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).

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#17601

Kshama Sawant

#17612

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Kshama Sawant is an Indian-American politician and economist who has served on the Seattle City Council since 2014. She is a member of Socialist Alternative, the first and only member of the party to date to be elected to public office.

#17602

Sajeev John

#17613

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Sajeev John, OC, FRSC is a Professor of Physics at the University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair holder. He is known for his discovery of photonic crystals. Education and career He received his bachelor's degree in physics in 1979 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in physics at Harvard University in 1984. His Ph.D. work at Harvard introduced the theory of classical wave localization and, in particular, the localization of light in three-dimensional strongly scattering dielectrics. From 1984–1986 he was a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Ca...

#17603

John Woods

#17614

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

John Hayden Woods is a Canadian logician and philosopher. He currently holds the position of Director of the Abductive Systems Group at the University of British Columbia and is The UBC Honorary Professor of Logic. He is also affiliated with the Group on Logic, Information and Computation within the Department of Informatics at King's College London where he has held the Charles S. Peirce Visiting Professorship of Logic position since 2001.

#17604

Forest Whitaker

Forest Whitaker

#17615

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Forest Steven Whitaker is an American actor, producer and director. He is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a British Academy Film Award, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

#17605

Eric Hilgendorf

Eric Hilgendorf

#17616

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Eric Andreas Hilgendorf is a German professor of law and legal philosopher. He holds the Chair in Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Legal Theory, and Information and Computer Science Law at the University of Würzburg. Hilgendorf is one of Germany's most influential scholars in the field of criminal law, with special focuses on IT law as well as on artificial intelligence and law.

#17606

Diogenes Angelakos

#17617

Overall Influence

1920 - 1997 (77 years)

Diogenes James Angelakos was an American electrical engineer and professor emeritus of electronic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who served as the director of the Electronics Research Laboratory for 20 years. He is credited with building up the research group into one of the university's biggest research labs. He is considered a pioneer in the fields of microwaves, antennas and electromagnetic waves.

#17607

Sam Brownback

#17618

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Samuel Dale Brownback is an American attorney, politician, and diplomat who served as a United States senator from Kansas from 1996 to 2011 and as the 46th governor of Kansas from 2011 to 2018. A member of the Republican Party, Brownback also served as the United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom during the administration of President Donald Trump and was a candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 2008.

#17608

Jean-Louis Margolin

#17619

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Jean-Louis Margolin is a French academic specialising in the history of eastern Asia. His positions include coordinator and lecturer in history at the University of Provence, and for the Research Institute on Southeast Asia of CNRS. Margolin's works include L'armée de l'empereur: Violences et crimes du Japon en guerre 1937-1945 , which was awarded the Augustin Thierry literary prize in 2007. He was one of authors of The Black Book of Communism.

#17609

Polly Matzinger

#17620

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Polly Celine Eveline Matzinger is a French-born immunologist who proposed the danger model theory of how the immune system works. Early years Polly Matzinger was born on July 21, 1947, in France, to a French mother and a Dutch father . In 1954, she immigrated to the US with her sister, Marjolaine, and parents. Her prior jobs included being a bass jazz musician, carpenter, dog trainer, waitress, and Playboy Bunny. Although it took her eleven years to finish her undergraduate degree, she finished her BS in biology at the University of California, Irvine, in 1976. She was talked into going to g...

#17610

Stella Chess

#17621

Overall Influence

1914 - 2007 (93 years)

Stella Chess was an American child psychiatrist who taught at New York University . With her husband, Alexander Thomas, she undertook research into whether the temperaments of children are innate or are dependent on their nurturing. She also conducted studies on the potential links between rubella during pregnancy and autism in the child.

#17611

Shoshana Kamin

#17622

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Shoshana Kamin , born Susanna L'vovna Kamenomostskaya , is a Soviet-born Israeli mathematician, working on the theory of parabolic partial differential equations and related mathematical physics problems.

#17612

Morris Dickstein

#17623

Overall Influence

1940 - 2021 (81 years)

Morris Dickstein was an American literary scholar, cultural historian, professor, essayist, book critic, and public intellectual. He was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

#17613

Alec Sulkin

#17624

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Alexander Matthew Sulkin is an American screenwriter, producer, and voice actor known for his work on Family Guy and The Cleveland Show. Career Sulkin began as a writer for The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, during the show's first three years. On the August 18, 2014 WTF podcast, he stated that he got the job after being recommended by Wellesley Wild.

#17614

Lee Hall

#17625

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Lee Hall is an English writer and lyricist. He is best known for writing the screenplay for the film Billy Elliot and the book and lyrics for its adaptation as a stage musical of the same name. In addition, he wrote the play The Pitmen Painters , and the screenplays for the films War Horse and Rocketman .

#17615

Nancy Langston

#17626

Overall Influence

Nancy Langston is an American environmental historian, currently working as a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University. She was the President of the American Society of Environmental History from 2007 to 2009. Her initial research on the historical and spatial migrations of toxic contaminants within the Lake Superior basin was supported by the National Science Foundation, and has informed her most recent publication titled Toxic Bodies. Langston is a Marshall Scholar.

#17616

A. W. B. Simpson

#17627

Overall Influence

1931 - 2011 (80 years)

Alfred William Brian Simpson, QC , JP, FBA usually referred to as Brian Simpson and publishing as A. W. Brian Simpson, was a British legal historian and legal philosopher. At the time of his retirement, he was Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.

#17617

Mario Alinei

#17628

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

Mario Alinei was an Italian linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Utrecht, where he taught from 1959 to 1987. He was founder and editor of Quaderni di semantica, a journal of theoretical and applied semantics. Until 1997, he was president of Atlas Linguarum Europae at UNESCO.

#17618

Ian Nish

#17629

Overall Influence

1926 - 2022 (96 years)

Ian Hill Nish CBE was a British academic. A specialist in Japanese studies, he was Emeritus Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science . His scholarship relating to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japanese foreign policy and Anglo-Japanese relations in the twentieth century has garnered international renown.

#17619

John R. Platt

#17630

Overall Influence

1918 - 1992 (74 years)

For other people named John Platt, see John Platt. John Rader Platt was an American physicist and biophysicist, professor at the University of Chicago, noted for his pioneering work on strong inference in the 1960s and his analysis of social science in the 1970s.

#17620

Anne-Marie Brady

#17631

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Anne-Marie Sharon Brady is a New Zealand academic and Professor of Political Science at the University of Canterbury. She specialises in Chinese domestic and foreign politics, Antarctic and Arctic politics, Pacific politics, and New Zealand Foreign Policy.

#17621

Clifford Orwin

#17632

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Clifford Orwin is a Canadian-American professor of ancient, modern, contemporary and Jewish political thought. He is also a prominent writer on contemporary politics and culture. Life career Orwin was born in 1947 in Chicago, Illinois, United States to a Jewish family. He earned B.A. in Modern History from Cornell University, where he studied political philosophy with Allan Bloom, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Harvard University under Harvey Mansfield.

#17622

Warren Ellis

#17633

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Warren Girard Ellis is a British comic book writer, novelist, and screenwriter. He is best known as the co-creator of several original comics series, including Transmetropolitan , Global Frequency and Red , which was adapted into the feature films Red and Red 2 . Ellis is the author of the novels Crooked Little Vein and Gun Machine and the novella Normal .

#17623

Ali Hajimiri

#17634

Overall Influence

Ali Hajimiri is an academic, entrepreneur, and inventor in various fields of engineering, including electrical engineering and biomedical engineering. He is the Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology .

#17624

John Edward Williams

#17635

Overall Influence

1922 - 1994 (72 years)

John Edward Williams was an American author, editor and professor. He was best known for his novels Butcher's Crossing , Stoner , and Augustus , which won a U.S. National Book Award. Life Williams was born in Clarksville, Texas. Shortly thereafter, his family moved to Wichita Falls, Texas, in pursuit of the Texas oil boom. His grandparents were farmers; his father, J. E. Jewell, worked in a feed store. Jewell disappeared in mysterious circumstances when Williams was two years old, and his mother remarried to George Williams, a local shift worker in Wichita Falls. John Williams attended a loc...

#17625

Reiko Kuroda

#17636

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

is a Japanese chemist who is a professor at the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Tokyo. Early life and education Kuroda was born in Akita but grew up in Miygai, on the island of Honshu, Japan. She obtained her MSc and PhD in Chemistry from the University of Tokyo. Her doctorate focused on determining the stereochemistry of metal complexes.

#17626

Luigi Pareyson

#17637

Overall Influence

1918 - 1991 (73 years)

Luigi Pareysón was an Italian philosopher, best known for challenging the positivist and idealist aesthetics of Benedetto Croce in his 1954 monograph, Estetica. Teoria della formatività , which builds on the hermeneutics of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

#17627

Vernon Ingram

#17638

Overall Influence

1924 - 2006 (82 years)

Vernon Martin Ingram, was a German–American professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Biography Ingram was born in Breslau as Werner Adolf Martin Immerwahr, Lower Silesia. When he was 14, he and his family left Nazi Germany because of their opposition to Nazism and settled in England. He then Anglicised his name to Vernon Ingram.

#17628

Thomas Henzinger

#17639

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Thomas Henzinger is an Austrian computer scientist, researcher, and former president of the Institute of Science and Technology, Austria. Early life and education Henzinger was born in Austria. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science from Johannes Kepler University Linz, and his PhD from Stanford University in 1991, advised by Zohar Manna. He is married to Monika Henzinger and has three children.

#17629

Michael C. McFarland

#17640

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Michael C. McFarland, S.J. was the 31st president of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He succeeded Acting President Frank Vellaccio on July 1, 2000, and was succeeded by Rev. Philip Boroughs, S.J.

#17630

Ann Compton

#17641

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Ann Compton is an American former news reporter and White House correspondent for ABC News Radio. Career highlights Ann Compton graduated from New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1965. She began her broadcasting career in Virginia, where an internship during her junior year at Hollins College led to a full-time job as the first woman reporting for WDBJ TV, a CBS affiliate in Roanoke. She established a State Capitol Bureau in Richmond for the station. In 1973, ABC News hired her and she reported from New York City until December 1974, when she was assigned to the White House.

#17631

Valeria Vegh Weis

Valeria Vegh Weis

#17642

Overall Influence

Valeria Vegh Weis is an Argentinean-German Author. She specializes in criminology, criminal law, international criminal law and transitional justice. Vegh Weis is a Research Fellow at Konstanz Universität Zukunftskolleg, where she focuses on the role of victims organizations to confront state crimes. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Buenos Aires University and Quilmes National University. She is the Vice President of the Instituto Latinoamericano de Criminología y Desarrollo Social . Vegh Weis won several awards, including the Critical Criminology of the Year Award by the American Society ...

#17632

Edward L. Kaplan

#17643

Overall Influence

1920 - 2006 (86 years)

Edward Lynn Kaplan was a mathematician most famous for the Kaplan–Meier estimator, developed together with Paul Meier. Biography Edward Lynn Kaplan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 11, 1920. His parents were Eugene V. Kaplan and Frances Rhodes Kaplan . He graduated from Swissvale High School in Swissvale, Pennsylvania, in 1937. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1937 to 1941 and graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1941. Three times—in 1939, 1940, and 1941—he was one of the five honorees in the nationwide William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition conducted by the American Mathematical Association.

#17633

Dieter Enders

#17644

Overall Influence

1946 - 2019 (73 years)

Dieter Enders was a German organic chemist who did work developing asymmetric synthesis, in particular using modified prolines as chiral auxiliaries. The most widely applied of his chiral auxiliaries are the complementary SAMP and RAMP auxiliaries, which allow for asymmetric alpha-alkylation of aldehydes and ketones. In 1974 he obtained his doctorate from the University of Gießen studying under Dieter Seebach and followed this with a postdoc at Harvard University studying with Elias James Corey. He then moved back to Gießen to obtain his Habilitation in 1979, whereupon he became a lecturer, soon obtaining Professorship in 1980 as Professor of Organic Chemistry at Bonn.

#17634

David Lordkipanidze

David Lordkipanidze

#17645

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

David Otaris dze Lordkipanidze is a Georgian anthropologist and archaeologist, Professor , Dr.Sc. , Corresponding Member of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences , since 2004 General Director of the Georgian National Museum . He is a son of the archaeologist Otar Lordkipanidze.

#17635

Peter York

#17646

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Peter York is a British management consultant, author and broadcaster best known for writing Harpers & Queen's The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook with Ann Barr. He has worked as a columnist for The Independent on Sunday, GQ and Management Today, and Associate of the media, analysis and networking organisation Editorial Intelligence.

#17636

Vladimir Turaev

#17647

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Vladimir Georgievich Turaev is a Russian mathematician, specializing in topology. Turaev received in 1979 from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics his Candidate of Sciences degree under Oleg Viro. Turaev was a professor at the University of Strasbourg and then became a professor at Indiana University. In 2016 he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

#17637

Susan Collins

#17648

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Susan Margaret Collins is an American politician serving as the senior United States senator for Maine. A member of the Republican Party, she has held her seat since 1997 and is Maine's longest-serving senator.

#17638

Nonie Darwish

#17649

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Nonie Darwish is an Egyptian-American writer, founder of Arabs for Israel movement, and is Director of Former Muslims United. Darwish is an outspoken critic of Islam. The Southern Poverty Law Center has described her as an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim activist.

#17639

Francis Xavier Clooney

Francis Xavier Clooney

#17650

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Francis Xavier Clooney is an American Jesuit priest and scholar in the teachings of Hinduism. He is currently a professor at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Career A native of Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from the prestigious Regis High School in Manhattan and entered the novitiate of Society of Jesus in 1968 and was subsequently ordained in 1978. Following that, he earned his bachelor's degree at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York.

#17640

Louann Brizendine

Louann Brizendine

#17651

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Louann Brizendine is an American scientist, a neuropsychiatrist who is both a researcher and a clinician and professor at the University of California, San Francisco . She is the author of three books: The Female Brain , The Male Brain , and The Upgrade .

#17641

John Toland

#17652

Overall Influence

1912 - 2004 (92 years)

John Willard Toland was an American writer and historian. He is best known for a biography of Adolf Hitler and a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of World War II-era Japan, The Rising Sun. Biography Toland was born in 1912 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1932 and from Williams College in 1936 and attended the Yale School of Drama for a time. His original goal was to become a playwright. In the summers between college years, he traveled with hobos and wrote several plays with hobos as central characters, none of which were performed. He reca...

#17642

Norris J. Lacy

#17653

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Norris J. Lacy is an American scholar focusing on French medieval literature. He was the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor Emeritus of French and Medieval Studies at the Pennsylvania State University until his retirement in 2012, a position he had held since 1998. He is a leading expert on the Arthurian legend and has written and edited numerous books, papers, and articles on the topic. In 2014 the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch, presented him an award for Lifetime Service to Arthurian Studies.

#17643

Thomas LaMarre

#17654

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Thomas Mark Lamarre is an American-Canadian academic, author, Japanologist and professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. Education LaMarre was awarded a bachelor's degree in Biology in 1981 at Georgetown University. He continued his studies in science and the Université de la Méditerranée Aix-Marseille II in France, earning a Master's equivalent degree in Oceanology in 1982, and a doctorate equivalent in Oceanology in 1985.

#17644

Robert W. Lucky

Robert W. Lucky

#17655

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Robert Wendell Lucky was an electrical engineer, inventor, and research manager at Bell Labs and Bell Communications Research . He is best known for his writings and speeches about technology, society, and engineering culture. Bob is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is also a member of TTI/Vanguard's advisory board.

#17645

Fred Basolo

#17656

Overall Influence

1920 - 2007 (87 years)

Fred Basolo was an American inorganic chemist. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1943, under Prof. John C. Bailar, Jr. Basolo spent his professional career at Northwestern University. He was a prolific contributor to the fields of coordination chemistry, organometallic, and bioinorganic chemistry, publishing over 400 papers. He supervised many Ph.D. students. With colleague Ralph Pearson, he co-authored the influential monograph "Mechanisms of Inorganic Reactions", which illuminated the importance of mechanisms involving coordination compounds. This w...

#17646

Ascher H. Shapiro

#17657

Overall Influence

1916 - 2004 (88 years)

Ascher Herman Shapiro was a professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He grew up in New York City. Early life and education Shapiro was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish Lithuanian immigrant parents. He earned his S.B. in 1938 and an Sc.D. in 1946 in the field of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

#17647

Ramón Xirau

#17658

Overall Influence

1924 - 2017 (93 years)

Ramón Xirau Subías was a Spanish-born Mexican poet, philosopher and literary critic. In 1939, as the Spanish civil war was coming to an end, Xirau emigrated to Mexico where he obtained Mexican citizenship in 1955. He obtained a Master's Degree in philosophy at the UNAM and an honorary doctorate from the Universidad de las Américas. He was a research faculty member of the UNAM y and the National System of Researchers. At the UNAM he taught at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature and did research at the Institute of Philosophy Research. He was a member of the Colegio Nacional since 1973.

#17648

Kenneth H. Keller

#17659

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Kenneth Harrison Keller is professor emeritus and former president of the University of Minnesota . He was the first Jewish president of the university. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2002.

#17649

Walter V. Robinson

#17660

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Walter V. Robinson is an American investigative reporter serving as editor-at-large at The Boston Globe, where he has worked as reporter and editor for 34 years. From 2007 to 2014, he was a distinguished professor of journalism at the Northeastern University School of Journalism. Robinson is the Donald W. Reynolds Visiting Professor of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and a professor of practice at the Northeastern University School of Journalism. He has reported for the Globe from 48 states and more than 30 countries.

#17650

Aidan Nichols

#17661

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

John Christopher "Aidan" Nichols is an English academic and Catholic priest. Nichols served as the first John Paul II Memorial Visiting Lecturer at the University of Oxford for 2006 to 2008, the first lectureship of Catholic theology at that university since the Protestant Reformation. He is a member of the Order of Preachers residing in the Priory of St Michael the Archangel in Cambridge, England.

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