Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#18151

Wolfgang Helfrich

#18162

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Wolfgang Helfrich is a German physicist and inventor recognized for his contributions to twisted-nematic liquid crystal technology, which is used to produce a variety of modern LCD electronic displays.

#18152

Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson

#18163

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Gregory Crewdson is an American photographer who makes large-scale, cinematic, psychologically-charged prints of staged scenes set in suburban landscapes and interiors. He directs a large production and lighting crew to construct his images.

#18153

David Eisenbach

#18164

Overall Influence

David Eisenbach is a historian and an expert on media and politics and a lecturer in the history department at Columbia University. He was a Democratic candidate for New York City's Public Advocate in the 2017 primary election, where he received 23.42% and 92,246 votes against incumbent Letitia James. He was also a candidate in the February 2019 non-partisan special election for the same position in which he came in 13th place in a field of 17.

#18154

C. J. van Rijsbergen

C. J. van Rijsbergen

#18165

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

C. J. "Keith" van Rijsbergen FREng is a professor of computer science at the University of Glasgow, where he founded the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group. He is one of the founders of modern Information Retrieval and the author of the seminal monograph Information Retrieval and of the textbook The Geometry of Information Retrieval.

#18155

Wayne Smith

#18166

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Wayne S. Smith is a former US diplomat, academic, and author. He published four books on the topic of Cuba and U.S.-Cuba relations. Government service In 1949, Smith joined the United States Marine Corps, and served until 1953, including combat in the 1950-1953 Korean War. In 1957, he joined the US State Department, serving in posts in Brazil, the Soviet Union, Argentina and Cuba. From 1979 to 1982, he was the second Chief of Mission of the US Interests Section in Havana under President Jimmy Carter and President Ronald Reagan. Smith retired after 25 years in the Foreign Service due to personal disagreement with the policies of Reagan in Latin America.

#18156

Franz Kamphaus

#18167

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Franz Kamphaus is a German Catholic priest, bishop emeritus of the Diocese of Limburg. He was bishop of the diocese from 1982 to 2007. He was the only German bishop to oppose Pope John Paul II in the matter of counseling pregnant women in conflict situations. Before being bishop, he taught pastoral theology and homiletics at the University of Münster; afterwards he became minister of a home for people with physical and mental disabilities in Aulhausen.

#18157

George F. Carrier

George F. Carrier

#18168

Overall Influence

1918 - 2002 (84 years)

George Francis Carrier was an engineer and physicist, and the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Applied Mathematics Emeritus of Harvard University. He was particularly noted for his ability to intuitively model a physical system and then deduce an analytical solution. He worked especially in the modeling of fluid mechanics, combustion, and tsunamis.

#18158

Linda Partridge

Linda Partridge

#18169

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Professor Dame Linda Partridge is a British geneticist, who studies the biology and genetics of ageing and age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Partridge is currently Weldon Professor of Biometry at the Institute of Healthy Ageing, Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment, University College London, and Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany.

#18159

James Russell

#18170

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

James T. Russell is an American inventor. He earned a BA in physics from Reed College in Portland in 1953. He joined General Electric's nearby labs in Richland, Washington, where he initiated many types of experimental instrumentation. He designed and built the first electron beam welder.

#18160

Amina Mama

#18171

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Amina Mama is a Nigerian-British writer, feminist and academic. Her main areas of focus have been post-colonial, militarist and gender issues. She has lived in Africa, Europe, and North America, and worked to build relationships between feminist intellectuals across the globe.

#18161

Jürgen Stock

#18172

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Jürgen Stock is a German police officer and academic. He has served as secretary general of Interpol since November 7, 2014. Biography Stock was born on October 4, 1959, in Wetzlar, Germany. He joined the Kriminalpolizei in Hesse in 1978 and stayed on as an officer until 1992. Between 1992 and 1996 he went to the University of Giessen to occupy himself with scientific research in criminology. In 1996 he worked as a lawyer, before returning to the Bundeskriminalamt to become the deputy head of a unit combating economic crime. Stock became President of the University of Applied Police Science l...

#18162

Egon Balas

#18173

Overall Influence

1922 - 2019 (97 years)

Egon Balas was an applied mathematician and a professor of industrial administration and applied mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University. He was the Thomas Lord Professor of Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business and did fundamental work in developing integer and disjunctive programming.

#18163

Richard Mills Smith

#18174

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Richard Mills Smith is an American editor and journalist who has served as Editor-in-Chief, CEO and Chairman of the Newsweek magazine. Education Smith graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Albion College in 1968, attended Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and received an M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1970.

#18164

Billy Mills

#18175

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

William Mervin Mills , also known as Tamakhóčhe Theȟíla, is an American Oglala Lakota former track and field athlete who won a gold medal in the 10,000 metre run at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. His 1964 victory is considered one of the greatest Olympic upsets because he was a virtual unknown going into the event. He was the first non-European to win the Olympic event and remains the only winner from the Americas. A United States Marine, Mills is a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

#18165

Elmar Klos

#18176

Overall Influence

1910 - 1993 (83 years)

Elmar Klos was a Czech film director. He collaborated for 17 years with his Slovak colleague Ján Kadár and with him won the 1965 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for the film The Shop on Main Street.

#18166

Xiao-Gang Wen

#18177

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Xiao-Gang Wen is a Chinese-American physicist. He is a Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His expertise is in condensed matter theory in strongly correlated electronic systems. In Oct. 2016, he was awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize.

#18167

Mary L. Good

#18178

Overall Influence

1931 - 2019 (88 years)

Mary Lowe Good was an American inorganic chemist who worked academically, in industrial research and in government. Good contributed to the understanding of catalysts such as ruthenium which activate or speed up chemical reactions.

#18168

Timothy O'Shea

#18179

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Sir Timothy Michael Martin O'Shea is a British computer scientist and academic. He was the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Edinburgh from 2002 to 2018. Biography O'Shea grew up in London, attended the Royal Liberty School, in Romford, Essex. A computer scientist, he was Master of Birkbeck College from 1998 to 2002 and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 2001.

#18169

Mohammed Berrada

#18180

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Mohammed Berrada , also transliterated Muhammad Baradah is a Moroccan novelist, literary critic and translator writing in Arabic. He is considered one of Morocco's most important modern authors. Early life Berrada studied literature in France. From 1976 to 1983, Berrada was the president of Morocco's writers union. He has for some decades taught Arabic literature at the Faculté des lettres of the Mohammed V University in Rabat. He is a member of the advisory board of the Moroccan literary magazine Prologue.

#18170

Derek Hockridge

#18181

Overall Influence

1934 - 2013 (79 years)

Derek Hockridge was a British translator, teacher, lecturer, and occasional actor, who was perhaps best known for his translations of the Asterix comic book series. Born in Wales and brought up in Birmingham, he completed a degree in French at the University of Wales, Cardiff, which was followed by teacher training at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Subsequently, he was a French teacher at Manchester Grammar School, then a lecturer at Leicester Polytechnic. During this time, with Anthea Bell, he translated the Asterix comic books, which were written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo.

#18171

Glenn Albrecht

#18182

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Glenn A. Albrecht, born in 1953, was Professor of Sustainability at Murdoch University in Western Australia until his retirement in 2014. He is an honorary fellow in the School of Geosciences of the University of Sydney.

#18172

David S. Oderberg

#18183

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Professor David Simon Oderberg is an Australian philosopher of metaphysics and ethics based in Britain since 1987. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. He describes himself as a non-consequentialist or a traditionalist in his works. Broadly speaking, Oderberg places himself in opposition to Peter Singer and other utilitarian or consequentialist thinkers. He has published over thirty academic papers and has authored six books: The Metaphysics of Good and Evil, Opting Out: Conscience and Cooperation in a Pluralistic Society, Real Essentialism, Applied Ethics, Moral Theory, and The Metaphysics of Identity over Time.

#18173

Katherine Dunn

#18184

Overall Influence

1945 - 2016 (71 years)

Katherine Karen Dunn was an American novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her novel Geek Love . She was also a prolific writer on boxing.

#18174

Carl Kaysen

#18185

Overall Influence

1920 - 2010 (90 years)

Carl Kaysen was an American academic, policy advisor and international security specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the Committee on International Security Studies at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the father of Girl, Interrupted author Susanna Kaysen. He was married for 50 years to Annette Neutra until her death in 1990. In 1994, he married Ruth Butler.

#18175

Ernest Emenyonu

#18186

Overall Influence

Chief Sir Ernest Emenyonu is a Nigerian academic, who is an African literature critic and professor. He was formerly head of the department of English and Literary Studies, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calabar, in that order, through the 1980s and 1990s. He was also Provost of Alvan Ikoku College of Education now Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Educationˌ Owerri in Imo stateˌ Nigeria .

#18176

Amos N. Wilson

#18187

Overall Influence

1941 - 1995 (54 years)

Amos Nelson Wilson was an African-American theoretical psychologist, social theorist, Pan-African thinker, scholar, author and a professor of psychology at the City University of New York. Early life and education Born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1940 or 1941, Wilson completed his undergraduate degree at the Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, master's degree at The New School of Social Research, and attained a PhD degree from Fordham University in New York. Wilson worked as a psychologist, social caseworker, supervising probation officer and as a training administrator in the New York City Department of Juvenile Justice.

#18177

Hua Hsu

#18188

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Hua Hsu is an American writer and academic, based in New York City. He is a professor of English at Bard College and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His work includes investigations of immigrant culture in the United States, as well as public perceptions of diversity and multiculturalism. He is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific. His second book, Stay True: A Memoir, was published in September 2022.

#18178

Walter F. Tichy

#18189

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Walter F. Tichy is a German computer scientist. He was professor of computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany where he taught classes in software engineering until April 2022 when he retired.

#18179

Walter Bobbie

#18190

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Walter Bobbie is an American theatre director, choreographer, and occasional actor and dancer. Bobbie has directed both musicals and plays on Broadway and Off-Broadway, and was the Artistic Director of the New York City Center Encores! concert series. He directed the long-running Broadway revival of the musical Chicago. His most well-known acting role was Nicely-Nicely Johnson in the 1992 Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls.

#18180

Jack Corliss

#18191

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

John B. Corliss is a scientist who has worked in the fields of geology, oceanography, and the origins of life. Corliss is a University of California, San Diego Alumnus, receiving his PhD from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the 1960s. As part of his doctoral work under Jerry van Andel, he analyzed samples of basaltic rock from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Chemical traces in these rocks showed evidence of hot water circulation, suggesting the existence of undersea hot springs known as hydrothermal vents.

#18181

Max Lu

#18192

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Gaoqing Max Lu FREng FIChemE, FRSC is a Chinese–Australian chemical engineer and nanotechnologist. He is the current Vice-Chancellor of the University of Surrey. Early life and education Lu was born in the countryside of Shandong, China. He obtained his bachelor's degree in engineering from Northeastern University in Shenyang. He subsequently received a scholarship from the University of Queensland in Australia, where he earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering.

#18182

Georges Chapouthier

Georges Chapouthier

#18193

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Georges Chapouthier is a French neuroscientist and philosopher. Biography Georges Chapouthier is the son of Odette Mazaubert and Fernand Chapouthier . Fernand Chapouthier was a classicist and archeologist who was deputy director of the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. Odette Mazaubert was known under the pseudonym of "Carquelin" for her Saintongeais writings. Chapouthier attended the Lycée Montaigne and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He then followed the "Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles" at the Lycée Saint-Louis and subsequently enrolled at the Ecole normale supérieure in 1964....

#18183

Jim Geelen

#18194

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jim Geelen is a professor at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization in the faculty of mathematics at the University of Waterloo, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Combinatorial optimization. He is known for his work on Matroid theory and the extension of the Graph Minors Project to representable matroids. In 2003, he won the Fulkerson Prize with his co-authors A. M. H. Gerards, and A. Kapoor for their research on Rota's excluded minors conjecture. In 2006, he won the Coxeter–James Prize presented by the Canadian Mathematical Society.

#18184

Mike Schmidt

#18195

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Michael Jack Schmidt is an American former professional baseball third baseman who played his entire 18-season career in Major League Baseball for the Philadelphia Phillies. Schmidt was a 12-time All-Star and a three-time winner of the National League Most Valuable Player award , and he was known for his combination of power hitting and strong defense. As a hitter, he compiled 548 home runs and 1,595 runs batted in , and led the NL in home runs eight times and in RBIs four times. As a fielder, Schmidt won the National League Gold Glove Award for third basemen ten times. Schmidt was elected ...

#18185

James A. Lindsay

#18196

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

James Stephen Lindsay , known professionally as James A. Lindsay, is an American author and cultural critic. He is known for the grievance studies affair, in which he, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose submitted hoax articles to academic journals in 2017 and 2018 to test scholarship and rigor in several academic fields. Lindsay has written several books including Cynical Theories , which he co-authored with Pluckrose. He is also known for promoting conspiracy theories, such as that of Cultural Marxism, and right-wing LGBT grooming conspiracy theories.

#18186

Hussain Muhammad Ershad

#18197

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Hussain Muhammad Ershad was a Bangladeshi military officer and politician who served as the president of Bangladesh from 1983 to 1990, a time many consider to have been a military dictatorship. He seized power as head of the army during a bloodless coup against President Abdus Sattar on 24 March 1982 . He declared himself President in 1983, and subsequently won the controversial 1986 Bangladeshi presidential election. Despite claims to have legitimately won the 1986 election, many consider his regime as an era of military dictatorship. Ershad served in the Presidential office until 1990, when...

#18187

Thibault Damour

Thibault Damour

#18198

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Thibault Damour is a French physicist. He was a permanent professor in theoretical physics at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques from 1989 to 2022. Since then, he is professor emeritus. An expert in general relativity, he has long taught this theory at the École Normale Supérieure . He contributed greatly to the modelling of gravitational waves from compact binary systems, and with Alessandra Buonanno, he invented the "effective one-body" approach to representing the orbital trajectories of binary black holes.

#18188

David Greenberg

#18199

Overall Influence

David Greenberg is a historian and professor of US history as well as of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey, United States. US history books Greenberg’s Ph.D. thesis won Columbia University’s 2001 Bancroft Dissertation Award and became his first book, Nixon’s Shadow , which won the Washington Monthly Annual Political Book Award and the American Journalism Historians Association's Book Award. Calvin Coolidge , a biography in Henry Holt's American Presidents Series, appeared on the Washington Post’s list of best books of 2007. Presidential Doodles was widely reviewed and featured on CNN, NPR's All Things Considered, and CBS’s Sunday Morning.

#18189

Gene Wilder

#18200

Overall Influence

1933 - 2016 (83 years)

Jerome Silberman , known professionally as Gene Wilder, was an American actor, comedian, writer and filmmaker. He was known mainly for his comedic roles, but also for his portrayal of Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory . He collaborated with Mel Brooks on the films The Producers , Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein , and with Richard Pryor in the films Silver Streak , Stir Crazy , See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Another You .

#18190

James G. Nell

#18201

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

James G. "Jim" Nell is an American engineer. He was the principal investigator of the Manufacturing Enterprise Integration Project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology , and is known for his work on enterprise integration.

#18191

Laura Coates

#18202

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Laura Coates is an American attorney. She has formerly served as a trial attorney for the law firms Faegre & Benson and Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman, and a federal prosecutor for the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. Since 2016, she has served as an analyst for CNN, and became the network's chief legal analyst in 2023.

#18192

Dirk Bezemer

#18203

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Dirk Bezemer is a Dutch economist who is a professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. He studied at Wageningen University and University of Amsterdam & Tinbergen Institute . His topics of expertise include the financial sector, credit creation, credit cycles, monetary policy, and the cause of economic crises. Bezemer provides commentary at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and De Groene Amsterdammer. In a September 2009 opinion piece in the Financial Times he wrote that a dozen economists whom he listed had seen the 2007-08 financial crisis ...

#18193

John Toshack

#18204

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

John Benjamin Toshack is a Welsh former professional football player and manager. He began his playing career as a teenager with his hometown club Cardiff City, becoming the youngest player to make an appearance for the side when he made his debut in 1965. After establishing himself in the first-team, he went on to make over 200 appearances and scored 100 goals in all competitions after forming a striking partnership with Brian Clark.

#18194

Thomas Hoeren

#18205

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Thomas Hoeren is a German law professor and a former Court of appeal judge with focus on Information and Media Law. Career Studies Thomas Hoeren studied Theology and Law at the Universities of Tübingen, Münster and London Guildhall University from 1980 to 1987. In 1986 he graduated from Theology in Münster. From October 1986 to May 1988 he wrote his doctorate's thesis in IT Law at the University of Münster . In May 1994, Thomas Hoeren qualified as a professor of Civil Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Münster .

#18195

Princess Michael of Kent

#18206

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Princess Michael of Kent is a member of the British royal family who is of German, Austrian, Czech and Hungarian descent. She is married to Prince Michael of Kent, who is a grandson of King George V. Princess Michael of Kent was an interior designer before becoming an author; she has written several books on European royalty.

#18196

Lotte Motz

#18207

Overall Influence

1922 - 1997 (75 years)

Lotte Motz, born Lotte Edlis was an Austrian-American scholar, obtaining a Ph.D. in German and philology, who published four books and many scholarly papers, primarily in the fields of Germanic mythology and folklore.

#18197

James Lawson

#18208

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

James Morris Lawson Jr. is an American activist and university professor. He was a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence within the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s, he served as a mentor to the Nashville Student Movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was expelled from Vanderbilt University for his civil rights activism in 1960, and later served as a pastor in Los Angeles for 25 years.

#18198

Katajun Amirpur

Katajun Amirpur

#18209

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Katajun Amirpur is a German-Iranian professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Cologne. Biography Amirpur graduated in Iranian Studies at the University of Bonn. She subsequently taught at the Free University of Berlin, the University of Bamberg and the University of Bonn. In 2000, she was awarded her doctorate by the University of Bamberg on the Shiite exegesis of the Qur'an with a thesis on the "Thought and Influence of Abdolkarim Soroush in the Islamic Republic of Iran". In February 2010, she was appointed Assistant Professor for Modern Islamic World with a focus on Iran by the university board of the University of Zurich.

#18199

Denis Alexander

Denis Alexander

#18210

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Dr. Denis Alexander has spent 40 years in the biomedical research community. He is an Emeritus Fellow of St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge and an Emeritus Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge which he co-founded with Bob White in 2006.

#18200

Karl Reinisch

#18211

Overall Influence

1921 - 2007 (86 years)

Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at :de:Karl Reinisch; see its history for attribution. Karl Reinisch was a German electrical engineer and professor for control engineering in Ilmenau. Under his lead, a solid foundation for automation and system technology for cybernetics was developed at the Technische Universität Ilmenau. For many years, he was active at the International Federation of Automatic Control .

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