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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List of the most influential people

#18551

Jerry Sloan

#18562

Overall Influence

1942 - 2020 (78 years)

Gerald Eugene Sloan was an American professional basketball player and coach. He played 11 seasons in the National Basketball Association before beginning a 30-year coaching career, 23 of which were spent as head coach of the Utah Jazz . NBA commissioner David Stern referred to Sloan as "one of the greatest and most respected coaches in NBA history". Sloan was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009.

#18552

Lajos Szilassi

#18563

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Lajos Szilassi was a professor of mathematics at the University of Szeged who worked in projective and non-Euclidean geometry, applying his research to computer generated solutions of geometric problems.

#18553

Jerry Lucas

#18564

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Jerry Ray Lucas is an American former basketball player. He was a nationally awarded high school player, national college star at Ohio State, and 1960 gold medal Olympian and international player before later starring as a professional player in the National Basketball Association .

#18554

Zubin Mehta

#18565

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Zubin Mehta is an Indian conductor of Western classical music. He is music director emeritus of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor emeritus of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Mehta's father was the founder of the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, and Mehta received his early musical education from him. When he was 18, he enrolled in the Vienna state music academy, from which he graduated after three years with a diploma as a conductor. He began winning international competitions and conducted the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic at age 21. Beginning in the 1960s, Mehta gained experience by ...

#18555

John McGahern

#18566

Overall Influence

1934 - 2006 (72 years)

John McGahern was an Irish writer and novelist. He is regarded as one of the most important writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. Known for the detailed dissection of Irish life found in works such as The Barracks, The Dark and Amongst Women, he was hailed by The Observer as "the greatest living Irish novelist" and in its obituary The Guardian described him as "arguably the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett".

#18556

Bill Buxton

#18567

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

William Arthur Stewart Buxton is a Canadian computer scientist and designer. Most recently -having left in December 2022 - he was a partner researcher at Microsoft Research. He is known for being one of the pioneers in the human–computer interaction field. He is still active in research, especially the curation of his collection documenting the history of interactive devices.

#18557

Robert Greene

#18568

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Robert Greene is an American author of books on strategy, power, and seduction. He has written six international bestsellers, including The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law , Mastery, and The Laws of Human Nature.

#18558

Felix Magath

#18569

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Wolfgang Felix Magath is a German football manager and former player. The most notable spell of his playing career was with Hamburger SV, with whom he won three Bundesliga titles, the 1977 European Cup Winners' Cup Final and the 1983 European Cup Final, scoring in both Finals. He also gained 43 international caps for the West Germany national team, winning UEFA Euro 1980 and reaching two consecutive World Cup finals.

#18559

Cindy Crawford

#18570

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Cynthia Ann Crawford is an American model, actress and television personality. During the 1980s and 1990s, she was among the most popular supermodels and a ubiquitous presence on magazine covers and runways, as well as fashion campaigns. She subsequently expanded into acting and business ventures.

#18560

Frank Aarebrot

#18571

Overall Influence

1947 - 2017 (70 years)

Frank Henrik Aarebrot was a Norwegian political scientist, political commentator, and professor of comparative politics. Among the most quoted and popular academics in the Norwegian press, he became better known during his later years for his televised "marathon lectures" and his recurring role in coverage of national and international elections on Norwegian television.

#18561

Bunji Sakita

#18572

Overall Influence

1930 - 2002 (72 years)

was a Japanese-American theoretical physicist who made important contributions in quantum field theory, superstring theory and discovered supersymmetry in 1971. He was a distinguished professor of physics at the City College of New York.

#18562

Mary Jackson

#18573

Overall Influence

1921 - 2005 (84 years)

Mary Jackson was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics , which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration . She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. In 1958, after taking engineering classes, she became NASA's first black female engineer.

#18563

Albert J. Raboteau

#18574

Overall Influence

1943 - 2021 (78 years)

Albert Jordy "Al" Raboteau II was an American scholar of African and African-American religions. Since 1982, he had been affiliated with Princeton University, where he was Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion.

#18564

Benny Blanco

#18575

Overall Influence

1988 - Present (38 years)

Benjamin Joseph Levin , known professionally as Benny Blanco , is an American record producer. He is the recipient of the 2013 Hal David Starlight Award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He also won the BMI Songwriter of the Year Award five non-consecutive times, and won the 2017 iHeartRadio Producer of the Year Award.

#18565

Ralph F. Hirschmann

#18576

Overall Influence

1922 - 2009 (87 years)

Ralph Franz Hirschmann was a German American chemist who led a team that was responsible for the first organic synthesis of an enzyme, a ribonuclease. Early life and education Born on May 6, 1922, in Fürth, he emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1936 and settled with his family in Kansas City, Missouri. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1944. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1943, he served in the United States Army for three years in the Pacific Theater of Operations. Following the completion of his military service, Hirschmann attended the University of Wisconsin–Ma...

#18566

William C. Kirby

#18577

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University. He is the chairman of the Harvard China Fund, Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai, Harvard's first University-wide center located outside the United States, former Director of Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, former Chair of the History Department and the former Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where he oversaw 10,000 students, 1,000 faculty members, 2,500 staff, and an annual budget of $1 billion and announced his resignation...

#18567

Bruno Étienne

#18578

Overall Influence

1937 - 2009 (72 years)

Bruno Étienne was a French sociologist, freemason and a political analyst. He was a specialist of Algeria, Islam and anthropology of the religious and masonic fact. He graduated in Arabic-language and political sciences at the Institut d'études politiques d'Aix-en-Provence and the University of Tunis. Bruno Étienne was a researcher in Cairo and was a teacher at the ENA-Algiers, at the law faculty of Algiers and the universities of Casablanca and Marmara. He was also director of researches at the CNRS.

#18568

Jonathan Lunine

#18579

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Jonathan I. Lunine is an American planetary scientist and physicist. Lunine teaches at Cornell University, where he is the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and chair of the Department of Astronomy. Having published more than 380 research papers, Lunine is at the forefront of research into planet formation, evolution, and habitability. His work includes analysis of brown dwarfs, gas giants, and planetary satellites. Within the Solar System, bodies with potential organic chemistry and prebiotic conditions, particularly Saturn's moon Titan, have been the focus of Lunine's resea...

#18569

Tobias Colding

#18580

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Tobias Holck Colding is a Danish mathematician working on geometric analysis, and low-dimensional topology. He is the great grandchild of Ludwig August Colding. Biography He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, to Torben Holck Colding and Benedicte Holck Colding. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1992 at the University of Pennsylvania under Chris Croke. Since 2005 Colding has been a professor of mathematics at MIT. He was on the faculty at the Courant Institute of New York University in various positions from 1992 to 2008. He has also been a visiting professor at MIT and at Princeton University and a postdoctoral fellow at MSRI .

#18570

Hernán Crespo

#18581

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Hernán Jorge Crespo is an Argentine professional football coach and former player. He is currently the head coach of UAE Pro League club Al Ain. A prolific striker, Crespo scored over 300 goals in a career spanning 19 years. At international level, he scored 35 goals and is Argentina's fourth highest goalscorer behind only Sergio Agüero, Gabriel Batistuta and Lionel Messi. He played in three FIFA World Cups: 1998, 2002, 2006. At club level, Crespo was the world's most expensive player, when he was bought by Lazio from Parma in 2000 for €56 million . He was top scorer in the 2000–01 Serie A wi...

#18571

Jarvis Cocker

#18582

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Jarvis Branson Cocker is an English musician and radio presenter. As the founder, frontman, lyricist and only consistent member of the band Pulp, he became a figurehead of the Britpop genre of the mid-1990s. Following Pulp's hiatus, Cocker has pursued a solo career, and for seven years he presented the BBC Radio 6 Music show Jarvis Cocker's Sunday Service.

#18572

Yvonne Mokgoro

#18583

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Yvonne Mokgoro GOB is a former justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Career Mokgoro was appointed to the bench in 1994 by Nelson Mandela. Mokgoro is a board member of the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria and is the current Chairperson of the South African Law Reform Commission.

#18573

Leonard Woodcock

Leonard Woodcock

#18584

Overall Influence

1911 - 2001 (90 years)

Leonard Freel Woodcock was President of the United Auto Workers and the first US ambassador to the People's Republic of China after being the last Chief of the US Liaison Office in Beijing. Early life Woodcock was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1911. He was the son of Ernest Woodcock and Margaret Freel. At the outbreak of World War I, the family was living in Germany, and Ernest was interned. While Leonard had been born in the United States, his parents were British. Both mother and son returned to the United Kingdom for the duration of the war, where he attended school.

#18574

Natasha Kaplinsky

Natasha Kaplinsky

#18585

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Natasha Margaret Kaplinsky is an English newsreader, TV presenter and journalist, best known for her roles as a studio anchor on Sky News, BBC News, Channel 5 and ITV News. After two years at Sky News, Kaplinsky joined BBC News in 2001 where she co-hosted Breakfast until 2005, when she became the host of the Six O'Clock News. In October 2007, Kaplinsky was recruited to help relaunch Five , reportedly for the highest fee ever paid to a UK newsreader, where she presented a new look, retitled Five News with Natasha Kaplinsky for three years. After leaving Channel 5, she went on to join ITV News...

#18575

Wilfrid Rall

#18586

Overall Influence

1922 - 2018 (96 years)

Wilfrid Rall was a neuroscientist who spent most of his career at the National Institutes of Health. He is considered one of the founders of computational neuroscience, and was a pioneer in establishing the integrative functions of neuronal dendrites. Rall developed the use of cable theory in neuroscience, as well as passive and active compartmental modeling of the neuron.

#18576

William E. May

#18587

Overall Influence

1928 - 2014 (86 years)

William E. May was an American theologian who was the Michael J. McGivney Emeritus Professor of Moral Theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC where he taught from 1991 to 2008.

#18577

Anna Castelli Ferrieri

#18588

Overall Influence

1918 - 2006 (88 years)

Anna Castelli Ferrieri was an Italian architect and industrial designer. She is most known for her influence in the use of plastics as a mainstream design material and her cofounding of Kartell, an Italian contemporary furniture company.

#18578

Dee Brown

#18589

Overall Influence

1908 - 2002 (94 years)

Dorris Alexander "Dee" Brown was an American novelist, historian, and librarian. His most famous work, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee , details the history of the United States' westward colonization of the continent between 1830 and 1890 from the point of view of Native Americans.

#18579

Adam Mansbach

#18590

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Adam Mansbach is an American author. He has previously been a visiting professor of literature at Rutgers University-Camden, with their New Voices Visiting Writers program . Biography Mansbach graduated from Columbia College in 1998 and received a MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2000.

#18580

Mikhail Voloshin

#18591

Overall Influence

1953 - 2020 (67 years)

Mikhail "Misha" Voloshin was a Russian and American theoretical physicist. Voloshin graduated from physics class of Moscow School 57 in 1970. Voloshin started working at ITEP in 1976 and accordingly earned his Ph.D. in 1977. In 1983 he received a Soviet medal and an award in physics. Beginning in 1990, he taught quantum physics at the William I Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, a division of the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering. In 1997 elected a fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2001 he was awarded J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics and ...

#18581

Patrick Collinson

#18592

Overall Influence

1929 - 2011 (82 years)

Patrick "Pat" Collinson, was an English historian, known as a writer on the Elizabethan era, particularly Elizabethan Puritanism. He was emeritus Regius Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge, having occupied the chair from 1988 to 1996. He once described himself as "an early modernist with a prime interest in the history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."

#18582

Jon Michael Dunn

#18593

Overall Influence

1941 - 2021 (80 years)

J. Michael Dunn was Oscar Ewing Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Professor Emeritus of Informatics and Computer Science, was twice chair of the Philosophy Department, was Executive Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and was founding dean of the School of Informatics at Indiana University.

#18583

William C. Dowling

#18594

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

William Courtney Dowling is University Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, specializing in 18th-century English literature, literature of the early American Republic, and Literary Theory.

#18584

Leah Jamieson

#18595

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Leah H. Jamieson is an American engineering educator, currently the Ransburg Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Jamieson was a founder of the Engineering Projects in Community Service program , a multi-university engineering design program that operates in a service-learning context. She is a recipient of the Gordon Prize. From 2006-2017, she served as the John A. Edwardson Dean of Engineering at Purdue.

#18585

Guillermo Sheridan

#18596

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Guillermo Humberto Sheridan Prieto is a Mexican literary critic, scholar and public commentator. Life and work Sheridan was born in Mexico City. He was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia in 1986. He was awarded a doctorate in Mexican literature by the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is a member of Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Investigadores, a government agency established in 1984 to promote both the quantity and quality of research.

#18586

Pat Benatar

#18597

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Patricia Mae Giraldo is an American rock singer and songwriter. In the United States, she has had two multi-platinum albums, five platinum albums, and 15 Billboard top 40 singles, while in Canada she had eight straight platinum albums, and she has sold over 35 million albums worldwide. She is also a four-time Grammy Award winner. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in November 2022.

#18587

Ingeborg Hochmair

Ingeborg Hochmair

#18598

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Ingeborg J. Hochmair-Desoyer is an Austrian electrical engineer and the CEO and CTO of hearing implant company MED-EL. Dr Hochmair and her husband Prof. Erwin Hochmair co-created the first micro-electronic multi-channel cochlear implant in the world. She received the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for her contributions towards the development of the modern cochlear implant. She also received the 2015 Russ Prize for bioengineering.

#18588

Gilles Pisier

#18599

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Gilles I. Pisier is a professor of mathematics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and a distinguished professor and A.G. and M.E. Owen Chair of Mathematics at the Texas A&M University. He is known for his contributions to several fields of mathematics, including functional analysis, probability theory, harmonic analysis, and operator theory. He has also made fundamental contributions to the theory of C*-algebras. Gilles is the younger brother of French actress Marie-France Pisier.

#18589

Jürgen W. Falter

Jürgen W. Falter

#18600

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Jürgen Wilfried Falter is a German political scientist. His research interests include political extremism and xenophobia. Born in Heppenheim, Hesse, Falter enrolled with a political science and modern history major at the University of Heidelberg in 1963 before finishing his studies with a Diplom at the Free University of Berlin in 1968. He earned his doctoral degree in 1973 and his Habilitation in 1981, both from the Saarland University.

#18590

Irving London

#18601

Overall Influence

1918 - 2018 (100 years)

Irving M. London was a hematologist and geneticist. He was an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons when he was selected to be the founding chair of the department of medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1955. He was recruited to become the founding director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology in 1970. Dr. London was the first professor to hold dual roles at both Harvard and MIT.

#18591

William Crowther

William Crowther

#18602

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

William Crowther is an American computer programmer, caver, and rock climber. He is the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure from 1975 onward, a seminal computer game that influenced the first decade of video game design and inspired the text adventure game genre.

#18592

Waldemar Chrostowski

Waldemar Chrostowski

#18603

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Monsignor Waldemar Chrostowski is a Polish Catholic priest, Bible scholar, and theologian. He is a professor of theology at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw. Chrostowski has attracted attention for propagating antisemitic and homophobic views.

#18593

Neil Crosby

#18604

Overall Influence

Neil Crosby is an academic valuer, Professor of Real Estate at the University of Reading. He has been instrumental in changing property valuation practices in the United Kingdom through a series of journal publications in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which dealt with questions of investment property valuation methodology, and through an influential book . The RICS adopted the 'Short-cut DCF' method proposed by Crosby, in the 1997 Valuation Information Paper: Commercial Investment Property - Valuation Methods.

#18594

Heribert Prantl

Heribert Prantl

#18605

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Heribert Prantl is a German author, journalist and jurist . At the Süddeutsche Zeitung he was head of the department of domestic policy from 1995 to 2017, head of the department "opinion" from 2018 to 2019, member of the chief editors from 2011 to 2019 and is now columnist and author. Since 2002 he has been a lecturer at the faculty of law at Bielefeld University, where he was appointed honorary professor in 2010.

#18595

Ben Hogan

#18606

Overall Influence

1912 - 1997 (85 years)

William Ben Hogan was an American professional golfer who is generally considered to be one of the greatest players in the history of the game. He is notable for his profound influence on golf swing theory and his ball-striking ability.

#18596

Friedrich Stadler

Friedrich Stadler

#18607

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Friedrich Stadler is an Austrian historian and philosopher and professor for history and philosophy of science at the University of Vienna. He is the founder and long-time director of the Institute Vienna Circle, which was established as a Department of the Faculty of Philosophy and Education of the Vienna University in May 2011. Currently he is a permanent fellow of this department and serves at the same time as the Director of the co-operating Vienna Circle Society, which is the continuation of the former Institute Vienna Circle as an extra-university institution.

#18597

Leon Fuerth

#18608

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Leon Sigmund Fuerth is a former diplomat who served as national security adviser to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. He was succeeded in that capacity by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in January 2001. Fuerth now directs the Project on Forward Engagement at the George Washington University, where he also serves as a professor of international affairs.

#18598

Nita Ahuja

#18609

Overall Influence

Nita Ahuja is a surgeon and the Chair of the Department of Surgery at Yale School of Medicine and Surgeon-in-Chief of Surgery at Yale New Haven Hospital. She is the first woman ever to serve as Chair of Surgery in Yale in its >200 year history. Before taking this position she was the first woman ever to be the Chief of Surgical Oncology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, USA. Ahuja researches in the field of epigenetics and is a passionate advocate of clinician scientist. She also served as the director of Sarcoma and peritoneal surface malignancy program. She is a surgeon-scientist and her...

#18599

David Maister

#18610

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

David H. Maister is a former Harvard Business School professor, American writer and expert on business management practices and the management of professional service firms. He is best known for writing Managing the Professional Service Firm and co-writing The Trusted Advisor with Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford. Born and raised in London, England, Maister became a citizen of the United States in 2006.

#18600

Ruha Benjamin

#18611

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly focusing on the intersection of race, justice and technology. Benjamin is the author of numerous publications, including the books People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier , Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want .

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