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
#19251
Ian Macfarlane
#19262
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Ian John Macfarlane is an Australian economist, and central banker. After an early career as an economist in Melbourne, Sydney, Oxford and Paris, he joined the Reserve Bank of Australia in 1979 and rose to become Governor from 1996 to 2006. After retiring from the Reserve Bank, he became a company director, economic consultant and author of two books.
Go to Profile#19252
Peter M. Neumann
#19263
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Peter Michael Neumann OBE was a British mathematician. His fields of interest included the history of mathematics and Galois theory. Biography Born in December 1940, Neumann was a son of the German-born mathematicians Bernhard Neumann and Hanna Neumann. He gained a BA degree from The Queen's College, Oxford in 1963, and a DPhil degree from the University of Oxford in 1966. Neumann was a Tutorial Fellow at the Queen's College, Oxford, and a lecturer at the University of Oxford. His research work was in the field of group theory. In 1987, Neumann won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical...
Go to Profile#19253
Axel T. Brunger
#19264
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Axel T. Brunger is a German American biophysicist. He is Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He served as the Chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology .
Go to Profile#19254
Abhisit Vejjajiva
#19265
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Abhisit Vejjajiva is a Thai politician who was the prime minister of Thailand from 2008 to 2011. He was the leader of the Democrat Party from 2005 until he resigned following the party's weak performance in the 2019 election. As leader of the second largest party in the House of Representatives, he was also leader of the opposition – a position he held from 2005 to 2008 and again after his premiership until his party's en masse resignation from the House on 8 December 2013. As of 2023, Abhisit is the last prime minister to not come from the military or be related to the Shinawatra family.
Go to Profile#19255
Egon Flaig
#19266
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Egon Flaig is a German ancient historian and public intellectual, currently Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Rostock. Flaig's research has ranged from ancient Greek and Roman history to world-historical treatments of topics such as slavery and democracy. He has also been an active commentator on issues such as democracy, national identity, and religion, especially as pertaining to his home country.
Go to Profile#19256
Peter Jones
#19267
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Peter Langley Jones was a British journalist, author, editor, promoter and presenter who wrote mainly on show business matters, especially pop music, for magazines including Record Mirror and Billboard. He was involved in the early careers of both The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, pseudonymously writing the first book-length biographies of both bands.
Go to Profile#19257
Giancarlo Ghirardi
#19268
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Giancarlo Ghirardi was an Italian physicist and emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Trieste. He is well known for the Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber theory , which he proposed in 1985 together with Alberto Rimini and Tullio Weber, and for his contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics. He independently rederived, in a referee report to Foundations of Physics, the no-cloning theorem, before the works by Wootters and Zurek and by Dieks in 1982, but after the actual first derivation by Park in 1970.
Go to Profile#19258
Bill Laswell
#19269
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
William Otis Laswell is an American bass guitarist, record producer, and record label owner. He has been involved in thousands of recordings with many collaborators from all over the world. His music draws from funk, world music, jazz, dub, and ambient styles.
Go to Profile#19259
Timo Airaksinen
#19270
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Timo Airaksinen is Professor of Moral Philosophy in the Discipline of Social and Moral Philosophy at Helsinki University. By longstanding tradition in the University of Helsinki, the philosophy faculty is divided into two major areas, the practical and the theoretical. He graduated from the University of Turku in 1971 and defended his doctoral dissertation The Hegelianism of Bradley and McTaggart in 1975. He specializes in ethics and social philosophy, ethics of technology, the history of philosophy, and education. He has written on a wide range of topics dealing with these issues, from the thinking of Hobbes to Marquis de Sade.
Go to Profile#19260
Dennis Lee
#19271
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Dennis Beynon Lee is a Canadian poet, teacher, editor, and critic born in Toronto, Ontario. He is also a children's writer, well known for his book of children's rhymes, Alligator Pie. Life After attending high school at the University of Toronto Schools, Lee received bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Toronto, where he coauthored articles in Acta Victoriana with Margaret Atwood. He taught English at the University's Victoria College from 1963 until 1967, at which time he became 'resource person' for Rochdale College.
Go to Profile#19261
John Chambers
#19272
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
John McKinley Chambers is the creator of the S programming language, and core member of the R programming language project. He was awarded the 1998 ACM Software System Award for developing S. Early life Chambers received a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto in 1963. He received a Master of Arts in 1965 and a PhD degree in 1966, both in statistics, from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#19262
Varol Akman
#19273
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Varol Akman is Professor of Computer Engineering in Bilkent University, Ankara. An academic of engineering background, Akman obtained his B.A in Electrical Engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. He then continued his graduate studies and obtained his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under the tutelage of influential logician William Randolph Franklin.
Go to Profile#19263
Matilde Marcolli
#19274
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Matilde Marcolli is an Italian and American mathematical physicist. She has conducted research work in areas of mathematics and theoretical physics; obtained the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Preis of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Sofia Kovalevskaya Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Marcolli has authored and edited numerous books in the field. She is currently the Robert F. Christy Professor of Mathematics and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#19264
Timothy Naftali
#19275
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Timothy Naftali is a Canadian-American historian who is clinical associate professor of public service at New York University. He has written four books, two of them co-authored with Alexander Fursenko on the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev. He is a regular CNN contributor as a CNN presidential historian.
Go to Profile#19265
Alexandre Lamfalussy
#19276
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Alexandre, Baron Lamfalussy was a Hungarian-born Belgian economist who served as President of the European Monetary Institute from 1994 to 1997, which was the forerunner to the European Central Bank .
Go to Profile#19266
John C. DeFries
#19277
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
John C. DeFries is one of the world's leading behavior geneticists. His achievements include being President of the Behavior Genetics Association and cofounder of the journal Behavior Genetics, as well as its co-editor . His awards include The Dobzhansky Award for Outstanding Research in Behavior Genetics , Consulting Editor of the Journal of Learning Disabilities , Fellowships in the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities, Association for Psychological Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Section J .
Go to Profile#19267
Selim Akl
#19278
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Selim G. Akl is a professor at Queen's University in the Queen's School of Computing, where he leads the Parallel and Unconventional Computation Group. His research interests are primarily in the area of algorithm design and analysis, in particular for problems in parallel computing and unconventional computing.
Go to Profile#19268
Guido Barbujani
#19279
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Guido Barbujani is an Italian population geneticist, evolutionary biologist and literary author born in Adria, who has worked with the State University of New York at Stony Brook , University of Padua, and University of Bologna. He has taught at the University of Ferrara since 1996.
Go to Profile#19269
James M. Bower
#19280
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
James Mason Bower is an American neuroscientist and CEO and chairman of the Board of Numedeon Inc., creator of the Whyville.net educational virtual world. He graduated from McQuaid Jesuit High School in Rochester, New York attending Antioch College and Montana State University as an undergraduate and then received his PhD in neurophysiology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, U.S. in 1982. From 1984 until 2001, he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology and from 2001 until 2013 he was a professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. At pres...
Go to Profile#19270
Eric Jacobson
#19281
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Eric Jacobson is an American puppeteer and actor. He is best known for his involvement with the Muppets, performing Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, and Sam Eagle for The Muppets Studio, as well as Sesame Street characters Bert, Grover, Oscar the Grouch, and Guy Smiley—all roles that he inherited from the characters' original performers, Frank Oz, Caroll Spinney, and Jim Henson.
Go to Profile#19271
Robert Galbraith Heath
#19282
Overall Influence
1915 - 1999 (84 years)
Robert Galbraith Heath was an American psychiatrist. He followed the theory of biological psychiatry that organic defects were the sole source of mental illness, and that consequently mental problems were treatable by physical means. He published 425 papers and three books. One of his first papers is dated 1946. He was profiled as a "famous American psychiatrist" in 1983 by Psychiatric Annals.
Go to Profile#19272
Peter Nowell
#19283
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Peter Carey Nowell was a cancer researcher and co-discoverer of the Philadelphia chromosome. At the time of his death, he was the Gaylord P. and Mary Louise Harnwell Emeritus Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#19273
Matt Stone
#19284
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Matthew Richard Stone is an American actor, animator, filmmaker, and composer. He is best known for co-creating South Park and The Book of Mormon with his creative partner Trey Parker. Stone was interested in film and music as a child and at high school, and attended the University of Colorado Boulder, where he met Parker. The two collaborated on various short films, and starred in the feature-length musical Cannibal! The Musical .
Go to Profile#19274
Carla J. Shatz
#19285
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Carla J. Shatz is an American neurobiologist and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine.
Go to Profile#19275
Larbi Sadiki
#19286
Overall Influence
Larbi Sadiki is a Tunisian writer, political scientist and professor of political science and democratization at the College of Arts and Sciences of Qatar University. He was formerly a scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center and lecturer at University of Exeter. Sadiki's writing focuses on the democratization of the Arab world as well as human rights studies and dialogue between the Western and Islamic civilizations.
Go to Profile#19276
Samuel John Hazo
#19287
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Samuel John Hazo is a poet, playwright, fiction novelist, and the founder and director of the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is also McAnulty Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Duquesne University, where he taught for forty-three years.
Go to Profile#19277
Deborah Kerr
#19288
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Deborah Jane Trimmer CBE , known professionally as Deborah Kerr , was a British actress. She was nominated six times for the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first person from Scotland to be nominated for any acting Oscar.
Go to Profile#19278
Bruce Johnston
#19289
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Bruce Arthur Johnston is an American singer, musician and songwriter who is a member of the Beach Boys. He also collaborated on many records with Terry Melcher and composed the 1975 Barry Manilow hit, "I Write the Songs".
Go to Profile#19279
Bob Rock
#19290
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Robert Jens Rock is a Canadian record producer, sound engineer and musician, best known for producing rock bands and music artists such as Metallica, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, the Tragically Hip, the Cult, 311, Our Lady Peace, Bryan Adams, the Offspring, Michael Bublé, Black Veil Brides, David Lee Roth, and Ron Sexsmith.
Go to Profile#19280
Halil Mete Soner
#19291
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Halil Mete Soner is a Turkish American mathematician born in Ankara. Soner's current research interests are nonlinear partial differential equations; asymptotic analysis of Ginzburg-Landau type systems, viscosity solutions, and mathematical finance.
Go to Profile#19281
Christopher Bigsby
#19292
Overall Influence
1941 - 2005 (64 years)
Christopher William Edgar Bigsby FRSA FRSL, is a British literary analyst and novelist, with more than sixty books to his credit. Earlier in his writing career, his books were published under the name C. W. E. Bigsby. He has won awards for his work on the American theatre, for his biography of Arthur Miller, for his first novel, Hester, and for his work in study abroad. He holds honorary degrees from Bolton University and the Complutense University of Madrid.
Go to Profile#19282
Janelle Monáe
#19293
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Janelle Monáe Robinson is an American singer, songwriter, rapper and actress. She has received ten Grammy Award nominations, and won a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Children's and Family Emmy Award. Monáe has also been honored with the ASCAP Vanguard Award, as well as the Rising Star Award and the Trailblazer of the Year Award from Billboard Women in Music. She is signed to Atlantic Records, as well as to her own imprint, the Wondaland Arts Society.
Go to Profile#19283
Elie Abel
#19294
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Elie Abel was a Canadian-American journalist, author and academic. Early life Born in Montreal, Quebec, Abel received a Bachelor of Arts degree from McGill University in 1941 and a Master of Science in journalism degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1942. He worked as a reporter for the Windsor Star in Windsor, Ontario, for a year, then served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II.
Go to Profile#19284
Bernard Richards
#19295
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Bernard Richards is a British computer scientist and an Emeritus Professor of Medical Informatics at the University of Manchester, England. Richards studied mathematics and physics for his bachelor's degree. For his master's degree, he worked under the supervision of Alan Turing at Manchester as one of Turing's last students, helping to validate Turing’s theory of morphogenesis. Reflecting on Turing's death at the age of 80 during Turing's centenary year in 2012, Richards commented: "The day he died felt like driving through a tunnel and the lights being switched off".
Go to Profile#19285
Ann Althouse
#19296
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ann Althouse is an American law professor and blogger. Early life and education Althouse was raised in Newark and Wilmington, Delaware . She obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan in 1973 and graduated first in her class from the New York University School of Law with a J.D. in 1981.
Go to Profile#19286
Richard Deacon
#19297
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Richard Deacon CBE is a British abstract sculptor, and a winner of the Turner Prize. Early life and education Deacon was born in Bangor, Wales and educated at Plymouth College. He then studied at the Somerset College of Art, Taunton, at St Martin's School of Art, London, and at the Royal College of Art, also in London. He left the Royal College in 1977, and went on to study part-time at the Chelsea School of Art. Deacon's first one-person show came in 1978 in Brixton.
Go to Profile#19287
Hossein Saffar Harandi
#19298
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Mohammad-Hossein Saffar-Harandi is an Iranian politician who was minister of culture and Islamic guidance of Iran from 21 August 2005 until 23 July 2009 when he resigned after opposing the appointment of Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei as vice president. He is currently member of the Expediency Discernment Council.
Go to Profile#19288
Terence Parr
#19299
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Terence John Parr is a professor of computer science at the University of San Francisco. He is best known for his ANTLR parser generator and contributions to parsing theory. He also developed the StringTemplate engine for Java and other programming languages.
Go to Profile#19289
Gilbert F. White
#19300
Overall Influence
1911 - 2006 (95 years)
Gilbert Fowler White was a prominent American geographer, sometimes termed the "father of floodplain management" and the "leading environmental geographer of the 20th century" . White is known predominantly for his work on natural hazards, particularly flooding, and the importance of sound water management in contemporary society.
Go to Profile#19290
Julian Edelman
#19301
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Julian Francis Edelman is an American former football wide receiver who played in the National Football League for 12 seasons with the New England Patriots. He played college football for the Kent State Golden Flashes as a quarterback and was selected in the seventh round of the 2009 NFL Draft by the Patriots, where he transitioned to a return specialist and wide receiver. Edelman became a primary offensive starter in 2013 and was a staple of the Patriots' receiving corps until his retirement after the 2020 season.
Go to Profile#19291
Fred Karlsson
#19302
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Fred Göran Karlsson is a professor emeritus of general linguistics at the University of Helsinki. Education and background Karlsson's father Göran Karlsson was a prominent linguist and worked as a professor of Finnish Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi.
Go to Profile#19292
Fabolous
#19303
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
John David Jackson , known professionally as Fabolous, is an American rapper. Raised in Brooklyn, he first gained recognition while still a senior in high school, when he performed live on American music executive DJ Clue's radio show, then on Hot 97. Jackson subsequently signed to DJ Clue's Desert Storm imprint, and later secured a distribution deal with major-label, Elektra. Jackson gained prominence with his first release, Ghetto Fabolous , which spawned the hit singles "Can't Deny It" and "Young'n ". His second release was 2003's Street Dreams, which was supported by two US top 10 singles...
Go to Profile#19293
Yves Roucaute
#19304
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Yves Roucaute is a French philosopher , Phd , Phd , writer, professeur agrégé in philosophy, professeur agrégé in political science, teaching at Paris X University Nanterre, Previous President of the scientific Council of the "Institut National des Hautes Etudes de Securité et de Justice" , director of the review "Cahiers de la Sécurité", counsellor of the "réformateurs" group at the French National Assembly. He has held a number of positions in cabinet ministers of right-wing governments, and is a close friend of Alain Madelin, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and Nicolas Sarkozy. He is also a journali...
Go to Profile#19294
Judy Malloy
#19305
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Judy Malloy is an American poet whose works embrace the intersection of hypernarrative, magic realism, and information art. Beginning with Uncle Roger in 1986, Malloy has composed works in both new media literature and hypertext fiction. She was an early creator of online interactive and collaborative fiction on The WELL and the website ArtsWire.
Go to Profile#19295
Klaus Knopper
#19306
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Klaus Knopper is a German electrical engineer and free software developer. Knopper is the creator of Knoppix, a well-known live CD Linux distribution. He received his degree in electrical engineering from the Kaiserslautern University of Technology , co-founded LinuxTag in 1996 and has been a self-employed information technology consultant since 1998. He also teaches at the Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences.
Go to Profile#19296
C.M.I.M. Matthiessen
#19307
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Christian Matthias Ingemar Martin Matthiessen is a Swedish-born linguist and a leading figure in the systemic functional linguistics school, having authored or co-authored more than 100 books, refereed journal articles, and papers in refereed conference proceedings, with contributions to three television programs. One of his major works is Lexicogrammatical cartography , a 700-page study of the grammatical systems of English from the perspective of SFL. He has co-authored a number of books with Michael Halliday. Since 2008 he has been a professor in the Department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Go to Profile#19297
Roger Collins
#19308
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Roger J. H. Collins is an English medievalist, currently an honorary fellow in history at the University of Edinburgh. Collins studied at the University of Oxford under Peter Brown and John Michael Wallace-Hadrill. He then taught ancient and medieval history at the universities of Liverpool and Bristol. He arrived at the University of Edinburgh in 1994 and joined the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities before becoming an honorary fellow in the Department of History in 1998.
Go to Profile#19298
Avram Grant
#19309
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Avraham "Avram" Grant is an Israeli professional football manager who currently manages the Zambia national football team. He has spent the majority of his career coaching and managing in Israel, winning a number of national league and cup victories with different teams, and also managing the Israel national team for four years.
Go to Profile#19299
Les Hatton
#19310
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Les Hatton is a British-born computer scientist and mathematician most notable for his work on failures and vulnerabilities in software controlled systems. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge 1967–1970 and the University of Manchester where he received a Master of Science degree in electrostatic waves in relativistic plasma and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1973 for his work on computational fluid dynamics in tornadoes.
Go to Profile#19300
B. V. Sreekantan
#19311
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Badanaval Venkatasubba Sreekantan was an Indian high-energy astrophysicist and a former associate of Homi J. Bhabha at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research . He was also a Dr. S. Radhakrishnan Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.
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