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
#1901
Helmut Kohl
#1903
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Helmut Josef Michael Kohl was a German politician who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1982 to 1998 and Leader of the Christian Democratic Union from 1973 to 1998. Kohl's 16-year tenure is the longest of any German chancellor since Otto von Bismarck, and oversaw the end of the Cold War, the German reunification and the creation of the European Union . Furthermore, Kohl's 16 years and 30-day tenure is the longest for any democratically elected chancellor of Germany.
Go to Profile#1902
Chris Thomas
#1904
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Christopher P. Thomas is an English record producer who has worked extensively with the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, Roxy Music, Badfinger, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, Pulp and the Pretenders. He has also produced breakthrough albums for the Sex Pistols, the Climax Blues Band and INXS.
Go to Profile#1903
Richard R. Ernst
#1905
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Richard Robert Ernst was a Swiss physical chemist and Nobel laureate. Ernst was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1991 for his contributions towards the development of Fourier transform nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy while at Varian Associates and ETH Zurich. These underpin applications to both to chemistry with NMR spectroscopy and to medicine with magnetic resonance imaging .
Go to Profile#1904
Garry Trudeau
#1906
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Garretson Beekman Trudeau is an American cartoonist, best known for creating the Doonesbury comic strip. Trudeau is also the creator and executive producer of the Amazon Studios political comedy series Alpha House.
Go to Profile#1905
Ron Fair
#1907
Overall Influence
Ronald Fair is an American A&R executive, record producer, record executive, musical arranger, recording engineer and conductor. In a career that has spanned over 30 years at major record labels he has produced and arranged hits for several artists, but he is best known as a "guru/mentor", guiding the careers of unknown artists. Among the artists he has mentored are Christina Aguilera, Vanessa Carlton, Keyshia Cole, The Black Eyed Peas and Fergie, and the Pussycat Dolls.
Go to Profile#1906
Jon Landau
#1908
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Jon Landau is an American music critic, manager, and record producer. He has worked with Bruce Springsteen in all three capacities. He is the head of the nominating committee for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and received that institution's Ahmet Ertegun Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2020.
Go to Profile#1907
Clive Cussler
#1909
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Clive Eric Cussler was an American adventure novelist and underwater explorer. His thriller novels, many featuring the character Dirk Pitt, have been listed on The New York Times fiction best-seller list more than 20 times. Cussler was the founder and chairman of the National Underwater and Marine Agency , which has discovered more than 60 shipwreck sites and numerous other notable underwater wrecks. He was the sole author or main author of more than 80 books.
Go to Profile#1908
Jeffrey Beall
#1910
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Jeffrey Beall is an American librarian and library scientist, who drew attention to "predatory open access publishing", a term he coined, and created Beall's list, a list of potentially predatory open-access publishers. He is a critic of the open access publishing movement and particularly how predatory publishers use the open access concept, and is known for his blog Scholarly Open Access. He has also written on this topic in The Charleston Advisor, in Nature, in Learned Publishing, and elsewhere.
Go to Profile#1909
Stanley B. Prusiner
#1911
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Stanley Ben Prusiner is an American neurologist and biochemist. He is the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco . Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for prion research developed by him and his team of experts beginning in the early 1970s.
Go to Profile#1910
Athol Fugard
#1912
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Athol Fugard OIS HonFRSL is a South African playwright, novelist, actor, and director widely regarded as South Africa's greatest playwright. He is best known for his political and penetrating plays opposing the system of apartheid and for the 2005 Oscar-winning film of his novel Tsotsi, directed by Gavin Hood.
Go to Profile#1911
Jack Williamson
#1913
Overall Influence
1908 - 2006 (98 years)
John Stewart Williamson , who wrote as Jack Williamson, was an American science fiction writer, one of several called the "Dean of Science Fiction". He is also credited with one of the first uses of the term genetic engineering. Early in his career he sometimes used the pseudonyms Will Stewart and Nils O. Sonderlund.
Go to Profile#1912
Elias M. Stein
#1914
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Elias Menachem Stein was an American mathematician who was a leading figure in the field of harmonic analysis. He was the Albert Baldwin Dod Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, at Princeton University, where he was a faculty member from 1963 until his death in 2018.
Go to Profile#1913
Christopher A. Wray
#1915
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Christopher Asher Wray is an American attorney who is the current director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation . He was nominated by president Donald Trump on June 7, 2017, and has served since August 2, 2017.
Go to Profile#1914
Charles Tart
#1916
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Charles T. Tart is an American psychologist and parapsychologist known for his psychological work on the nature of consciousness , as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology, and for his research in parapsychology.
Go to Profile#1915
David Benioff
#1917
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
David Friedman , known professionally as David Benioff , is an American writer and producer. Along with his collaborator D. B. Weiss, he is best known for co-creating Game of Thrones , the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's series of books A Song of Ice and Fire. He also wrote 25th Hour , Troy , City of Thieves and co-wrote X-Men Origins: Wolverine .
Go to Profile#1916
Victor Davis Hanson
#1918
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, farmer, and political commentator. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Washington Times, and other media outlets.
Go to Profile#1917
Kunihiko Kodaira
#1919
Overall Influence
1915 - 1997 (82 years)
Kunihiko Kodaira was a Japanese mathematician known for distinguished work in algebraic geometry and the theory of complex manifolds, and as the founder of the Japanese school of algebraic geometers. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1954, being the first Japanese national to receive this honour.
Go to Profile#1918
Perry Anderson
#1920
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Francis Rory Peregrine "Perry" Anderson is a British intellectual, historian and essayist. His work ranges across historical sociology, intellectual history, and cultural analysis. What unites Anderson's work is a preoccupation with Western Marxism.
Go to Profile#1919
Robert Barro
#1921
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Robert Joseph Barro is an American macroeconomist and the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Barro is considered one of the founders of new classical macroeconomics, along with Robert Lucas Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-editor of the influential Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Go to Profile#1920
Richard Stone
#1922
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Sir John Richard Nicholas Stone was an eminent British economist. He was educated at Gonville and Caius College and King's College at the University of Cambridge. In 1984, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for developing an accounting model that could be used to track economic activities on a national and, later, an international scale.
Go to Profile#1921
Antony Beevor
#1923
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
#1922
Wallace Stegner
#1924
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
Wallace Earle Stegner was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.
Go to Profile#1923
Andy Clark
#1925
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Andy Clark, is a British philosopher who is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Prior to this, he was a professor of philosophy and Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, director of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana and previously taught at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Clark is one of the founding members of the CONTACT collaborative research project whose aim is to investigate the role environment plays in shaping the nature of conscious experience. Clark's papers and b...
Go to Profile#1924
Vladimir Voevodsky
#1926
Overall Influence
1966 - 2017 (51 years)
Vladimir Alexandrovich Voevodsky was a Russian-American mathematician. His work in developing a homotopy theory for algebraic varieties and formulating motivic cohomology led to the award of a Fields Medal in 2002. He is also known for the proof of the Milnor conjecture and motivic Bloch–Kato conjectures and for the univalent foundations of mathematics and homotopy type theory.
Go to Profile#1925
Maya Lin
#1927
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Maya Ying Lin is an American designer and sculptor. In 1981, while an undergraduate at Yale University, she achieved national recognition when she won a national design competition for the planned Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#1926
Andrew Lih
#1928
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Andrew Lih is a Chinese-American new media researcher, consultant and writer, as well as an authority on both Wikipedia and internet censorship in the People's Republic of China. In 2013 he was appointed an associate professor of journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.
Go to Profile#1927
Peter Gabriel
#1929
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Peter Brian Gabriel is an English musician. He rose to fame as the original lead singer of the progressive rock band Genesis. After leaving Genesis in 1975, he launched a successful solo career with "Solsbury Hill" as his first single. His fifth studio album, So , is his best-selling release and is certified triple platinum in the UK and five times platinum in the US. The album's most successful single, "Sledgehammer", won a record nine MTV Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards and, according to a report in 2011, it was MTV's most played music video of all time.
Go to Profile#1928
Amy Coney Barrett
#1930
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Amy Vivian Coney Barrett is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The fifth woman to serve on the court, she was nominated by President Donald Trump and has served since October 27, 2020. Barrett was a U.S. circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 2017 to 2020.
Go to Profile#1929
Bernard Weiner
#1931
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Bernard Weiner is an American social psychologist known for developing a form of attribution theory which seeks to explain the emotional and motivational entailments of academic success and failure. His contributions include linking attribution theory, the psychology of motivation, and emotion.
Go to Profile#1930
Emmanuel Saez
#1932
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
#1931
Michael Witzel
#1933
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Michael Witzel is a German-American philologist, comparative mythologist and Indologist. Witzel is the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and the editor of the Harvard Oriental Series .
Go to Profile#1932
Brihaspati
#1934
Overall Influence
Brihaspati , also known as Guru, is a Hindu deity. In the ancient Vedic scriptures of Hinduism, Brihaspati is a deity associated with fire, and the word also refers to a rishi who counsels the devas . In some later texts, the word refers to the largest planet of the solar system, Jupiter, and the deity is associated with the planet as a Navagraha.
Go to Profile#1933
Saul Perlmutter
#1935
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Saul Perlmutter is a U.S. astrophysicist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and head of the International Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P.
Go to Profile#1934
Don Bluth
#1936
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Donald Virgil Bluth is an American filmmaker and animator. He is best known for directing the animated films The Secret of NIMH , An American Tail , The Land Before Time , All Dogs Go to Heaven , Anastasia , and Titan A.E. , for his involvement in the LaserDisc game Dragon's Lair , and for competing with former employer Walt Disney Productions during the years leading up to the films that became the Disney Renaissance. He is the older brother of illustrator Toby Bluth.
Go to Profile#1935
Donna Strickland
#1937
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Areas of Specialization: Intense Laser-Matter Interactions, Nonlinear Optics, Chirped Pulse Amplification Donna Theo Strickland was born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She is currently a Professor of Physics at the University of Waterloo. She is the first woman to hold this position at the University. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in engineering physics in 1981 from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. At McMaster, she specialized in lasers and electro-optics. She then received her PhD in physics in 1989 from University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, where she worked at the Institute of Optics and the Institute for Laser Optics.
Go to Profile#1936
John Negroponte
#1938
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John Dimitri Negroponte is an American diplomat. He is currently a James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He is a former J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of International Affairs at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Prior to this appointment, he served as a research fellow and lecturer in international affairs at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, United States Deputy Secretary of State , and the first ever Director of National Intelligence .
Go to Profile#1937
Ann Coulter
#1939
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Ann Hart Coulter is an American conservative media pundit, author, syndicated columnist, and lawyer. She became known as a media pundit in the late 1990s, appearing in print and on cable news as an outspoken critic of the Clinton administration. Her first book concerned the impeachment of Bill Clinton and sprang from her experience writing legal briefs for Paula Jones's attorneys, as well as columns she wrote about the cases. Coulter's syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate appears in newspapers and is featured on conservative websites. Coulter has also written 13 books.
Go to Profile#1938
Robert Paxton
#1940
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Robert Owen Paxton is an American political scientist and historian specializing in Vichy France, fascism, and Europe during the World War II era. He is Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is best known for his 1972 book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, which precipitated intense debate in France, and led to a paradigm shift in how the events of the Vichy regime are interpreted.
Go to Profile#1939
Joseph L. Goldstein
#1941
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Joseph Leonard Goldstein ForMemRS is an American biochemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1985, along with fellow University of Texas Southwestern researcher, Michael Brown, for their studies regarding cholesterol. They discovered that human cells have low-density lipoprotein receptors that remove cholesterol from the blood and that when LDL receptors are not present in sufficient numbers, individuals develop hypercholesterolemia and become at risk for cholesterol related diseases, notably coronary heart disease. Their studies led to the development of statin dru...
Go to Profile#1940
Patrick Winston
#1942
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Patrick Henry Winston was an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succeeding Marvin Minsky, who left to help found the MIT Media Lab. Winston was succeeded as director by Rodney Brooks.
Go to Profile#1941
Ahasuerus
#1943
Overall Influence
Ahasuerus is a name applied in the Hebrew Bible to three rulers of Ancient Persia and to a Babylonian official in the Book of Tobit. It is a transliteration of either Xerxes I or Artaxerxes; both are names of multiple Achaemenid dynasty Persian kings.
Go to Profile#1942
Quentin Meillassoux
#1944
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#1943
Joseph Polchinski
#1945
Overall Influence
1954 - 2018 (64 years)
Joseph Gerard Polchinski Jr. was an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Biography Polchinski was born in White Plains, New York, the elder of two children to Joseph Gerard Polchinski Sr. , a financial consultant and manager, and Joan , an office worker and homemaker. Polchinski was primarily of Irish descent with his paternal grandfather being Polish.
Go to Profile#1944
Suisheng Zhao
#1946
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Suisheng Zhao is a professor of Chinese politics and foreign policy at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He serves as director of the school's Center for China–US Cooperation, and is the founding editor and the editor-in-chief of the multidisciplinary Journal of Contemporary China.
Go to Profile#1945
Richard Lazarus
#1947
Overall Influence
1922 - 2002 (80 years)
Richard S. Lazarus was an American psychologist who began rising to prominence in the 1960s. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lazarus as the 80th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He was well renowned for his theory of cognitive-mediational theory within emotion.
Go to Profile#1946
Leon Henkin
#1948
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Leon Albert Henkin was an American logician, whose works played a strong role in the development of logic, particularly in the theory of types. He was an active scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where he made great contributions as a researcher, teacher, as well as in administrative positions. At this university he directed, together with Alfred Tarski, the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science, from which many important logicians and philosophers emerged. He had a strong sense of social commitment and was a passionate defensor of his pacifist and progressive ideas. H...
Go to Profile#1947
John Robert Schrieffer
#1949
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
John Robert Schrieffer was an American physicist who, with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper, was a recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the BCS theory, the first successful quantum theory of superconductivity.
Go to Profile#1948
Rudolf Arnheim
#1950
Overall Influence
1904 - 2007 (103 years)
Rudolf Arnheim was a German-born writer, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist. He learned Gestalt psychology from studying under Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin and applied it to art.
Go to Profile#1949
Ahmed Zewail
#1951
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
Ahmed Hassan Zewail was an Egyptian and American chemist, known as the "father of femtochemistry". He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry and became the first Egyptian and Arab to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field, and the second African to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was the Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry, a professor of physics, and the director of the Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#1950
David Kelley
#1952
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David Christopher Kelley is an American philosopher. He is a professed Objectivist, though his position that Objectivism can be revised and influenced by other schools of thought has prompted disagreements with other Objectivists. Kelley is also an author of several books on philosophy and the founder of The Atlas Society, an institution he established in 1990 after permanently dissociating with Leonard Peikoff and the Ayn Rand Institute.
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