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).
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List of the most influential people
#19551
Adrian Melott
#19562
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Adrian Lewis Melott is an American physicist. He is one of the pioneers of using large-scale computing to investigate the formation of large-scale structure in a Universe dominated by dark matter. He later turned his attention to an area he calls “astrobiophysics”, examining a variety of ways that external events in our galaxy may have influenced the course of life on Earth, including analysis of gamma-ray burst events.
Go to Profile#19552
Terrell Carver
#19563
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Terrell Foster Carver is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol. Career Carver was born in Boise, Idaho. After receiving his B.A. from Columbia University in 1968, Carver went on to study in England. After finishing his BPhil and DPhil at Oxford University, he worked as a lecturer at the University of Liverpool between 1974 and 1979. In 1980 he moved to the University of Bristol, where he was a lecturer until 1990, when he became a reader. In 1985/86 he was visiting professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 1991 he was both a visiting fellow at The Research Sch...
Go to Profile#19553
Johann Kriegler
#19564
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Johann Christiaan Kriegler is a retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Early life Born in Pretoria, he matriculated at King Edward VII School in Johannesburg in 1949. He then attended the South African Military Academy for two years. He studied law at the University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa.
Go to Profile#19554
Uri Gordon
#19565
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
#19555
Orna Lin
#19566
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Orna Lin is the owner of a private law firm, Orna Lin & Co. and a leading labor lawyer in Israel. Biography Orna Lin is the daughter of former Israeli Knesset member Amnon Lin and granddaughter of Haifa's first Jewish mayor, Abba Hushi. She is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#19556
John Greco
#19567
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
John Greco is the Robert L. McDevitt and Catherine H. McDevitt Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. Before coming to Georgetown, Greco taught at Saint Louis University. Greco received his A.B. from Georgetown University in 1983 and completed his Ph.D. at Brown University in 1989 under Ernest Sosa. His research interests are in epistemology and metaphysics and he has published widely on virtue epistemology, epistemic normativity, skepticism, and Thomas Reid. From 2013 until 2020, he was the Editor of American Philosophical Quarterly. For 2013–15, together with Eleonore Stump, he h...
Go to Profile#19557
John Todd
#19568
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
John Todd is a Canadian biologist working in the general field of ecological design. He addresses problems of food production and wastewater processing by using ecosystems technologies that incorporate plants, animals and bacteria. Todd has developed "Arks" or "bioshelters", ecologically closed "life-support systems" with the goal of sustainable functioning. He combines alternative technologies for renewable energy, organic farming, aquaculture, hydroponics and architecture to create "living machines" or "eco-machines".
Go to Profile#19558
Nicholas J. Cull
#19569
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Nicholas J. Cull is a historian and professor in the Master's in Public Diplomacy program at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He was the founding director of this program and ran it from 2005 to 2019.
Go to Profile#19559
Zhou Chaochen
#19570
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Zhou Chaochen is a Chinese computer scientist. Zhou was born in Nanhui, Shanghai, China. He studied as an undergraduate at the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics, Peking University and as a postgraduate at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences .
Go to Profile#19560
Jc Beall
#19571
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Jc Beall is an American philosopher, formerly the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. As of late 2020 Beall holds the O’Neill Family Chair of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
Go to Profile#19561
Moshe Kaveh
#19572
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Moshe Kaveh is an Israeli physicist and former President of Bar-Ilan University. Biography Kaveh was born in Tashkent, Uzbek SSR, Soviet Union where his parents sought safety after fleeing from Poland. All of his father 's ten siblings perished in the Holocaust. The Kaveh family made aliyah to Israel in 1950.
Go to Profile#19562
Rufus Wainwright
#19573
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Rufus McGarrigle Wainwright is a Canadian singer, songwriter, and composer. He has recorded eleven studio albums and numerous tracks on compilations and film soundtracks. He has also written two classical operas and set Shakespeare's sonnets to music for a theatre piece by Robert Wilson.
Go to Profile#19563
Emily M. Bender
#19574
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Emily Menon Bender is an American linguist who is a professor at the University of Washington. She specializes in computational linguistics and natural language processing. She is also the director of the University of Washington's Computational Linguistics Laboratory. She has published several papers on the risks of large language models.
Go to Profile#19564
Horst Köhler
#19575
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Horst Köhler is a German politician who served as President of Germany from 2004 to 2010. As the candidate of the two Christian Democratic sister parties, the CDU and the CSU, as well as the liberal FDP, Köhler was elected to his first five-year term by the Federal Convention on 23 May 2004 and was subsequently inaugurated on 1 July 2004. He was reelected to a second term on 23 May 2009. Just a year later, on 31 May 2010, he resigned from his office in a controversy over a comment on the role of the German Bundeswehr in light of a visit to the troops in Afghanistan. During his tenure as pres...
Go to Profile#19565
Robert Hazen
#19576
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
#19566
Poppy Z. Brite
#19577
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
William Joseph Martin , formerly Poppy Z. Brite, is an American author. He initially achieved fame in the gothic horror genre of literature in the early 1990s by publishing a string of successful novels and short story collections. He is best known for his novels Lost Souls , Drawing Blood , and Exquisite Corpse . His later work moved into the genre of dark comedy, with many stories set in the New Orleans restaurant world. Martin's novels are typically standalone books but may feature recurring characters from previous novels and short stories. Much of his work features openly bisexual and gay...
Go to Profile#19567
Nikolai Bezroukov
#19578
Overall Influence
Nikolai Bezroukov is a Senior Internet Security Analyst at BASF Corporation and was member of Computer Science at Fairleigh Dickinson University . Also Webmaster of Open Source Software University, a volunteer technical site for the United Nations Sustainable Development Networking Programme that helps with Internet connectivity and distributes Linux to developing countries.
Go to Profile#19568
Eric Baer
#19579
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Eric Baer, is an American scientist and engineer known for his major research and educational contributions to polymer science and engineering. He is a leading pioneer in understanding the complex relationships between solid state structure, processing, and properties of polymeric materials and systems.
Go to Profile#19569
Steve Carlton
#19580
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Steven Norman Carlton is an American former professional baseball player. He played in Major League Baseball as a left-handed pitcher for six different teams from 1965 to 1988, most notably as a member of the Philadelphia Phillies with whom he won four Cy Young Awards as well as the 1980 World Series. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994.
Go to Profile#19570
Francesco Calogero
#19581
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Francesco Calogero is an Italian physicist, active in the community of scientists concerned with nuclear disarmament. Biography Born on 6 February 1935, he is the son of the philosopher Guido Calogero. After his father was sentenced to national exile by fascist police, Francesco Calogero spent more than one year in Scanno, a small Italian village. After World War II, Calogero graduated "laurea in fisica" cum laude at University of Rome La Sapienza, in February 1958. He became Professor of Theoretical Physics, in the same university in 1976.
Go to Profile#19571
Casey Reas
#19582
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Casey Edwin Barker Reas , also known as C. E. B. Reas or Casey Reas, is an American artist whose conceptual, procedural and minimal artworks explore ideas through the contemporary lens of software. Reas is perhaps best known for having created, with Ben Fry, the Processing programming language.
Go to Profile#19572
Jean-Yves Béziau
#19583
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Jean-Yves Beziau Career Béziau works in the field of logic—in particular, paraconsistent logic, the square of opposition and universal logic. He holds a Maîtrise in Philosophy from Pantheon-Sorbonne University, a DEA in Philosophy from Pantheon-Sorbonne University, a PhD in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo, a MSc and a PhD in Logic and Foundations of Computer Science from Paris Diderot University.
Go to Profile#19573
Victor Fuchs
#19584
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (102 years)
Victor Robert Fuchs was an American health economist. He was known for his 1975 book Who Shall Live?, which detailed the consequences of rising health care costs in the United States. Early life and education Fuchs was born in the Bronx. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Austria. His younger brother, Lawrence Fuchs, went on to be a professor of American studies at Brandeis University.
Go to Profile#19574
Raffaele Farina
#19585
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Raffaele Farina SDB is an Italian cardinal of the Catholic Church. He was Archivist of the Vatican Secret Archives, Librarian of the Vatican Library, and president of Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia, Diplomatica e Archivistica. Farina was elevated to the cardinalate in 2007.
Go to Profile#19575
Elena Kagan
#19586
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Elena Kagan is an American lawyer who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 10, 2010, and has served since August 7, 2010. Kagan is the fourth woman to become a member of the Court.
Go to Profile#19576
Carl O. Helvie
#19587
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Carl O. Helvie was an American registered nurse and Professor Emeritus of Nursing at Old Dominion University. Helvie is known for his development and implementation of the Helvie Energy Theory of Nursing and Health.
Go to Profile#19577
Michael Jackson
#19588
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Michael Robin Jackson was a British-American talk radio host and occasional actor. He was based in the Los Angeles area. Jackson is best known for his radio show which covered arts, politics, and human interest subjects, particularly in the Los Angeles and greater Southern California area in the era before "shock jocks". His show originally aired on L.A. radio station KABC and briefly aired on KGIL.
Go to Profile#19578
Dan Meyerstein
#19589
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Dan Meyerstein FRSC is an Israeli academic and former president of Ariel University. Biography Meyerstein was born in Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine. He earned an M.Sc. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Physical Chemistry , and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the school as well .
Go to Profile#19579
Edward Burger
#19590
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Edward Burger Burger is an American mathematician and President Emeritus of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Previously, he was the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, and the Robert Foster Cherry Professor for Great Teaching at Baylor University. He also had been named to a single-year-appointment as vice provost of strategic educational initiatives at Baylor University in February 2011. He currently serves as the president and CEO of St. David's Foundation.
Go to Profile#19580
Thomas R. Bruce
#19591
Overall Influence
Thomas R. "Tom" Bruce is an American academic and former software engineer who co-founded the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School with Peter Martin in 1992. Education Bruce earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and a Master of Fine Arts in stage management from the School of Drama at Yale University.
Go to Profile#19581
Dwight Yorke
#19592
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Dwight Eversley Yorke CM is a Trinidadian and Tobagonian professional football coach and former player who was most recently in charge of Australian A-League club Macarthur FC. Yorke formed a prolific strike partnership with Andy Cole at Manchester United, where he won numerous honors, including the treble in 1998-1999 and several Premier League titles.
Go to Profile#19582
Chris Connelly
#19593
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Chris Connelly is an American sports and entertainment reporter who currently works for ESPN as a contributor to its E:60 newsmagazine. He was also the interim editor-in-chief of Grantland.com, replacing Bill Simmons, before ESPN shuttered the site in October 2015.
Go to Profile#19583
Jan Blommaert
#19594
Overall Influence
1961 - 2021 (60 years)
Jan Blommaert was a Belgian sociolinguist and linguistic anthropologist, Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He also held appointments at Ghent University and University of the Western Cape . He was considered to be one of the world's most prominent sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, who had contributed substantially to sociolinguistic globalization theory that focuses on historical as well as contemporary patterns of the spread of languages and forms of literacy, and on lasting and new forms ...
Go to Profile#19584
Max Roach
#19595
Overall Influence
1924 - 2007 (83 years)
Maxwell Lemuel Roach was an American jazz drummer and composer. A pioneer of bebop, he worked in many other styles of music, and is generally considered one of the most important drummers in history. He worked with many famous jazz musicians, including Clifford Brown, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Abbey Lincoln, Dinah Washington, Charles Mingus, Billy Eckstine, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, and Booker Little. He also played with his daughter Maxine Roach, Grammy nominated Violist. He was inducted into the DownBeat Hall...
Go to Profile#19585
Adele Diamond
#19596
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Adele Dorothy Diamond is a professor of neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, where she is currently a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. One of the pioneers in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, Diamond researches how executive functions are affected by biological and environmental factors, especially in children. Her discoveries have improved treatment for disorders such as phenylketonuria and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and they have impacted early education.
Go to Profile#19586
Volker Zotz
#19597
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Volker Helmut Manfred Zotz is an eminent Austrian philosopher, religious studies scholar, Buddhologist and a prolific author. Early life The Zotz family originated in Tyrol and spread to Germany. Volker Zotz was born in Landau in der Pfalz, Germany, where he attended elementary school and high school.
Go to Profile#19587
Ricardo Ffrench-Davis
#19598
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Ricardo Ffrench-Davis is a Chilean economist. He is Professor of the Department of Economics and the Instituto de Estudios Internacionales at the University of Chile. Along with a few other Chilean students, Ffrench-Davis got the chance to study at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1971. Although the students were later named Chicago Boys, Professor Ffrench-Davis was a critic of the neo-liberal policies implemented in Chile by the Pinochet dictatorship.
Go to Profile#19588
Richard Wright
#19599
Overall Influence
1943 - 2008 (65 years)
Richard William Wright was an English musician who co-founded the progressive rock band Pink Floyd. He played keyboards and sang, appearing on almost every Pink Floyd album and performing on all their tours. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 as a member of Pink Floyd.
Go to Profile#19589
Charles Plosser
#19600
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Charles Irving Plosser is a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia who served from August 1, 2006, to March 1, 2015. An academic macroeconomist, he is well known for his work on real business cycles, a term which he and John B. Long, Jr. coined. Specifically, he wrote along with Charles R. Nelson in 1982 an influential work entitled "Trends and Random Walks in Macroeconomic Time Series" in which they dealt with the hypothesis of permanent shocks affecting the aggregate product .
Go to Profile#19590
Hector DeLuca
#19601
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Hector F. DeLuca, born in Pueblo, Colorado in 1930, is an emeritus University of Wisconsin–Madison professor and former chairman of the university's biochemistry department. DeLuca is well known for his research in involving Vitamin D, from which several pharmaceutical drugss are derived. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1979.
Go to Profile#19591
Ronald G. Douglas
#19602
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Ronald George Douglas was an American mathematician, best known for his work on operator theory and operator algebras. Education and career Douglas was born in Osgood, Indiana. He was an undergraduate at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and received his Ph.D. in 1962 from Louisiana State University as a student of Pasquale Porcelli. He was at the University of Michigan until 1969, when he moved to the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Beginning in 1986 he moved into university administration, eventually becoming Vice Provost at Stony Brook in 1990, and Provost at Texas A&M University from 1996 until 2002.
Go to Profile#19592
Keith Hopkins
#19603
Overall Influence
1934 - 2004 (70 years)
Morris Keith Hopkins, FBA was a British historian and sociologist. He was professor of ancient history at the University of Cambridge from 1985 to 2000. Hopkins had a relatively unconventional route to the Cambridge professorship. After Brentwood School, he graduated in classics at King's College, Cambridge in 1958. He spent time as a graduate student, much influenced by Moses Finley, but left before completing his doctorate for an assistant lectureship in sociology at the University of Leicester .
Go to Profile#19593
Rita Laura Segato
#19604
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Rita Laura Segato is an Argentine-Brazilian academic, who has been called "one of Latin America's most celebrated feminist anthropologists" and "one of the most lucid feminist thinkers of this era". She is specially known for her research oriented towards gender in indigenous villages and Latin American communities, violence against women and the relationships between gender, racism and colonialism. One of her specialist areas is the study of gender violence.
Go to Profile#19594
Olivier Panis
#19605
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Olivier Jean Denis Marie Panis is a French former racing driver. Panis raced in Formula One for ten seasons, earning his first and only win at the 1996 Monaco Grand Prix for the Ligier team. He is the father of racing driver Aurélien Panis.
Go to Profile#19595
Michael Ashburner
#19606
Overall Influence
1942 - 2023 (81 years)
Michael Ashburner was an English biologist and Professor in the Department of Genetics at University of Cambridge. He was also the former joint-head and co-founder of the European Bioinformatics Institute of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#19596
Ian Morris
#19607
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ian Matthew Morris is a British historian, archaeologist, and Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University. Early life Morris was born on 27 January 1960 in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England. He attended Alleyne's High School, a comprehensive school in Stone, Staffordshire. He studied at the University of Birmingham, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981. He undertook a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1985. His doctoral thesis was titled "Burial and society at Athens, 1100-500 BC".
Go to Profile#19597
Benjamin Wiker
#19608
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Benjamin Wiker is a Roman Catholic ethicist and professor of political science and Human Life studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Biography Benjamin Wiker obtained his PhD in theological ethics from Vanderbilt University then went on to teach at a variety of institutions including Marquette University, Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, Thomas Aquinas College, and the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He came to attention in 2002 with the publication of Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists. In this book, Wiker aims to show how Darwinism by its very nature completely ...
Go to Profile#19598
Ghulam Ishaq Khan
#19609
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Ghulam Ishaq Khan , commonly known by his initials GIK, was a Pakistani bureaucrat, politician and statesman who served as the seventh president of Pakistan from 1988 to 1993. He previously served as Chairman of the Senate from 1985 to 1988 under president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, and was sworn in shortly after Zia's death.
Go to Profile#19599
James E. Darnell
#19610
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
James Edwin Darnell Jr. is an American biologist who made significant contributions to RNA processing and cytokine signaling and is author of the cell biology textbook Molecular Cell Biology. In 2004, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013.
Go to Profile#19600
Peter Dreier
#19611
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Peter Dreier is an American urban policy analyst, author, liberal commentator, leftist and college political science professor. He is the Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California.
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