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
#18051
Dem Jointz
#18062
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Dwayne Allen Abernathy Jr. , better known by his stage name Dem Jointz, is an American record producer. He has produced tracks for numerous artists including Rihanna, Anderson .Paak, and NCT, Nmixx , among others. He also co-produced four tracks on Compton , the third and latest studio album by Dr. Dre, as well as several tracks on Janet Jackson's Billboard 200 number 1 album Unbreakable . Abernathy has also worked extensively on the album Donda by Kanye West, providing production work or additional vocals on songs such as "Jail".
Go to Profile#18052
Josefina Zoraida Vázquez
#18063
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Josefina Zoraida Vázquez is a noted Mexican historian, considered the Mexican expert on the Mexican–American War. Early life Vázquez is the daughter of Modesto Vázquez. She was raised in Mexico City, where she attended public schools. Her education was conducted entirely in Spanish; she did not study either English or French in school, as her counterparts in private schools did. As a teenager, she worked part-time for her father, clerking in his bookstore and correcting gallery proofs for books he was editing. After graduating from high school, Vázquez entered the National Autonomous University of Mexico , studying philosophy and letters.
Go to Profile#18053
Morgan Reynolds
#18064
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Morgan O. Reynolds is the former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, Texas, and a retired professor of economics at Texas A&M University. He served as chief economist for the United States Department of Labor in 2001–2002, during George W. Bush's first term. A member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, Reynolds was one of the first prominent government officials to claim that 9/11 was an inside job.
Go to Profile#18054
Aušra Augustinavičiūtė
#18065
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Aušra Augustinavičiūtė was a Lithuanian psychologist, economist and dean of the Vilnius Pedagogical University's department of family science. Founder of socionics, the theory of information processing and personality types.
Go to Profile#18055
Phyllis Fox
#18066
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Phyllis Ann Fox was an American mathematician and computer scientist. Early life and education Fox was born on March 13, 1923, and raised in Colorado. She did her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College, earning a B.A. in mathematics in 1944.
Go to Profile#18056
Andrew Sentance
#18067
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Andrew Sentance CBE is a British business economist. He is currently Senior Adviser to Cambridge Econometrics. From November 2011 until October 2018, he was Senior Economic Adviser to PwC. He was an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England from October 2006 to May 2011.
Go to Profile#18057
André Bourguignon
#18068
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
André Bourguignon was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, born in Paris. A psychiatry professor at the University of Paris XII, he was part of a team in charge of translating Sigmund Freud's work from German into French, together with Jean Laplanche, Pierre Cotet and François Robert.
Go to Profile#18058
Fabien Morel
#18069
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Fabien Morel is a French algebraic geometer and key developer of A¹ homotopy theory with Vladimir Voevodsky. Among his accomplishments is the proof of the Friedlander conjecture, and the proof of the complex case of the Milnor conjecture stated in Milnor's 1983 paper 'On the homology of Lie groups made discrete'. This result was presented at the Second Abel Conference, held in January–February 2012.
Go to Profile#18059
Irit Dinur
#18070
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Irit Dinur is an Israeli computer scientist. She is professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research is in foundations of computer science and in combinatorics, and especially in probabilistically checkable proofs and hardness of approximation.
Go to Profile#18060
Stefan Ihrig
#18071
Overall Influence
Stefan Ihrig is an academic, author, and speaker. He is professor of history at the University of Haifa and director of the Haifa Center for German and European Studies. His research interests are European and Middle Eastern history, with a focus on media and political and social discourse. His 2014 and 2016 books dealing with German-Turkish history and entanglement have elicited critical praise. He is also an editor of the Journal of Holocaust Research published by the University of Haifa and has contributed articles for HuffPost, Tablet, Haaretz, and History Today, among other publications.
Go to Profile#18061
Jim McMahon
#18072
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
James Robert McMahon Jr. is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 15 seasons, most notably with the Chicago Bears. McMahon played college football for the BYU Cougars, winning the Davey O'Brien Award and the Sammy Baugh Trophy as a senior. He was selected by the Bears fifth overall in the 1982 NFL Draft.
Go to Profile#18062
Zachary Lippman
#18073
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Zachary B. Lippman is an American plant biologist and the Jacob Goldfield Professor of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Lippman has used gene editing technology to investigate the control of fruit production in various crops. In 2019 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2020 he received the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences.
Go to Profile#18063
Jacques Parizeau
#18074
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Jacques Parizeau was a Canadian politician and Québécois economist who was a noted Quebec sovereigntist and the 26th premier of Quebec from September 26, 1994, to January 29, 1996. Early life and career Parizeau was born in Montreal, Quebec, the son of Germaine and Gérard Parizeau, from a family of wealth and privilege. Gérard Parizeau built one of Quebec’s great fortunes and one of the province’s largest financial firms from a brokerage he established in the 1930s. Jacques' great-grandfather was a founder of the Montreal Chambre de Commerce and his grandfather was a doctor of renown and a...
Go to Profile#18064
Stephen A. Zeff
#18075
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Stephen Addam Zeff is an American accounting historian, and Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University, Houston, Texas, United States. He was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame in 2002.
Go to Profile#18065
S. G. Dani
#18076
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Shrikrishna Gopalrao Dani is a professor of mathematics at the Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, Mumbai who works in the broad area of ergodic theory. Education He did a master's degree from the University of Mumbai in 1969. He then joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , Mumbai for a PhD which he was awarded in 1975. After that, he joined TIFR as a faculty member. After TIFR, he was the Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study during 1976–77 and 1983–84.
Go to Profile#18066
Butch Vig
#18077
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Bryan David "Butch" Vig is an American musician, record producer, and songwriter. He is best known as the drummer and co-producer of the rock band Garbage and the producer of the diamond-selling Nirvana album Nevermind . His work on the latter earned him the nickname the Nevermind Man.
Go to Profile#18067
Jessie J
#18078
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Jessica Ellen Cornish , known professionally as Jessie J, is an English singer. Born and raised in London, she began her career on stage, aged 11, with a role in the West End musical Whistle Down the Wind. She studied at the BRIT School before signing with Gut Records and striking a songwriting deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing.
Go to Profile#18068
Sorley MacLean
#18079
Overall Influence
1911 - 1996 (85 years)
Sorley MacLean was a Scottish Gaelic poet, described by the Scottish Poetry Library as "one of the major Scottish poets of the modern era" because of his "mastery of his chosen medium and his engagement with the European poetic tradition and European politics". Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney credited MacLean with saving Scottish Gaelic poetry.
Go to Profile#18069
Corrado de Concini
#18080
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Corrado de Concini is an Italian mathematician and professor at the Sapienza University of Rome. He studies algebraic geometry, quantum groups, invariant theory, and mathematical physics. Life and work He was born in Rome in 1949, the son of Ennio de Concini, a noted screenwriter and film director.
Go to Profile#18070
Bryan Thwaites
#18081
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (103 years)
Sir Bryan Thwaites, FIMA, FRSA is an English applied mathematician, educationalist and administrator. Early life Bryan Thwaites was born on 6 December 1923, the eldest son of Ernest and Dorothy Thwaites. He was educated at Dulwich College, from 1936–1940, and, thereafter, at Winchester College, aided in both colleges by scholarships. He was graduated with an MA from Clare College, Cambridge University, in 1944, gaining a First in the Maths Tripos. He received his doctorate from London University.
Go to Profile#18071
Tom Harkin
#18082
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Thomas Richard Harkin is an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as a United States senator from Iowa from 1985 to 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously was the U.S. representative for Iowa's 5th congressional district from 1975 to 1985. He is the longest-serving senator to spend the entire tenure as a state's junior senator.
Go to Profile#18072
Xavier Tilliette
#18083
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Xavier Tilliette was a French philosopher, historian of philosophy, and theologian. A former student of Jean Wahl and of Vladimir Jankélévitch, he was a member of the Society of Jesus and professor emeritus at the Catholic Institute of Paris , having taught also at the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome , the Lateran University, and the Centre Sèvres in Paris.
Go to Profile#18073
John R. Hubbard
#18084
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
John Randolph Hubbard was an American educator, academic administrator, and diplomat who served as the eighth president of the University of Southern California from 1970 and 1980. Early life and education Hubbard was born and raised in Belton, Texas. He earned his Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin. As an undergraduate at the University of Texas, he became a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity.
Go to Profile#18074
Jan-Olov Liljenzin
#18085
Overall Influence
1936 - 2019 (83 years)
Jan-Olov Liljenzin was a Swedish chemist and professor in nuclear chemistry. Liljenzin was professor at University of Oslo, Nuclear Chemistry, Norway 1986-1989, and at Chalmers University of Technology, Nuclear Chemistry, Gothenburg, Sweden, between 1989 and 2001.
Go to Profile#18075
Tomaž Šalamun
#18086
Overall Influence
1941 - 2014 (73 years)
Tomaž Šalamun was a Slovenian poet who was a leading figure of postwar neo-avant-garde poetry in Central Europe and an internationally acclaimed absurdist. His books of Slovene poetry have been translated into twenty-one languages, with nine of his thirty-nine books of poetry published in English. His work has been called a poetic bridge between old European roots and America. Šalamun was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and was married to the painter Metka Krašovec.
Go to Profile#18076
Charles L. Bennett
#18087
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Charles L. Bennett is an American observational astrophysicist. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a Gilman Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. He is the Principal Investigator of NASA's highly successful Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe .
Go to Profile#18077
Jeff Moss
#18088
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Jeff Moss , also known as Dark Tangent, is an American hacker, computer and internet security expert who founded the Black Hat and DEF CON computer security conferences. Early life and education Moss received his first computer at the age of 10. He became fascinated because he wasn't old enough to drive a car or vote, but he could engage in adult conversation with people all over the country.
Go to Profile#18078
Sophie Bessis
#18089
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sophie Bessis is a Tunisian-born French historian, journalist, researcher, and feminist author. She has written numerous works in French, Spanish, and English on development in the Maghreb and the Arab world, as well as the situation of women denouncing the identity imprisonment to which they are subjected. She is the recipient of the Paris Liège literary prize and was honored as Commandeur of the Order of the Republic.
Go to Profile#18079
Mike Cafarella
#18090
Overall Influence
Mike Cafarella is a computer scientist specializing in database management systems. He is a principal research scientist of computer science at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Before coming to MIT, he was a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan from 2009 to 2020. Along with Doug Cutting, he is one of the original co-founders of the Hadoop and Nutch open-source projects. Cafarella was born in New York City but moved to Westwood, MA early in his childhood. After completing his bachelor's degree at Brown University, he earned a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#18080
Tim Dunne
#18091
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Timothy J. Dunne is a British scholar of international relations, currently serving as Provost and Senior Vice-President at the University of Surrey. He is also an Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland, where he was previously Deputy Provost and Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Go to Profile#18081
Guillermina Jasso
#18092
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Guillermina Jasso is a sociologist who has significantly contributed to the demography of immigration to America. Jasso is currently the Silver professor of Sociology at New York University where she was formerly Chair of the Department of Sociology. Jasso's research addresses distributive justice, inequality and stratification, mathematical methods for theoretical analysis, and survey methods for empirical analysis.
Go to Profile#18082
Svetozar Stojanović
#18093
Overall Influence
1931 - 2010 (79 years)
Svetozar "Sveta" Stojanović was a Serbian philosopher and political theorist. Biography Stojanović was an intellectual in the European tradition, an academic who contributed to philosophical theory and engaged in practical politics. He bridged the divide between the more grand and speculative Continental philosophy and analytic Anglo-American ethical theory. His doctoral dissertation on Contemporary Meta-ethics was grounded on his study of ordinary language analysis at the University of Oxford and later he met weekly at the University of Michigan to discuss ethical issues with William Frankena, Richard Brandt and Charles Stevenson.
Go to Profile#18083
Kapil Hari Paranjape
#18094
Overall Influence
Kapil Hari Paranjape is an Indian mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry. He is a Professor of Mathematics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali. Biography He was born in Mumbai, Maharashtra near the Kabootar Khana in Dadar but grew up in New Delhi. He completed his schooling from the Sardar Patel Vidyalaya in 1977. He then joined the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur where he pursued a five-years integrated Master’s programme in Mathematics and graduated in 1982. He was awarded the General Proficiency Prize for Mathematics from IIT Kanpur in 1982.
Go to Profile#18084
Richard Friberg
#18095
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Richard Friberg is a Swedish economist specializing in industrial organization, international trade, and risk management. He is the Jacob Wallenberg professor of economics at the Stockholm School of Economics.
Go to Profile#18085
Ivo Karlović
#18096
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Ivo Karlović is a Croatian former professional tennis player. His height of 211 cm makes him the joint tallest ranked tennis player in history, along with Reilly Opelka. He won eight ATP Tour singles titles between 2007 and 2016. He is a serve-and-volleyer and officially held the record for the fastest serve recorded in professional tennis, measured at 251 km/h , before being surpassed unofficially by Samuel Groth in 2012, and officially by John Isner in 2016. In his prime, he was considered one of the best servers on tour, and held the record for career aces from 1991 onwards with 13,728 before the record was broken by Isner on July 1 2022.
Go to Profile#18086
Bogdan Bogdanović
#18097
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Bogdan Bogdanović was a Serbian and Yugoslav architect, urbanist and essayist. He taught architecture at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Architecture, where he also served as dean. Bogdanović wrote numerous articles about urbanism, especially about its mythic and symbolic aspects, some of which appeared in international journals such as El País, Die Zeit, and others. He was also involved in politics, as a Yugoslav Partisan in World War II, later as mayor of Belgrade. When Slobodan Milošević rose to power and nationalism gained ground in Yugoslavia, Bogdanović became a dissident.
Go to Profile#18087
Pat Hudson
#18098
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Pat Hudson, is a British historian and academic. She is a Professor Emeritus of History at Cardiff University. In 2022, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy , the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.
Go to Profile#18088
Donna Jo Napoli
#18099
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Donna Jo Napoli is an American writer of children's and young adult fiction, as well as a linguist. She currently is a professor at Swarthmore College teaching Linguistics in all different forms .She has also taught linguistics at Smith College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Georgetown University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Pennsylvania,
Go to Profile#18089
Diana Walsh Pasulka
#18100
Overall Influence
Diana Walsh Pasulka is an American writer and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Education Pasulka has a B.A. from University of California, Davis, an M.A. from Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Syracuse University.
Go to Profile#18090
Shadi Bartsch
#18101
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer is an American academic and is the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. She has previously held professorships at the University of California, Berkeley and Brown University where she was the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics in 2008-2009.
Go to Profile#18091
William B. Quandt
#18102
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
William B. Quandt is an American scholar, author, and professor emeritus in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He previously served as senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and as a member on the National Security Council in the Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter administrations. He was actively involved in the negotiations that led to the Camp David Accords and the Egypt–Israel peace treaty. His areas of expertise include Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, and U.S. foreign policy.
Go to Profile#18092
Robert E. Van Voorst
#18103
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Robert E. Van Voorst is an American theologian and educator. He retired in 2018 as a Professor of New Testament Studies at Western Theological Seminary, in Holland, Michigan, and has published scholarly works in early Christian writings and New Testament Greek. He received his B.A. in Religion from Hope College in Holland, Michigan, his M.Div. from Western Theological Seminary, and his Ph.D. in New Testament from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He has served at Lycoming College in Williamsport, PA, and was a visiting professor at Westminster College, Oxford, England. He has lec...
Go to Profile#18093
Peter H. Smith
#18104
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Peter Hopkinson Smith is a scholar of Latin American history, politics, economics, and diplomacy. He is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science and the Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies at University of California in San Diego. He previously served as a professor of history and Department chairman at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and as professor and dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#18094
Gideon J. Mellenbergh
#18105
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Gideon Jan Mellenbergh was a Dutch psychologist, who was Professor of Psychological methods at the University of Amsterdam, known for his contribution in the field of psychometrics, and Social Research Methodology.
Go to Profile#18095
Gregory Gabadadze
#18106
Overall Influence
Gregory Gabadadze is a physicist of Georgian origin. He is a professor of physics and dean for science at New York University, where he served previously as chair of the Department of Physics and as the director of the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics.
Go to Profile#18096
Florence Nightingale David
#18107
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Florence Nightingale David, also known as F. N. David was an English statistician. She was head of the Statistics Department at the University of California, Riverside between 1970 – 77 and her research interests included the history of probability and statistical ideas.
Go to Profile#18097
Mike Muuss
#18108
Overall Influence
1958 - 2000 (42 years)
Michael John Muuss was the American author of the freeware network tool ping. Career A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, Muuss was a senior scientist specializing in geometric solid modeling, ray-tracing, MIMD architectures and digital computer networks at the United States Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland when he died. He wrote a number of software packages and network tools and contributed to many others .
Go to Profile#18098
Patrizia Nanz
#18109
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Patrizia Nanz is a political scientist and an expert in public participation and democratic innovations. She has provided expertise to businesses, state agencies, and governments in various European countries.
Go to Profile#18099
Ethan Siegel
#18110
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Ethan R. Siegel is an American theoretical astrophysicist and science writer, who studies the Big Bang theory. In the past he has been a professor at Lewis & Clark College and a blogger at Starts With a Bang, on ScienceBlogs and also on Forbes.com since 2016.
Go to Profile#18100
George Bowering
#18111
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
George Harry Bowering, is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet, historian, and biographer. He was the first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. He was born in Penticton, British Columbia, and raised in the nearby town of Oliver, where his father was a high-school chemistry teacher. Bowering is author of more than 100 books.
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