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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List of the most influential people

#17651

Robert Fogelin

#17662

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

Robert John Fogelin was an American philosopher, and advocate and leading scholar of modern Pyrrhonism. He was a professor of philosophy and Sherman Fairchild Professor in the humanities at Dartmouth College where he had taught since 1980. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

#17652

Jorge Giordani

#17663

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Jorge Antonio Giordani Cordero is a Venezuelan politician and Marxian economist. Early life and education Jorge Giordani was born on June 30, 1940, in the city of San Francisco de Macorís in the Dominican Republic. His parents were both immigrants; his father from Italy and his mother from Spain. Both had left Europe in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, in which Jorge's father had fought on the Republican side as part of the Garibaldi Battalion. In 1942, Jorge and his family moved to Caracas, Venezuela. Jorge and his mother became naturalised citizens of the country, while his father retained his Italian citizenship.

#17653

Geraldine Ferraro

#17664

Overall Influence

1935 - 2011 (76 years)

Geraldine Anne Ferraro was an American politician, diplomat, and attorney. She served in the United States House of Representatives from 1979 to 1985, and was the Democratic Party's vice presidential nominee in the 1984 presidential election, running alongside Walter Mondale; this made her the first female vice-presidential nominee representing a major American political party. She was also a journalist, author, and businesswoman.

#17654

Joybrato Mukherjee

Joybrato Mukherjee

#17665

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Joybrato Mukherjee is a German professor of English Linguistics and the president of the University of Giessen. When he took office in 2009, he was the youngest university president ever appointed in Germany. In June 2019, he was elected president of the German Academic Exchange Service ; he took office on 1 January 2020.

#17655

Emo Welzl

#17666

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Emmerich Welzl is a computer scientist known for his research in computational geometry. He is a professor in the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Biography Welzl was born on 4 August 1958 in Linz, Austria. He studied at the Graz University of Technology receiving a Diplom in Applied Mathematics in 1981 and a doctorate in 1983 under the supervision of Hermann Maurer. Following postdoctoral studies at Leiden University, he became a professor at the Free University of Berlin in 1987 at age 28 and was the youngest professor in Germany. Since 1996 he has b...

#17656

Hellmuth Karasek

Hellmuth Karasek

#17667

Overall Influence

1934 - 2015 (81 years)

Hellmuth Karasek was a German journalist, literary critic, novelist, and the author of many books on literature and film. He was one of Germany's best-known feuilletonists. Biography Karasek was born in the capital city of Moravia, Brno , which was then a part of Czechoslovakia . Karasek attended the National Political Institutes of Education in Loben. In 1944, when he was ten, his family fled from Bielitz in the neighbouring German region of Silesia to Bernburg in Saxony-Anhalt. After finishing his schooling in the early 1950s he moved from there—then part of East Germany—to West Germany an...

#17657

Moti Bodek

#17668

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Moti Bodek is an Israeli architect. He is the CEO of Bodek Architects based in Tel Aviv and a Professor of Architecture at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem & at Tel Aviv University. Biography Moti Bodek was born and grew up in Haifa. He served in the Israeli security forces from 1979 to 1985. In 1989 he graduated with honors from the department of Environmental Design at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem, and in 1990 he earned his B.Arch. degree from the Faculty of Architecture in the Technion, Haifa.

#17658

Mem Fox

#17669

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Merrion Frances Fox AM is an Australian writer of children's books and an educationalist specialising in literacy. Fox has been semi-retired since 1996, but she still gives seminars and lives in Adelaide, South Australia.

#17659

Martin Albrow

#17670

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Martin Albrow is a British sociologist, noted for his works on globalization, the theory of the global age and global civil society. He was appointed in 1963 as the first full-time sociologist at Reading University, and subsequently worked at University College Cardiff, where he was Head of Department, and at Roehampton University. He has also held visiting or guest positions at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the London School of Economics, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the Beijing Foreign Studies University, and the University of Bonn.

#17660

JoAnne Yates

#17671

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

JoAnne Yates Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management, Emerita at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has worked at the intersection of organization studies and information technology. She has contributed to a number of fields including organizational theory, rhetoric and writing studies, genre theory, business history, archival studies, history of computing, and standardization.

#17661

Manuel Zelaya

#17672

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

José Manuel Zelaya Rosales is a Honduran politician who was President of Honduras from 27 January 2006 until his forcible removal in the 2009 coup d'état, and who since January 2022 serves as the first First Gentleman of Honduras. He is the eldest son of a wealthy businessman, and inherited his father's nickname "Mel". Before entering politics he was involved in his family's logging and timber businesses.

#17662

Bartolomé Bennassar

Bartolomé Bennassar

#17673

Overall Influence

1929 - 2018 (89 years)

Bartolomé Bennassar was a French historian and writer. He specialized in Spanish and Latin American history. Career Bennassar began as a history professor in 1952, and defended his thesis in 1957. He was a Professor Emeritus at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, specializing in contemporary history of Spain and Latin America, as well as the 16th and 17th centuries. He was also a renowned critic of bullfighting.

#17663

Karen Hunter

#17674

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Karen Hunter is an American journalist and publisher, talk show host, and the co-author of several books. Hunter is the host of The Karen Hunter Show on SiriusXM Urban View. Early life and education Born and raised in East Orange, New Jersey, Hunter graduated from Marylawn of the Oranges High School in 1983 and received a B.A. in English literature from Drew University in 1987.

#17664

Alexis McGill Johnson

#17675

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Lori Alexis McGill Johnson is an American academic and social justice advocate. She is the President and CEO of Planned Parenthood. Early life and education McGill Johnson was born in New York City in 1972 and raised by her mother and father. Her mother worked her way up from a secretary to an executive-level position at AT&T. McGill Johnson's childhood was strongly influenced by her parents' pride in black culture.

#17665

Laura Danly

#17676

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Laura Danly is an American astronomer and academic who served as Curator of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. She has also served as chair of the Department of Space Sciences at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

#17666

Richard Donner

#17677

Overall Influence

1930 - 2021 (91 years)

Richard Donner was an American filmmaker and film producer. He directed several financially successful films during the New Hollywood period. Michael Barson, Senior Publicist for Putnam, author of over ten books, wrote, Donner was "one of Hollywood's most reliable makers of action blockbusters." This 50 year career crossed genres and influenced trends among film makers.

#17667

Kelsey Grammer

#17678

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Allen Kelsey Grammer is an American actor. He gained fame for his role as psychiatrist Dr. Frasier Crane on the NBC sitcom Cheers and its spin-off Frasier . At nearly 20 years on-air, this is one of the longest-running roles played by a single live-action actor in television history. He has received numerous accolades including a total of six Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Tony Award. He was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2000.

#17668

Stephen Schneider

Stephen Schneider

#17679

Overall Influence

1945 - 2010 (65 years)

Stephen Henry Schneider was Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University, a Co-Director at the Center for Environment Science and Policy of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Senior Fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Schneider served as a consultant to federal agencies and White House staff in the Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

#17669

Peter Todd

#17680

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Peter Todd is a Canadian professor and academic administrator. He was the dean of McGill University's Desautels Faculty of Management from 2005 to 2014. From July 2015 to October 2020, he has served as the director of HEC Paris.

#17670

Andrew Koppelman

#17681

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Andrew Koppelman is the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law and professor of political science at Northwestern University. He is the recipient of the 2015 Walder Award for Research Excellence. The main focus of his research is on the intersection of law and political philosophy.

#17671

Pierangelo Garegnani

#17682

Overall Influence

1930 - 2011 (81 years)

Pierangelo Garegnani was an Italian economist and professor of the University of Rome III. He was the director of the Fondazione Centro Piero Sraffa di Studi e Documenti at the Federico Caffè School of Economics, and also the literary executor of the works, documents and papers left by the Italian economist Piero Sraffa to the University of Cambridge's Wren Library.

#17672

Melissa Bowerman

#17683

Overall Influence

1942 - 2011 (69 years)

Melissa Bowerman was a leading researcher in the area of language acquisition. From 1982-2007, she was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Education and career In 1971, Bowerman earned her PhD in social psychology from Harvard University, where she studied under Roger Brown. She held positions at the University of Kansas from 1970 until 1982, when she joined the Max Planck Institute.

#17673

Peter Doherty

#17684

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Peter Charles Doherty is an Australian immunologist and Nobel laureate. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1995, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Rolf M. Zinkernagel in 1996 and was named Australian of the Year in 1997. In the Australia Day Honours of 1997, he was named a Companion of the Order of Australia for his work with Zinkernagel. He is also a National Trust Australian Living Treasure. In 2009 as part of the Q150 celebrations, Doherty's immune system research was announced as one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland for its role as an ic...

#17674

Abe Gelbart

#17685

Overall Influence

1911 - 1994 (83 years)

Abraham Markham Gelbart was an American mathematician, the founding dean of the Belfer Graduate School of Science at Yeshiva University and the namesake of the International Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel.

#17675

Harry Callahan

#17686

Overall Influence

1912 - 1999 (87 years)

Harry Morey Callahan was an American photographer and educator. He taught at both the Institute of Design in Chicago and the Rhode Island School of Design. Callahan's first solo exhibition was at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1951. He had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976/1977. Callahan was a recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal and the National Medal of Arts. He represented the United States in the Venice Biennale in 1978.

#17676

Marcello Barbieri

Marcello Barbieri

#17687

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Marcello Barbieri is an Italian theoretical biologist at the University of Ferrara whose main interest is the origin of novelties in macroevolution. He has been one of founders and first editor-in-chief of the journal Biosemiotics until 2012; currently, he is an editor of the journal BioSystems. His research field is code biology, the study of all codes of life from the genetic code to the codes of culture. His major books are The Semantic Theory of Evolution , The Organic Codes , and Code Biology. A New Science of Life .

#17677

Miller Williams

Miller Williams

#17688

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Stanley Miller Williams was an American contemporary poet, as well as a university professor, translator and editor. He produced over 25 books and won several awards for his poetry. His accomplishments were chronicled in Arkansas Biography. Williams was chosen to read a poem at the second inauguration of Bill Clinton. One of his best-known poems is "The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina." He was the father of American singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams.

#17678

Pierre Bec

#17689

Overall Influence

1921 - 2014 (93 years)

Pierre Bec was a French Occitan-language poet and linguist. Born in Paris, he spent his childhood in Comminges, where he learnt Occitan. He was deported to Germany between 1943 and 1945. After returning, he studied in Paris, where he graduated in 1959. He was one of the founders of the IEO or Institut d'Estudis Occitans as well as its president from 1962 to 1980.

#17679

Meredith Kline

#17690

Overall Influence

1922 - 2007 (85 years)

Meredith George Kline was an American theologian and Old Testament scholar. He also had degrees in Assyriology and Egyptology. Academic career Kline received his AB from Gordon College, Th.B. and Th.M. from Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and PhD in Assyriology and Egyptology from Dropsie College. He enjoyed a long and fruitful professorial career spanning five decades and two coasts, teaching Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary , Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary , the Claremont School of Theology , Reformed Theological Seminary , and Westminster Seminary California .

#17680

Wayne Andre

#17691

Overall Influence

1931 - 2003 (72 years)

Wayne Andre was an American jazz trombonist, best known for his work as a session musician. Andre's father was a saxophonist, and he took private music lessons from age 15. He played with Charlie Spivak in the early 1950s before spending some time in the U.S. Air Force. In 1955 he joined the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra, and in 1956 played with Woody Herman. From 1956 to 1958 he played with Kai Winding and attended the Manhattan School of Music. He composed his "Nutcracker" and arranged "The Preacher" for the Kai Winding septet while performing with the septet. In the 1960s, he performed with Ge...

#17681

Rudy Tomjanovich

Rudy Tomjanovich

#17692

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Rudolph Tomjanovich Jr. is an American former professional basketball player and coach was a consultant for the Minnesota Timberwolves of the National Basketball Association He was a consultant for the Los Angeles Lakers for 14 years.

#17682

W. Kip Viscusi

#17693

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

William Viscusi is an American economist whose primary fields of research are the economics of risk and uncertainty, risk and environmental regulation, behavioral economics, and law and economics. Viscusi is the University Distinguished Professor of Law, Economics, and Management at Vanderbilt Law School where he and his wife, Joni Hersch, are the founders and co-directors of the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics. Prior to his appointment at Vanderbilt, Viscusi was the first John F. Cogan, Jr. Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School and Director of the Harvard Program on Empirical Legal Studies.

#17683

Adam Morton

#17694

Overall Influence

1945 - 2020 (75 years)

Adam Morton was a Canadian philosopher. Morton's work focused on how we understand one another's behaviour in everyday life, with an emphasis on the role mutual intelligibility plays in cooperative activity. He also wrote on ethics, decision-making, philosophy of language and epistemology. His later work concerned our vocabulary for evaluating and monitoring our thinking. Morton was Professor of Philosophy from 1980 to 2000 at the University of Bristol in the UK and finished his academic career at the University of British Columbia. He was president of the Aristotelian Society during 1998–19...

#17684

Donald J. Newman

#17695

Overall Influence

1930 - 2007 (77 years)

Donald Joseph Newman was an American mathematician. He gave simple proofs of the prime number theorem and the Hardy-Ramanujan partition formula. He excelled on multiple occasions at the annual Putnam competition while studying at City College of New York and New York University, and later received his PhD from Harvard University in 1953.

#17685

Kai T. Erikson

#17696

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Kai Theodor Erikson is an Austrian-born American sociologist, noted as an authority on the social consequences of catastrophic events. He served as the 76th president of the American Sociological Association.

#17686

Ramesh K. Agarwal

Ramesh K. Agarwal

#17697

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Ramesh K. Agarwal is the William Palm Professor of Engineering in the department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He is also the director of Aerospace Engineering Program, Aerospace Research and Education Center and Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at WUSTL. From 1994 to 1996, he was the Sam Bloomfield Distinguished Professor and Chair of Aerospace Engineering department at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas. From 1996 to 2001, he was the Bloomfield Distinguished Professor and the executive director of the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University.

#17687

Ferdinand Freudenstein

#17698

Overall Influence

1926 - 2006 (80 years)

Ferdinand Freudenstein was an American physicist and engineer known as the "Father of Modern Kinematics." Freudenstein applied digital computation to the kinematic synthesis of mechanismss. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he developed what became known as the Freudenstein equation, which uses a simple algebraic method to synthesize planar four-bar function generators.

#17688

Makoto Asashima

#17699

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

is a Japanese developmental biologist known for his pioneer research on Activin. He is Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo and Yokohama City University. He is also Vice President of the Tokyo University of Science.

#17689

David Zarefsky

#17700

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

David H. Zarefsky is an American communication scholar with research specialties in rhetorical history and criticism. He is professor emeritus at Northwestern University. He is a past president of the National Communication Association and the Rhetoric Society of America. Among his publications are six books and over 70 scholarly articles concerned with American public discourse , argumentation, rhetorical criticism, and public speaking are books on the Lincoln-Douglas debates and on the rhetoric of the war on poverty during the Johnson administration. His lectures on argumentation and rhet...

#17690

Ungku Abdul Aziz

Ungku Abdul Aziz

#17701

Overall Influence

1922 - 2020 (98 years)

Ungku Abdul Aziz bin Ungku Abdul Hamid was a Malaysian economist and lecturer. He was the 3rd Vice-Chancellor of the University of Malaya from 1968 to 1988 and the 1st General Director of the Council on Language and Literature of Malaysia from 1956 until 1957. He was awarded the title of Royal Professor in 1978.

#17691

Mizuko Ito

#17702

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Mizuko Itō , sometimes known as Mimi Ito, is a Japanese cultural anthropologist. She is Professor in Residence and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chair in Digital Media and Learning, and Director of the Connected Learning Lab in the Department of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her main professional interest is young people's use of media technology. She has explored the ways in which digital media are changing relationships, identities, and communities.

#17692

William Barber II

#17703

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

William J. Barber II is an American Protestant minister, social activist, professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy and founding director of the Center for Public Theology & Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He is the president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival. He also serves as a member of the national board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and is the chair of its legislative political action committee. From 2006 to 2017, Barber served as p...

#17693

Michael Quinn Patton

#17704

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Michael Quinn Patton is an independent organizational development and program evaluation consultant, and former president of the American Evaluation Association. He is the founder and director of Utilization-Focused Evaluation.

#17694

Jinyoung Park

#17705

Overall Influence

Jinyoung Park is a South Korean mathematician at Stanford University working in combinatorics and graph theory. In 2022, she released a preprint containing a 6-page proposed proof of the Kahn–Kalai conjecture with Huy Tuan Pham.

#17695

Isaac Kramnick

#17706

Overall Influence

1938 - 2019 (81 years)

Isaac Kramnick was an American political theorist, historian of political thought, political scientist, and the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government at Cornell University. He was a subject-matter expert on English and American political thought and history.

#17696

Timothy Gantz

#17707

Overall Influence

1945 - 2004 (59 years)

Timothy Nolan Gantz was an American classical scholar and the author of Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources. Education Gantz received his Bachelor of Arts from Haverford College in 1967, and his Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University in 1970.

#17697

Peter Linebaugh

#17708

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Peter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labour history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic. He is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.

#17698

Anil Kapoor

#17709

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Anil Kapoor is an Indian actor and producer who works primarily in Hindi films, besides television and international films. In a career spanning over 40 years as an actor and since 2005 as a producer, Kapoor has appeared in more than 100 films. Recognised for multiple iconic, popular and cult films, he has received several accolades including two National Film Awards and seven Filmfare Awards.

#17699

Darrin McMahon

#17710

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Darrin M. McMahon is a historian, author, public speaker, and currently a professor of history at Dartmouth College, where he is Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History. Prior to joining the Dartmouth Faculty, he was Ben Weider Professor and distinguished research professor at Florida State University.

#17700

Abdul Mannan Choudhury

Abdul Mannan Choudhury

#17711

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Abdul Mannan Choudhury is a Bangladeshi academic, educationist and freedom fighter of the liberation war 1971 of Bangladesh. He is currently the Vice-Chancellor of the World University of Bangladeshand Professor Emeritus. He was formerly a professor and a selection grade professor at the University of Dhaka.He is also one of the Advisors of the National Council for Freedom Fighters, President of Bangamata Sheikh Fazilatun Nesa Mujib Parishad & Swadinata Shikkoh Parishad, Honorary Fellow of Bangla Academy and winner of several gold medals for education, administrative and war of liberation. O...

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