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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#19201
Mario Hamuy
#19212
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Mario Andrés Hamuy Wackenhut is a Chilean Astronomer and Professor of Astronomy at the University of Chile and Cerro Calan Observatory. He is well known for his observational work on all classes of supernovae, especially the use of Type Ia and Type II supernovae as measures of cosmic distance.
Go to Profile#19202
Post Malone
#19213
Overall Influence
1995 - Present (31 years)
Austin Richard Post , known professionally as Post Malone, is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor. Malone has gained distinction and acclaim for his blending of various genres including hip hop, pop, R&B, and trap. His stage name was derived from inputting his birth name into a rap name generator.
Go to Profile#19203
William C. Davis
#19214
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
William Charles "Jack" Davis is an American historian who was a professor of history at Virginia Tech and the former director of programs at that school's Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. Specializing in the American Civil War, Davis has written more than 40 books on that subject and other aspects of early southern U.S. history, such as the Texas Revolution. He is the only three-time winner of the Jefferson Davis Prize for Confederate history and was awarded the Jules and Frances Landry Award for Southern History. His book Lone Star Rising has been called "the best one-volume history of...
Go to Profile#19204
Tom Rapoport
#19215
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Tom Abraham Rapoport is a German-American cell biologist who studies protein transport in cells. Currently, he is a professor at Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he grew up in East Germany. In 1995 he accepted an offer to become a professor at Harvard Medical School. In 1997 he became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a member of the American and German National Academies of Science.
Go to Profile#19205
Kiese Laymon
#19216
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. He is the author of three full-length books: a novel, Long Division , and two memoirs, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and the award-winning Heavy: An American Memoir . Laymon was awarded a "Genius Grant" from the MacArthur Fellows Program in 2022.
Go to Profile#19206
Henry Kamen
#19217
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Henry A. Kamen is a British historian, who has published extensively on Europe, Spain, and the Spanish Empire. Biography Henry Arthur Kamen was born in Rangoon in 1936, the son of Maurice Joseph Kamen, an Anglo-Burmese engineer working for Shell Oil, and his wife, Agnes Frizelle, by descent half Anglo-Irish and half Nepalese. Kamen was educated at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School, from where he won a Major Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, earning his doctorate at St Antony's College. During National Service he studied Russian, and his first book was a translation of the...
Go to Profile#19207
Marvin Leonard Goldberger
#19218
Overall Influence
1922 - 2014 (92 years)
Marvin Leonard "Murph" Goldberger was an American theoretical physicist and former president of the California Institute of Technology. Biography Goldberger was born in Chicago, Illinois. He went on to receive his B.S. at the Carnegie Institute of Technology , and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1948. His advisor on thesis, Interaction of High-Energy Neutrons with Heavy Nuclei, was Enrico Fermi. While serving in the Army shortly after graduation, he was assigned to the Manhattan Project, where he worked under renowned physicist Enrico Fermi from 1943–45.
Go to Profile#19208
Neil Shephard
#19219
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Neil Shephard , FBA, is an econometrician, currently Frank B. Baird Jr., Professor of Science in the Department of Economics and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. His most well known contributions are: the formalisation of the econometrics of realised volatility, which nonparametrically estimates the volatility of asset prices, the introduction of the auxiliary particle filter , the nonparametric identification of jumps in financial economics, through multipower variation, stochastic volatility models based on non-Gaussian Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, known as 'Barndorff...
Go to Profile#19209
Michael Spence
#19220
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Michael James Spence is an Australian university administrator who served as the vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Sydney from 2008 to 2020. He is currently the president and provost of University College London.
Go to Profile#19210
John Dear
#19221
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
John Dear is an American Catholic priest, peace activist, lecturer, and author of 35 books on peace and nonviolence. He has spoken on peace around the world, organized hundreds of demonstrations against war, injustice and nuclear weapons and been arrested 85 times in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience against war, injustice, poverty, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction.
Go to Profile#19211
Rodolfo Gambini
#19222
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Rodolfo Gambini is a physicist and professor of the Universidad de la Republica in Montevideo, Uruguay and a visiting professor at the Horace Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Louisiana State University.
Go to Profile#19212
Eckard Wimmer
#19223
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Eckard Wimmer is a German American virologist, organic chemist and distinguished professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Stony Brook University. He is best known for his seminal work on the molecular biology of poliovirus and the first chemical synthesis of a viral genome capable of infection and subsequent production of live viruses.
Go to Profile#19213
Robert Schifreen
#19224
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Robert Jonathan Schifreen is a former UK-based computer hacker and magazine editor, and the founder of IT security awareness training programme SecuritySmart.co.uk. He was the first person charged with illegally accessing a computer system, but was acquitted because there was no such specific criminal offence at the time. Later in life he became a computer security consultant, speaking at many conferences on information security and training banks, large companies and universities in the UK on IT security. In 2014 he began developing the software on which SecuritySmart runs from scratch which...
Go to Profile#19214
Roger Bootle
#19225
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Roger Bootle is a British economist and a weekly columnist for The Daily Telegraph. He is the chairman of Capital Economics, an independent macroeconomic research consultancy. He and Capital Economics were awarded the Wolfson Economics Prize in 2012.
Go to Profile#19215
Howard Baker
#19226
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Howard Henry Baker Jr. was an American politician, diplomat and photographer who served as a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1967 to 1985. During his tenure, he rose to the rank of Senate Minority Leader and then Senate Majority Leader. A member of the Republican Party, Baker was the first Republican to be elected to the US Senate in Tennessee since the Reconstruction era.
Go to Profile#19216
Jason BeDuhn
#19227
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jason David BeDuhn is a historian of religion and culture, currently Professor of Religious Studies at Northern Arizona University. Education BeDuhn holds a B.A. in Religious studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, an M.T.S. in New Testament and Christian Origins from Harvard Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in the Comparative Study of Religions from Indiana University Bloomington.
Go to Profile#19217
Gavin Stamp
#19228
Overall Influence
1948 - 2017 (69 years)
Gavin Mark Stamp was a British writer, television presenter and architectural historian. Education Stamp was educated at Dulwich College in South London from 1959 to 1967 as part of the "Dulwich Experiment", then at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he obtained a PhD in 1978 with a thesis entitled George Gilbert Scott, junior, architect, 1839–1897.
Go to Profile#19218
John Zarnecki
#19229
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Jan Charles "John" Zarnecki, is an English space science professor and researcher. Since 2013, Zarnecki has been a Director of the International Space Science Institute . Between 2004 and 2013 he was a Professor of Space Science at the Open University, having previously been a professor and researcher at the University of Kent.
Go to Profile#19219
Robin Thicke
#19230
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Robin Alan Thicke is an American singer, songwriter and record producer. He is best known for his 2013 hit single "Blurred Lines" , which is one of the best-selling singles of all time. At the 56th Annual Grammy Awards, he received nominations for Record of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.
Go to Profile#19220
Richard Ellis
#19231
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Richard Salisbury Ellis is Professor of Astrophysics at the University College London. He previously served as the Steele Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology . He was awarded the 2011 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 2022 the Royal Medal of the Royal Society and in 2023 the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.
Go to Profile#19221
Yoshitaka Fujii
#19232
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Yoshitaka Fujii is a Japanese researcher in anesthesiology, who in 2012 was found to have fabricated data in at least 219 scientific papers, of which 172 have been retracted. Summary of professional career Fujii graduated from Tokai University School of Medicine in 1987 and holds an M.D. degree. He attended the Graduate School of Medical and Dental Sciences, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, where he majored in anesthesiology and received his Ph.D. in 1991. During his career, he worked at institutions including Tokyo Medical and Dental University, the University of Tsukuba, and Toho University.
Go to Profile#19222
Zack Snyder
#19233
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Zachary Edward Snyder is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and cinematographer. He made his feature film debut in 2004 with Dawn of the Dead, a remake of the 1978 horror film of the same name. Since then, he has directed or produced a number of comic book and superhero films, including 300 and Watchmen , as well as the Superman film that started the DC Extended Universe, Man of Steel , and its follow-ups, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League , as well as the director's cut of Justice League that was later released in 2021. He also directed the computer-anim...
Go to Profile#19223
Holly Krieger
#19234
Overall Influence
Holly Krieger is a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, where she is also the Corfield Fellow at Murray Edwards College. Her current research interests are in arithmetic and algebraic aspects of families of complex dynamical systems. She is well known for her appearances in the popular mathematics YouTube video series Numberphile.
Go to Profile#19224
Horace Newcomb
#19235
Overall Influence
Horace Newcomb held the Lambdin Kay Chair for the Peabody Award in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia from 2001 through June 2013. Prior to this, he was a member of the Board of Jurors from 1989 to 1995.
Go to Profile#19225
Joseph Walther
#19236
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Joseph B. Walther is the Mark and Susan Bertelsen Presidential Chair in Technology and Society and the Director of the Center for Information Technology & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on social and interpersonal dynamics of computer-mediated communication, in groups, personal relationships, organizational and educational settings. He is noted for creating social information processing theory in 1992 and the hyperpersonal model in 1996.
Go to Profile#19226
Jean Berko Gleason
#19237
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Jean Berko Gleason is an American psycholinguist and professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, aphasia, gender differences in language development, and parent–child interactions.
Go to Profile#19227
Karl Raimund Sir Popper
#19238
Overall Influence
#19228
Victor Allis
#19239
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Louis Victor Allis is a Dutch computer scientist working in the artificial intelligence field. In his graduate work, he revealed AI solutions for Connect Four, Qubic, and Gomoku. His dissertation introduced two new game search techniques: proof-number search and dependency-based search. Proof-number search has seen further successful application in computer Go tactical search and many other games.
Go to Profile#19229
Jacques Prost
#19240
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jacques Prost, born in 1946 in Bourg-en-Bresse, is a French physicist, former General director of École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris, member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#19230
Neal Adams
#19241
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Neal Adams was an American comic book artist. He was the co-founder of the graphic design studio Continuity Associates, and was a creators-rights advocate who helped secure a pension and recognition for Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. During his career, Adams co-created the characters Ra's al Ghul, Man-Bat, and John Stewart for DC Comics.
Go to Profile#19231
Charles Lemert
#19242
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Charles Lemert is an American born social theorist and sociologist. He has written extensively on social theory, globalization and culture. He has contributed to many key debates in social thought, authoring dozens of books including his text Social Things: An Introduction to the Sociological Life, 5th edition . From 1982 to 2010, he taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut with his family.
Go to Profile#19232
Sergio Romano
#19243
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Sergio Romano is an Italian diplomat, writer, journalist, and historian. He is a columnist for the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Romano is also a former Italian ambassador to Moscow. Biography Born in Vicenza, he grew up between Milan and Genoa in a middle-class business family. He graduated from the liceo classico Cesare Beccaria of Milan, then began working as a journalist. In 1952, he obtained a degree in Law at the University of Milan, but he never finished his studies in Political Science at the University of Genoa before graduation. He travelled to European capitals recently emerged from the war, which directed him to a diplomatic career.
Go to Profile#19233
Svend Brinkmann
#19244
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Svend Brinkmann is a Danish Professor of Psychology in the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He serves as a co-director of the Center for Qualitative Studies. His research primarily involves philosophical, moral, and methodological issues in psychology and other human and social sciences. In recent years, Brinkmann has been studying the impact of psychiatric diagnoses on individuals and society.
Go to Profile#19234
Alain Fischer
#19245
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Alain Fischer is a doctor, professor of pediatric immunology and French researcher in biology. Biography Alain Fischer's father had wanted to become a doctor, but had been prevented from doing so by the numerous clauses established against the Jews of Hungary. Alain Fischer says his father was one of the reasons he has made a medical career choice.
Go to Profile#19235
Edward Trifonov
#19246
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Edward Nikolayevich Trifonov is a Russian-born Israeli molecular biophysicist and a founder of Israeli bioinformatics. In his research, he specializes in the recognition of weak signal patterns in biological sequences and is known for his unorthodox scientific methods.
Go to Profile#19236
Ace Frehley
#19247
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Paul Daniel "Ace" Frehley is an American musician, best known as the original lead guitarist, occasional lead vocalist and co-founding member of the hard rock band Kiss. He invented the persona of The Spaceman and played with the group from its inception in 1973 until his departure in 1982. After leaving Kiss, Frehley formed his own band named Frehley's Comet and released two albums with this group. He subsequently embarked on a solo career, which was put on hold when he rejoined Kiss in 1996 for a highly successful reunion tour.
Go to Profile#19237
Mimi Sheller
#19248
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Mimi Sheller is Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, USA. From 2009–2021 she was professor of sociology in the Department of Culture and Communication, and the founding Director of the New Mobilities Research and Policy Center at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is widely cited and considered a "key theorist in mobilities studies" and specializes in the post-colonial context of the Caribbean.
Go to Profile#19238
Eberhard Wächtler
#19249
Overall Influence
1929 - 2010 (81 years)
Eberhard Wächtler was a German economic historian. He was particularly notable for research in coal and steel sciences in postwar Germany. Wächtler was born in Dresden, Weimar Republic, in 1929. After graduating from high school in 1947, he studied history, literature, philosophy and political economy at the University of Leipzig. In 1953 he graduated with a degree in history. He first worked as a research assistant in Leipzig, after which he worked as a research associate at the Institute of History of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin until 1962. He received his doctorate in 1957 on ...
Go to Profile#19239
David Ginola
#19250
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
David Ginola-Ceze is a French former professional footballer who has also worked as an actor, model and football pundit. A forward, Ginola played for ten seasons in France with Toulon, RC Paris, Brest and Paris Saint-Germain before moving to Newcastle United in the English Premier League in July 1995. He subsequently played for Tottenham Hotspur, Aston Villa and Everton before retiring in 2002. At international level, he made 17 appearances, scoring three goals, for the France national team between 1990 and 1995.
Go to Profile#19240
Norma Broude
#19251
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Norma Broude is an American art historian and scholar of feminism and 19th-century French and Italian painting. She is also a Professor Emerita of art history from American University. Broude, with Mary Garrard, is an early leader of the American feminist movement and both have redefined feminist art theory.
Go to Profile#19241
Rikki Ducornet
#19252
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Rikki Ducornet is an American writer, poet, and artist. Her work has been described as “linguistically explosive and socially relevant,” and praised for “deploy[ing] tactics familiar to the historical avant-garde, including an emphasis on gnosticism, cosmology, diablerie, bestiary, eroticism, and revolution, to produce an astounding body of work, cogent and ethical in its beauty and spirit.”
Go to Profile#19242
Pedro Sánchez
#19253
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón is a Spanish politician who has been Prime Minister of Spain since June 2018. He has also been Secretary-General of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party since June 2017, having previously held that office from 2014 to 2016, and was elected President of the Socialist International in November 2022.
Go to Profile#19243
Wilhelmus Luxemburg
#19254
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Wilhelmus Anthonius Josephus Luxemburg was a Dutch American mathematician who was a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He received his B.A. from the University of Leiden in 1950; his M.A., in 1953; his Ph.D., from the Delft Institute of Technology, in 1955. He was assistant professor at Caltech during 1958–60; Associate Professor, during 1960–62; Professor, during 1962–2000; Professor Emeritus, from 2000. He was the Executive Officer for Mathematics during 1970–85. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Luxemburg became a correspondin...
Go to Profile#19244
Jacqueline Woodson
#19255
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for children and adolescents. She is best known for Miracle's Boys, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles Brown Girl Dreaming, After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. After serving as the Young People's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, by the Library of Congress, for 2018 to 2019. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020.
Go to Profile#19245
Joel Schumacher
#19256
Overall Influence
1939 - 2020 (81 years)
Joel T. Schumacher was an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Raised in New York City by his mother, Schumacher graduated from Parsons School of Design and originally became a fashion designer. He first entered filmmaking as a production and costume designer before gaining writing credits on Car Wash, Sparkle, and The Wiz.
Go to Profile#19246
Neil Lennon
#19257
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Neil Francis Lennon is a football coach and former player from Northern Ireland. During his playing career he represented English clubs Manchester City, Crewe Alexandra and Leicester City. Lennon moved to Celtic in 2000, where he made over 200 appearances and was appointed captain in 2005. Before retiring as a player, he returned to England and played for Nottingham Forest and Wycombe Wanderers. Lennon also earned 40 caps for the Northern Ireland national team over nine years, scoring two goals.
Go to Profile#19247
Daniel Inouye
#19258
Overall Influence
1924 - 2012 (88 years)
Daniel Ken Inouye was an American attorney, soldier, and politician who served as a United States senator from Hawaii from 1963 until his death in 2012. Beginning in 1959, he was the first U.S. Representative for the State of Hawaii, and a Medal of Honor recipient. A member of the Democratic Party, he also served as the president pro tempore of the United States Senate from 2010 until his death. Inouye was the highest-ranking Asian-American politician in U.S. history until Kamala Harris became vice president in 2021. Inouye also chaired various senate committees, including those on Intellige...
Go to Profile#19248
Paul J. Hopper
#19259
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Paul J. Hopper is an American linguist, who was born in Great Britain. In 1973, he proposed the glottalic theory regarding the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European consonant inventory, in parallel with the Georgian linguist Tamaz Gamkrelidze and the Russian linguist Vyacheslav Ivanov. He later also became known for his theory of emergent grammar , for his contributions to the theory of grammaticalisation and other work dealing with the interface between grammar and usage. He currently works as the Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pitts...
Go to Profile#19249
Hans-Ulrich Wittchen
#19260
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Hans-Ulrich Wittchen is a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and epidemiologist. He has been a head of the Institute of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy and the Center of Clinical Epidemiology and Longitudinal Studies at the Technische Universität Dresden. Since 2018, he is leading the research group "Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy Research" at the Psychiatric Clinic of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and directs the IAP-TU Dresden GmbH in Dresden.
Go to Profile#19250
Arvind Kejriwal
#19261
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Arvind Kejriwal is an Indian politician, activist and former bureaucrat, who is serving as the 7th and current Chief Minister of Delhi since 2015, after his first term in the post from 2013 to 2014. He is also the national convener of the Aam Aadmi Party since 2012. He has represented the New Delhi constituency in the Delhi Legislative Assembly since 2015 and from 2013 to 2014.
Go to Profile