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
#18901
Gustavo Petricioli
#18912
Overall Influence
1928 - 1998 (70 years)
Gustavo Petricioli Iturbide was a Mexican economist who served as Secretary of Finance in the last cabinet of Miguel de la Madrid and as Mexican ambassador to the United States . Biography Petricioli was the son of Carlos Petricioli Alarcón and Ada Iturbide Preciat. He received a high school diploma from the Monterrey Institute of Technology , a bachelor's degree in Economics from the ITAM and a master's degree in the same discipline from Yale University . He lectured on Monetary Theory at both ITAM and the National Autonomous University of Mexico , and joined the Revolutionary Institutiona...
Go to Profile#18902
Eli Noam
#18913
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Eli M. Noam is a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, and holds the Paul Garrett Chair in Public Policy and Business Responsibility. He is the director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information . He works on the economics, management, and policy of media and the digital world, most recently on global media ownership and on next-generation “Cloud-TV”. He has written over 400 articles and has authored, edited, and co-edited over 30 books.
Go to Profile#18903
Richard H. Bube
#18914
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Richard H. Bube was an American scientist. Academic career Bube received his B.S. in physics from Brown University in 1946 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He was a researcher at RCA Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1948 to 1962. Thereafter he taught at Stanford University where he was an associate professor from 1962 to 1964, when he became professor of materials science and electrical engineering. He served as his department's chair from 1975 to 1986 and is now an emeritus professor
Go to Profile#18904
Dierk Raabe
#18915
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Dierk Raabe is a German materials scientist and researcher, who has contributed significantly to the field of materials science. He is a professor at RWTH Aachen University and director of the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf. He is the recipient of the 2004 Leibniz Prize, and the 2022 Acta Materialia's Gold Medal. He also received the honorary doctorate of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Go to Profile#18905
Glen L. Urban
#18916
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Glen L. Urban has been a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty since 1966 and dean at the school from 1993 to 1998. Urban is a leading educator, prize-winning researcher specializing in marketing and new product development, entrepreneur, and author. He is the Chairman of Sloan's MIT Center for Digital Business.
Go to Profile#18906
Zaki Badawi
#18917
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Sheikh Mohammed Aboulkhair Zaki Badawi , KBE, GCFO was a prominent Egyptian Islamic scholar, community activist, and promoter of interfaith-dialogue. He was the principal of the Muslim College in London, which he founded in 1986. He also was a frequent writer and broadcaster on Islamic affairs.
Go to Profile#18907
Roman Frydman
#18918
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Roman Frydman is an American, Polish born economist at New York University and the author of more than ten books treating macroeconomic theory and privatization. Frydman's research, exemplified by his two recent books with Michael D. Goldberg, Imperfect Knowledge Economics: Exchange Rates and Risk and Beyond Mechanical Markets: Asset Price, Swings, Risk, and the Role of the State , argues that markets cannot be predicted accurately by deterministic optimization models, particularly models promoted by adherents of the rational expectations hypothesis. Rather, Frydman argues that predictive mo...
Go to Profile#18908
James Woods
#18919
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
James Howard Woods is an American actor. He is known for fast-talking intense roles on stage and screen. He received numerous accolades including three Emmy Awards, and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and three Screen Actors Guild Awards. He started his career in minor roles on and off-Broadway before making his Broadway debut in The Penny Wars , followed by Borstal Boy , The Trial of the Catonsville Nine , and Moonchildren . Woods early film roles include in The Visitors , The Way We Were and Night Moves . He starred in the NBC miniseries Holocaust oppos...
Go to Profile#18909
Barry Freundel
#18920
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bernard "Barry" Freundel was the rabbi of Kesher Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C. from 1989 until 2014. Freundel was regarded as "a brilliant scholar," a "profound" orator and an authority in several areas of halakha , including eruvim, which he assisted in constructing in a number of cities, including Washington.
Go to Profile#18910
Vsevolod Tkachuk
#18921
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Vsevolod Tkachuk Soviet and Russian biochemist. Academician of RAMS and RAS . Dean of the Faculty of fundamental medicine of Lomonosov Moscow State University . Director of institute of regenerative medicine in Lomonosov Moscow State University and president of National regenerative medicine society .
Go to Profile#18911
Joel Hyatt
#18922
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Joel Z. Hyatt is an American entrepreneur and former politician. He founded Hyatt Legal Services, in which capacity he became a household name for many years, as he was featured in his firm's nationwide television commercials which always ended with the slogan, "I'm Joel Hyatt and you have my word on it." Hyatt was a co-founder of Current TV.
Go to Profile#18912
David P. Gardner
#18923
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
David Pierpont Gardner was the 15th president of the University of California and was also the president of the University of Utah. Biography Gardner was born in Berkeley, California, to Reed S. Gardner and Margaret Pierpont Gardner. He married Elizabeth Fuhriman in 1958. They had four daughters before Libby's death in 1991. He married Sheila S. Rogers in 1995.
Go to Profile#18913
Martti Koskenniemi
#18924
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Martti Antero Koskenniemi is a Finnish international lawyer and former diplomat. Currently he is professor of International Law in the University of Helsinki and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, as well as Centennial Professor at the Law Department of the London School of Economics. He is well known for his critical approach to international law. In 2008–2009 he held the seat of distinguished visiting Goodhart Professor at the Faculty of Law, Cambridge University. In 2011 Koskenniemi was Peace of Utrecht professor at Utrecht University. In 2014 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Go to Profile#18914
Keith Geddes
#18925
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Keith Oliver Geddes is a professor emeritus in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science within the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. He is a former director of the Symbolic Computation Group in the School of Computer Science. He received a BA in Mathematics at the University of Saskatchewan in 1968; he completed both his MSc and PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#18915
R. R. Reno
#18926
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Russell Ronald Reno III , known as R. R. Reno, is the editor of First Things magazine. He was formerly a professor of theology and ethics at Creighton University. Biography Reno was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1959, and grew up in Towson, Maryland. A graduate of Towson High School in 1978, after a year living in his tent in Yosemite Valley, he attended Haverford College, receiving a B.A. in 1983. He began graduate study at Yale University in the Department of Religious Studies in 1984 and completed his doctoral degree in 1990 in the area of religious ethics. While in graduate school he met and married Juliana Miller, with whom he has had two children, Rachel and Jesse .
Go to Profile#18916
Eugene G. Rochow
#18927
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
Eugene George Rochow was an American inorganic chemist. Rochow worked on organosilicon chemistry; in the 1940s, he described the direct process, also known as the Rochow process or Müller-Rochow process.
Go to Profile#18917
Juan José Arreola
#18928
Overall Influence
1918 - 2001 (83 years)
Juan José Arreola Zúñiga was a Mexican writer, academic, and actor. He is considered Mexico's premier experimental short story writer of the 20th century. Arreola is recognized as one of the first Latin American writers to abandon realism; he used elements of fantasy to underscore existentialist and absurdist ideas in his work. Although he is little known outside Mexico, Arreola has served as the literary inspiration for a legion of Mexican writers who have sought to transform their country's realistic literary tradition by introducing elements of magical realism, satire, and allegory. Alongs...
Go to Profile#18918
William Hurt
#18929
Overall Influence
1950 - 2022 (72 years)
William McChord Hurt was an American actor. Known for his performances on stage and screen, he received various awards including an Academy Award, BAFTA Award and Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor.
Go to Profile#18919
Anders Hald
#18930
Overall Influence
1913 - 2007 (94 years)
Anders Hjorth Hald was a Danish statistician. He was a professor at the University of Copenhagen from 1960 to 1982. While a professor, he did research in industrial quality control and other areas, and also authored textbooks. After retirement, he made important contributions to the history of statistics.
Go to Profile#18920
Bettina Aptheker
#18931
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Bettina Fay Aptheker is an American political activist, radical feminist, professor and author. Aptheker was active in civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and has since worked in developing feminist studies.
Go to Profile#18921
Trish Stratus
#18932
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Patricia Anne Stratigeas , better known by the ring name Trish Stratus, is a Canadian professional wrestler, actress and yoga instructor. She is currently signed to WWE, where she performs on the Raw brand. A member of the WWE Hall of Fame, Stratus was ranked the greatest women's superstar of all time by WWE.
Go to Profile#18922
Éric Rohmer
#18933
Overall Influence
1920 - 2010 (90 years)
Jean Marie Maurice Schérer or Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer, known as Éric Rohmer , was a French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and teacher. Rohmer was the last of the post-World War II French New Wave directors to become established. He edited the influential film journal Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, while most of his colleagues—among them Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut—were making the transition from critics to filmmakers and gaining international attention.
Go to Profile#18923
Leon Silver
#18934
Overall Influence
1925 - 2022 (97 years)
Leon Theodore "Lee" Silver was an American geologist who was professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology . He was an instructor to the Apollo 13, 15, 16, and 17 astronaut crews. Working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration , he taught astronauts how to perform field geology, essentially creating lunar field geology as a new discipline. His training is credited with a significant improvement in the J-Mission Apollo flights' scientific returns. After the Apollo program, he became a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1974. He retired in 1996 as the W.
Go to Profile#18924
David Naylor
#18935
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Christopher David Naylor, is a Canadian physician, medical researcher and former president of the University of Toronto. He is ICES scientist emeritus and founding CEO. In 2016, he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#18925
Dilhan Eryurt
#18936
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Dilhan Eryurt was a Turkish astrophysicist who made major contributions to scientific research on the formation and evolution of the Sun and other main sequence stars. From 1961 to 1973, Eryurt worked for NASA, performing research for the Apollo program. She then established the astrophysics department at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey. She was the Dean of METU's science and arts faculty from 1988 to 1993.
Go to Profile#18926
Marshall Clagett
#18937
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Marshall Clagett was an American historian of science who specialized in medieval science. John Murdoch describes him as "a distinguished medievalist" who was "the last member of a triumvirate [with Henry Guerlac and I. Bernard Cohen, who] … established the history of science as a recognized discipline within American universities" while Edward Grant ranks him "among the greatest historians and scholars of the twentieth century."
Go to Profile#18927
John B. Fenn
#18938
Overall Influence
1917 - 2010 (93 years)
John Bennett Fenn was an American professor of analytical chemistry who was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002. Fenn shared half of the award with Koichi Tanaka for their work in mass spectrometry. The other half of the 2002 award went to Kurt Wüthrich. Fenn's contributions specifically related to the development of electrospray ionization, now a commonly used technique for large molecules and routine liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Early in his career, Fenn did research in the field of jet propulsion at Project SQUID, and focused on molecular beam studies.
Go to Profile#18928
Zay N. Smith
#18939
Overall Influence
1949 - 2020 (71 years)
Zay N. Smith was a columnist and author known for his work at the Chicago Sun-Times. He wrote a popular column from 1995 to 2008 called QT, which was a mixture of humor and comment. Early life and education Born Zay Nockton Smith, Smith grew up in Palos Park, Illinois, the son of an English teacher mother and a father who was an airline pilot turned architect and designer. Smith was a graduate of Lawrence University, did postgraduate work at the University of Iowa and taught at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#18929
David Miliband
#18940
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
David Wright Miliband is the president and chief executive officer of the International Rescue Committee and a British Labour Party former politician. He was the Foreign Secretary from 2007 to 2010 and the Member of Parliament for South Shields in North East England from 2001 to 2013. He and his brother, Ed, were the first siblings to sit in the Cabinet simultaneously since Lord Edward and Oliver Stanley in 1938. He was a candidate for Labour Party leadership in 2010, following the departure of Gordon Brown, but was defeated by his brother and subsequently left politics.
Go to Profile#18930
Frank Bruno
#18941
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Franklin Roy Bruno, is a British former professional boxer who competed from 1982 to 1996. He had a highly publicised and eventful career, both in and out of the ring. The pinnacle of Bruno's boxing career was winning the WBC heavyweight title from Oliver McCall at a packed Wembley Stadium in 1995, in what was his fourth world championship challenge. Bruno faced multiple top-rated heavyweights throughout his career, including two defeats against Mike Tyson in 1989 and 1996, and a defeat against fellow Briton Lennox Lewis in 1993.
Go to Profile#18931
Simon Pegg
#18942
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Simon John Pegg is an English actor, comedian and screenwriter. He came to prominence in the UK as the co-creator of the Channel 4 sitcom Spaced , directed by Edgar Wright. He and Wright co-wrote the films Shaun of the Dead , Hot Fuzz , and The World's End , known collectively as the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, all of which saw Wright directing and Pegg starring alongside Nick Frost. Pegg and Frost also wrote and starred in the sci-fi comedy film Paul .
Go to Profile#18932
Hung Cheng
#18943
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Hung Cheng , also known as Hong Zheng,is an American mathematician, novelist, and physicist teaching at MIT. Education Cheng received his B.Sc and the Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology, in 1959 and 1961. He had post-doctorate research appointments at Caltech, Princeton University and Harvard University before joining the MIT faculty in applied mathematics in 1965. His doctoral advisor was Leverett Davis, Jr., and his thesis was on spin absorption lines of solids.
Go to Profile#18933
Derek Fisher
#18944
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Derek Lamar Fisher is an American professional basketball coach and former player. Fisher played professionally in the National Basketball Association for 18 seasons, spending the majority of his career with the Los Angeles Lakers, with whom he won five NBA championships. He also played for the Golden State Warriors, Utah Jazz, Oklahoma City Thunder, and Dallas Mavericks. He has also served as president of the National Basketball Players Association .
Go to Profile#18934
Alan Deardorff
#18945
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Alan V. Deardorff is the John W. Sweetland Professor of International Economics and a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, Ann Arbor. Deardorff received his Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University in 1971.
Go to Profile#18935
Ahmed Sharif
#18946
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Ahmed Sharif was an educationist, philosopher, critic, writer and scholar of medieval Bengali literature. He is recognized as one of the most outspoken atheist and radical thinkers of Bangladesh. Background Sharif was born on 13 February 1921 in Patiya, Chittagong District. His father was Abdul Aziz and his uncle was Abdul Karim Sahitya Bisharad, a prominent historian of Bangla literature. He did his master's and Ph.D. degrees in Bengali literature from the University of Dhaka, in 1944 and 1967 respectively. From 1945 to 1949, he taught at Laksham Nawab Faizunnessa College and later on at Feni College.
Go to Profile#18936
Margrethe II of Denmark
#18947
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
#18937
Richard Somerville
#18948
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Richard Chapin James Somerville is an American climate scientist who is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, where he has been a professor since 1979.
Go to Profile#18938
Andrzej Zoll
#18949
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Andrzej Stanisław Zoll is a Polish lawyer, former judge and president of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal, former Polish Ombudsman, former president of the State Electoral Commission, former president of the Legislative Council, co-author of the Polish Penal Code of 1997. Professor of criminal law at the Jagiellonian University.
Go to Profile#18939
Francesco Cossiga
#18950
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Francesco Maurizio Cossiga was an Italian politician. A member of Christian Democracy, he was prime minister of Italy from 1979 to 1980 and the president of Italy from 1985 to 1992. Cossiga is widely considered one of the most prominent and influential politicians of the First Italian Republic.
Go to Profile#18940
Harry Eagle
#18951
Overall Influence
1905 - 1992 (87 years)
Harry Eagle was an American physician and pathologist. He was born in New York City then studied, and later worked, at Johns Hopkins University before moving on to the National Institutes of Health. From 1961 to 1988 he worked at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is best known for Eagle's minimal essential medium, which is important in understanding how human and mammalian cells reproduce. He is also known for the Eagle effect. In 1936 he was the inaugural winner of the Eli Lilly and Company-Elanco Research Award. In 1973, he was a co-winner of the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University.
Go to Profile#18941
Eugene Webb
#18952
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Eugene Webb is Professor Emeritus in the University of Washington Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Webb holds a Ph.D., in Comparative Literature from Columbia University , an M.A. in English Literature from Columbia University and also a B.A., in Philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles . Webb was a member of the faculties of both the Comparative Literature Department and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, where he served as Associate Director and chaired programs in both Comparative Religion and European Studies . Webb was also the founder of those two programs: Comparative Religion in 1974, and European Studies in 1994.
Go to Profile#18942
Hubert Markl
#18953
Overall Influence
1938 - 2015 (77 years)
Hubert Simon Markl was a German biologist who also served as president of the Max Planck Society from 1996 to 2002. Early life Markl was born on 17 August 1938 in Regensburg, Germany. He studied biology, chemistry and geography at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He completed his Ph.D. in zoology from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1962. He did research internships at Harvard University and Rockefeller University in 1965–1966. In 1976, he earned his Habilitation in zoology from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.
Go to Profile#18943
Holland Cotter
#18954
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Holland Cotter is co-chief art critic with The New York Times. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Life and work Cotter was born in Connecticut and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. from Harvard College in 1970, where he studied English literature under poet Robert Lowell and was an editor of the Harvard Advocate literary magazine. His first art course was an anthropology course on primitive art, which led to his first of many visits to Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Go to Profile#18944
Alfred Grosser
#18955
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (101 years)
Alfred Grosser is a German-French writer, sociologist, and political scientist. He is known for his contributions towards the Franco-German cooperation after World War II and for criticizing Israel.
Go to Profile#18945
Adriano González León
#18956
Overall Influence
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Adriano González León was a Venezuelan writer who is known in his country for the novel País Portátil , widely regarded as the premier Venezuelan novel of the latter half of the 20th century, and for his many years of hosting a television program dedicated to promoting literary appreciation among the general public.
Go to Profile#18946
Peter Häberle
#18957
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Peter Häberle is a German legal scholar, specialising in constitutional law. Biography Häberle is the son of Hugo Häberle, a medical doctor, and Ursula Häberle . Häberle studied law in Tübingen, Bonn, Freiburg im Breisgau and Montpellier. In 1961 he received his juris doctor under supervision of Konrad Hesse at the faculty of law, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. His thesis, titled "Die Wesensgehaltgarantie des Art. 19 Abs. 2 Grundgesetz", became both influential and controversial.
Go to Profile#18947
Malcolm Perry
#18958
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Malcolm John Perry is a British theoretical physicist and emeritus professor of theoretical physics at University of Cambridge and professor of theoretical physics at Queen Mary University of London. His research mainly concerns quantum gravity, black holes, general relativity, and supergravity.
Go to Profile#18948
Jean-Luc Mélenchon
#18959
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jean-Luc Antoine Pierre Mélenchon is a French far-left politician who was a member of the National Assembly for the 4th constituency of Bouches-du-Rhône from 2017 to 2022. He led the La France Insoumise group in the National Assembly from 2017 to 2021. Mélenchon has run three times in elections for president of France; in 2012 and 2017, and a strong third in the 2022 election, where he narrowly missed continuing on to the second round in France's two-round voting system.
Go to Profile#18949
Hrithik Roshan
#18960
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Hrithik Roshan is an Indian actor who works in Hindi cinema. He has portrayed a variety of characters and is known for his dancing skills. One of the highest-paid actors in India, he has won many awards, including six Filmfare Awards, of which four were for Best Actor. Starting from 2012, he has appeared in Forbes India Celebrity 100 several times based on his income and popularity.
Go to Profile#18950
Buddy Guy
#18961
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
George "Buddy" Guy is an American blues guitarist and singer. He is an exponent of Chicago blues who has influenced generations of guitarists including Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Beck, Gary Clark Jr. and John Mayer. In the 1960s, Guy played with Muddy Waters as a session guitarist at Chess Records and began a musical partnership with blues harp virtuoso Junior Wells.
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