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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#1801
Julius Axelrod
#1803
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Julius Axelrod was an American biochemist. He won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1970 along with Bernard Katz and Ulf von Euler. The Nobel Committee honored him for his work on the release and reuptake of catecholamine neurotransmitters, a class of chemicals in the brain that include epinephrine, norepinephrine, and, as was later discovered, dopamine. Axelrod also made major contributions to the understanding of the pineal gland and how it is regulated during the sleep-wake cycle.
Go to Profile#1802
Anders Hejlsberg
#1804
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Anders Hejlsberg is a Danish software engineer who co-designed several programming languages and development tools. He was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi. He currently works for Microsoft as the lead architect of C# and core developer on TypeScript.
Go to Profile#1803
Peter Ackroyd
#1805
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Peter Ackroyd is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a specialist interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, William Blake, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More, he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He is noted for the volume of work he has produced, the range of styles therein, his skill at assuming different voices, and the depth of his research.
Go to Profile#1804
Quentin Blake
#1806
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Sir Quentin Saxby Blake, is an English cartoonist, caricaturist, illustrator and children's writer. He has illustrated over 300 books, including 18 written by Roald Dahl, which are among his most popular works. For his lasting contribution as a children's illustrator he won the biennial international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2002, the highest recognition available to creators of children's books. From 1999 to 2001, he was the inaugural British Children's Laureate. He is a patron of the Association of Illustrators.
Go to Profile#1805
Mary Daly
#1807
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a "radical lesbian feminist", taught at the Jesuit-run Boston College for 33 years. Once a practicing Roman Catholic, she had disavowed Christianity by the early 1970s. Daly retired from Boston College in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male students in her advanced women's studies classes. She allowed male students in her introductory class and privately tutored those who wanted to take advanced classes.
Go to Profile#1806
Taylor Swift
#1808
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (35 years)
Taylor Alison Swift is an American singer-songwriter. Recognized for her songwriting, musical versatility, artistic reinventions, and influence on the music industry, she is a prominent cultural figure of the 21st century.
Go to Profile#1807
Bruce Weber
#1809
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Bruce Weber is an American fashion photographer and occasional filmmaker. He has made ad campaigns for Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Pirelli, Abercrombie & Fitch, Revlon, and Gianni Versace, and made work for Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, Elle, Life, Interview, and Rolling Stone magazines.
Go to Profile#1808
Fred Shuttlesworth
#1810
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Freddie Lee Shuttlesworth was an American civil rights activist who led the fight against segregation and other forms of racism as a minister in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, initiated and was instrumental in the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, and continued to work against racism and for alleviation of the problems of the homeless in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he took up a pastorate in 1961. He returned to Birmingham after his retirement in 2007. He worked with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, though the two men often...
Go to Profile#1809
Ei-ichi Negishi
#1811
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
#1810
Brendan Eich
#1812
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Brendan Eich is an American computer programmer and technology executive. He created the JavaScript programming language and co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer before he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his firm opposition to same-sex marriage. He subsequently became the CEO of Brave Software.
Go to Profile#1811
Dan Brown
#1813
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Daniel Gerhard Brown is an American author best known for his thriller novels, including the Robert Langdon novels Angels & Demons , The Da Vinci Code , The Lost Symbol , Inferno , and Origin . His novels are treasure hunts that usually take place over a period of 24 hours. They feature recurring themes of cryptography, art, and conspiracy theories. His books have been translated into 57 languages and, as of 2012, have sold over 200 million copies. Three of them, Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and Inferno, have been adapted into films, while one of them, The Lost Symbol, was adapted into...
Go to Profile#1812
Jose Maria Sison
#1814
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Jose Maria Canlas Sison , also known by his nickname Joma, was a Filipino writer, poet and activist who founded the Communist Party of the Philippines and added elements of Maoism to its philosophy – which would be known as national democracy. He applied the theory of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism to the history and current circumstances of the Philippines.
Go to Profile#1813
Solomon W. Golomb
#1815
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Solomon Wolf Golomb was an American mathematician, engineer, and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, best known for his works on mathematical games. Most notably, he invented Cheskers in 1948. He also fully described polyominoes and pentominoes in 1953. He specialized in problems of combinatorial analysis, number theory, coding theory, and communications. Pentomino boardgames, based on his work, would go on to inspire Tetris.
Go to Profile#1814
Steven Lukes
#1816
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Steven Michael Lukes is a British political and social theorist. Currently he is a professor of politics and sociology at New York University. He was formerly a professor at the University of Siena, the European University Institute and the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#1815
Régis Debray
#1817
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jules Régis Debray is a French philosopher, journalist, former government official and academic. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society, and for associating with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 and advancing Salvador Allende's presidency in Chile in the early 1970s. He returned to France in 1973 and later held various official posts in the French government.
Go to Profile#1816
Douglas T. Ross
#1818
Overall Influence
1929 - 2007 (78 years)
Douglas Taylor "Doug" Ross was an American computer scientist pioneer, and chairman of SofTech, Inc. He is most famous for originating the term CAD for computer-aided design, and is considered to be the father of Automatically Programmed Tools , a programming language to drive numerical control in manufacturing. His later work focused on a pseudophilosophy he developed and named Plex.
Go to Profile#1817
Paul Johnson
#1819
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Paul Bede Johnson was an English journalist, popular historian, speechwriter and author. Although associated with the political left in his early career, he became a popular conservative historian.
Go to Profile#1818
Walt Rostow
#1820
Overall Influence
1916 - 2003 (87 years)
Walt Whitman Rostow was an American economist, professor and political theorist who served as national security advisor to president of the United States Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1969. Rostow worked in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and later was a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter for presidential candidate and then President John F. Kennedy; he is often credited with writing Kennedy's famous "New Frontier" speech. Prominent for his role in shaping US foreign policy in Southeast Asia during the 1960s, he was a staunch anti-communist, noted for a belief in t...
Go to Profile#1819
Jayant Narlikar
#1821
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Jayant Vishnu Narlikar is an Indian astrophysicist and emeritus professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics . He developed with Sir Fred Hoyle the conformal gravity theory, known as Hoyle–Narlikar theory. It synthesises Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Mach's principle. It proposes that the inertial mass of a particle is a function of the masses of all other particles, multiplied by a coupling constant, which is a function of cosmic epoch.
Go to Profile#1820
Jacob T. Schwartz
#1822
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Jacob Theodore "Jack" Schwartz was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and professor of computer science at the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He was the designer of the SETL programming language and started the NYU Ultracomputer project. He founded the New York University Department of Computer Science, chairing it from 1964 to 1980.
Go to Profile#1821
Michael Rutter
#1823
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Sir Michael Llewellyn Rutter CBE FRS FRCP FRCPsych FMedSci was the first person to be appointed professor of child psychiatry in the United Kingdom. He has been described as the "father of child psychiatry". Rutter was professor of developmental psychopathology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London and consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, a post he held since 1966, until retiring in July 2021. A survey published in Review of General Psychology in 2002 ranked Rutter as the 68th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He died of cancer on October 23, 2021, aged...
Go to Profile#1822
Tipper Gore
#1824
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Mary Elizabeth "Tipper" Gore is an American social issues advocate. She was the second lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001 through her marriage to 45th vice president Al Gore in 1970, although they separated in 2010.
Go to Profile#1823
Lawrence M. Friedman
#1825
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Lawrence Meir Friedman is an American law professor, historian of American legal history, and author of nonfiction and fiction books. He has been a member of the faculty at Stanford Law School since 1968.
Go to Profile#1824
Richard J. Roberts
#1826
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Sir Richard John Roberts is a British biochemist and molecular biologist. He was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phillip Allen Sharp for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing. He currently works at New England Biolabs.
Go to Profile#1825
Kurt Loder
#1827
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Kurt Loder is an American entertainment critic, author, columnist, and television personality. He served in the 1980s as editor at Rolling Stone, during a tenure that Reason later called "legendary". He has contributed to articles in Reason, Esquire, Details, New York, and Time. He has also made cameos on several films and television series. He is best known for his role at MTV News since the 1980s and for appearing in other MTV-related television specials. He has hosted the SiriusXM radio show True Stories since 2016.
Go to Profile#1826
Wouter Hanegraaff
#1828
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Wouter Jacobus Hanegraaff is professor of the History of Hermetic Philosophy and related currents at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He served as the first president of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism from 2005 to 2013.
Go to Profile#1827
Simon Conway Morris
#1829
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Simon Conway Morris is an English palaeontologist, evolutionary biologist, and astrobiologist known for his study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian explosion. The results of these discoveries were celebrated in Stephen Jay Gould's 1989 book Wonderful Life. Conway Morris's own book on the subject, The Crucible of Creation , however, is critical of Gould's presentation and interpretation.
Go to Profile#1828
Osamu Shimomura
#1830
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Osamu Shimomura was a Japanese organic chemist and marine biologist, and professor emeritus at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Boston University School of Medicine. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008 for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein with two American scientists: Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Tsien of the University of California-San Diego.
Go to Profile#1829
Michael Freedman
#1831
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael Hartley Freedman is an American mathematician at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the 4-dimensional generalized Poincaré conjecture. Freedman and Robion Kirby showed that an exotic ℝ4 manifold exists.
Go to Profile#1830
Albert Fert
#1832
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Albert Fert is a French physicist and one of the discoverers of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks. Currently, he is an emeritus professor at Paris-Saclay University in Orsay, scientific director of a joint laboratory between the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and Thales Group, and adjunct professor at Michigan State University. He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Peter Grünberg.
Go to Profile#1831
Jill Stein
#1833
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jill Ellen Stein is an American physician, activist, and political candidate. She was the Green Party's nominee for president of the United States in the 2012 and 2016 elections and the Green-Rainbow Party's candidate for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and 2010.
Go to Profile#1832
Cindy Sherman
#1834
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Cynthia Morris Sherman is an American artist whose work consists primarily of photographic self-portraits, depicting herself in many different contexts and as various imagined characters. Her breakthrough work is often considered to be the collected Untitled Film Stills, a series of 70 black-and-white photographs of herself evoking typical female roles in performance media . In the 1980s, she used color film and large prints, and focused more on costume, lighting and facial expression.
Go to Profile#1833
Louis Néel
#1835
Overall Influence
1904 - 2000 (96 years)
Louis Eugène Félix Néel was a French physicist born in Lyon who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 for his studies of the magnetic properties of solids. Biography Néel studied at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and was accepted at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He obtained the degree of Doctor of Science at the University of Strasbourg. He was corecipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1970 for his pioneering studies of the magnetic properties of solids. His contributions to solid state physics have found numerous useful applications, particularly in the development of improved computer memory units.
Go to Profile#1834
Günther Anders
#1836
Overall Influence
1902 - 1992 (90 years)
Günther Anders was a German-born philosopher, journalist and critical theorist. Trained as a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, he obtained his doctorate under Edmund Husserl in 1923 and worked then as a journalist at the Berliner Börsen-Courier. At that time, he changed his name Stern to Anders. He unsuccessfully tried to get a university tenure in the early 1930s and ultimately fled Nazism to the United States. Back to Europe in the 1950s, he published his major book, The Obsolescence of Humankind, in 1956.
Go to Profile#1835
G. Ledyard Stebbins
#1837
Overall Influence
1906 - 2000 (94 years)
George Ledyard Stebbins Jr. was an American botanist and geneticist who is widely regarded as one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. Stebbins received his Ph.D. in botany from Harvard University in 1931. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where his work with E. B. Babcock on the genetic evolution of plant species, and his association with a group of evolutionary biologists known as the Bay Area Biosystematists, led him to develop a comprehensive synthesis of plant evolution incorporating genetics.
Go to Profile#1836
Alan Hodgkin
#1838
Overall Influence
1914 - 1998 (84 years)
Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin was an English physiologist and biophysicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Huxley and John Eccles. Early life and education Hodgkin was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, on 5 February 1914. He was the oldest of three sons of Quakers George Hodgkin and Mary Wilson Hodgkin. His father was the son of Thomas Hodgkin and had read for the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge where he had befriended electrophysiologist Keith Lucas.
Go to Profile#1837
Richard Corliss
#1839
Overall Influence
1944 - 2015 (71 years)
Richard Nelson Corliss was an American film critic and magazine editor for Time. He focused on movies, with occasional articles on other subjects. He was the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment and authored several books including Talking Pictures, which, along with other publications, drew early attention to the screenwriter, as opposed to the director.
Go to Profile#1838
Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán
#1840
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera , commonly known as "El Chapo" and "JGL", is a Mexican former drug lord and a former leader within the Sinaloa Cartel, an international crime syndicate. He is considered to have been one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world.
Go to Profile#1839
Maureen Dowd
#1841
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Maureen Brigid Dowd is an American columnist for The New York Times and an author. During the 1970s and early 1980s, Dowd worked for The Washington Star and Time, writing news, sports and feature articles. She joined The New York Times in 1983 as a metropolitan reporter, and became an op-ed writer in 1995.
Go to Profile#1840
Jesse Prinz
#1842
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jesse J. Prinz is an American philosopher who is Distinguished Professor of philosophy and Director of the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Go to Profile#1841
Donald Johanson
#1843
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Donald Carl Johanson is an American paleoanthropologist. He is known for discovering, with Yves Coppens and Maurice Taieb, the fossil of a female hominin australopithecine known as "Lucy" in the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia.
Go to Profile#1842
Carlo Rubbia
#1844
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Carlo Rubbia is an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN. Early life and education Rubbia was born in 1934 in Gorizia, an Italian town on the border with Slovenia. His family moved to Venice then Udine because of wartime disruption. His father was an electrical engineer and encouraged him to study the same, though he stated his wish to study physics. In the local countryside, he collected and experimented with abandoned military communications equipment. ...
Go to Profile#1843
Gerd Faltings
#1845
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gerd Faltings is a German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic geometry. Education From 1972 to 1978, Faltings studied mathematics and physics at the University of Münster. In 1978 he received his PhD in mathematics.
Go to Profile#1844
Georges Charpak
#1846
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Georges Charpak was a Polish-born French physicist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992. Life Georges Charpak was born in 1926 as Jerzy Charpak to Jewish parents, Anna and Maurice Charpak, in the village of Dąbrowica in Poland . Charpak's family moved from Poland to Paris when he was seven years old, beginning his study of mathematics in 1941 at the Lycée Saint Louis. The actor and film director André Charpak was his younger brother.
Go to Profile#1845
Stephen Greenblatt
#1847
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is an American Shakespearean, literary historian, and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Go to Profile#1846
Alan Blinder
#1848
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Alan Stuart Blinder is an American economics professor at Princeton University and is listed among the most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. He is a leading macroeconomist, politically liberal, and a champion of Keynesian economics and policies.
Go to Profile#1847
Richie Unterberger
#1849
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Richie Unterberger is an American author and journalist whose focus is popular music and travel writing. Life and writing Unterberger attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote for the university newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian and in the early 1980s was a deejay on the Penn radio station, WXPN-FM. Just prior to graduating in late 1982, he started reviewing records for Op magazine, which marked the start of his career as a freelance writer.
Go to Profile#1848
Jeffrey Goldstone
#1850
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Jeffrey Goldstone is a British theoretical physicist and an emeritus physics faculty member at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He worked at the University of Cambridge until 1977. He is famous for the discovery of the Nambu–Goldstone boson. He is currently working on quantum computation.
Go to Profile#1849
Hermann Bondi
#1851
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Sir Hermann Bondi was an Austrian-British mathematician and cosmologist. He is best known for developing the steady state model of the universe with Fred Hoyle and Thomas Gold as an alternative to the Big Bang theory. He contributed to the theory of general relativity, and was the first to analyze the inertial and gravitational interaction of negative mass and the first to explicate correctly the nature of gravitational waves. In his 1990 autobiography, Bondi regarded the 1962 work on gravitational waves as his "best scientific work".
Go to Profile#1850
George Noory
#1852
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
George Ralph Noory is a conservative American radio talk show host. Since January 2003, Noory has been the weekday host of the late-night radio talk show Coast to Coast AM. The program is syndicated to hundreds of radio stations in the U.S. and Canada by Premiere Networks. Noory has also appeared in the History Channel series Ancient Aliens and in Beyond Belief, a subscription-based online video series presented by Gaia.
Go to Profile