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
#18401
Christine Romans
#18412
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Christine Romans is an American broadcast journalist, author, and a Senior Business Correspondent for NBC News. She previously served as the chief business correspondent and anchor for CNN's Early Start.
Go to Profile#18402
Terrance Hayes
#18413
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Terrance Hayes is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. His 2010 collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. In September 2014, he was one of 21 recipients of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, awarded to individuals who show outstanding creativity in their work.
Go to Profile#18403
Nasrollah Hekmat
#18414
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Nasrollah Hekmat is an Iranian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the Shahid Beheshti University. He first went to hawza and got the highest degree of Islamic studies. But in 1980, he came out from hawza and began to study philosophy. Finally, in 1994 Hekmat got his Ph.D. in Western Philosophy.
Go to Profile#18404
Ron Sun
#18415
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ron Sun is a cognitive scientist who made significant contributions to computational psychology and other areas of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. He is currently professor of cognitive sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and formerly the James C. Dowell Professor of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at University of Missouri. He received his Ph.D. in 1992 from Brandeis University.
Go to Profile#18405
Paul Connerton
#18416
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Paul James Connerton was a British social anthropologist best known for his work on social and body memory. Biography Born in Chesterfield to James Connerton, and his wife, Mary , he was first educated at Chesterfield Grammar School for Boys, then studied history at Jesus College, Oxford. After Graduating Connerton went to Nuffield College to study the works of neo-Marxist philosopher György Lukács who is best known for his concept of Reification. His interest in Lukács motivated him to deepen his knowledge of literary theory so he enrolled at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and gained another first degree in English.
Go to Profile#18406
David Paterson
#18417
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David Alexander Paterson is an American politician and attorney who served as the 55th governor of New York, succeeding Eliot Spitzer and serving out nearly three years of Spitzer's term from March 2008 to December 2010. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first legally blind person to be sworn in as governor of a U.S. state, and the first African-American governor of New York.
Go to Profile#18407
Sloane Stephens
#18418
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (33 years)
Sloane Stephens is an American professional tennis player. She achieved a career-best ranking of world No. 3 after Wimbledon in 2018. Stephens was the 2017 US Open champion, and has won seven WTA Tour singles titles in total.
Go to Profile#18408
Wilhelm Halbfass
#18419
Overall Influence
1940 - 2000 (60 years)
Wilhelm Halbfass was a German-born Indologist and philosopher. Life Wilhelm Halbfass studied Philosophy, Indology and Classical Philology at the Universities of Vienna and Göttingen and successfully defended his doctoral thesis on Indian Philosophy at Göttingen University in 1967. He was a professor in the departments of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and South Asia Regional Studies at the University of Pennsylvania from 1982 until his death in 2000. Along with Prof. Ludo Rocher, Prof. Ernest Bender, Prof. George Cardona, and several other Sanskritists, he made the University of Pennsylvani...
Go to Profile#18409
Virginia Page Fortna
#18420
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Virginia Page Fortna is an American political scientist, a specialist in the study of peace negotiations. She is currently the Harold Brown Professor of U.S. Foreign and Security Policy at Columbia University. She is the recipient of the 2010 Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association.
Go to Profile#18410
Don Budge
#18421
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
John Donald Budge was an American tennis player. He is most famous as the first tennis player — male or female, and still the only American male — to win the Grand Slam, and to win all four Grand Slam eventss consecutively overall. Budge was the second man to complete the career Grand Slam after Fred Perry, and remains the youngest to achieve the feat. He won ten majors, of which six were Grand Slam events and four Pro Slams, the latter achieved on three different surfaces. Budge is considered to have one of the best backhands in the history of tennis, with most observers rating it better th...
Go to Profile#18411
Ioana Dumitriu
#18422
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Ioana Dumitriu is a Romanian-American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests include the theory of random matrices, numerical analysis, scientific computing, and game theory.
Go to Profile#18412
Ron Greenwood
#18423
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Ronald Greenwood CBE was an English football player and manager, best known for being manager of the England national football team from 1977 until 1982, as well as being manager of West Ham United for 13 years, a time during which the club gained much of its fame. His final role in football was managing the England national football team.
Go to Profile#18413
Michael Albeck
#18424
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Michael Albeck is an Israeli organic and bioorganic chemist of tellurium compounds. He was President of Bar-Ilan University from 1986 to 1989. Biography Michael Albeck was born in Berlin, Germany to Hanoch and Henya Albeck in October 1934. His family immigrated to Israel in 1935 and settled in Jerusalem. He earned both MSc in Chemistry and PhD from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#18414
Martin Fishbein
#18425
Overall Influence
1936 - 2009 (73 years)
Martin Fishbein was a social psychologist, considered influential, and active AIDS prevention. He had been director of the health communication program at the University of Pennsylvania Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication.
Go to Profile#18415
Owen Gleiberman
#18426
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Owen Gleiberman is an American film critic who has been chief film critic for Variety magazine since May 2016, a title he shares with . Previously, Gleiberman wrote for Entertainment Weekly from 1990 until 2014. From 1981 to 1989, he wrote for The Phoenix.
Go to Profile#18416
Stephen Biddle
#18427
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Stephen D. Biddle is an American author, historian, policy analyst and columnist whose work concentrates on U.S. foreign policy. Currently, he is the Professor of International and Public Affairs at School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. He received recognition for his 2004 book Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, published through Princeton University Press. He also has worked in groups under Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus forming U.S. counter-insurgency policy.
Go to Profile#18417
Michael Loren Mauldin
#18428
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Michael Loren "Fuzzy" Mauldin is an American retired computer scientist and the inventor of the Lycos web search engine. He has written 2 books, 10 refereed papers, and several technical reports on natural-language processing, autonomous information agents, information retrieval, and expert systems. He is also one of the authors of Rog-O-Matic and Julia, a Turing test competitor in the Loebner Prize.
Go to Profile#18418
Richard Canary
#18429
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Richard Douglas Canary is an American mathematician working mainly on low-dimensional topology. He is a professor at the University of Michigan. Canary obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1989 under the supervision of William Paul Thurston, with the thesis Hyperbolic Structures on 3-Manifolds with Compressible Boundaries.
Go to Profile#18419
J. Andrew McCammon
#18430
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
James Andrew McCammon is an American physical chemist known for his application of principles and methods from theoretical and computational chemistry to biological systems. A professor at the University of California, San Diego, McCammon's research focuses on the theoretical aspects of biomolecular and cellular activity. In 2011 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#18420
Emilio Gentile
#18431
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Emilio Gentile is an Italian historian and professor, specializing in the history, ideology, and culture of Italian fascism. Gentile is considered one of Italy's foremost cultural historians of Fascist Italy and its ideology. He studied under the renowned Italian historian Renzo De Felice and wrote a book about him.
Go to Profile#18421
William B. Kannel
#18432
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
William B. Kannel was a former director of the Framingham Heart Study and a former head of the American Heart Association's Council of Epidemiology. He was among the recipients of the 1976 Gairdner Foundation International Award. He coined the term "risk factor", which first appeared in a 1961 article in Annals of Internal Medicine.
Go to Profile#18422
Jim Lee
#18433
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jim Lee is a Korean American comic-book artist, writer, editor, and publisher. He is currently the President, Publisher and Chief Creative Officer of DC Comics. In recognition of his work, Lee has received a Harvey Award, Inkpot Award and three Wizard Fan Awards.
Go to Profile#18423
Rochel Gelman
#18434
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Rochel Gelman is an emeritus psychology professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Science. Gelman is married to fellow psychologist C. Randy Gallistel. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#18424
Seymour S. Kety
#18435
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Seymour S. Kety was an American neuroscientist who was credited with making modern psychiatry a rigorous and heuristic branch of medicine by applying basic science to the study of human behavior in health and disease. After Kety died, his colleague Louis Sokoloff noted that: "He discovered a method for measuring blood flow in the brain, was the first scientific director of the National Institute of Mental Health and produced the most-definitive evidence for the essential involvement of genetic factors in schizophrenia."
Go to Profile#18425
Reviel Netz
#18436
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Reviel Netz is an Israeli scholar of the history of pre-modern mathematics, who is currently a professor of classics and of philosophy at Stanford University. Life and work Netz was born January 2, 1968, in Tel Aviv, Israel to Israeli author and Yoel Netz, an entrepreneur and translator of Russian classics.
Go to Profile#18426
Dirk Helbing
#18437
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences and affiliate of the Computer Science Department at ETH Zurich. Biography Dirk Helbing studied physics and mathematics at the University of Göttingen. He completed his doctoral thesis at Stuttgart University, on modeling social processes by means of game-theoretical approaches, stochastic methods, and complex systems theory. In 1996, he completed further studies on traffic dynamics and optimization.
Go to Profile#18427
Aleksander Bobko
#18438
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Aleksander Bobko is the Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education of Poland. He was previously the rector of Rzeszów University. Biography Bobko graduated in informatics from the AGH University of Science and Technology. He also earned advanced degrees in philosophy, including a doctorate and a habilitation, at the Pontifical University of John Paul II and at the Jagiellonian University. In the years 1998–2002, Bobko was a member of the city council of Rzeszów.
Go to Profile#18428
James Mosley
#18439
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
James Mosley is a retired librarian and historian whose work has specialised in the history of printing and letter design. The main part of Mosley's career has been 42 years as Librarian of the St Bride Printing Library in London, where he curated and worked to expand the museum's large collection of printing and lettering materials, books and examples. This collection greatly expanded with the close of the metal type era, which saw many companies and printing shops selling off their equipment and archives. Mosley also expanded the library's collection of lettering and signs. He has also been...
Go to Profile#18429
Thomas W. Laqueur
#18440
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Thomas Walter Laqueur is an American historian, sexologist and writer. He is the author of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation and Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud as well as many articles and reviews. He is the winner of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award, and is currently the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, located in Berkeley, California. Laqueur was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2015.
Go to Profile#18430
Edgar C. Polomé
#18441
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Edgar Ghislain Charles Polomé was a Belgian-American philologist and religious studies scholar. He specialized in Germanic and Indo-European studies and was active at the University of Texas at Austin for much of his career.
Go to Profile#18431
Tymofiy Mylovanov
#18442
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Tymofiy Mylovanov is a Ukrainian economist and former Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture of Ukraine in the government of Oleksiy Honcharuk. After his dismissal as government minister Mylovanov was appointed president of the Kyiv School of Economics
Go to Profile#18432
Apoorva D. Patel
#18443
Overall Influence
Apoorva D. Patel is a professor at the Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is notable for his work on quantum algorithms, and the application of information theory concepts to understand the structure of genetic languages. His major field of work has been the theory of quantum chromodynamics, where he has used lattice gauge theory techniques to investigate spectral properties, phase transitions, and matrix elements.
Go to Profile#18433
Ichirō Ozawa
#18444
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ichirō Ozawa is a Japanese politician and has been a member of the House of Representatives since 1969, representing the Iwate 3rd district . He is often dubbed the "Shadow Shōgun" due to his back-room influence.
Go to Profile#18434
Constantine Sandis
#18445
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Constantine Sandis is a Greek and British philosopher and entrepreneur. Having worked on philosophy of action, moral psychology, David Hume, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, in 2013 he became Professor of Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University. He is currently Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, a Founding Director of author services firm Lex Academic and Chief Operations Officer of lexacademic.science.
Go to Profile#18435
Edwin M. Yamauchi
#18446
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Edwin Masao Yamauchi is a Japanese-American historian, Christian apologist, editor and academic. He is Professor Emeritus of History at Miami University, where he taught from 1969 until 2005. He is married to Kimie Yamauchi .
Go to Profile#18436
James B. Saxe
#18447
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
James Benjamin Saxe is an American computer scientist who has worked for many years at the DEC Systems Research Center and its successors, the Compaq Systems Research Center and the Systems Research Center of HP Labs.
Go to Profile#18437
David H. Adams
#18448
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David H. Adams is an American cardiac surgeon and the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Professor and Chairman of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Dr. Adams is a recognized leader in the field of heart valve surgery and mitral valve reconstruction. As director of Mount Sinai Mitral Valve Repair Center, he has set national benchmarks with >99% degenerative mitral valve repair rates, while running one of the largest valve repair programs in the United States. Dr. Adams is the co-inventor of 2 mitral valve annuloplasty repa...
Go to Profile#18438
Greg Phillinganes
#18449
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Gregory Arthur Phillinganes is an American keyboardist. A prolific session musician, Phillinganes has contributed to numerous albums representing a broad array of artists and genres. He has toured with artists including Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton, David Gilmour and Toto, was musical director for Michael Jackson, and has released two solo studio albums.
Go to Profile#18439
Roberto Bautista Agut
#18450
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Roberto Bautista Agut is a Spanish professional tennis player. He has been ranked as high as world No. 9 by the Association of Tennis Professionals in singles, which he first achieved on 4 November 2019.
Go to Profile#18440
Louise A. Tilly
#18451
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Louise Audino Tilly was an American historian known for utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to her scholarly work, fusing sociology with historical research. Biographer Carl Strikwerda, states:Louise Tilly has been one of the leaders in the growth of scholarship on women's history, the history of the family, and social history in the late 20th century, helping to create an interdisciplinary approach to the study of social change that combines anthropology, sociology, economics, and demography with traditional archival and historical research. Her central contributions have been in demons...
Go to Profile#18441
Igor Tyutin
#18452
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Igor Viktorovich Tyutin is a Russian theoretical physicist, who works on quantum field theory. Tyutin is a professor at the Lebedev Institute in Moscow. In an unpublished Lebedev Institute report, he developed the BRST formalism around 1975 in Russia in parallel to and independently of the work of Carlo Becchi, Alain Rouet, and Raymond Stora in France. The BRST formalism is a method for quantization of fields with constraints such as gauge invariance. In quantum field theory, the procedure is of fundamental importance for attempts at constructing string field theories. In 2009 Tyutin recei...
Go to Profile#18442
Liselotte Mettler
#18453
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Liselotte Mettler is an Austrian-German surgeon who specializes in endocrinology, reproductive medicine, gynecological endoscopy and gynecological oncology. Mettler is a professor emeritus for the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics at Kiel University, Germany where she worked closely with Kurt Semm. The author of more than 600 publications and several books.
Go to Profile#18443
Sofia Coppola
#18454
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Sofia Carmina Coppola is an American filmmaker and actress. Coppola has received an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Golden Lion, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, as well as nominations for three BAFTA Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award.
Go to Profile#18444
Trevor Johnston
#18455
Overall Influence
Trevor Johnston is an Australian expert on Auslan. Johnston received his PhD from the University of Sydney in 1989 for his work on Auslan. Johnston was responsible for coining the term Auslan, and created the first Auslan dictionary, which was also one of the first sign language dictionaries that sequenced signs throughout according to principles that were language internal - such as handshape.
Go to Profile#18445
David M. Raup
#18456
Overall Influence
1933 - 2015 (82 years)
David M. Raup was a University of Chicago paleontologist. Raup studied the fossil record and the diversity of life on Earth. Raup contributed to the knowledge of extinction events along with his colleague Jack Sepkoski. They suggested that the extinction of dinosaurs 66 mya was part of a cycle of mass extinctions that may have occurred every 26 million years.
Go to Profile#18446
John Sweeney
#18457
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
John Joseph Sweeney was an American labor leader who served as president of the AFL–CIO from 1995 to 2009. Early years Born in The Bronx, New York, Sweeney was the son of James, a city bus driver, and Agnes, a domestic worker, both Irish immigrants. Sweeney's family moved to Yonkers in 1944, where Sweeney attended St. Barnabas Elementary School and graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School. Sweeney's father took him to numerous union meetings, and it was there that Sweeney began his lifelong commitment to the American labor movement.
Go to Profile#18447
Sun Kwok
#18458
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sun Kwok is a Hong Kong astronomer best known for his work on physics and chemistry of the late stages of stellar evolution. In 1978, he proposed a new theory on the origin of planetary nebulae. which has transformed our understanding of the death of Sun-like stars. He is a pioneer on the study of stellar synthesis of organic compounds, which may have implications on the origin of life on Earth.
Go to Profile#18448
Ed Paschke
#18459
Overall Influence
1939 - 2004 (65 years)
Edward Francis Paschke was an American painter of Polish descent. His childhood interest in animation and cartoons, as well as his father's creativity in wood carving and construction, led him toward a career in art. As a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago he was influenced by many artists featured in the museum's special exhibitions, in particular the work of Gauguin, Picasso and Seurat.
Go to Profile#18449
Lenhard Ng
#18460
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Lenhard Ng is an American mathematician, working primarily on symplectic geometry. Ng is a professor of mathematics at Duke University. Background and education Lenhard Ng is an American of Chinese descent. His father, Jack Ng, is a professor of physics at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Go to Profile#18450
Stephen F. Jones
#18461
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Stephen F. Jones is an English expert on post-Communist societies in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe who currently serves as Chair of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts.
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