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
#1801
Karen Jean Meech
#84750
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Karen J. Meech is an American planetary astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaiʻi. Career Karen Meech specializes in planetary astronomy, in particular the study of distant comets and their relation to the early Solar System. She is also very active in professional-amateur collaboration and science teacher education and was the founder of the Towards Planetary Systems high-school teacher / student outreach program that helps educate science teachers in the Pacific islands. She received her PhD in Planetary Sciences in 1987 at the Massachusetts Institute of Techn...
Go to Profile#1802
Jason Speyer
#84785
Overall Influence
Jason Lee Speyer is an American engineer working with mechanical and aerospace engineering currently the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Endowed Professor of Engineering, at University of California, Los Angeles and is also a published author, being held in 860 libraries.
Go to Profile#1803
Oskar Painter
#84838
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Oskar Painter is a Canadian born experimental physicist who works on nanoscale optics, nanomechanical devices, and superconducting qubits. He is the John G. Braun Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics at Caltech. Since 2019, he is also Head of Quantum Hardware at Amazon Web Services .
Go to Profile#1804
Mark J. Lewis
#84851
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Dr. Mark J. Lewis is a senior American aerospace and defense executive with special expertise in hypersonics. He is currently the Executive Director of the National Defense Industrial Association's Emerging Technologies Institute, following his role in the second half of 2020 as the acting US Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, and before that the Director of Defense Research and Engineering for Modernization. He was the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C. from 2004 to 2008 and was the longest-serving Chief Scientist in Air Force history. He ser...
Go to Profile#1805
J. Thomas Dickinson
#84909
Overall Influence
J. Thomas Dickinson is an American physicist and astronomer. H earned a B.A. degree in physics from Western Michigan University in 1963, and a PhD degree in chemical physics from the University of Michigan in 1968. He went directly to Washington State University and was appointed Paul A. Anderson Professor and regents professor, positions he held until his retirement in 2017. His field research involved laser-materials relations, nanotribology and tribochemistry.
Go to Profile#1806
Finn Ravndal
#84961
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Finn Ravndal is a Norwegian physicist. Ravndal grew up in Molde, Norway. In 1961 he enrolled at the Norwegian Institute of Technology to study physics . In 1966 he completed the degree of sivilingeniør with a dissertation in the area of theoretical physics under the supervision of Harald Wergeland. During the summer of 1965, he interned at CERN where he worked with an experimental particle physics group to study bubble chamber images for the detection of new elementary particles.
Go to Profile#1807
Mark M. Green
#84977
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Mark Mordecai Green is an American chemist, writer and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering. He is best known for his extensive work on an aspect of stereochemistry involved in cooperative chirality and also for his book Organic Chemistry Principles in Context: A Story Telling Historical Approach, which can be used in teaching organic chemistry in an unprecedented way.
Go to Profile#1808
Katelin Schutz
#85020
Overall Influence
Katelin Schutz is an American particle physicist known for using cosmological observations to study dark sectors, that is new particles and forces that interact weakly with the visible world. She is a NASA Einstein Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow in the MIT Department of Physics.
Go to Profile#1809
Anthony Kelly
#85065
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Anthony Elliott-Kelly FAcSS or Anthony Kelly, better known as Tony Kelly, is an Irish academic who is currently Professor of Education at the University of Southampton, England. Education and career Kelly attended the National University of Ireland, Queens' College, Cambridge and Trinity College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#1810
Linda Hsieh-Wilson
#85135
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Linda Carol Hsieh-Wilson is an American chemist and the Milton and Rosalind Chang Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. She is known for her work in chemical neurobiology on understanding the structure and function of carbohydrates in the nervous system. Her studies have revealed critical roles for carbohydrates and protein glycosylation in fundamental processes ranging from cellular metabolism to memory storage. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Go to Profile#1811
Alfred Yi Summit Cho
#85153
Overall Influence
#1812
Charles Tahan
#85198
Overall Influence
Charles Tahan is a U.S. physicist specializing in condensed matter physics and quantum information science and technology. He currently serves as the Assistant Director for Quantum Information Science and the Director of the National Quantum Coordination Office within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Tahan is also Chief Scientist of the National Security Agency's Laboratory for Physical Sciences.
Go to Profile#1813
Morton Denn
#85279
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Morton Mace Denn is a rheologist, chemical engineer, and the Albert Einstein Professor Emeritus of Science and Engineering at the City College of New York. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and winner of a Fulbright Lectureship award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Bingham Medal. He previously taught at the University of Delaware and the University of California, Berkeley and was the director of the Benjamin Levich Institute for Physicochemical Hydrodynamics from 2001 to 2015. He was also a program leader at Lawrence ...
Go to Profile#1814
Peter Setlow
#85280
Overall Influence
#1815
Greg Hjorth
#85299
Overall Influence
1963 - 2011 (48 years)
Greg Hjorth was an Australian Professor of Mathematics, chess International Master and joint Commonwealth Champion in 1983. He worked in the field of mathematical logic. Chess career Hjorth came second in the 1980 Australian Chess Championship, at the age of 16. He won the Doeberl Cup in Canberra in 1982, 1985 and 1987, and played for Australia in the Chess Olympiads of 1982, 1984 and 1986.
Go to Profile#1816
David Ewins
#85306
Overall Influence
David John Ewins FRS FREng was a British mechanical engineer. He was Director of the Bristol Laboratory for Advanced Dynamics Engineering at University of Bristol from 2007 to 2015. Life and career Ewins studied mechanical engineering at Imperial College London, and studied for a PhD at the University of Cambridge. He was Professor of Vibration Engineering at Imperial College London.
Go to Profile#1817
Mark W. Grinstaff
#85346
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Mark W. Grinstaff is the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering and Medicine, at Boston University, Director of the National Institutes of Health's T32 Program in Translational Research in Biomaterials and Director of Nanotechnology Innovation Center. Grinstaff is an avid mentor and teacher who is always asking questions. In the laboratory, he has developed new paradigms for translating rigorous, academic work, which promotes intellectual progress, economic growth, and improved clinical outcomes.
Go to Profile#1818
Alvin V. Tollestrup
#85455
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Alvin Virgil Tollestrup was an American high-energy particle physicist best known for his key roles in the development of the superconducting magnets for Fermilab's Tevatron and the formation of CDF.
Go to Profile#1819
Robb Krumlauf
#85554
Overall Influence
Robb Krumlauf is an American developmental biologist. He is best known for researching the Hox family of transcription factors. He is most interested in understanding the role of the Hox genes in the hindbrain and their role in areas of animal development, such as craniofacial development. Krumlauf worked with a variety of renowned scientists in the field of developmental biology throughout his time researching Hox genes.
Go to Profile#1820
Larry Robinson
#85566
Overall Influence
Larry Robinson is an American professor and academic administrator, who is the current President of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. Career Robinson, an African American, started his college education at LeMoyne-Owen College and graduated from Memphis State University now the University of Memphis, in 1979 with summa cum laude honors and a B.S. degree in chemistry. He received a Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis in 1984. In that same year, he joined the research staff of Oak Ridge National Laboratory , where he was a research scientist and served as a group leader, of the neutron activation analysis facility.
Go to Profile#1821
James N. Brune
#85578
Overall Influence
#1822
Christopher D. Lima
#85601
Overall Influence
Christopher David Lima is an American biologist. He is currently Chair and Member at the Sloan Kettering Institute of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#1823
Arvind Victor Shah
#85602
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Arvind Victor Shah is a Swiss electronics engineer, educator and scientist. He founded the Centre For Electronics Design And Technology at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in 1974, where he was co-director during its first four years. Thereafter, he became full professor for electronics at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Because of his interest for the field of photovoltaics, he initiated in 1985 the Photovoltaic Laboratory within the Institute of Microtechnology in Neuchâtel. In 1987, Shah became part-time professor of electronic materials at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in addition to his duties at the University of Neuchâtel.
Go to Profile#1824
Michael M. Thackeray
#85681
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Michael Makepeace Thackeray is a South African chemist and battery materials researcher. He is mainly known for his work on electrochemically active cathode materials. In the mid-1980s he co-discovered the manganese oxide spinel family of cathodes for lithium ion batteries while working in the lab of John Goodenough at the University of Oxford. In 1998, while at Argonne National Laboratory, he led a team that first reported the NMC cathode technology. Patent protection around the concept and materials were first issued in 2005 to Argonne National Laboratory to a team with Thackeray, Khalil Amine, Jaekook Kim, and Christopher Johnson.
Go to Profile#1825
Jacob Matijevic
#85703
Overall Influence
1947 - 2012 (65 years)
Jacob Matijevic, also known as "Jake" Matijevic, was an American NASA engineer of Croatian origin who worked on Mars Exploration Rovers. Dr. Matijevic was involved in developing the "Sojourner", "Spirit", "Opportunity" and "Curiosity" rovers. For his contributions to the rover projects, NASA named several landmarks on the planet Mars after him.
Go to Profile#1826
Sarah T. Stewart-Mukhopadhyay
#85713
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Sarah T. Stewart-Mukhopadhyay is an American planetary scientist known for studying planet formation, planetary geology, and materials science. She is a professor at the University of California, Davis in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. She was a professor at Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences from 2003 to 2014.
Go to Profile#1827
Giovanna Tinetti
#85775
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (53 years)
Giovanna Tinetti is an Italian physicist based in London. She is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at University College London, who researches galactic planetary science, exoplanets and atmospheric science.
Go to Profile#1828
John Elliott Nafe
#85844
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
John Elliott Nafe was an American oceanographer and geophysicist best known for his work on acoustic propagation in the oceans and solid earth. Born in Seattle, Nafe received his bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1938. He then served in the United States Merchant Marine, leaving to begin graduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He obtained an MS degree in 1940 and then joined the Navy during World War II, during which he taught physics and engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Go to Profile#1829
Rusty Roberts
#85858
Overall Influence
Rusty Roberts is the director of the Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, a position he has held since April 2009. Education Roberts received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from West Point in 1978, a Master of Science in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1985, and a master of business administration in finance from Long Island University in 1987.
Go to Profile#1830
Padhraic Smyth
#85935
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Padhraic Smyth is a Professor of Computer Science in UC Irvine's Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. He also serves as Director of UC Irvine's Data Science Initiative and Associate Director for UC Irvine's Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems. He was elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2010 "for significant contributions to the theory and practice of statistical machine learning".
Go to Profile#1831
Alexandria Boehm
#86015
Overall Influence
Alexandria Boehm is an American scientist whose field of study is civil and environmental engineering. She studies sources, fate and transport of pathogens outside the human body, and coastal water quality. Boehm is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment, faculty fellow at Stanford University's Center for Innovation in Global Health, and an associate professor in Stanford University's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Go to Profile#1832
Marjorie J. Vold
#86054
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Marjorie J. Vold was an American chemist. Her research focused on colloids, and was recognized with a Garvan-Olin Medal from the American Chemical Society in 1967. Early life and education Marjorie Jean Young was born on October 25, 1913, in Ottawa, Ontario, and moved to Mount Hamilton, California as a child, with her parents Reynold K. Young and Wilhelmine E. Aitken. Her grandfather Robert Grant Aitken cataloged binary stars at Lick Observatory, and her father also worked an astronomer there. Young attended the University of California at Berkeley for undergraduate and graduate work, earning her doctorate in 1936.
Go to Profile#1833
David Ciardi
#86068
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
David Robert Ciardi is an American astronomer. He received a bachelor's degree in physics and astronomy from Boston University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wyoming in 1997.
Go to Profile#1834
Richard E. Carson
#86214
Overall Influence
Richard Ellis Carson is an American researcher and biomedical engineer. He is currently Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging and of Biomedical Engineering at Yale University. At Yale he is also Director of the PET Center and Director of Graduate Studies in Biomedical Engineering. His research focuses on the application of mathematical techniques to the study of humans and primates with Positron Emission Tomography.
Go to Profile#1835
AnnMarie Thomas
#86298
Overall Influence
AnnMarie Thomas is a mechanical engineer, author, blogger, and advocate for early engineering education. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Ocean Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went on to attain both an M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology. Additionally, she has her certification in Sustainable Design from Minneapolis College of Art and Design . She is currently associate professor in the School of Engineering, the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship, and the Opus College of Business at the University of St.
Go to Profile#1836
Keith Bullock
#86301
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Keith Joseph Bullock FTSE was an engineer and academic at the University of Queensland. Early life Bullock was born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1931. He attended Moorooka State School and the Church of England Grammar School. Bullock enrolled in the engineering program at the University of Queensland in 1948, gaining his B.E. with first class honours in 1952. He won a number of prizes and the Alfred Henry Darker scholarship.
Go to Profile#1837
Robert Waymouth
#86452
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
Robert M. Waymouth is an American chemist. He is the Robert Eckles Swain Professor in Chemistry at Stanford University. Early life and education He was born in 1960 in Warner Robins, Georgia. In 1982 he earned a B.S. in chemistry and a B.A. in mathematics from Washington and Lee University. He received a PhD in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1987 and did postdoctoral research at the Institut fur Polymere in Zurich, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#1838
Leeat Yariv
#86522
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Leeat Yariv is the Uwe E. Reinhardt Professor of Economics at Princeton University, a research fellow of CEPR, and a research associate of NBER. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and has held positions at UCLA and Caltech prior to her move to Princeton in 2017, where she is the founder and director of the Princeton Experimental Laboratory for the Social Sciences . Yariv’s research focuses on political economy, market design, social and economic networks, and experimental economics.
Go to Profile#1839
Sundeep Khosla
#86565
Overall Influence
#1840
William French Anderson
#86599
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
William French Anderson is an American physician, geneticist and molecular biologist. He is known as the "father of gene therapy". He graduated from Harvard College in 1958, Trinity College, Cambridge University in 1960, and from Harvard Medical School in 1963. In 1990 he was the first person to succeed in carrying out gene therapy by treating a 4-year-old girl suffering from severe combined immunodeficiency . In 2006, he was convicted of sexual abuse of a minor and in 2007 was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He was paroled on May 17, 2018, for good behavior.
Go to Profile#1841
Dennis Weatherby
#86611
Overall Influence
1959 - 2007 (48 years)
Dennis W. Weatherby, Ph.D. was an inventor, scientist, university administrator, and proponent of minority college students' success. While working for Procter & Gamble in the 1980s, Weatherby patented lemon-scented Cascade, a detergent with a new chemical formula that would not stain dishes, unlike the detergents of the previous decade. As the founding director of Auburn University's Minority Engineering Program, he made Auburn one of the top universities for graduating African Americans in the field of engineering.
Go to Profile#1842
Renu Malhotra
#86682
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Renu Malhotra is an American planetary scientist from India, known for using the orbital resonance between Pluto and Neptune to infer large-scale orbital migration of the giant planets and to predict the existence of Plutinos in resonance with Neptune. The asteroid 6698 Malhotra was named for her on 14 December 1997 . She is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the co-discovery of , a trans-Neptunian object in the Kuiper belt.
Go to Profile#1843
Michael Demetriou
#86713
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Michael A. Demetriou is a professor of aerospace engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for his contributions to estimation and optimization of distributed parameter systems.
Go to Profile#1844
Noemie Benczer Koller
#86732
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Noemie Benczer Koller is a nuclear physicist. She was the first tenured female professor of Rutgers College. Early life and education Koller was born Noemie Benczer in Vienna, Austria, on born August 21, 1933. Her father was a Ph.D. chemist and her mother worked as a bookbinder. The family moved frequently in her early childhood due to the turbulence of World War II. Her family moved from Vienna to Paris, and then subsequently moved further south in France several times to escape the German invasion. They subsequently emigrated to Cuba, and then to Mexico where she attended the Lycée Franco-Mexicain beginning in 1943.
Go to Profile#1845
Wolfgang P. Baumeister
#86772
Overall Influence
#1846
David Rutledge
#86819
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
David B. Rutledge is the Kiyo and Eiko Tomiyasu Professor of Engineering and former chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology , United States. His earlier work on microwave circuits has been important for various advances in wireless communications and has been useful for applications such as radar, remote sensing, and satellite broadcasting. He also covers research in estimating fossil-fuel supplies, and the implications for alternative energy sources and climate change.
Go to Profile#1847
Cassandra Fraser
#86840
Overall Influence
Cassandra L. Fraser is an American synthetic chemist with an interest in biomedicine and sustainable design. She is a Full Professor of Chemistry at the University of Virginia. Early life and education Fraser completed her Bachelor of Arts degree at Kalamazoo College in 1984 and her master's degree at Harvard Divinity School. Following her PhD at the University of Chicago in 1993, she accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. Fraser conducted her postdoctoral studies under the guidance of Robert H. Grubbs.
Go to Profile#1848
Robert W. Conn
#86847
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Robert W. Conn was president and chief executive officer of The Kavli Foundation from 2009 to 2020, a U.S. based foundation dedicated to the advancement of basic science research and public interest in science. A physicist and engineer, Conn was also the board chair of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, an organization that aims to increase private support for basic science research, and dean emeritus of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego . In the 1970s and 1980s, Conn participated in some of the earliest studies of fusion energy as a potential source ...
Go to Profile#1849
Albert F. Case Jr.
#86897
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Albert F. Case Jr. is an American software engineer and one of the leaders in the development of computer-aided software engineering technologies and system development methodologies. Biography Case is a graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo. He began his software development career in 1972 and worked in a variety of IT-related capacities, including director of Management Information Systems for Ryder System and co-founder of Maximus Systems, Inc., developers of the Maximus code generator. In 1982, Case joined start-up Nastec Corporation, a Southfield, Mich. based software development company.
Go to Profile#1850
Antoine Bechara
#86899
Overall Influence
Antoine Bechara is an American neuroscientist, academic and researcher. He is currently a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. Education Bechara studied at the University of Toronto, and earned his Doctoral degree in 1991. He then completed his Fellowship in Behavioral Neurology from the University of Iowa in 1996.
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