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
#1951
Leonardo Boff
#1953
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Leonardo Boff , born as Genézio Darci Boff , is a Brazilian theologian, philosopher writer, and former Catholic priest known for his active support for Latin American liberation theology. He is Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Ecology at the Rio de Janeiro State University. In 2001, he received the Right Livelihood Award for "his inspiring insights and practical work to help people realise the links between human spirituality, social justice and environmental stewardship."
Go to Profile#1952
Jack Dongarra
#1954
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jack Joseph Dongarra is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He holds the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Turing Fellowship in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester, and is an adjunct professor and teacher in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He served as a faculty fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study .
Go to Profile#1953
Irene Khan
#1955
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Irene Zubaida Khan is a Bangladeshi lawyer appointed as of August 2020 to be the United Nations Special Rapporteur for freedom of expression and opinion, the first woman appointed to this mandate. She previously served as the seventh Secretary General of Amnesty International . In 2011, she was elected Director-General of the International Development Law Organization in Rome, an intergovernmental organization that works to promote the rule of law, and sustainable development. She was a consulting editor of The Daily Star in Bangladesh from 2010 to 2011.
Go to Profile#1954
Ben Goertzel
#1956
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Ben Goertzel is a computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, CEO and founder of SingularityNET, leader of the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society, and chair of Humanity+. He helped popularize the term 'artificial general intelligence'.
Go to Profile#1955
Robert Ballard
#1957
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Robert Duane Ballard is an American retired Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island who is most noted for his work in underwater archaeology: maritime archaeology and archaeology of shipwrecks. He is best known for the discoveries of the wrecks of the RMS Titanic in 1985, the battleship Bismarck in 1989, and the aircraft carrier in 1998. He discovered the wreck of John F. Kennedy's PT-109 in 2002 and visited Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who saved its crew.
Go to Profile#1956
Galen Strawson
#1958
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Galen John Strawson is a British analytic philosopher and literary critic who works primarily on philosophy of mind, metaphysics , John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. He has been a consultant editor at The Times Literary Supplement for many years, and a regular book reviewer for The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Independent, the Financial Times and The Guardian. He is the son of philosopher P. F. Strawson. He holds a chair in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, and taught for many years before that at the University of Reading, City Un...
Go to Profile#1957
Eugene Thacker
#1959
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Eugene Thacker is an American theorist, poet, and author. He is Professor of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. His writing is often associated with the philosophy of nihilism and pessimism. Thacker's books include In the Dust of This Planet and Infinite Resignation.
Go to Profile#1958
Irfan Habib
#1960
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Irfan Habib is an Indian Marxist historian of ancient and medieval India, following the methodology of Marxist historiography in his contributions to economic history. He identifies as a Marxist and is well known for his strong stance against Hindutva and Islamic fundamentalism. He has authored a number of books, notably the Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707, an Atlas of the Mughal Empire: Political and Economic Maps With Detailed Notes, and an Atlas of Ancient Indian History . As the general editor, he is also the driving force behind the A People's History of India series, volumes ...
Go to Profile#1959
Joe L. Kincheloe
#1961
Overall Influence
1950 - 2008 (58 years)
Joe Lyons Kincheloe was a professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education, McGill University in Montreal and founder of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy. He wrote more than 45 books, numerous book chapters, and hundreds of journal articles on issues including critical pedagogy, educational research, urban studies, cognition, curriculum, and cultural studies. Kincheloe received three graduate degrees from the University of Tennessee. The father of four children, he worked closely for the last 19 years of his life with his partner, Shirley R....
Go to Profile#1960
Warren Spector
#1962
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Warren Evan Spector is an American role-playing and video game designer, director, writer, producer and production designer. He is known for creating immersive sim games, which give players a wide variety of choices in how to progress. Consequences of those choices are then shown in the simulated game world in subsequent levels or missions. He is best known for the critically acclaimed video game Deus Ex that embodies the choice and consequence philosophy while combining elements of the first-person shooter, role-playing, and adventure game genres. In addition to Deus Ex, Spector is known for...
Go to Profile#1961
John L. Hall
#1963
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
John Lewis "Jan" Hall is an American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics. He shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics with Theodor W. Hänsch and Roy Glauber for his work in precision spectroscopy.
Go to Profile#1962
John Young
#1964
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
John Watts Young was an American astronaut, naval officer and aviator, test pilot, and aeronautical engineer. He became the 9th person to walk on the Moon as commander of the Apollo 16 mission in 1972. He is the only astronaut to fly on four different classes of spacecraft: Gemini, the Apollo command and service module, the Apollo Lunar Module and the Space Shuttle.
Go to Profile#1963
Godfrey Hounsfield
#1965
Overall Influence
1919 - 2004 (85 years)
Sir Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield was a British electrical engineer who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Allan MacLeod Cormack for his part in developing the diagnostic technique of X-ray computed tomography .
Go to Profile#1964
Alan Dundes
#1966
Overall Influence
1934 - 2005 (71 years)
Alan Dundes was an American folklorist. He spent much of his career as a professional academic at the University of California, Berkeley and published his ideas in a wide range of books and articles.
Go to Profile#1965
Lori Lightfoot
#1967
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Lori Elaine Lightfoot is an American politician and attorney who was the 56th mayor of Chicago from 2019 until 2023. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Before becoming mayor, Lightfoot worked in private legal practice as a partner at Mayer Brown and held various government positions in Chicago. She served as president of the Chicago Police Board and chair of the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force. In 2019, Lightfoot defeated Toni Preckwinkle in a runoff election for Chicago mayor. She ran again in 2023 but failed to qualify for the runoff, becoming the city's first incumbent mayor...
Go to Profile#1966
Naguib Mahfouz
#1968
Overall Influence
1911 - 2006 (95 years)
Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mahfouz is regarded as one of the first contemporary writers in Arabic literature, along with Taha Hussein, to explore themes of existentialism. He is the only Egyptian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He published 35 novels, over 350 short stories, 26 screenplays, hundreds of op-ed columns for Egyptian newspapers, and seven plays over a 70-year career, from the 1930s until 2004. All of his novels take place in Egypt, and always mentions the lane, which equals the world. His most famous works include The Cairo Trilogy and Children of Gebelawi.
Go to Profile#1967
Robert Darnton
#1969
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Choate Darnton is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France. He was director of the Harvard University Library from 2007 to 2016. Life Darnton was born in New York City. He graduated from Phillips Academy in 1957 and Harvard University in 1960, attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, and earned a PhD in history from Oxford in 1964, where he studied with Richard Cobb, among others. The title of his thesis was Trends in radical propaganda on the eve of the French Revolution . He worked as reporter at The New York Times from 1964 to 1965.
Go to Profile#1969
Narendra Karmarkar
#1971
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Narendra Krishna Karmarkar is an Indian mathematician. Karmarkar developed Karmarkar's algorithm. He is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher. He invented one of the first provably polynomial time algorithms for linear programming, which is generally referred to as an interior point method. The algorithm is a cornerstone in the field of linear programming. He published his famous result in 1984 while he was working for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.
Go to Profile#1970
Bryan Caplan
#1972
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Bryan Douglas Caplan is an American economist and author. Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research fellow at the Mercatus Center, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and former contributor to the Freakonomics blog and EconLog. He currently publishes his own blog, Bet on It. Caplan is a self-described "economic libertarian". The bulk of Caplan's academic work is in behavioral economics and public economics, especially public choice theory.
Go to Profile#1971
Gardner Dozois
#1973
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
Gardner Raymond Dozois was an American science fiction author and editor. He was the founding editor of The Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies and was editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine , garnering multiple Hugo and Locus Awards for those works almost every year. He also won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story twice. He was inducted to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame on June 25, 2011.
Go to Profile#1972
Kaushik Basu
#1974
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Kaushik Basu is an economist who was Chief Economist of the World Bank from 2012 to 2016 and Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India from 2009 to 2012. He is the C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and academic advisory board member of upcoming Plaksha University. He began a three-year term as President of the International Economic Association in June 2017. From 2009 to 2012, during the United Progressive Alliance's second term, Basu served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. Kaushik Basu is winner of t...
Go to Profile#1973
H. R. Giger
#1975
Overall Influence
1940 - 2014 (74 years)
Hans Ruedi Giger was a Swiss artist best known for his airbrushed images that blended human physiques with machines, an art style known as "biomechanical". Giger later abandoned airbrush for pastels, markerss and ink. He was part of the special effects team that won an Academy Award for the visual design of Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi horror film Alien, and was responsible for creating the titular Alien itself. His work is on permanent display at the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyères, Switzerland. His style has been adapted to many forms of media, including album covers, furniture, tattoos and vid...
Go to Profile#1974
Eduard Limonov
#1976
Overall Influence
1943 - 2020 (77 years)
Eduard Veniaminovich Limonov was a Russian writer, poet, publicist, political dissident and politician. He emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1974, but returned to Russia in 1991, where he founded the National Bolshevik Party. The party was banned in the country in 2007 and superseded by The Other Russia of E. V. Limonov. In the 2000s, he was one of the leaders of The Other Russia coalition of opposition forces.
Go to Profile#1975
Robert Zoellick
#1977
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Robert Bruce Zoellick is an American public official and lawyer who was the 11th president of the World Bank Group, a position he held from July 1, 2007, to June 30, 2012. He was previously a managing director of Goldman Sachs, United States Deputy Secretary of State and U.S. Trade Representative, from February 7, 2001, until February 22, 2005. Zoellick has been a senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs since ending his term with the World Bank. He is currently a Senior Counselor at Brunswick Group.
Go to Profile#1976
Frances Oldham Kelsey
#1978
Overall Influence
1914 - 2015 (101 years)
Frances Kathleen Oldham Kelsey was a Canadian-American pharmacologist and physician. As a reviewer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration , she refused to authorize thalidomide for market because she had concerns about the lack of evidence regarding the drug's safety. Her concerns proved to be justified when it was shown that thalidomide caused serious birth defects. Kelsey's career intersected with the passage of laws strengthening FDA oversight of pharmaceuticals. Kelsey was the second woman to receive the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, awarded to her by John F.
Go to Profile#1977
Rick Warren
#1979
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Richard Duane Warren is an American Baptist evangelical Christian pastor and author. He is the founder of Saddleback Church, an evangelical Baptist megachurch in Lake Forest, California. Early life and education Warren was born in San Jose, California, the son of Jimmy and Dot Warren. His father was a Baptist minister, his mother a high-school librarian. He was raised in Ukiah, California, and graduated from Ukiah High School in 1972, where he founded the first Christian club on the school's campus.
Go to Profile#1978
Herbert C. Brown
#1980
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Herbert Charles Brown was an American chemist and recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with organoboranes. Life and career Brown was born Herbert Brovarnik in London, to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Zhitomir, Pearl and Charles Brovarnik, a hardware store manager and carpenter. His family moved to Chicago in June 1914, when he was two years old. Brown attended Crane Junior College in Chicago, where he met Sarah Baylen, whom he would later marry. The college was under threat of closing, and Brown and Baylen transferred to Wright Junior College. In 1935 he left Wri...
Go to Profile#1979
Donald J. Cram
#1981
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Donald James Cram was an American chemist who shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jean-Marie Lehn and Charles J. Pedersen "for their development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity." They were the founders of the field of host–guest chemistry.
Go to Profile#1980
Richard Perle
#1982
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Richard Norman Perle is an American political advisor who served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs under President Ronald Reagan. He began his political career as a senior staff member to Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson on the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 1970s. He served on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004 where he served as chairman from 2001 to 2003 under the Bush Administration before resigning due to conflict of interests.
Go to Profile#1981
Andrew Fire
#1983
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Andrew Zachary Fire is an American biologist and professor of pathology and of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Craig C. Mello, for the discovery of RNA interference . This research was conducted at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and published in 1998.
Go to Profile#1982
Charles Stross
#1984
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a British writer of science fiction and fantasy. Stross specialises in hard science fiction and space opera. Between 1994 and 2004, he was also an active writer for the magazine Computer Shopper and was responsible for its monthly Linux column. He stopped writing for the magazine to devote more time to novels. However, he continues to publish freelance articles on the Internet.
Go to Profile#1983
Trevor Hastie
#1985
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Trevor John Hastie is an American statistician and computer scientist. He is currently serving as the John A. Overdeck Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. Hastie is known for his contributions to applied statistics, especially in the field of machine learning, data mining, and bioinformatics. He has authored several popular books in statistical learning, including The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction. Hastie has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Mathematics by the ISI Web of Knowledge.
Go to Profile#1984
Ralph Steadman
#1986
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Ralph Idris Steadman is a British illustrator best known for his collaboration with the American writer Hunter S. Thompson. Steadman is renowned for his political and social caricatures, cartoons and picture books.
Go to Profile#1985
Jenny Holzer
#1987
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist, based in Hoosick, New York. The main focus of her work is the delivery of words and ideas in public spaces and includes large-scale installations, advertising billboards, projections on buildings and other structures, and illuminated electronic displays.
Go to Profile#1986
Shuji Nakamura
#1988
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
#1987
Béla H. Bánáthy
#1989
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Béla Heinrich Bánáthy was a Hungarian-American linguist, and Professor at San Jose State University and UC Berkeley. He is known as founder of the White Stag Leadership Development Program, established the International Systems Institute in 1982, and was co-founder of the General Evolutionary Research Group in 1984.
Go to Profile#1988
Mae Jemison
#1990
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mae Carol Jemison is an American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut. She became the first African-American woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992. Jemison joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1987 and was selected to serve for the STS-47 mission, during which the Endeavour orbited the Earth for nearly eight days on September 12–20, 1992.
Go to Profile#1989
Harold Evans
#1991
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Sir Harold Matthew Evans was a British-American journalist and writer. In his career in his native Britain, he was editor of The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981, and its sister title The Times for a year from 1981, before being forced out of the latter post by Rupert Murdoch. While at The Sunday Times, he led the newspaper's campaign to seek compensation for mothers who had taken the morning sickness drug thalidomide, which led to their children having severely deformed limbs.
Go to Profile#1990
Jacques Rancière
#1992
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Jacques Rancière is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis. After co-authoring Reading Capital with the structuralist Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and others, and after witnessing the 1968 political uprisings his work turned against Althusserian Marxism, he later came to develop an original body of work focused on aesthetics.
Go to Profile#1991
Damien Keown
#1993
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Damien Keown is a British academic, bioethicist, and authority on Buddhist bioethics. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. Keown earned a B.A. in religious studies from the University of Lancaster in 1977 and a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford in 1986.
Go to Profile#1992
Richard Prince
#1994
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Richard Prince is an American painter and photographer. In the mid-1970s, Prince made drawings and painterly collages that he has since disowned. His image, Untitled , a photographic reproduction of a photograph by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement, was the first rephotograph to be sold for more than $1 million at auction at Christie's New York in 2005. He is regarded as "one of the most revered artists of his generation" according to The New York Times.
Go to Profile#1993
Amitai Etzioni
#1995
Overall Influence
1929 - 2023 (94 years)
Amitai Etzioni was a German-born Israeli-American sociologist, best known for his work on socioeconomics and communitarianism. He founded the Communitarian Network, a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to supporting the moral, social, and political foundations of society. He established the network to disseminate the movement's ideas. His writings argue for a carefully crafted balance between individual rights and social responsibilities, and between autonomy and order, in social structure. In 2001, he was named among the top 100 American intellectuals, as measured by academic c...
Go to Profile#1994
Francis Bacon
#1996
Overall Influence
1909 - 1992 (83 years)
Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his raw, unsettling imagery. Focusing on the human form, his subjects included crucifixions, portraits of popes, self-portraits, and portraits of close friends, with abstracted figures sometimes isolated in geometrical structures. Rejecting various classifications of his work, Bacon said he strove to render "the brutality of fact." He built up a reputation as one of the giants of contemporary art with his unique style.
Go to Profile#1995
James M. McPherson
#1997
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
#1996
Jürgen Moser
#1998
Overall Influence
1928 - 1999 (71 years)
Jürgen Kurt Moser was a German-American mathematician, honored for work spanning over four decades, including Hamiltonian dynamical systems and partial differential equations. Life Moser's mother Ilse Strehlke was a niece of the violinist and composer Louis Spohr. His father was the neurologist Kurt E. Moser , who was born to the merchant Max Maync and Clara Moser . The latter descended from 17th century French Huguenot immigrants to Prussia. Jürgen Moser's parents lived in Königsberg, German empire and resettled in Stralsund, East Germany as a result of the Second World War. Moser attended ...
Go to Profile#1997
James MacGregor Burns
#1999
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
James MacGregor Burns was an American historian and political scientist, presidential biographer, and authority on leadership studies. He was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Government Emeritus at Williams College and Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1971 Burns received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in History and Biography for his work on America's 32nd president, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom.
Go to Profile#1998
Ross Brawn
#2000
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Ross James Brawn is a British Formula One managing director, motor sports and technical director. He is a former motorsport engineer and Formula One team principal, and has worked for a number of Formula One teams. Serving as the technical director of the championship-winning Benetton and Ferrari teams, he earned fame as the "mastermind" behind Michael Schumacher's seven world championship titles. He took a sabbatical in 2007 and returned to F1 for the 2008 season as team principal of Honda. He acquired the Honda team in early 2009 to form the Brawn GP team, which won the Formula One Constructors' and Drivers' Championships in that year.
Go to Profile#1999
Bonnie Nardi
#2001
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Bonnie A. Nardi is an emeritus professor of the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where she led the TechDec research lab in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. She is well known for her work on activity theory, interaction design, games, social media, and society and technology. She was elected to the ACM CHI academy in 2013. She retired in 2018.
Go to Profile#2000
N. T. Wright
#2002
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Nicholas Thomas Wright , known as N. T. Wright or Tom Wright, is an English New Testament scholar, Pauline theologian and Anglican bishop. He was the bishop of Durham from 2003 to 2010. He then became research professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at St Mary's College in the University of St Andrews in Scotland until 2019, when he became a senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall at the University of Oxford.
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