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).
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List of the most influential people
#17801
Agnès Varda
#17812
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Agnès Varda was a Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter, photographer, and artist. Her pioneering work was central to the development of the widely influential French New Wave film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Her films focused on achieving documentary realism, addressing women's issues, and other social commentary, with a distinctive experimental style.
Go to Profile#17802
Vittore Branca
#17813
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Vittore Branca was a philologist, literary critic, and Italian academic. He was a professor emeritus of Italian literature at the University of Padua until his death in 2004, and one of the most acclaimed contemporary scholars of Italian author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio.
Go to Profile#17803
Ida Altman
#17814
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ida Louise Altman is an American historian of early modern Spain and Latin America. Her book Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century received the 1990 Herbert E. Bolton Prize of the Conference on Latin American History. She is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Florida and served as Department Chair.
Go to Profile#17804
Yiorgos Veltsos
#17815
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Yiorgos Veltsos is a Greek philosopher, author, poet, and former academic professor. Biography Veltsos was born in Athens, Greece. He studied Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and received his doctoral degree in Political Sociology from the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis. From 1975 onward, Veltsos taught communication theory at the Panteion University in Athens, where he became associate professor in 1980, and professor of Sociology in 1985.
Go to Profile#17805
Monroe D. Donsker
#17816
Overall Influence
1924 - 1991 (67 years)
Monroe David Donsker was an American mathematician and a professor of mathematics at New York University . His research interest was probability theory. Education and career Donsker was born in Burlington, Iowa. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Minnesota in 1948 under the supervision of Robert Horton Cameron. He became a professor at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1962, about a year before his frequent co-author S.R.S. Varadhan started working there. Before joining NYU, Donsker taught at Cornell University and the University of Minnesota. His doctoral students include Glen E.
Go to Profile#17806
Rebecca MacKinnon
#17817
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Rebecca MacKinnon is an author, researcher, Internet freedom advocate, and co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices. She is notable as a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. She is on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative the founding director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, and is the Vice President for Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Go to Profile#17807
Rodolfo Sacco
#17818
Overall Influence
1923 - 2022 (99 years)
Rodolfo Sacco was an Italian legal scholar. Biography Born in Fossano, Italy, he was professor emeritus at the University of Turin, Faculty of Law. He is arguably one of the country's best known legal scholars and one of Europe's most famous comparative lawyers.
Go to Profile#17808
Pierre Dusart
#17819
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Pierre Dusart is a French mathematician at the Université de Limoges who specializes in number theory. He has published in several countries, specially in South Korea, with his colleague Damien Sauveron who is associate professor in Computer Sciences at the Université de Limoges.
Go to Profile#17809
Romeo Ortega
#17820
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Romeo Ortega, born in Mexico, is a Mexican-French control scientist and distinguished professor. He is head of the Adaptive and Nonlinear Control Systems Lab in St. Petersburg, Russia and full-professor at the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology in Mexico City.
Go to Profile#17810
Alissa Quart
#17821
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Alissa Quart is an American nonfiction writer, critic, journalist, editor, and poet. Her nonfiction books are Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels , Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child , Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers , Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America , and Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream ; her poetry books are Monetized and Thoughts and Prayers .
Go to Profile#17811
Eli Hirsch
#17822
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Eli Hirsch is an American philosopher and the Charles Goldman Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University. He is best known for his work in meta-ontology. He coined the phrase "soft ontology" and has authored over 70 books and papers. Many of his books deal with objections to ontology based upon common sense and that most disputes involving metaphysical objects revolve around linguistics and are merely verbal in nature. Among his books are "Against Revisionary Ontology" and "Physical-Object Ontology, Verbal Disputes, and Common Sense" .
Go to Profile#17812
Robert Pastor
#17823
Overall Influence
1947 - 2014 (67 years)
Robert Alan Pastor was a member of the National Security Council staff and a writer on foreign affairs. Education Pastor earned his bachelor's degree in history from Lafayette College and a Masters of Public Administration and Policy , with a concentration in International Economics from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He also holds a PhD from Harvard in the field of political science. He served in the US Peace Corps in Malaysia where he learned Malay/Indonesian. He also was a Fulbright Professor at El Colegio de México in Mexico where he taught courses on U.S....
Go to Profile#17813
Robert C. Koons
#17824
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Robert Charles Koons is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas , noted for his contribution to metaphysics and philosophical logic. Koons has also advocated for academic freedom and courses on Western civilization.
Go to Profile#17814
Ulus Baker
#17825
Overall Influence
1960 - 2007 (47 years)
Ulus Sedat Baker was a Turkish Cypriot sociologist. Biography Baker was born on July 14, 1960, in Ankara, Turkey. He was born to a cosmopolitan family; his mother was the Cypriot poet Pembe Marmara, and his father was the prominent psychiatrist of the island, Sedat Baker. Baker studied in the Soviet Union, Turkey, France, and Cyprus. He completed his studies at the Department of Sociology in METU in Ankara and began his academic life in the same institution shortly thereafter. He was a very productive intellectual and a prolific scholar; he had already become an influential public intellectual in Turkish cultural life beyond the academia by mid-nineties.
Go to Profile#17815
Jean-Louis Nicolas
#17826
Overall Influence
Jean-Louis Nicolas is a French number theorist. He is the namesake of the Erdős–Nicolas numbers, and was a frequent co-author of Erdős, who would take over the desk of Nicolas' wife Anne-Marie whenever he would visit. Nicolas is also known for his research on partitions, and for his unusual proof that there exist infinitely many n for which is Euler's totient function and γ is Euler's constant: he proved this bound unconditionally by providing two different proofs, one in the case that the Riemann hypothesis holds and another in the case that it fails.
Go to Profile#17816
Nur Masalha
#17827
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Nur ad-Din Masalha commonly known in English as Nur Masalha is a Palestinian writer, historian, and academic. He is a historian of Palestine and formerly professor of religion and politics and director of the Centre for Religion and History and the Holy Land Research Project at St. Mary's University. He was also programme director of the MA in religion, Politics and Conflict Resolution at St Mary's University .
Go to Profile#17817
Lisel Mueller
#17828
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Lisel Mueller was a German-born American poet, translator and academic teacher. Her family fled the Nazi regime, and she arrived in the U.S. in 1939 at the age of 15. She worked as a literary critic and taught at the University of Chicago, Elmhurst College and Goddard College. She began writing poetry in the 1950s and published her first collection in 1965, after years of self-study. She received awards including the National Book Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997, as the only German-born poet awarded that prize.
Go to Profile#17818
Walter Oi
#17829
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
Walter Yasuo Oi was the Elmer B. Milliman Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a distinguished fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, and a recipient of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. He is credited with providing the economic basis for a voluntary military and the elimination of a draft.
Go to Profile#17819
Lawrence Conrad
#17830
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Lawrence Irvin Conrad is a British historian and scholar of Oriental studies, specializing in Near Eastern studies and the history of medicine. He currently serves as historian for the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London.
Go to Profile#17820
Klaus Theweleit
#17831
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Klaus Theweleit is a German sociologist and writer. Life Theweleit was born in Ebenrode, East Prussia , the son of a railway company worker and a Jewish mother. He wrote the following about his father: "Above all he was a railroader, wholeheartedly, as he used to say, and then a human being. He was a rather good human being and a good fascist. His beatingss which he gave away abundantly and brutally as it was usual in his time and with the best of intentions were the first lessons I received on fascism, a fact I only later fully discovered."
Go to Profile#17822
Gerald Weissmann
#17833
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Gerald Weissmann was an Austrian-born American physician/scientist, editor, and essayist. He was Professor Emeritus and Research Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine. He was editor-in-chief of The FASEB Journal. At the time of his death he was its book review editor. In 1965, he was one of the discoverers of liposomes and is credited with coining that term.
Go to Profile#17823
Yan Lianke
#17834
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Yan Lianke is a Chinese writer of novels and short stories based in Beijing. His work is highly satirical, which has resulted in some of his most renowned works being banned in China. He has admitted to self-censorship while writing his stories in order to avoid censorship.
Go to Profile#17824
Robert J. Weber
#17835
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert J. Weber is the Frederic E. Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Decision Sciences at the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University. Biography Education Weber received his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1969 from Princeton University, and both his MS in 1972 and Ph.D. in 1974 in operations research from Cornell University.
Go to Profile#17825
Joseph A. Swanson
#17836
Overall Influence
Joseph A. Swanson is visiting scholar in finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management—where he was Professor of Finance from 1975 through 1986; Adjunct Professor of Finance, 1988-2007; Clinical Professor of Finance, 2007-2014. Since 2007 he has been the Board Chair of Jos. Swanson & Co., a Milwaukee-based management consulting firm.
Go to Profile#17826
Tom Holland
#17837
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Thomas Holland is an English author and popular historian who has published best-selling books on topics including classical and medieval history, and the origins of Islam. He has worked with the BBC to create and host historical television documentaries, and presented the radio series Making History. He co-hosts The Rest is History podcast.
Go to Profile#17827
Aleksandr Serebrov
#17838
Overall Influence
1944 - 2013 (69 years)
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Serebrov was a Soviet cosmonaut. He graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology , and was selected as a cosmonaut on 1 December 1978. He retired on 10 May 1995. He was married and had one child.
Go to Profile#17828
Jack Cohen
#17839
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Jack Cohen was a British reproductive biologist also known for his science books and involvement with science fiction. Life Cohen was born 19 September 1933 in Norwich, but grew up in Stoke Newington. His father was killed shortly after the end of the Second World War, 1 September 1945. His grandfather was a rabbi and Cohen was an observant Jew in his youth. He continued to attend the synagogue for cultural reasons. He was married three times, and had six children.
Go to Profile#17829
Barry Levinson
#17840
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Barry Lee Levinson is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. His best-known works are mid-budget comedy drama and drama filmss such as Diner , The Natural , Good Morning, Vietnam , Bugsy , and Wag the Dog . Levinson won the Academy Award for Best Director for Rain Man . In 2021, he co-executive produced the Hulu miniseries Dopesick and directed the first two episodes.
Go to Profile#17830
Fred Van Oystaeyen
#17841
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Fred Van Oystaeyen , also Freddy van Oystaeyen, is a mathematician and emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Antwerp. He has pioneered work on noncommutative geometry, in particular noncommutative algebraic geometry.
Go to Profile#17831
Rasheed Wallace
#17842
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Rasheed Abdul Wallace is an American basketball coach and former professional player. A native of Philadelphia, Wallace played college basketball at the University of North Carolina before declaring for the draft in 1995. He played 16 seasons in the National Basketball Association .
Go to Profile#17832
Richard D. Gitlin
#17843
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Richard D. Gitlin is an electrical engineer, inventor, research executive, and academic whose principal places of employment were Bell Labs and the University of South Florida . He is known for his work on digital subscriber line , multi-code CDMA, and smart MIMO antenna technology all while at Bell Labs.
Go to Profile#17833
Les Paul
#17844
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
Lester William Polsfuss , known as Les Paul, was an American jazz, country, and blues guitarist, songwriter, luthier, and inventor. He was one of the pioneers of the solid-body electric guitar, and his prototype, called the Log, served as inspiration for the Gibson Les Paul. Paul taught himself how to play guitar, and while he is mainly known for jazz and popular music, he had an early career in country music. In the 1950s, he and his wife, singer and guitarist Mary Ford, recorded numerous records, selling millions of copies.
Go to Profile#17834
Mark Horowitz
#17845
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mark A. Horowitz is an American electrical engineer, computer scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur who is the Yahoo! Founders Professor in the School of Engineering and the Fortinet Founders Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He holds a joint appointment in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments and previously served as the Chair of the Electrical Engineering department from 2008 to 2012. He is a co-founder of Rambus Inc., now a technology licensing company. Horowitz has authored over 700 published conference and research papers and is among the most highly-cited computer architects of all time.
Go to Profile#17835
Stephen Raudenbush
#17846
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Stephen Webb Raudenbush is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Sociology and Chairman of the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. He is best known for his development and application of hierarchical linear models in the field of education but he has also published on other subjects such as health and crime. Hierarchical linear models, which go by many other names, are used to study many natural processes. To use an example from education, a three level hierarchical model might account for the fact that students are nested in classrooms which are nested in schools. With the rig...
Go to Profile#17836
Elif Batuman
#17847
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Elif Batuman is an American author, academic, and journalist. She is the author of three books: a memoir, The Possessed, and the novels The Idiot, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Either/Or. Batuman is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Go to Profile#17837
Cal Newport
#17848
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Calvin C. Newport is an American nonfiction author and associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University. Background and education Newport completed his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College in 2004 and received a Ph.D. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 under Nancy Lynch. He was a post-doctoral associate in the MIT computer science department from 2009-2011. His grandfather, John Newport, was a Baptist minister and theologian.
Go to Profile#17838
Michael Shanks
#17849
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Michael Shanks is a British archaeologist specialising in classical archaeology and archaeological theory. He received his BA, MA and PhD from Cambridge University, and was a lecturer at the University of Wales, Lampeter before moving to the U.S. in 1999 to take up a Chair in Classics at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#17839
Kevin Love
#17850
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Kevin Wesley Love is an American professional basketball player for the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association . He is a five-time All-Star and a two-time member of the All-NBA Second Team and won an NBA championship with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016. He was also a member of the gold medal-winning United States national team at the 2010 FIBA World Championship and the 2012 Summer Olympics. In 2011, Love won the NBA Most Improved Player Award and led the league in rebounding.
Go to Profile#17840
Mathieu Kérékou
#17851
Overall Influence
1933 - 2015 (82 years)
Mathieu Kérékou was a Beninese politician who served as president of the Peoples Republic of Benin from 1972 to 1991 and the Republic of Benin from 1996 to 2006. After seizing power in a military coup, he ruled the country for 19 years, for most of that time under an officially Marxist–Leninist ideology, before he was stripped of his powers by the National Conference of 1990. He was defeated in the 1991 presidential election but was returned to the presidency in the 1996 election and controversially re-elected in 2001.
Go to Profile#17841
Mike Holmgren
#17852
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Michael George Holmgren is an American former football coach and executive in the National Football League . He began his NFL career as a quarterbacks' coach and later as an offensive coordinator with the San Francisco 49ers, where they won Super Bowls XXIII and XXIV. He served as the head coach of the Green Bay Packers from 1992 to 1998, where he won Super Bowl XXXI, and of the Seattle Seahawks from 1999 to 2008. His last role in the NFL was as team president of the Cleveland Browns from 2010 to 2012. Prior to his career in the NFL, Holmgren coached football at the high school and collegiate...
Go to Profile#17842
Aníbal Quijano
#17853
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Aníbal Quijano was a Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed the concepts of "coloniality of power" and "coloniality of knowledge". His body of work has been influential in the fields of decolonial studies and critical theory.
Go to Profile#17843
Lorna Sage
#17854
Overall Influence
1943 - 2001 (58 years)
Lorna Sage was an English academic, literary critic and author, remembered especially for contributing to consideration of women's writing and for a memoir of her early life, Bad Blood . She taught English literature at the University of East Anglia.
Go to Profile#17844
Mark Jarzombek
#17855
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mark Jarzombek is a United States-born architectural historian, author and critic. Since 1995 he has taught and served within the History Theory Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture at MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
Go to Profile#17845
Hendrik Streeck
#17856
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Hendrik Streeck is a German researcher of human immunodeficiency virus, epidemiologist and clinical trialist. He is professor of virology and the director of the Institute of Virology and HIV Research at the University Bonn.
Go to Profile#17846
Antoine Griezmann
#17857
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Antoine Griezmann is a French professional footballer who plays as a forward for La Liga club Atlético Madrid and the France national team. Regarded as one of the greatest players of his generation, he is known for his versatility, attacking, passing and supportive defence, and has played as an attacking midfielder, winger, and striker in his career.
Go to Profile#17847
Brennan Manning
#17858
Overall Influence
1934 - 2013 (79 years)
Richard Francis Xavier Manning, known as Brennan Manning was an American author, laicized priest, and public speaker. He is best known for his bestselling book The Ragamuffin Gospel. Early life Manning was born in Depression-era Brooklyn, New York City, and was one of three children. After studying at St. John's University in Queens for two years, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and fought in the Korean War. After returning to the U.S., he studied journalism.
Go to Profile#17848
Matthias Jarke
#17859
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Matthias Jarke is a German computer scientist. Life and work After double master's degrees in computer science and business administration at the University of Hamburg, Germany, he received his doctorate in operations research there in 1980. In 1981 he joined the Stern School of Management at New York University as an Assistant Professor, where he received an early promotion to Associate Professor in 1983, and early tenure in 1985. In 1986 he returned to Germany as a full professor of dialog-oriented systems at the University of Passau, from where he moved to RWTH Aachen University as Professor of Information Systems in 1991.
Go to Profile#17849
Bruce Winick
#17860
Overall Influence
1944 - 2010 (66 years)
Bruce J. Winick was the Silvers-Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where he had taught since 1974. He was an internationally known scholar and lecturer in mental health law and in law and psychology. The co-founder of the school of social enquiry known as therapeutic jurisprudence, Winick is Director of the University of Miami School of Law’s recently established Therapeutic Jurisprudence Center. Winick also had a long career as a civil rights lawyer, and had served as an expert witness on a variety of law-related issues.
Go to Profile#17850
Peter Schröder
#17861
Overall Influence
Peter Schröder is an American computer scientist and a professor of computer science at California Institute of Technology. Schröder is known for his contributions to discrete differential geometry and digital geometry processing. He is also a world expert in the area of wavelet based methods for computer graphics. In 2015, Schröder was elected as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for "contributions to computer graphics and geometry processing.".
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