD and teacher of philosophy.
Go to Profile#17389
Jonathan Van-Tam
#17400
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Professor Sir Jonathan Stafford Nguyen Van-Tam is a British healthcare professional specialising in influenza, including its epidemiology, transmission, vaccinology, antiviral drugs and pandemic preparedness.
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Horst Knörrer
#17401
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Horst Knörrer is a German mathematician, who studies algebraic geometry and mathematical physics. Knörrer studied from 1971 at University of Regensburg and University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and received a doctorate in 1978 from the University of Bonn under the supervision of Egbert Brieskorn . After that, he was a research assistant until 1985 in Bonn, interrupted by two years 1980 to 1982 at the Leiden University. In 1985 he completed his habilitation in Bonn and was a Heisenberg fellow the following two years. During 1986/87, he was a department representative at the University of Düsseldorf.
Go to Profile#17391
Faubion Bowers
#17402
Overall Influence
1917 - 1999 (82 years)
Faubion Bowers was an American academic and writer in the area of Asian Studies, especially Japanese theatre. He also wrote the first full-length biography of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. During the Allied Occupation of Japan, he was General Douglas MacArthur's personal Japanese language interpreter and aide-de-camp.
Go to Profile#17392
Konstantinos Karamanlis
#17403
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Konstantinos G. Karamanlis , commonly anglicised to Constantine Karamanlis or just Caramanlis, was a four-time Prime Minister of Greece and two-term president of the Third Hellenic Republic. A towering figure of Greek politics, his political career spanned portions of seven decades, covering much of the latter half of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#17393
Tom Raworth
#17404
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
Thomas Moore Raworth was an English-Irish poet, publisher, editor, and teacher who published over 40 books of poetry and prose during his life. His work has been translated and published in many countries. Raworth was a key figure in the British Poetry Revival.
Go to Profile#17394
Jane Elliott
#17405
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Jane Elliott is an American diversity educator. As a schoolteacher, she became known for her "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise, which she first conducted with her third-grade class on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The publication of compositions which the children had written about the experience in the local newspaper led to much broader media interest in it.
Go to Profile#17395
Xu Xing
#17406
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Xu Xing is a Chinese paleontologist who has named more dinosaurs than any other living paleontologist. Such dinosaurs include the Jurassic ceratopsian Yinlong, the Jurassic tyrannosauroid Guanlong, the large oviraptorosaur Gigantoraptor, and the troodontid Mei.
Go to Profile#17396
Alan Hollinghurst
#17407
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Alan James Hollinghurst is an English novelist, poet, short story writer and translator. He won the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award, the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and for his novel The Line of Beauty the 2004 Booker Prize. Hollinghurst is credited with having helped gay-themed fiction to break into the literary mainstream through his six novels since 1988.
Go to Profile#17397
Leonel Brizola
#17408
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Leonel de Moura Brizola was a Brazilian politician. Launched into politics by Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas in the 1930–1950s, Brizola was the only politician to serve as elected governor of two Brazilian states. An engineer by training, Brizola organized the youth wing of the Brazilian Labour Party and served as state representative for Rio Grande do Sul and mayor of its capital, Porto Alegre. In 1958 he was elected governor and subsequently played a major role in thwarting a first coup attempt by sectors of the armed forces in 1961, who wished to stop João Goulart from assuming the presidency, under allegations of communist ties.
Go to Profile#17398
William Brainard
#17409
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
William C. "Bill" Brainard is an American economist. He is the Arthur Okun Professor Emeritus of Economics at Yale University, and he served as the provost of the university from 1981 to 1986. Brainard is the namesake of the William C. Brainard chair, which current Yale provost Ben Polak holds. Brainard earned both his economics M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale. He has been teaching at Yale since 1962.
Go to Profile#17399
Alberto Pérez-Gómez
#17410
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Alberto Pérez-Gómez is an architectural historian and theorist known for taking a phenomenological approach to architecture. He lives in Montreal. Biography Born December 24, 1949, in Mexico City he graduated as an engineer and architect from the National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico. Afterwards he did postgraduate work at Cornell University. He then pursued graduate studies in the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Essex where he received his Master of Arts in 1975 and Ph.D. in 1979. In 1987 he became a Canadian Citizen and a Quebec resident. In 1984, he won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award for his book Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science.
Go to Profile#17400
Garret FitzGerald
#17411
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Garret Desmond FitzGerald was an Irish Fine Gael politician, public intellectual, economist and barrister who served twice as Taoiseach, serving from 1981 to 1982 and 1982 to 1987. He served as Leader of Fine Gael from 1977 to 1987 and was twice Leader of the Opposition between 1977 and 1982; he was previously Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1973 to 1977. FitzGerald served as a Teachta Dála from 1969 to 1992 and was a Senator for the Industrial and Commercial Panel from 1965 to 1969.
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