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
#1751
Brian Williams
#1753
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Brian Douglas Williams is an American journalist and television news anchor. He was a correspondent for NBC Nightly News starting in 1993, before his promotion to anchor and managing editor of the broadcast in 2004.
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John Taylor Gatto
#1754
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
John Taylor Gatto was an American author and school teacher. After teaching for nearly 30 years he authored several books on modern education, criticizing its ideology, history, and consequences. He is best known for his books Dumbing Us Down: the Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, and The Underground History of American Education: A Schoolteacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling.
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Stephanie Kwolek
#1755
Overall Influence
1923 - 2014 (91 years)
Stephanie Louise Kwolek was a Polish-American chemist who is known for inventing Kevlar. Her career at the DuPont company spanned more than 40 years. She discovered the first of a family of synthetic fibers of exceptional strength and stiffness: poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide.
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Robert F. Engle
#1756
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Fry Engle III is an American economist and statistician. He won the 2003 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, sharing the award with Clive Granger, "for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility ".
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James Bevel
#1757
Overall Influence
1936 - 2008 (72 years)
James Luther Bevel was a minister and leader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the United States. As a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference , and then as its Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education, Bevel initiated, strategized, and developed SCLC's three major successes of the era: the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade, the 1965 Selma voting rights movement, and the 1966 Chicago open housing movement. He suggested that SCLC call for and join a March on Washington in 1963. Bevel strategized the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, which contributed to Congressio...
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Avi Wigderson
#1758
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Avi Wigderson is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the school of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America. His research interests include complexity theory, parallel algorithms, graph theory, cryptography, distributed computing, and neural networks. Wigderson received the Abel Prize in 2021 for his work in theoretical computer science.
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Jack Steinberger
#1759
Overall Influence
1921 - 2020 (99 years)
Jack Steinberger was a German-born American physicist noted for his work with neutrinos, the subatomic particles considered to be elementary constituents of matter. He was a recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for the discovery of the muon neutrino. Through his career as an experimental particle physicist, he held positions at the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University , and the CERN . He was also a recipient of the United States National Medal of Science in 1988, and the Matteucci Medal from the Italian Academy of Sc...
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Lars Peter Hansen
#1760
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Lars Peter Hansen is an American economist. He is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the Booth School of Business, at the University of Chicago and a 2013 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
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Silvio Micali
#1761
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Silvio Micali is an Italian computer scientist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founder of Algorand, a proof-of-stake blockchain cryptocurrency protocol. Micali's research at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory centers on cryptography and information security.
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Ehud Shapiro
#1762
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ehud Shapiro is an Israeli scientist, artist, and entrepreneur, who is Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science. With international reputation, he made fundamental contributions to many scientific disciplines, laying in each a long-term research agenda by asking a novel basic question and offering a first step towards answering it, including how to computerize the process of scientific discovery, by providing an algorithmic interpretation to Karl Popper's methodology of conjectures and refutations; how to automate program debugging, by algorithms for faul...
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Jack Kornfield
#1763
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jack Kornfield is an American writer and teacher in the Vipassana movement in American Theravada Buddhism. He trained as a Buddhist monk in Thailand, Burma and India, first as a student of the Thai forest master Ajahn Chah and Mahasi Sayadaw of Burma. He has taught mindfulness meditation worldwide since 1974. In 1975, he co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, and subsequently in 1987, Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. Kornfield has worked as a peacemaker and activist, organized teacher training, and le...
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Mieczysław Maneli
#1764
Overall Influence
1922 - 1994 (72 years)
Mieczysław Maneli was a Polish lawyer, diplomat and academic best remembered for his work with the International Control Commission during the Vietnam War, especially the 1963 "Maneli Affair". During the Holocaust, he survived the Auschwitz death camp, and then became after the war a prominent academic in Poland, serving as the Dean of Law at University of Warsaw. The name "Maneli Affair", a proposal to end the Vietnam War by creating a federation of the two Vietnams that would be neutral in the Cold War is a misnomer as the proposal was actually a diplomatic initiative made by the French Pr...
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Christina Hoff Sommers
#1765
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys . She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.
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David Lodge
#1766
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
David John Lodge CBE is an English author and critic. A literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses , Small World: An Academic Romance and Nice Work . The second two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers . Lodge has also written television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T.
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Robin Dunbar
#1767
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and specialist in primate behaviour. Dunbar is professor emeritus of evolutionary psychology of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".
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Randy Schekman
#1768
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Randy Wayne Schekman is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and former editor of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. In 2011, he was announced as the editor of eLife, a new high-profile open-access journal published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust launching in 2012. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C....
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Tove Jansson
#1769
Overall Influence
1914 - 2001 (87 years)
Tove Marika Jansson was a Swedish-speaking Finnishish author, novelist, painter, illustrator and comic strip author. Brought up by artistic parents, Jansson studied art from 1930 to 1938 in Stockholm, Helsinki and Paris. Her first solo art exhibition was held in 1943. Over the same period, she penned short stories and articles for publication, and subsequently drew illustrations for book covers, advertisements, and postcards. She continued her work as an artist and writer for the rest of her life.
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Fernando J. Corbató
#1770
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Fernando José "Corby" Corbató was an American computer scientist, notable as a pioneer in the development of time-sharing operating systems. Career Corbató was born on July 1, 1926, in Oakland, California, to Hermenegildo Corbató, a Spanish literature professor from Villarreal, Spain, and Charlotte Corbató. In 1930 the Corbató family moved to Los Angeles for Hermenegildo's job at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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James P. Allison
#1771
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
James Patrick Allison is an American immunologist and Nobel laureate who holds the position of professor and chair of immunology and executive director of immunotherapy platform at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas.
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Muammar Gaddafi
#1772
Overall Influence
1942 - 2011 (69 years)
Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi was a Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist who ruled Libya from 1969 until his killing in 2011 by rebel forces. He first served as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977 and then as the Brotherly Leader of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011. Initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, Gaddafi later ruled according to his own Third International Theory.
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Alexander McQueen
#1773
Overall Influence
1969 - 2010 (41 years)
Lee Alexander McQueen was a British fashion designer and couturier. He founded his own Alexander McQueen label in 1992, and was chief designer at Givenchy from 1996 to 2001. His achievements in fashion earned him four British Designer of the Year awards , as well as the CFDA's International Designer of the Year award in 2003. McQueen died by suicide in 2010 at the age of 40, at his home in Mayfair, London, shortly after the death of his mother.
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Michael Novak
#1774
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Michael John Novak Jr. was an American Catholic philosopher, journalist, novelist, and diplomat. The author of more than forty books on the philosophy and theology of culture, Novak is most widely known for his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism . In 1993 Novak was honored with an honorary doctorate at Universidad Francisco Marroquín due to his commitment to the idea of liberty. In 1994 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, which included a million-dollar purse awarded at Buckingham Palace. He wrote books and articles focused on capitalism, religion, and the polit...
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Ian Stevenson
#1775
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Ian Pretyman Stevenson was a Canadian-born American psychiatrist, the founder and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He was a professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for fifty years. He was chair of their department of psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and Research Professor of Psychiatry from 2002 until his death in 2007.
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George Zweig
#1776
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
George Zweig is an American physicist of Jewish origin. He was trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman. He introduced, independently of Murray Gell-Mann, the quark model . He later turned his attention to neurobiology. He has worked as a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the financial services industry.
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Max Frisch
#1777
Overall Influence
1911 - 1991 (80 years)
Max Rudolf Frisch was a Swiss playwright and novelist. Frisch's works focused on problems of identity, individuality, responsibility, morality, and political commitment. The use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war output. Frisch was one of the founders of Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the 1965 Jerusalem Prize, the 1973 Grand Schiller Prize, and the 1986 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
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Corrado Böhm
#1778
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Corrado Böhm was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and a computer scientist known especially for his contributions to the theory of structured programming, constructive mathematics, combinatory logic, lambda calculus, and the semantics and implementation of functional programming languages.
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Wil van der Aalst
#1779
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Willibrordus Martinus Pancratius van der Aalst is a Dutch computer scientist and full professor at RWTH Aachen University, leading the Process and Data Science group. His research and teaching interests include information systems, workflow management, Petri nets, process mining, specification languages, and simulation. He is also known for his work on workflow patterns.
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Sidney Sheldon
#1780
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Sidney Sheldon was an American writer. He was prominent in the 1930s, first working on Broadway plays, and then in motion pictures, notably writing the successful comedy The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer , which earned him an Oscar in 1948. He went on to work in television, where over twenty years he created The Patty Duke Show , I Dream of Jeannie , and Hart to Hart . After turning 50, he began writing best-selling romantic suspense novels, such as Master of the Game , The Other Side of Midnight , and Rage of Angels .
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Allen Frances
#1781
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Allen J. Frances is an American psychiatrist. He is currently Professor and Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. He is best known for serving as chair of the American Psychiatric Association task force overseeing the development and revision of the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . Frances is the founding editor of two well-known psychiatric journals: the Journal of Personality Disorders and the Journal of Psychiatric Practice.
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Kenneth Frampton
#1782
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Kenneth Brian Frampton is a British architect, critic and historian. He is regarded as one of the world's leading historians of modernist and contemporary architecture. He is an Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, New York, where he taught for over 50 years. He is a citizen of Britain and the United States.
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Naomi Wolf
#1783
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Naomi Rebekah Wolf is an American feminist author, journalist, and conspiracy theorist. After the 1991 publication of her first book, The Beauty Myth, Wolf became a leading spokeswoman of what has been called the third wave of the feminist movement. Feminists including Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan praised her work. Others, including Camille Paglia, criticized it. In the 1990s, she was a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
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George Andrew Olah
#1784
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
George Andrew Olah was a Hungarian-American chemist. His research involved the generation and reactivity of carbocations via superacids. For this research, Olah was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994 "for his contribution to carbocation chemistry." He was also awarded the Priestley Medal, the highest honor granted by the American Chemical Society and F.A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Research of the American Chemical Society in 1996.
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Barbara Ehrenreich
#1785
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Barbara Ehrenreich was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.
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Thom Mayne
#1786
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Thom Mayne is an American architect. He is based in Los Angeles. In 1972, Mayne helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecture , where he is a trustee and the coordinator of the Design of Cities postgraduate program. Since then he has held teaching positions at SCI-Arc, the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and the University of California, Los Angeles . He is principal of Morphosis Architects, an architectural firm based in Culver City, California and New York City, New York. Mayne received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in March 2005.
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Michel Callon
#1787
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#1786
Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter
#1788
Overall Influence
1907 - 2003 (96 years)
Harold Scott MacDonald "Donald" Coxeter was a British-Canadian geometer and mathematician. He is regarded as one of the greatest geometers of the 20th century. Biography Coxeter was born in Kensington, England, to Harold Samuel Coxeter and Lucy . His father had taken over the family business of Coxeter & Son, manufacturers of surgical instruments and compressed gases , but was able to retire early and focus on sculpting and baritone singing; Lucy Coxeter was a portrait and landscape painter who had attended the Royal Academy of Arts. A maternal cousin was the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scot...
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Francis Heylighen
#1789
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Francis Paul Heylighen is a Belgian cyberneticist investigating the emergence and evolution of intelligent organization. He presently works as a research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel , where he directs the transdisciplinary "Center Leo Apostel" and the research group on "Evolution, Complexity and Cognition". He is best known for his work on the Principia Cybernetica Project, his model of the Internet as a global brain, and his contributions to the theories of memetics and self-organization. He is also known, albeit to a lesser extent, for his work on gifted people and their pro...
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Frans de Waal
#1790
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Franciscus Bernardus Maria "Frans" de Waal is a Dutch primatologist and ethologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory, and author of numerous books including Chimpanzee Politics and Our Inner Ape . His research centers on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Roy...
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Paul Virilio
#1791
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military. Virilio was a prolific creator of neologisms, most notably his concept of "Dromology", the all-around, pervasive inscription of speed in every aspect of life.
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Vin Scully
#1792
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Vincent Edward Scully was an American sportscaster, best known for his broadcast work in Major League Baseball. Scully was the play-by-play announcer for the Brooklyn / Los Angeles Dodgers for sixty-seven years, beginning in 1950 and ending in 2016. He is considered by many to be the greatest baseball broadcaster of all time.
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Ha-Joon Chang
#1793
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#1792
Linda Evangelista
#1794
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Linda Evangelista is a Canadian fashion model. She is regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential models of all time, and has been featured on over 700 magazine covers. Evangelista is primarily known for being the longtime "muse" of photographer Steven Meisel, as well as for the phrase: "We don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day."
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Michael Rosen
#1795
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michael Wayne Rosen is a British children's author, poet, presenter, political columnist, broadcaster and activist who has written 140 books. He served as Children's Laureate from 2007 to 2009. He won the 2023 PEN Pinter Prize, awarded by English PEN, for his "fearless" body of work.
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Jim Blinn
#1796
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
James F. Blinn is an American computer scientist who first became widely known for his work as a computer graphics expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory , particularly his work on the pre-encounter animations for the Voyager project, his work on the 1980 Carl Sagan documentary series Cosmos, and the research of the Blinn–Phong shading model.
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Wisława Szymborska
#1797
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, translator, and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Prowent , she resided in Kraków until the end of her life. In Poland, Szymborska's books have reached sales rivaling prominent prose authors', though she wrote in a poem, "Some Like Poetry" , that "perhaps" two in a thousand people like poetry.
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William H. Riker
#1798
Overall Influence
1920 - 1993 (73 years)
William Harrison Riker was an American political scientist who is prominent for applying game theory and mathematics to political science. He helped to establish University of Rochester as a center of behavioral revolution in political science.
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Theodor W. Hänsch
#1799
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Theodor Wolfgang Hänsch is a German physicist. He received one-third of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for "contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique", sharing the prize with John L. Hall and Roy J. Glauber.
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Jody Rosen
#1800
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Jody Rosen is an American journalist and author. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Career Journalism Rosen served as critic-at-large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, pop music critic for New York, music critic for Slate, before joining the Times magazine. He has also written for such publications as The New Yorker and Rolling Stone.
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Karen Armstrong
#1801
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator of Irish Catholic descent known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, while in the convent and majored in English. She left the convent in 1969. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule.
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Jonathan Culler
#1802
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jonathan Culler is an American literary critic. He was Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and literary criticism.
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