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
#17951
Todd Beamer
#17962
Overall Influence
1968 - 2001 (33 years)
Todd Morgan Beamer was an American passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which was hijacked and crashed as part of the September 11 attacks in 2001. He was one of the passengers who attempted to regain control of the aircraft from the hijackers. During the struggle, the Boeing 757 lost control and crashed into a field in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board, but saving the hijackers' intended target and additional victims.
Go to Profile#17952
Adrian Peterson
#17963
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Adrian Lewis Peterson is an American football running back who is a free agent. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest running backs in football history. He played college football at Oklahoma, where he set the freshman rushing record with 1,925 yards during the 2004 season. Named a unanimous All-American that year, he became the first freshman to finish as a runner-up in the Heisman Trophy balloting. Peterson finished his college football career as the Sooners' third all-time leading rusher.
Go to Profile#17953
Gabriel Ruhumbika
#17964
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Gabriel Ruhumbika is a Tanzanian born novelist, short story writer, translator and academic. His first novel, Village in Uhuru, was published in 1969. He has written several subsequent novels in Swahili. He has also taught literature at a number of universities, and, until his retirement in 2016, he was a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia in the USA.
Go to Profile#17954
Daniel Day-Lewis
#17965
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Sir Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis is an English retired actor. Often described as one of the greatest actors in the history of cinema, he received numerous accolades throughout his career which spanned over four decades, including three Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. In 2014, Day-Lewis received a knighthood for services to drama.
Go to Profile#17955
Prith Banerjee
#17966
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Prithviraj "Prith" Banerjee is an Indian American academic and computer scientist and is currently the Chief Technology Officer at ANSYS and board member at Cray and CUBIC. Previously, he was a Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry where he was responsible for IOT and Digital Transformation Advisory Services within the Global Industrial Practice. Before that he was the Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Schneider Electric. He was formerly a senior vice president of research at Hewlett Packard and director of HP Labs. Previously he was the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of ABB Group.
Go to Profile#17956
Ellen Burstyn
#17967
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Ellen Burstyn is an American actress. Known for her portrayals of complex women in dramas, she is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, a Tony Award, and two Primetime Emmy Awards, making her one of the few performers to achieve the "Triple Crown of Acting".
Go to Profile#17957
Dennis Assanis
#17968
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Dionissios N. "Dennis" Assanis is a Greek academic administrator, scientist, engineer and author. He is the 28th president of the University of Delaware, a position he has held since June 6, 2016. Biography Assanis was born and raised in Athens, Greece, Assanis earned his bachelor's degree in Marine Engineering from Newcastle University in England . At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he earned three master's degrees: Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering , Mechanical Engineering and Management . Also at MIT, he earned a Ph.D. in Power and Propulsion .
Go to Profile#17958
Paul Di Filippo
#17969
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Paul Di Filippo is an American science fiction writer. He is a regular reviewer for print magazines Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Interzone, and Nova Express, as well as online at Science Fiction Weekly. He is a member of the Turkey City Writer's Workshop. Along with Michael Bishop, Di Filippo has published a series of novels under the pseudonym Philip Lawson.
Go to Profile#17959
Ted Danson
#17970
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Edward Bridge "Ted" Danson III is an American actor. He achieved stardom playing the lead character Sam Malone on the NBC sitcom Cheers, for which he received two Primetime Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. He was nominated for more Emmy Awards for roles in the legal drama Damages and the NBC dramedy The Good Place . He was awarded a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.
Go to Profile#17960
Vamık Volkan
#17971
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Vamık D. Volkan, M.D., DFLAPA, FACPsa, is a Turkish Cypriot born American psychiatrist, internationally known for his 40 years work bringing together conflictual groups for dialogue and mutual understanding. Among his many other honours, he is the president emeritus of International Dialogue Initiative .
Go to Profile#17961
Jeremy Deller
#17972
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Jeremy Deller is an English conceptual, video and installation artist. Much of Deller's work is collaborative; it has a strong political aspect, in the subjects dealt with and also the devaluation of artistic ego through the involvement of other people in the creative process. He won the Turner Prize in 2004 and represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2013.
Go to Profile#17962
Susan Love
#17973
Overall Influence
1948 - 2023 (75 years)
Susan Margaret Love was an American surgeon, a prominent advocate of preventive breast cancer research, and author. She was regarded as one of the most respected women's health specialists in the United States. Love is best known for pioneering work fueled by her criticism of the medical establishment's paternalistic treatment of women. She was an early advocate of cancer surgery that conserves as much breast tissue as possible. She also was among the first to sound the alarm on the risks of routine hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women.
Go to Profile#17963
Bruce H. Mann
#17974
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Bruce Hartling Mann is an American legal scholar who is the Carl F. Schipper, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and husband of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. A legal historian, his research focuses on the relationship among legal, social, and economic change in early United States. He began teaching at Harvard Law School in 2006, after being the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Go to Profile#17964
James McGann
#17975
Overall Influence
1955 - 2021 (66 years)
James G. McGann was an American academic who was a Senior Lecturer in International Studies, Founder and Director of the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the Lauder Institute, University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was the author of numerous publications, including the renowned annual Global Go To Think Tank Index which ranks think tanks in all regions of the world. His most recent book was "Think Tanks: The New Knowledge and Policy Brokers in Asia" published by the Brookings Institution Press. Dr. McGann was most notable for his ...
Go to Profile#17965
Eleanor F. Helin
#17976
Overall Influence
1932 - 2009 (77 years)
Eleanor Francis "Glo" Helin was an American astronomer. She was principal investigator of the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Helin was a prolific discoverer of minor planets and several comets, including periodic comets 111P/Helin–Roman–Crockett, 117P/Helin–Roman–Alu and 132P/Helin–Roman–Alu. She is credited as the discoverer of the object now known as both asteroid 4015 Wilson–Harrington and comet 107P/Wilson–Harrington. Although Wilson and Harrington preceded her by some decades, their observations did not establish an orbit for the object, while her rediscovery did.
Go to Profile#17966
Wolfgang U. Dressler
#17977
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Wolfgang U. Dressler is an Austrian professor of linguistics at the University of Vienna. Dressler is a polyglot and scholar who has contributed to various fields of linguistics, especially phonology, morphology, text linguistics, clinical linguistics and child language development. He is an important representative of the 'naturalness theory'.
Go to Profile#17967
Alan Bovik
#17978
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
#17968
Maryna Poroshenko
#17979
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Maryna Anatoliivna Poroshenko is a Ukrainian cardiologist who was the First Lady of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019. She is married to former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. After her husband's presidency ended in 2019, Maryna was a local political candidate for elections in Kyiv.
Go to Profile#17969
Amnon Pazy
#17980
Overall Influence
1936 - 2006 (70 years)
Amnon Pazy, אמנון פזי was an Israeli mathematician who specialized in partial differential equations , making important contributions to the PDE field and Semigroups. He served as president of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was the chairman of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education in Israel. He also had a brief appearance as a background character in “Friends,” season 9.
Go to Profile#17970
Chris Jones
#17981
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Christopher Nigel Jones is a British-American journalist and academic. He is the chief theater critic and Sunday culture columnist of the Chicago Tribune. Since 2014, he has also served as director of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Critics Institute. Jones has appeared on the news broadcast of CBS-2 Chicago as a weekly theater critic. In 2018, he was additionally named Broadway theater critic for the Tribune related publication, the New York Daily News. In 2021 he was named Editorial Page Editor of the Tribune, but he continues to review theater both in Chicago and New York...
Go to Profile#17971
Adrienne Mayor
#17982
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Adrienne Mayor is a historian of ancient science and a classical folklorist. Mayor specializes in ancient history and the study of "folk science", or how pre-scientific cultures interpreted data about the natural world, and how these interpretations form the basis of many ancient myths, folklore and popular beliefs. Her work in pre-scientific fossil discoveries and traditional interpretations of paleontological remains has opened up a new field within the emerging discipline of geomythology and classical folklore. Mayor's book, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, & the Scorpion Bombs, on the origins o...
Go to Profile#17972
Louise Chow
#17983
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Louise Tsi Chow is a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a foreign associate with the National Academy of Sciences, known for her research on the human papillomavirus. Her research contributed to the discovery of gene splicing, and in 1993, her collaborator, Richard J. Roberts, received the Nobel Prize for the research, leading some to assert that Chow should have received the honor as well.
Go to Profile#17973
Carl Safina
#17984
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Carl Safina is an American ecologist and author of books and other writings about the human relationship with the natural world. His books include Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace; Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel; Song for the Blue Ocean; Eye of the Albatross; The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World; and others. He is the founding president of the Safina Center, and is inaugural holder of the Carl Safina Endowed Chair for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University. Safina hosted the PBS series Saving the O...
Go to Profile#17974
Ernest McCulloch
#17985
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Ernest Armstrong McCulloch was a University of Toronto cellular biologist, best known for demonstrating – with James Till – the existence of stem cells. Biography McCulloch was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on 27 April 1926, and was educated at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#17975
Fouad Laroui
#17986
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Fouad Laroui is a Moroccan economist and writer, born in Oujda, Morocco. After his studies at the Lycée Lyautey , he joined the prestigious École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées , where he studied engineering. After working shortly for the Office Cherifien des Phosphates company in Khouribga , he moved to the United Kingdom where he spent several years in Cambridge and York. Later he obtained a PhD in economics and moved to Amsterdam where he started his career as a writer. He has published about twenty books between novels, collections of short stories and essays and two collections of poetry in Dutch.
Go to Profile#17976
David Whitney
#17987
Overall Influence
1939 - 2005 (66 years)
David Whitney was an American art curator, collector, gallerist and critic. He led a very private life and was not well known outside the art world, even though he participated naked in the 1965 Claes Oldenburg happening Washes. He was the life partner of architect Philip Johnson for 45 years until their deaths five months apart. He was also a close friend of Andy Warhol.
Go to Profile#17977
Walter Jakob Gehring
#17988
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
Walter Jakob Gehring was a Swiss developmental biologist who was a professor at the Biozentrum Basel of the University of Basel, Switzerland. He obtained his PhD at the University of Zurich in 1965 and after two years as a research assistant of Ernst Hadorn he joined Alan Garen's group at Yale University in New Haven as a postdoctoral fellow.
Go to Profile#17978
Frank McLynn
#17989
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Francis James McLynn FRHistS FRGS , known as Frank McLynn, is a British author, biographer, historian and journalist. He is known for biographies of Napoleon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Carl Jung, Richard Francis Burton and Henry Morton Stanley.
Go to Profile#17979
Xavier Le Pichon
#17990
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Xavier Le Pichon is a French geophysicist. Among many other contributions, he is known for his comprehensive model of plate tectonics , helping create the field of plate tectonics. In 1968 he combined the kinematic ideas of W. J. Morgan, D. McKenzie and R. L. Parker with the large data sets collected by Lamont, and especially with the respective magnetic profiles, to show that Plate Tectonics could accurately describe the evolution of the major ocean basins. He is professor at the Collège de France, holder of the Chair of Geodynamics . He is a lifelong devout Catholic, and has come to think of caring attention to others' weakness as an essential quality that allowed humanity to evolve.
Go to Profile#17980
Victor Shoup
#17991
Overall Influence
Victor Shoup is a computer scientist and mathematician. He obtained a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1989, and he did his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He is a professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, focusing on algorithm and cryptography courses. He is currently a Principal Research Scientist at DFINITY and has held positions at AT&T Bell Labs, the University of Toronto, Saarland University, and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory.
Go to Profile#17981
Abhijit Sen
#17992
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
Abhijit Sen was an Indian economist who focused on studying rural development. Sen was appointed to the Planning Commission of India between 2004 and 2014 and held a number of policy making positions in India. Amongst his works included recommendations toward establishment of minimum support price for farm produce and a universal public distribution system.
Go to Profile#17982
Akbar Ahmed
#17993
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Akbar Salahuddin Ahmed, is a Pakistani-American academic, author, poet, playwright, filmmaker and former diplomat. He currently is a professor of International Relations and holds the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at the American University, School of International Service in Washington, D.C. Akbar Ahmed served as the Pakistan High Commissioner to the UK and Ireland. He currently is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Go to Profile#17983
Victor Dzau
#17994
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Victor Joseph Dzau is a Chinese-American doctor and academic. He serves as the President of the United States National Academy of Medicine of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He was previously the president and CEO of Duke University Medical Center.
Go to Profile#17984
Sylvana Tomaselli
#17995
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Sylvana Palma Windsor, Countess of St Andrews is a Canadian-born academic and historian. By virtue of marriage she is a member of the House of Windsor and is related to the British royal family as the wife of George Windsor, Earl of St Andrews, eldest son of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Katharine, Duchess of Kent and second cousin of King Charles III.
Go to Profile#17985
Gonzalo Torrente Ballester
#17996
Overall Influence
1910 - 1999 (89 years)
Gonzalo Torrente Ballester was a Spanish writer associated with the Generation of '36 movement. Life He was born in Serantes, Ferrol, Galicia, and received his first education there, subsequently attending the universities of Santiago de Compostela and Oviedo.
Go to Profile#17986
Cornelia Druțu
#17997
Overall Influence
Cornelia Druțu is a Romanian mathematician notable for her contributions in the area of geometric group theory. She is Professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#17987
C. William Gear
#17998
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
C. William Gear was a British-American mathematician who specialized in numerical analysis and computer science. Gear was an American citizen. Gear studied at the University of Cambridge with a bachelor's degree in 1957 and an M.A. in 1960, and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with an M.S. in 1957 and a Ph.D. in 1960 under Abraham H. Taub with his thesis Singular Shock Intersections in Plane Flow. From 1960 to 1962, he worked as an engineer for IBM. From 1962 to 1990, he was a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he was the head of the computer science department from 1985 to 1990.
Go to Profile#17988
David F. Ford
#17999
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David Frank Ford is an Anglican public theologian. He was the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, beginning in 1991. He is now an Emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity. His research interests include political theology, ecumenical theology, Christian theologians and theologies, theology and poetry, the shaping of universities and of the field of theology and religious studies within universities, hermeneutics, and interfaith theology and relations. He is the founding director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme and a co-founder of the Society for Scriptural Reason...
Go to Profile#17989
Peter Stone
#18000
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Peter Stone is an American computer scientist who is the David Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, AAAI Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar.
Go to Profile#17990
Maurice Pryce
#18001
Overall Influence
1913 - 2003 (90 years)
Maurice Henry Lecorney Pryce was a British physicist. Life Pryce was born in Croydon to an Anglo-Welsh father and French mother, and in his teens attended the Royal Grammar School, Guildford. After a few months in Heidelberg to add German to the French that had been his first language at home, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#17991
Dominika Cibulková
#18002
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Dominika Cibulková is a Slovak former professional tennis player. She is the 2016 WTA Finals champion, becoming the fourth player to win the tournament on her debut. She won eight WTA Tour singles titles and two on the ITF Circuit.
Go to Profile#17992
Magnus Wenninger
#18003
Overall Influence
1919 - 2017 (98 years)
Father Magnus J. Wenninger OSB was an American mathematician who worked on constructing polyhedron models, and wrote the first book on their construction. Early life and education Born to German immigrants in Park Falls, Wisconsin, Joseph Wenninger always knew he was going to be a priest. From an early age, it was understood that his brother Heinie would take after their father and become a baker, and that Joe, as he was then known, would go into the priesthood.
Go to Profile#17993
Steve Jobs
#18004
Overall Influence
1955 - 2011 (56 years)
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known as the co-founder of Apple. Jobs was also chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar, and the founder of NeXT. He was a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Go to Profile#17994
Arran Fernandez
#18005
Overall Influence
1995 - Present (31 years)
Arran Fernandez is a British mathematician who, in June 2013, became Senior Wrangler at Cambridge University, aged 18 years and 0 months. He is thought to be the youngest Senior Wrangler ever. Biography Prior to university, Fernandez was educated at home, predominantly by his father, Neil Fernandez. In 2001 he broke the age record for gaining a General Certificate of Secondary Education , the English academic qualification usually taken at age 16, for which he sat the examinations aged five. In 2003 he became the youngest person ever to gain an A* grade at GCSE, also for Mathematics.
Go to Profile#17995
Richard Curtis
#18006
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Richard Whalley Anthony Curtis is a British screenwriter, producer and film director. One of Britain's most successful comedy screenwriters, he is known primarily for romantic comedy films, among them Four Weddings and a Funeral , Notting Hill , Bridget Jones's Diary , Love Actually , Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason , About Time , and Yesterday . He is also known for the drama War Horse and for having co-written the sitcoms Blackadder, Mr. Bean, and The Vicar of Dibley. His early career saw him write material for the BBC's Not the Nine O'Clock News and ITV's Spitting Image.
Go to Profile#17996
Umer Chapra
#18007
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Muhammad Umer Chapra is a Pakistani-Saudi economist. he serves as Advisor at the Islamic Research and Training Institute of the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Prior to this position, he worked at the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency , Riyadh, for nearly 35 years, as Economic Advisor and then Senior Economic Advisor.
Go to Profile#17997
Toby Miller
#18008
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Toby Miller is a British/Australian-American cultural studies and media studies scholar. He is the author of several books and articles. He was chair of the Department of Media & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside and is most recently a professor at Loughborough University. Prior to his academic career, Miller worked in broadcasting, banking, and civil service.
Go to Profile#17998
Ahmad Khatami
#18009
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ahmad Khatami is a professor of Persian language and literature, a lecturer at the Department of Persian Language and Literature, and the head of the Center of Excellence of Persian Literary History at Shahid Beheshti University in Iran.
Go to Profile#17999
Dru C. Gladney
#18010
Overall Influence
1956 - 2022 (66 years)
Dru Curtis Gladney was an American anthropologist who was president of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College and a professor of anthropology there. Gladney authored four books and more than 100 academic articles and book chapters on topics spanning the Asian continent.
Go to Profile#18000
Bill Elliott
#18011
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
William Clyde Elliott Sr. , also known as "Awesome Bill from Dawsonville", "Million Dollar Bill", or "Wild Bill" is an American former professional stock car racing driver. He competes full time in the Camping World Superstar Racing Experience. His accolades include the 1988 Winston Cup Championship and garnering 44 wins in that series, including two Daytona 500 victories in 1985 and 1987, three Southern 500 victories in 1985, 1988, and 1994, one Winston 500 victory in 1985, one Brickyard 400 victory in 2002, one "The Winston All-Star Race" win in 1986, and a record four consecutive wins at ...
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