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
#18351
Jean Pedersen
#18362
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Jean J. Pedersen was an American mathematician and author particularly known for her works on the mathematics of paper folding. Education and career Pedersen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, the daughter of an ophthalmologist and a teacher. She studied home economics changing to a double major in mathematics and physics as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, before becoming a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Utah under the supervision of E. Allen Davis.
Go to Profile#18352
Michel Debré
#18363
Overall Influence
1912 - 1996 (84 years)
Michel Jean-Pierre Debré was the first Prime Minister of the French Fifth Republic. He is considered the "father" of the current Constitution of France. He served under President Charles de Gaulle from 1959 to 1962. In terms of political personality, Debré was intense and immovable and had a tendency to rhetorical extremism.
Go to Profile#18353
Michael S. Longuet-Higgins
#18364
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Michael Selwyn Longuet-Higgins FRS was a British mathematician and oceanographer at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics , Cambridge University, England and Institute for Nonlinear Science, University of California, San Diego, USA. He was the younger brother of H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins.
Go to Profile#18354
Danny Yamashiro
#18365
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Daniel Keauhou Matsu Yamashiro , also known as D. K. M. Yamashiro, is an American clergyman, author, radio and podcast host, researcher, Christian media personality, and a chaplain at MIT who survived a fall from the ridge of the Nuʻuanu Pali in Honolulu, Hawaii, at 18. He is the first researcher to present aggregate data on childhood trauma as it relates to American presidents. Yamashiro also produced the first comprehensive study on American presidents that investigates the influence of religious development from a lens of trauma.
Go to Profile#18355
Wang Zhenyi
#18366
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (102 years)
Wang Zhenyi , also known as Zhen-yi Wang, is a Chinese pathophysiologist and hematologist who is a professor emeritus of Medicine and Pathophysiology at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University . He is most well known for discovering the cure for acute promyelocytic leukemia while working with Laurent Degos in France, using tretinoin on a trial of 24 patients at Ruijin Hospital in 1986.
Go to Profile#18356
Vahid Halilhodžić
#18367
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Vahid Halilhodžić is a Bosnian professional football manager and former player. He is regarded as one of the most controversially successful Bosnian football managers, due to his successful tenure in coaching various national teams yet having problematic relations with his teams and players due to different approaches.
Go to Profile#18357
Alec Wilkinson
#18368
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Alec Wilkinson is an American writer who has been on the staff of The New Yorker since 1980. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer he is among the "first rank of" contemporary American "literary journalists... of Naipaul, Norman Mailer and Agee".
Go to Profile#18358
Roger Hart
#18369
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Roger A. Hart is a child-rights academic, and former Professor of Psychology and Geography at the City University of New York and co-director of the Children's Environments Research Group. Education Hart received a B.A. in geography from the University of Hull in England in 1968 and undertook a Masters and PhD in geography at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#18359
Murray Shanahan
#18370
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Murray Patrick Shanahan is a professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London, in the Department of Computing, and a senior scientist at DeepMind. He researches artificial intelligence, robotics, and cognitive science.
Go to Profile#18360
Tim Howard
#18371
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Timothy Matthew Howard is an American former professional soccer player who played as a goalkeeper. He last played for USL Championship club Memphis 901 FC, a club of which he is a minority owner and sporting director. He is also international ambassador in the US for former club Everton. Widely considered as one of the greatest goalkeepers from North America, he holds the World Cup record for most saves in a match with 16.
Go to Profile#18361
Red Grange
#18372
Overall Influence
1903 - 1991 (88 years)
Harold Edward "Red" Grange , nicknamed "the Galloping Ghost" and "the Wheaton Iceman", was an American professional football halfback who played for the Chicago Bears and the short-lived New York Yankees. His signing with the Bears helped legitimize the National Football League .
Go to Profile#18362
David L. Katz
#18373
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
David L. Katz is an American physician, nutritionist and writer. He was the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center that was founded at Griffin Hospital in 1998. Katz is the founder of True Health Initiative and is an advocate of plant-predominant diets.
Go to Profile#18363
Mempo Giardinelli
#18374
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Mempo Giardinelli is an Argentine novelist and academic, author of numerous books, including novels, essay collections, and short story collections. Biography Giardinelli was born in Resistencia, Chaco Province. He enrolled at the National University of the Northeast, in neighboring Corrientes, in 1964. He enrolled in Law School, but left his law studies in 1969 to pursue writing and journalism. Giardinelli emigrated to Mexico following the March 1976 coup in Argentina; there, he taught journalism at the Ibero-American University from 1978 to 1984, and contributed to Mexico City-based business magazines Expansión and Forum.
Go to Profile#18364
Michael T. Hannan
#18375
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Michael Thomas Hannan is an American sociologist, and professor of management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, known for his seminal work in the field of organizational ecology. Biography Hannan received his B.A. at the College of the Holy Cross in 1965, his M.A. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1968, where he also obtained his Ph.D in sociology in 1970.
Go to Profile#18365
Jean Stefancic
#18376
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Jean Stefancic is an American legal academic, Professor and Clement Research Affiliate at the University of Alabama. She has written numerous books with her husband Richard Delgado. Life Stefancic received a BA from Maryville College and an MA from the University of San Francisco. She taught at the University of Pittsburgh for five years, during which she was a research professor of law and a Derrick Bell scholar. She spent ten years at the University of Colorado law school. There she was on the advisory committee of the Center of the American West and affiliated with the Latino/a Research & Policy Center.
Go to Profile#18366
Anders Martin-Löf
#18377
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Anders Martin-Löf is a Swedish physicist and mathematician. He has been a professor at the Department of Mathematics of Stockholm University. Martin-Löf did his undergraduate studies at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and got his exam in engineering physics in 1963. He continued with graduate studies in optimization at KTH and at MIT in the United States from 1967–1968, later on followed by a position as Research Associate at the Rockefeller University in New York City 1970–1971, working with probability theory and applications to statistical mechanics. he received his Ph.D.
Go to Profile#18367
Antje Jackelén
#18378
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Antje Jackelén is archbishop emerita and primate emerita of the Church of Sweden, the national church. On 15 October 2013, she was elected the 70th Archbishop of Uppsala and formally received through a service in Uppsala Cathedral on 15 June 2014, making her Sweden's first foreign-born archbishop since the 12th century, and the first female archbishop.
Go to Profile#18368
Ashutosh Saxena
#18379
Overall Influence
Ashutosh Saxena is an Indian-American computer scientist, researcher, and entrepreneur known for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and robotics. His research interests include deep learning, robotics, and 3-dimensional computer vision. Saxena is the co-founder and CEO of Caspar.AI, which is an artificial intelligence company that automates peoples' homes and builds applications such as fall detectors for senior living. Prior to Caspar.AI, Ashutosh co-founded Cognical Katapult , which provides a no credit required alternative to traditional financing for online and omni-channel retail.
Go to Profile#18369
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
#18380
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation . For this book, Taylor received the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book from the Lannan Foundation.
Go to Profile#18370
Ignacio Chapela
#18381
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ignacio Chapela is a microbial ecologist and mycologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for a 2001 paper in Nature on the flow of transgenes into wild maize populations, as an outspoken critic of the University of California's ties to the biotechnology industry, as well as a later dispute with the University over denial of tenure that Chapela argued was politically motivated. Chapela is also notable for his work with natural resources and indigenous rights.
Go to Profile#18371
Blake Ross
#18382
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Blake Aaron Ross is an American software engineer who is best known for his work as the co-creator of the Mozilla Firefox internet browser with Dave Hyatt. In 2005, he was nominated for Wired magazine's top Rave Award, Renegade of the Year, opposite Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jon Stewart. He was also a part of Rolling Stone magazine's 2005 hot list. From 2007, he worked for Facebook as Director of Product until resigning in early 2013.
Go to Profile#18372
Bruce M. Owen
#18383
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Bruce M. Owen is an economist and author. Owen is the Morris M. Doyle Professor in Public Policy, Emeritus, in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, and the Gordon Cain Senior Fellow, Emeritus, in Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research.
Go to Profile#18373
Charity Angya
#18384
Overall Influence
Charity Angya was a Nigerian Vice Chancellor at Benue State University. Life Charity Angya graduated at the University of Jos in 1983. She took her honours and doctorate at the University of Ibadan. In 2000 Charity Angya's plays were published under the title "The Cycle of the Moon, and Other Plays" and in 2005 her book titled "Perspectives on Violence Against Women in Nigeria" was published.
Go to Profile#18374
Michael McRobbie
#18385
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michael Alexander McRobbie is an Australian–American computer scientist and university administrator. He served as the 18th president of Indiana University from 2007 to 2021. Upon stepping down from the IU presidency, McRobbie was replaced by Pamela Whitten, who became the 19th president of Indiana University on July 1, 2021. On July 1, 2021, he assumed the titles of university chancellor, president emeritus and university professor. He is the third person to serve as university chancellor in the university's more than 200-year-old history.
Go to Profile#18375
Dunga
#18386
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Carlos Caetano Bledorn Verri , known as Dunga , is a Brazilian football manager and former professional player who played as a defensive midfielder. Under his captaincy, Brazil won the 1994 FIFA World Cup and he lifted the World Cup trophy. Along with Xavi, he is one of only two men to have played in a World Cup final, an Olympic final, a Confederations Cup final and a continental championship final. He was head coach of Brazil twice. In his first spell from 2006 to 2010, he led them to victory in the 2007 Copa América and the 2009 FIFA Confederations Cup, and to the quarter-finals of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, after which he was dismissed by the Brazilian Football Confederation.
Go to Profile#18376
Wayne A. I. Frederick
#18387
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Wayne Alix Ian Frederick is a Trinidadian-American scholar, surgeon, and university administrator. He served as president of Howard University in Washington D.C. from July 21, 2014 to August 31, 2023 superseded by Ben Vinson III. Frederick also serves as the distinguished Charles R. Drew Professor of Surgery.
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Sandip Trivedi
#18388
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Sandip Trivedi is an Indian theoretical physicist working at Tata Institute for Fundamental Research at Mumbai, India, while he is its current director. He is well known for his contributions to string theory, in particular finding the first models of accelerated expansion of the universe in low energy supersymmetric string . His research areas include string theory, cosmology and particle physics. He is now member of program advisory board of International Center for Theoretical Sciences . He is also the recipient of the Infosys Prize 2010 in the category of Physical Sciences.
Go to Profile#18378
Loretta Young
#18389
Overall Influence
1913 - 2000 (87 years)
Loretta Young was an American actress. Starting as a child, she had a long and varied career in film from 1917 to 1953. She received numerous honors including an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and three Primetime Emmy Awards as well as two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her work in film and television.
Go to Profile#18379
Luiz Fux
#18390
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Luiz Fux is a Brazilian judge and the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Federal Court. He is of Romanian Jewish descent, and the first Jewish Brazilian member of the Court. He was previously a minister of the Superior Court of Justice before assuming his position at the Supreme Court.
Go to Profile#18380
John Jost
#18391
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
John Thomas Jost is a social psychologist best known for his work on system justification theory and the psychology of political ideology. Jost received his AB degree in Psychology and Human Development from Duke University , where he studied with Irving E. Alexander, Philip R. Costanzo, David Goldstein, and Lynn Hasher, and his PhD in Social and Political Psychology from Yale University , where he was the last doctoral student of Leonard Doob and William J. McGuire. He was also a doctoral student of Mahzarin R. Banaji and a postdoctoral trainee of Arie W. Kruglanski.
Go to Profile#18381
Murray Barnson Emeneau
#18392
Overall Influence
1904 - 2005 (101 years)
Murray Barnson Emeneau was the founder of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Early life and education Emeneau was born in Lunenburg, a fishing town on the east coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. Having distinguished himself in classical languages in high school, he obtained a four-year scholarship to Dalhousie University in Halifax to further his classical studies. On obtaining his B.A. degree from Dalhousie, Emeneau was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford University. From Oxford he arrived at Yale University in 1926, where he took a teaching appointment in Latin.
Go to Profile#18382
Martín Abadi
#18393
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Martín Abadi is an Argentine computer scientist, working at Google . He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from Stanford University in 1987 as a student of Zohar Manna. He is well known for his work on computer security and on programming languages, including his paper on the Burrows–Abadi–Needham logic for analyzing authentication protocols, and his book A Theory of Objects, laying out formal calculi for the semantics of object-oriented programming languages.
Go to Profile#18383
Ludwik Leibler
#18394
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ludwik Leibler, born in 1952 is a Polish-born French physicist. He is Professor of École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris and member of the French Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering.
Go to Profile#18384
Samuel Buss
#18395
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Samuel R. Buss is an American computer scientist and mathematician who has made major contributions to the fields of mathematical logic, complexity theory and proof complexity. He is currently a professor at the University of California, San Diego, Department of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics.
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Joop Zoetemelk
#18396
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Hendrik Gerardus Joseph "Joop" Zoetemelk is a Dutch former professional racing cyclist. He started and finished the Tour de France 16 times, which were both records when he retired. He also holds the distance record in Tour de France history with 62,885 km ridden. He won the 1979 Vuelta a España and the 1980 Tour de France.
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Michael Hviid Jacobsen
#18397
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Michael Hviid Jacobsen is a Danish professor of sociology. Since 1997 he has been employed at Aalborg University, acting from 2009 as a professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work. He is a frequent lecturer and often appears in the media as an expert within a wide range of topics, particularly in relation to our changing culture of death and criminal issues.
Go to Profile#18387
Andreas Seppi
#18398
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Andreas Seppi is an Italian former professional tennis player. He reached a career-high singles ranking of world No. 18 on 28 January 2013. He became the first Italian to win a title on all three surfaces.
Go to Profile#18388
Peggy Phelan
#18399
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Peggy Phelan is an American feminist scholar. She is one of the founders of Performance Studies International, the former chair of New York University's Department of Performance Studies from 1993 to 1996, Stanford's Theatre and Performance Studies Department from 2007 to 2011, and continues as the Ann O’Day Maples Professor of the Arts, Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English, and the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute. Her research interests while at Stanford University include; American Literature, British Literature, and performance studies with a focus...
Go to Profile#18389
Bing Liu
#18400
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Bing Liu is a Chinese-American professor of computer science who specializes in data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing. In 2002, he became a scholar at University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh . His PhD advisors were Austin Tate and Kenneth Williamson Currie, and his PhD thesis was titled Reinforcement Planning for Resource Allocation and Constraint Satisfaction.
Go to Profile#18390
Emanuel Rackman
#18401
Overall Influence
1910 - 2008 (98 years)
Rabbi Emanuel Rackman was an American Modern Orthodox Rabbi, president of the RCA, vice-president of Yeshiva University. President of Bar-Ilan University from 1977 to 1986. He held pulpits in major congregations and helped draw attention to the plight of Refuseniks in the then-Soviet Union and attempted to resolve the dilemma of the Agunah, a woman who cannot remarry because her husband will not grant a Get, the required religious divorce decree that would free her to remarry under Halacha.
Go to Profile#18391
Asım Orhan Barut
#18402
Overall Influence
1926 - 1994 (68 years)
Asım Orhan Barut was a Turkish-American theoretical physicist. Education He received both his undergraduate diploma and his Ph.D. degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1949 and 1952, respectively. He pursued his postdoctoral studies at the University of Chicago during 1953–1954.
Go to Profile#18392
Mildred Fay Jefferson
#18403
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Mildred Fay Jefferson was an American physician and anti-abortion political activist. The first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, the first woman to graduate in surgery from Harvard Medical School and the first woman to become a member of the Boston Surgical Society, she is known for her opposition to the legalization of abortion and her work as president of the National Right to Life Committee.
Go to Profile#18393
Shariff Enamul Kabir
#18404
Overall Influence
Shariff Enamul Kabir is a Bangladeshi academic who served as the vice-chancellor of Jahangirnagar University from 24 February 2009 until May 2012. Early life and education Kabir was born on 28 February 1955 in Gopalganj District, East Pakistan, Pakistan. He has published more than three hundred articles in different journals. He has been an elected fellow of the Bangladesh Academy of Sciences since 1999.
Go to Profile#18394
David Haye
#18405
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
David Deron Haye is a British former professional boxer who competed between 2002 and 2018. He held multiple world championships in two weight classes, and was the first British boxer to reach the final of the World Amateur Boxing Championships, where he won a silver medal in 2001.
Go to Profile#18395
Tom Baker
#18406
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Thomas Stewart Baker is an English actor and writer. He played the fourth incarnation of the Doctor in the science fiction television series Doctor Who from 1974 to 1981. Later in his career, Baker performed in the television series Medics , Randall & Hopkirk and Monarch of the Glen . He also provided narration for the television comedy series Little Britain and Little Britain USA . His voice, which has been described as "sonorous", was voted the fourth-most recognisable in the UK in 2006.
Go to Profile#18396
Judy Rebick
#18407
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Judy Rebick is a Canadian writer, journalist, political activist, and feminist. Early life Born in Reno, Nevada, Rebick and her family moved to Toronto when she was 9. She became a socialist activist in the 1970s, joining the Revolutionary Marxist Group. She was a member of its successor, the Revolutionary Workers League, and wrote articles for the RWL's newspaper, Socialist Voice, until she left the organization in the early 1980s.
Go to Profile#18397
William Raspberry
#18408
Overall Influence
1935 - 2012 (77 years)
William Raspberry was an American syndicated public affairs columnist. He was also the Knight Professor of the Practice of Communications and Journalism at the Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University. An African American, he frequently wrote on racial issues.
Go to Profile#18398
Robert Gifford
#18409
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert Gifford is professor of Psychology and Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria . His main research interests are environmental psychology, social psychology and personality psychology. He has worked on nonverbal behavior and on climate change behavior barriers. Gifford is the author of five editions of Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice, which has also been translated into Japanese, and edited Research Methods for Environmental Psychology . From 2004 to 2016, he was the editor in chief of the Journal of Environmental Psychology. Gifford is also on the editorial boards of Architectural Science Review and Applied Psychology.
Go to Profile#18399
Frank Spitzer
#18410
Overall Influence
1926 - 1992 (66 years)
Frank Ludvig Spitzer was an Austrian-born American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to probability theory, including the theory of random walks, fluctuation theory, percolation theory, the Wiener sausage, and especially the theory of interacting particle systems. Rare among mathematicians, he chose to focus broadly on "phenomena", rather than any one of the many specific theorems that might help to articulate a given phenomenon. His book Principles of Random Walk, first published in 1964, remains a well-cited classic.
Go to Profile#18400
John Womack
#18411
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
John Womack Jr. is an American economist and historian of Mexico, the Mexican Revolution , and Emiliano Zapata. He is a former professor of Latin American history and economics at Harvard University. He is the grandfather of the late rapper Lil Peep.
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