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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List of the most influential people

#18501

John F. O. Bilson

#18512

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

John F.O. Bilson is a Professor of Finance and Director of the MS and Ph.D. Programs of Finance at the Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago. Bilson grew up in Melbourne, Australia where he attended Melbourne Grammar School. He went on to receive a Master of Economics and a Bachelor of Economics from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Bilson received his Ph.D. in International Economics from the University of Chicago in 1973.

#18502

Owen Roizman

#18513

Overall Influence

1936 - 2023 (87 years)

Owen Roizman was an American cinematographer. He received five Academy Award nominations for Best Cinematography, for the films The French Connection , The Exorcist , Network , Tootsie , and Wyatt Earp . He served on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and was president of the American Society of Cinematographers.

#18503

Lois B. DeFleur

#18514

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Lois B. DeFleur was president of Binghamton University from 1990 to 2010. She came to the university after being provost at the University of Missouri. Before that she had served as a sociology professor at Missouri State University and Washington State University. She has a doctorate in sociology from the University of Illinois. She studied juvenile delinquency in Latin America and has done extensive work in the fields of deviant behavior and occupational socialization.

#18504

Nayan Chanda

#18515

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Nayan Chanda is the founder and editor-in-chief of YaleGlobal Online, an online magazine that publishes articles about globalisation. The magazine launched in 2001. Control of the magazine was transferred in 2013 from the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization to the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

#18505

John Newcombe

#18516

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

John David Newcombe AO OBE is an Australian former professional tennis player. He is one of the few men to have attained a world No. 1 ranking in both singles and doubles. At the majors, he won seven singles titles, a former record 17 men's doubles titles, and two mixed doubles titles. He also contributed to five Davis Cup titles for Australia during an age when the Davis Cup was deemed as significant as the majors. Tennis magazine rated him the 10th best male player of the period 1965–2005.

#18506

Adel Sedra

#18517

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Adel S. Sedra is an Egyptian Canadian electrical engineer and professor. Career Born in Egypt in 1943, Sedra received his B.Sc. from Cairo University in 1964 and his M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, in 1968 and 1969, respectively. All three of his degrees are in electrical engineering.

#18507

Ginés Morata

#18518

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Ginés Morata Pérez ForMemRS is Research Professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain and an expert in developmental biology of the fruit fly , a specialty he has worked on for over 40 years.

#18508

Östen Dahl

#18519

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Östen Dahl is a Swedish linguist and professor best known for pioneering a marker-based approach to tense and aspect in linguistic typology. Dahl finished his PhD at the University of Gothenburg and subsequently worked there as a docent before becoming professor of general linguistics at the University of Stockholm in 1980.

#18509

Keith Frankish

#18520

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Keith Frankish is a British philosopher specializing in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of cognitive science. He is an Honorary Reader at the University of Sheffield, UK, Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete. He is known for his "illusionist" stance in the theory of consciousness. He holds that the conscious mind is a virtual system, a trick of the biological mind. In other words, phenomenality is an introspective illusion. This position is in opposition to dualist theo...

#18510

Shmuel Safra

#18521

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Shmuel Safra is an Israeli computer scientist. He is a Professor of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He was born in Jerusalem. Safra's research areas include complexity theory and automata theory. His work in complexity theory includes the classification of approximation problemss—showing them NP-hard even for weak factors of approximation—and the theory of probabilistically checkable proofs and the PCP theorem, which gives stronger characterizations of the class NP, via a membership proof that can be verified reading only a constant number of its bits.

#18511

Darrell L. Bock

#18522

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Darrell L. Bock is an American evangelical New Testament scholar. He is executive director of Cultural Engagement at The Hendricks Center and Senior Research Professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas, United States. Bock received his PhD from Scotland's University of Aberdeen. His supervisor was I. Howard Marshall. Harold Hoehner was an influence in his NT development, as were Martin Hengel and Otto Betz as he was a Humboldt scholar at Tübingen University multiple years.

#18512

Jalal Talabani

#18523

Overall Influence

1933 - 2017 (84 years)

Jalal Talabani was an Iraqi politician who served as the sixth president of Iraq from 2005 to 2014, as well as the president of the Governing Council of Iraq. He was the first non-Arab president of Iraq.

#18513

Alexander J. Motyl

Alexander J. Motyl

#18524

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

#18514

Gennady Zyuganov

#18525

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Gennady Andreyevich Zyuganov is a Russian politician who has been the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and served as Member of the State Duma since 1993. He is also the Chair of the Union of Communist Parties – Communist Party of the Soviet Union since 2001. Zyuganov ran for President of Russia four times, most notably in 1996, when he lost in the second round to Boris Yeltsin.

#18515

Kurt Marti

#18526

Overall Influence

1921 - 2017 (96 years)

Kurt Marti was a Swiss theologian and poet. His poetry often has theological and religious aspects to it. He is also known for dialect literature said to have intellectual quality. Marti attended the Freie Gymnasium in Bern together with Friedrich Dürrenmatt. He then completed two semesters at the law faculty of the University of Bern before deciding to study Protestant theology.

#18516

Ray Price

#18527

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Raymond Kissam Price Jr. was an American writer who was the chief speechwriter for U.S. President Richard Nixon, working on both inaugural addresses, his resignation speech, and Gerald Ford's pardon speech. During Nixon's presidential campaign of 1968, the candidate made use of the contrasting style of two speechwriters with Price becoming known to colleagues as Mr Outside because his work was aimed at broadening Nixon's appeal.

#18517

Lev Loseff

#18528

Overall Influence

1937 - 2009 (72 years)

Lev Loseff was a Russian poet, literary critic, essayist and educator. Early life and education The son of poet Vladimir Lifshitz, Loseff was born in Leningrad. He attended Leningrad's famous Saint Peter's School and graduated from the journalism department of the Leningrad State University.

#18518

Alexis Tsipras

#18529

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Alexis Tsipras is a Greek politician who served as Prime Minister of Greece from 2015 to 2019. A socialist, Tsipras was leader of the Greek political party Syriza from 2008 to 2023. Tsipras is the fourth prime minister who has governed in the course of the 2010s Greek government-debt crisis. Originally an outspoken critic of the austerity policies implemented during the crisis, his tenure in office was marked by an intense austerity policy, mostly in the context of the third EU bailout to Greece .

#18519

Gresham Sykes

#18530

Overall Influence

1922 - 2010 (88 years)

Gresham M'Cready Sykes was an American sociologist and criminologist. He earned a Bachelor of Arts at Princeton University and a Ph.D. at Northwestern University. He taught at Princeton, Dartmouth, and Northwestern prior to becoming sociology professor at the University of Virginia. Sykes's study of New Jersey State Prison has been described as a pioneering look at the issues faced by guards, as well as the pains of imprisonment encountered by inmates . His most famous work is The Society of Captives, which is sometimes considered the first work in the genre of prison sociology. He coauthored...

#18520

Frederick Turner

#18531

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Frederick Turner is an English–American poet affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism. He is the author of two full-length science fiction epic poems, The New World and Genesis; several books of his poetry and literary translations; and a number of other works. He has been called "a major poet of our time".

#18521

William S. Sly

#18532

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

William S. Sly is an internationally known physician and scientist who, except for sabbatical years at Oxford and Stanford, spent his entire academic career in St. Louis. Following M.D. training at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, he trained in internal medicine at Washington University in St. Louis and in research laboratories at the NIH, in Paris, and in Madison, Wisconsin. He then joined the faculty at Washington University, where he directed the division of medical genetics for 20 years. In 1984, he was recruited to St. Louis University School of Medicine and appointed Alice A. Doisy Professor and chairman of the Edward A.

#18522

Peter O'Hearn

#18533

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Peter William O'Hearn , formerly a research scientist at Meta, is a Distinguished Engineer at Lacework and a Professor of Computer science at University College London . He has made significant contributions to formal methods for program correctness. In recent years these advances have been employed in developing industrial software tools that conduct automated analysis of large industrial codebases.

#18523

Samuel Heilman

#18534

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Samuel C. Heilman is a professor of Sociology at Queens College, City University of New York, who focuses on social ethnography of contemporary Jewish Orthodox movements. Personal Heilman was born in May, 1946, to Henry and Lucia Heilman, both Polish survivors of the Holocaust who were saved by Oskar Schindler. After World War II, the family went to West Germany with the encouragement of the American occupation forces, who wanted a Jewish presence there. Heilman is married to Ellin Marcia Heilman, a psychologist in private practice. Together, they live in New Rochelle, New York and have four c...

#18524

Peter Barnes

#18535

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Sir Peter John Barnes, FRCP, FCCP, FMedSci, FRS is a British respiratory scientist and clinician, a specialist in the mechanisms and treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease . He was Margaret Turner-Warwick Professor of Thoracic Medicine at the National Heart & Lung Institute, previous head of respiratory medicine at Imperial College and honorary consultant physician at the Royal Brompton Hospital London. He is one of the most highly cited scientists in the world

#18525

Hito Steyerl

#18536

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, moving image artist, writer, and innovator of the essay documentary. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-founded the Research Center for Proxy Politics, together with Vera Tollmann and Boaz Levin.

#18526

Slaven Bilić

#18537

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Slaven Bilić is a Croatian professional football manager and former player. He is the current manager of Saudi Professional League side Al-Fateh. Bilić, who played as a defender, began his career in 1988 with his hometown club Hajduk Split, later having successful spells with Karlsruher SC in Germany, and West Ham United and Everton in England before retiring from active football in 2001. At the international level, Bilić served as one of Croatia's most consistent defenders during the tenure of coach Miroslav Blažević, earning 44 caps between 1992 and 1999, and playing in UEFA Euro 1996 and t...

#18527

Grant Guilford

#18538

Overall Influence

William Grant Guilford is a retired New Zealand academic, specialising in veterinary nutrition. He is currently Chair of the New Zealand Veterinary Association. He was previously Head of the Institute of Veterinary, Animal Sciences at Massey University, Dean of Science at the University of Auckland and Vice-Chancellor of Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington.

#18528

Cilla Black

#18539

Overall Influence

1943 - 2015 (72 years)

Priscilla Maria Veronica White , better known as Cilla Black, was an English singer and television presenter. Championed by her friends the Beatles, Black began her career as a singer in 1963. Her singles "Anyone Who Had a Heart" and "You're My World" both reached number one in the UK in 1964. She had 11 top 10 hits on the UK Singles Chart between then and 1971 and an additional eight hits that made the top 40. In May 2010, new research published by BBC Radio 2 showed that her version of "Anyone Who Had a Heart" was the UK's biggest-selling single by a female artist in the 1960s. "You're My World" was also a modest hit in the U.S., peaking at No.

#18529

Edward Zigler

#18540

Overall Influence

1930 - 2019 (89 years)

Edward Frank Zigler was an American developmental psychologist and Sterling Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. In addition to his academic research on child development, he was best known as one of the architects of the federal Head Start program.

#18530

Brian Butterworth

#18541

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Brian Lewis Butterworth FBA is emeritus professor of cognitive neuropsychology in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, England. His research has ranged from speech errors and pauses, short-term memory deficits, reading and the dyslexias both in alphabetic scripts and Chinese, and mathematics and dyscalculia. He has also pioneered educational neuroscience, notably in the study of learners with special educational needs .

#18531

Serhii Plokhy

#18542

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

<onlyinclude> </onlyinclude> Personal background Serhii Plokhy was born in Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia, to Ukrainian parents. He spent his childhood and school years in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, where his family returned soon after his birth.

#18532

Viktor Orbán

#18543

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Viktor Mihály Orbán is a Hungarian politician who has been Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010, previously holding the office from 1998 to 2002. He has presided over Fidesz since 1993, with a break between 2000 and 2003.

#18533

Mstislav Rostropovich

#18544

Overall Influence

1927 - 2007 (80 years)

Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich was a Russian cellist and conductor. In addition to his interpretations and technique, he was well known for both inspiring and commissioning new works, which enlarged the cello repertoire more than any cellist before or since. He inspired and premiered over 100 pieces, forming long-standing friendships and artistic partnerships with composers including Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Henri Dutilleux, Witold Lutosławski, Olivier Messiaen, Luciano Berio, Krzysztof Penderecki, Alfred Schnittke, Norbert Moret, Andreas Makris, Leonard Bernstein, Aram Khac...

#18534

Luis García Montero

Luis García Montero

#18545

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Luis García Montero is a Spanish poet and literary critic, as well as a professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Granada. Biography Descended from a granadina family that was very active in the community, Luis García Montero was born in Granada in 1958 as the son of Luis García López and Elisa Montero Peña, and studied at the Colegio Dulce Nombre de María- PP.Escolapios in Granada. As a teenager, he was a fan of equestrian sports and had the opportunity to meet Blas de Otero.

#18535

Scott Hull

#18546

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Scott E. Hull is a mastering engineer based in New York City, and the owner of Masterdisk. Hull began his career as an intern at Masterdisk in 1983. He became Bob Ludwig's assistant in 1984, and was promoted to Chief Engineer in 1994. In this first part of his career at Masterdisk Hull mastered albums for the following artists: Donald Fagen, Miles Davis, Bruce Springsteen, Spacehog, Congreso, Ani DiFranco, Lemonheads, Garbage, Shawn Mullins and multiple titles on the Luaka Bop label.

#18536

Erik Ringmar

#18547

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Erik Ringmar is a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at İbn Haldun Üniversitesi, Istanbul, Turkey. Background Ringmar graduated with a PhD from the Department of Political Science, Yale University, in 1993. Between 1995 and 2007 he was senior lecturer in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics, United Kingdom, and between 2007 and 2013 he worked as a professor of political science in China, the last two years as Zhi Yuan Chair Professor of International Relations at Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, PRC. Between 2013 and 2019 he worked in the department of political science at Lund University, Sweden.

#18537

Ben Wang

#18548

Overall Influence

Ben Wang is an American materials scientist who specializes in materials engineering, applying emerging technologies to improve the manufacturing of affordable composite materials. He is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, holds the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. Chair in Manufacturing, and is the Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute.

#18538

Harry Glicken

#18549

Overall Influence

1958 - 1991 (33 years)

Harry Glicken was an American volcanologist. He researched Mount St. Helens in the United States before and after its 1980 eruption, and was very distraught about the death of volcanologist David A. Johnston, who was Glicken's mentor and supervisor in Spring 1980 at Mount St. Helens. Glicken was initially assigned to the USGS observation post in the weeks leading up to the eruption but was called away the night before the eruption.

#18539

Kawhi Leonard

#18550

Overall Influence

1991 - Present (35 years)

Kawhi Anthony Leonard is an American professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Clippers of the National Basketball Association . A two-time NBA champion, he is a five-time All-Star and a five-time member of the All-NBA Team . Nicknamed the "Claw" or "Klaw" for his ball-hawking skills and exceptionally large hands, Leonard is often regarded as one of the greatest two-way players in NBA history, earning seven All-Defensive Team selections and winning Defensive Player of the Year honors in 2015 and 2016. In 2021, he was named to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team.

#18540

Wayne Fuller

#18551

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Wayne Arthur Fuller is an American statistician who has specialised in econometrics, survey sampling and time series analysis. He was on the staff of Iowa State University from 1959, becoming a Distinguished Professor in 1983.

#18541

Albert M. Craig

#18552

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (99 years)

Albert Morton Craig was an American academic, historian, author and professor emeritus in the Department of History at Harvard University. Early life As a youth in Chicago, Craig was an Eagle Scout, and also participated in both competitive swimming and judo. A more scholarly interest in Japan was piqued after the Second World War. While doing counterintelligence work for the United States Army in 1946 and 1947, he was stationed in Miyazaki and in Kyoto. While in Kyoto, he earned a third degree black belt in judo.

#18542

Robert Campbell

#18553

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Robert Campbell is a writer and architect. He is currently an architecture critic for the Boston Globe. He lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Education Campbell is a graduate of Harvard College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he received the Appleton Traveling Fellowship and Francis Kelley Prize.

#18543

Mojisola Adeyeye

#18554

Overall Influence

Mojisola Christianah Adeyeye is a Nigerian pharmacist and professor. She was appointed the Director-General of National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control on 3 November 2017 by the President of The Federal Republic of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari. Before her appointment as NAFDAC boss, she was the founding Chair of Biopharmaceutical Sciences and a Professor of Pharmaceutics, Manufacturing Science and Drug Product Evaluation at the College of Pharmacy, Roosevelt University in Schaumburg, Illinois, where she spent 7 years. She was also a Professor of Pharmaceutics and Manufacturing for 21 years at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

#18544

David Linden

#18555

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

David J. Linden is an American professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and the author of The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God. The book The Accidental Mind is an attempt to explain the human brain to intelligent lay readers, and recently received a silver medal in the category of Science from the Independent Publisher Association. As of July 1, 2008, he has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neurophysiology. Linden's second book, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exerc...

#18545

Philip Wolfe

#18556

Overall Influence

1927 - 2016 (89 years)

Philip Starr "Phil" Wolfe was an American mathematician and one of the founders of convex optimization theory and mathematical programming. Life Wolfe received his bachelor's degree, masters, and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. He and his wife, Hallie, lived in Ossining, New York.

#18546

Teresa Forcades

Teresa Forcades

#18557

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Teresa Forcades i Vila is a Catalan physician, Benedictine nun and social activist. Forcades i Vila is known for her outspoken and sometimes controversial views on the church, public health and Catalan independence, and for her vaccine skepticism.

#18547

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski

#18558

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard , also known simply as PPK , is a Peruvian economist, public administrator, and former politician who served as President of Peru from 2016 to 2018. He served as Prime Minister of Peru and as Minister of Economy and Finance during the presidency of Alejandro Toledo. Kuczynski resigned from the presidency on 23 March 2018, following a successful impeachment vote and days before a probable conviction vote. Since 10 April 2019 he has been in pretrial detention, due to an ongoing investigation on corruption, money laundering, and connections to Odebrecht, a public work...

#18548

Bruce Allen

#18559

Overall Influence

#18549

Kiran Musunuru

#18560

Overall Influence

Kiran Musunuru is an American cardiologist who is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He researches the genetics and genomics of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Musunuru is a leading expert in the field of gene-editing.

#18550

Ke Zhao

#18561

Overall Influence

1910 - 2002 (92 years)

Ke Zhao or Chao Ko was a Chinese mathematician born in Wenling, Taizhou, Zhejiang. Biography Ke graduated from Tsinghua University in 1933 and obtained his doctorate from the University of Manchester under Louis Mordell in 1937. His main fields of study were algebra, number theory and combinatorics. Some of his major contributions included his work on quadratic forms, the Erdős–Ko–Rado theorem and his theorem on Catalan's conjecture. In 1955, he was one of the founding members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was later a professor at Sichuan University and became the president of the un...

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