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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Search Influential People

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School

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#18851

Pai Hsien-yung

#18862

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Kenneth Hsien-yung Pai is a Chinese writer from Taiwan who has been described as a "melancholy pioneer". He was born in Guilin, Guangxi at the cusp of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Pai's father was the Kuomintang general Bai Chongxi , whom he later described as a "stern, Confucian father" with "some soft spots in his heart." Pai was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of seven, during which time he would have to live in a separate house from his siblings . He lived with his family in Chongqing, Shanghai, and Nanjing before moving to the British-controlled Hong Kong in 1948 as CPC forces turned the tide of the Chinese Civil War.

#18852

LaDainian Tomlinson

#18863

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

LaDainian Tarshane Tomlinson is an American former professional football running back who played in the National Football League for 11 seasons. After a successful college football career with the TCU Horned Frogs, the San Diego Chargers selected him as the fifth overall pick in the 2001 NFL Draft. He spent nine years with the Chargers, earning five Pro Bowl appearances, three Associated Press first-team All-Pro nominations, and two NFL rushing titles. Tomlinson was also voted the NFL Most Valuable Player in 2006 after breaking the record for touchdowns in a single season. He played two further seasons with the New York Jets, before retiring.

#18853

Nikola Pilić

#18864

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Nikola "Niki" Pilić is a Croatian former professional tennis player who competed for SFR Yugoslavia. He was one of the Handsome Eight. Pilić was ranked world No. 6 in January 1968 and world No. 7 for 1967 by Lance Tingay of The Daily Telegraph.

#18854

Geneviève Fraisse

#18865

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Geneviève Fraisse is a French feminist philosopher. Early life She was born within Murs blancs , a community founded by Emmanuel Mounier at Châtenay-Malabry. Her parents, Paul Fraisse and Simone Fraisse , were both professors at the Sorbonne. In May 1968, she is a first year philosophy student at the Sorbonne. She co-funded with Jacques Rancière the journal Les Révoltes logiques .

#18855

Daniel M. Oppenheimer

#18866

Overall Influence

Daniel M. Oppenheimer is a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences. Previously, he was a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. From 2004 to 2012, he worked at Princeton University's Department of Psychology.

#18856

Stuart Rothenberg

#18867

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Stuart Rothenberg is an American editor, publisher, and political analyst. He is best known for his biweekly political newsletter The Rothenberg Political Report, now known as Inside Elections. He was also a regular columnist at Roll Call and an occasional op-ed contributor to other publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Orlando Sentinel.

#18857

Ashok Das

#18868

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Ashok Das is an Indian-American physicist. Early life and education Das was born in Puri, Odisha. He received his BS in 1972 and MS in 1974 in physics from the University of Delhi. He received his PhD from SUNY Stony Brook in 1977.

#18858

Charles Issawi

#18869

Overall Influence

1916 - 2000 (84 years)

Charles Issawi was an economist and historian of the Middle East at Columbia University and Princeton University in the United States. Roger Owen, the A. J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History at Harvard, stated that Issawi, "was the father of the study of the modern economic history of the Middle East."

#18859

Brian Slattery

#18870

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Brian Slattery, B.A., BCL, D.Phil., F.R.S.C., is a Professor Emeritus of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is a prominent academic in Canadian Constitutional Law and Aboriginal rights discourse. He practices Aboriginal law at Slattery & Slattery.

#18860

Etzel Cardeña

#18871

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Etzel Cardeña is the Thorsen Professor of Psychology at Lund University, Sweden where he is Director of the Centre for Research on Consciousness and Anomalous Psychology . He has served as President of the Society of Psychological Hypnosis, and the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. He is the current editor of the Journal of Parapsychology. He has expressed views in favour of what he terms "an open, informed study on all aspects of consciousness" and the validity of some paranormal phenomena. The Parapsychological Association honored Cardeña with the 2013 Charles Honorton Integrative Contributions Award.

#18861

Larry Zox

#18872

Overall Influence

1937 - 2006 (69 years)

Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work.

#18862

Sharad Pawar

#18873

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Sharad Govindrao Pawar is an Indian politician. He has served as the Chief Minister of Maharashtra for four terms and has also served in the Union Council Of Ministers as the Minister of Defence in the Cabinet of P.V Narsimha Rao and Minister of Agriculture in the Cabinet of Manmohan Singh. He is the first and current president of the Nationalist Congress Party , which he founded in 1999, after separating from the Indian National Congress. He leads the NCP delegation in the Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber of the Indian parliament. He is the chairperson of Maha Vikas Aghadi, a regional Maharash...

#18863

Michael Baxandall

#18874

Overall Influence

1933 - 2008 (75 years)

Michael David Kighley Baxandall, FBA was a British art historian and a professor emeritus of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and worked as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy was profoundly influential in the social history of art, and is widely used as a textbook in college courses.

#18864

Donald Goldfarb

#18875

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Donald Goldfarb is an American mathematician, best known for his works in mathematical optimization and numerical analysis. Biography Goldfarb studied Chemical Engineering at Cornell University, earning a BSChE in 1963. He obtained an M.S. from Princeton University in 1965, and a doctorate in 1966.

#18865

Franjo Tuđman

#18876

Overall Influence

1922 - 1999 (77 years)

Franjo Tuđman was a Croatian politician and historian who became the first president of Croatia, from 1990 until his death. He served following the country's independence from Yugoslavia. Tuđman also was the ninth and last President of the Presidency of SR Croatia from May to July 1990.

#18866

Harjot Oberoi

#18877

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Harjot Singh Oberoi is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He received his PhD from the Australian National University. His thesis earned him the J.G. Crawford Prize in 1987. He is known for his studies of Sikh history, particularly during the late 19th-century and early 20th-century.

#18867

Andrew Witkin

#18878

Overall Influence

1952 - 2010 (58 years)

Andrew Paul Witkin was an American computer scientist who made major contributions in computer vision and computer graphics. Education Witkin studied psychology at Columbia College, Columbia University, for his bachelor's degree, and at MIT for his Ph.D supervised by Whitman A. Richards.

#18868

Ross Hassig

#18879

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Ross Hassig is an American historical anthropologist specializing in Mesoamerican studies, particularly the Aztec culture. His focus is often on the description of practical infrastructure in Mesoamerican societies. He is the author of several influential books, among them: Time, History, and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico; Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control; and Trade, Tribute, and Transportation: The Sixteenth-Century Political Economy of the Valley of Mexico.

#18869

Colin Mayer

#18880

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Colin Peter Mayer was the Peter Moores Professor of Management Studies at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. He was the Peter Moores Dean of the Saïd Business School between 2006 and 2011. He is a fellow of the British Academy, a fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He is a professorial fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an honorary fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He is an ordinary member of the Competition Appeal Tribunal and was a member of the UK government Natural Capital Committee.

#18870

Michael Pettis

#18881

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Michael Pettis is an American professor of finance at Guanghua School of Management at Peking University in Beijing and a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was founder and co-owner of punk-rock nightclub D22 in Beijing, which closed in January 2012.

#18871

Edison Liu

#18882

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Edison T. Liu is an American chemist who is the former president and CEO of The Jackson Laboratory, and the former director of its NCI-designated Cancer Center . Before joining The Jackson Laboratory, he was the founding executive director of the Genome Institute of Singapore , chairman of the board of the Health Sciences Authority, and president of the Human Genome Organization . As the executive director of the GIS, he brought the institution to international prominence as one of the most productive genomics institutions in the world.

#18872

Bart Wilson

#18883

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Bart Wilson is an experimental economist. He holds the Donald P. Kennedy Endowed Chair of Economics and Law in the Chapman University, Argyros School of Business and Economics. He is also the director of the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy and teaches courses in humanomics. His work has been widely published in both the popular and academic press.

#18873

Jane McGonigal

#18884

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

Jane McGonigal is an American author, game designer, and researcher. McGonigal is known for her game Jane the Concussion Slayer and her role as Director of Game Research and Development at Institute for the Future.

#18874

Tine Hribar

#18885

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Tine Hribar is a Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual, notable for his interpretations of Heidegger and his role in the democratization of Slovenia between 1988 and 1990, known as the Slovenian Spring. He is the husband of author, essayist and political commentator Spomenka Hribar.

#18875

Irwin Redlener

#18886

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Irwin Redlener is an American pediatrician and public health activist who specializes in health care for underserved children and disaster planning, response, and recovery. He is the author of The Future of Us: What the Dreams of Children Mean for 21st Century America and the author of Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do Now .

#18876

Vyacheslav Shokurov

Vyacheslav Shokurov

#18887

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Vyacheslav Vladimirovich Shokurov is a Russian mathematician best known for his research in algebraic geometry. The proof of the Noether–Enriques–Petri theorem, the cone theorem, the existence of a line on smooth Fano varieties and, finally, the existence of log flips—these are several of Shokurov's contributions to the subject.

#18877

Myrna Weissman

#18888

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Myrna Milgram Weissman is Diane Goldman Kemper Family Professor of Epidemiology in Psychiatry at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and Chief of the Division of Translational Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She is an epidemiologist known for her research on the prevalence of psychiatric disorders and psychiatric epidemiology, as it pertains to rates and risks of anxiety and mood disorders across generations. Among her many influential works are longitudinal studies of the impact of parental depress...

#18878

David Damrosch

#18889

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

David Damrosch is an American literary historian, was born in Maine and raised there and in New York, currently the Ernest Bernbaum Professor at Harvard University and an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

#18879

William W. Fisher

#18890

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

William "Terry" W. Fisher III is the WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His primary research and teaching areas are intellectual property law and legal history.

#18880

Tyler VanderWeele

#18891

Overall Influence

Tyler J. VanderWeele is the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also the co-director of Harvard University's Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality, the director of their Human Flourishing Program, and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University in mathematics, philosophy, theology, finance, and biostatistics.

#18881

Jim Sleeper

#18892

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Jim Sleeper is an American author and journalist. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale University from 1999 to 2020, teaching undergraduate seminars on American national identity and on journalism, liberalism, and democracy.

#18882

James Robins

#18893

Overall Influence

James M. Robins is an epidemiologist and biostatistician best known for advancing methods for drawing causal inferences from complex observational studies and randomized trials, particularly those in which the treatment varies with time. He is the 2013 recipient of the Nathan Mantel Award for lifetime achievement in statistics and epidemiology, and a recipient of the 2022 Rousseeuw Prize in Statistics, jointly with Miguel Hernán, Eric Tchetgen-Tchetgen, Andrea Rotnitzky and Thomas Richardson.

#18883

Kai Li

#18894

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Kai Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist and professor of Princeton University. He is noted for his work on Distributed Shared Memory and co-founding the storage deduplication company Data Domain Inc. which was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2009.

#18884

Harald Rosenthal

#18895

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Harald Rosenthal is a German hydrobiologist and fisheries scientist known for his work in fish farming, ecology, and international cooperation. Life Rosenthal was born and raised in Berlin. From 1957 to 1962, he studied zoology, botany, chemistry, geography, and philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin . From 1963 to 1968, he studied hydrobiology and fishery science in Hamburg.

#18885

Santosh Vempala

#18896

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Santosh Vempala is a prominent computer scientist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His main work has been in the area of Theoretical Computer Science.

#18886

Farshid Moussavi

Farshid Moussavi

#18897

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Farshid Moussavi is an Iranian-born British architect, educator, and author. She is the founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture and a Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The work of her London-based practice, FMA, is celebrated for projects that integrate an inventive approach to space and materials and a strong social awareness, whether they be a cultural centre such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland or a community centre such as the Ismaili Center Houston , a social housing project in Montpellier, or an elementary school in Saclay , both in France.

#18887

Cecilia R. Aragon

#18898

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon is an American computer scientist, professor, author, and champion aerobatic pilot who is best known as the co-inventor of the treap data structure, a type of binary search tree that orders nodes by adding a priority as well as a key to each node. She is also known for her work in data-intensive science and visual analytics of very large data sets, for which she received the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers .

#18888

Brian Bates

#18899

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Brian Bates is former chairman of Psychology at the University of Sussex. He is currently the director of the Medical Psychology Project at the Department of Psychology at University of Sussex in England. He is a visiting professor at the University of Brighton. He is known as the author of books on the shamanic wisdom of Anglo-Saxon England, and for his related course on "Shamanic Consciousness". He has also taught and directed at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

#18889

Uwe Storch

#18900

Overall Influence

1940 - 2017 (77 years)

Uwe Storch was a German mathematician. His field of research was commutative algebra and analytic and algebraic geometry, in particular derivationss, divisor class group, resultants. Storch studied mathematics, physics and mathematical logic in Münster and in Heidelberg. He got his PhD 1966 under the supervision of Heinrich Behnke with a thesis on almost factorial ringss. 1972 Habilitation in Bochum, 1974 professor in Osnabrück and since 1981 professor for algebra and geometry in Bochum. 2005 Emeritation. Uwe Storch is married and has four sons.

#18890

E. M. Wright

#18901

Overall Influence

1906 - 2005 (99 years)

Sir Edward Maitland Wright was an English mathematician, best known for co-authoring An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers with G. H. Hardy. He served as the Principal of the University of Aberdeen from 1962 to 1976.

#18891

Shirley Chisholm

#18902

Overall Influence

1924 - 2005 (81 years)

Shirley Anita Chisholm was an American politician who, in 1968, became the first black woman to be elected to the United States Congress. Chisholm represented New York's 12th congressional district, a district centered on Bedford–Stuyvesant, for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first black candidate for a major-party nomination for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Throughout her career she was known for taking "a resolute stand against economic, social, and political injustices," as well as bein...

#18892

Herman Klare

#18903

Overall Influence

1909 - 2003 (94 years)

Hermann Klare was a chemistry academic who played a prominent role in scientific administration and research in the German Democratic Republic . Klare held professorships at the Technical University Leuna-Merseburg and at Humboldt University . From 1968 to 1979 he was president of the German Academy of Sciences .

#18893

Uwe Reinhardt

#18904

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Uwe Ernst Reinhardt was a professor of political economy at Princeton University and held several positions in the healthcare industry. Reinhardt was a prominent scholar in health care economics and a frequent speaker and author on subjects ranging from the war in Iraq to the future of Medicare.

#18894

Thomas Hopko

#18905

Overall Influence

1939 - 2015 (76 years)

Thomas John Hopko was an Eastern Orthodox Christian priest and theologian. He was the Dean of Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary from September 1992 until July 1, 2002 and taught dogmatic theology there from 1968 until 2002. In retirement, he carried the honorary title of Dean Emeritus.

#18895

Kiran Desai

#18906

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Kiran Desai is an Indiann author. Her novel The Inheritance of Loss won the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award. In January 2015, The Economic Times listed her as one of 20 "most influential" global Indian women.

#18896

Jamie Bulloch

#18907

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Jamie Bulloch is a British historian and translator of German literature, with fifty published titles to his name. Life and work Bulloch was born at East Dulwich Hospital, London, in 1969 and grew up in Tooting. He first attended Rosemead School, then Whitgift School, where he opened the bowling for the 1st XI. In 1981 he performed with the Children's Music Theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe in a production directed by Jeremy James Taylor, which was also filmed for Granada Television the same year. He returned to the Fringe in 1983 and 1989, appearing latterly in Silver, written by Jonathan Smi...

#18897

Barbara Ransby

#18908

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Barbara Ransby is a writer, historian, professor, and activist. She is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians, and holds the John D. MacArthur Chair at the University of Illinois Chicago.

#18898

Thomas Carr

#18909

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Thomas D. Carr is a vertebrate paleontologist who received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005. He is now a member of the biology faculty at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Much of his work centers on tyrannosauroid dinosaurs. Carr published the first quantitative analysis of tyrannosaurid ontogeny in 1999, establishing that several previously recognized genera and species of tyrannosaurids were in fact juveniles of other recognized taxa. Carr shared the Lanzendorf Prize for scientific illustration at the 2000 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference for the artwork in this article.

#18899

Ian Paisley

#18910

Overall Influence

1926 - 2014 (88 years)

Ian Richard Kyle Paisley, Baron Bannside, was an loyalist politician and Protestant religious leader from Northern Ireland who served as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party from 1971 to 2008 and First Minister of Northern Ireland from 2007 to 2008.

#18900

Miroslav Klose

#18911

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Miroslav Josef Klose is a German professional football manager and former player. A striker, Klose is the all-time top scorer for Germany and holds the record for the most goals scored in the Men's FIFA World Cup with 16 goals scored over 4 editions of the tournament between 2002 and 2014.

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