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
#19701
Trisha Greenhalgh
#19712
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Patricia Mary Greenhalgh is a British professor of primary health care at the University of Oxford, and retired general practitioner. Early life and education Trisha Greenhalgh was born on 11 March 1959. She attended Folkestone Grammar School. She gained a BA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1980, and three years later graduated in medicine from the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#19702
Sarah Churchwell
#19713
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Sarah Bartlett Churchwell is a professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Her expertise is in 20th- and 21st-century American literature and cultural history, especially the 1920s and 1930s. She has appeared on British television and radio and has been a judge for the Booker Prize, the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature. She is the director of the Being Human festival and the author of three books: The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe; Careless P...
Go to Profile#19703
Titia de Lange
#19714
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Titia de Lange is the Director of the Anderson Center for Cancer Research, the Leon Hess professor and the head of Laboratory Cell Biology and Genetics at Rockefeller University. De Lange obtained her Masters on "Chromatin structure of the human β-globin gene locus" at the University of Amsterdam in 1981, and subsequently her PhD at the same institution in 1985 with Piet Borst on surface antigen genes in trypanosomes. In 1985 she joined Harold Varmus's lab at the University of California, San Francisco. Since 1990 she has had a faculty position at the Rockefeller University. In 2011, de Lange received the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science.
Go to Profile#19704
James David Barber
#19715
Overall Influence
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
James David Barber was a political scientist whose book The Presidential Character made him famous for his classification of presidents through their worldviews. From 1977 to 1995, he taught political science at Duke University.
Go to Profile#19705
Nick Meglin
#19716
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Nick Meglin was an American writer, humorist, and artist. He was known for his work as a contributor, comics writer, illustrator and editor for the satirical magazine Mad. He also scripted Superfan, a 1970s comic strip by Jack Davis. He was active as a lyricist of musical theatre, and had columns in various specialized magazines about culture and sports.
Go to Profile#19706
Jan Dibbets
#19717
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Jan Dibbets is an Amsterdam-based Dutch conceptual artist. His work is influenced by mathematics and works mainly with photography. Life and career In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he started as an art teacher at the Tilburg Academy and studied painting with Jan Gregoor in Eindhoven. He had his first solo exhibition in 1965 at Amsterdam's Galerie 845 and subsequently abandoned painting in 1967. At that same period, he visited London and met Richard Long and other artists working with land art. He returned to Amsterdam, incorporated land-art based theories into his work and began to use phot...
Go to Profile#19707
Michael Kearney
#19718
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Michael Kevin Kearney is an American college teaching assistant and game show contestant. He is known for setting several world records related to graduating at a young age, as well as teaching college students while still a teenager. Additionally, as a game-show contestant, he has won over one million dollars.
Go to Profile#19708
Christopher G. Atkeson
#19719
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Christopher Granger Atkeson is an American roboticist and a professor at the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University . Atkeson is known for his work in humanoid robots, soft robotics, and machine learning, most notably on locally weighted learning.
Go to Profile#19709
Ralph Wise Zwicker
#19720
Overall Influence
1903 - 1991 (88 years)
Major General Ralph Wise Zwicker, USA, was a highly decorated American Army officer who came to public attention during Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigation in 1954. Biography Zwicker was born on April 17, 1903, in Stoughton, Wisconsin. He was the first Eagle Scout in the state and graduated from high school in Madison, Wisconsin. After high school he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison before being recommended for the United States Military Academy at West Point. He graduated in 1927. His brother, Michael, also served in the Army as a colonel. He married Dorothy Harriet Stewart on July 14, 1927, exactly one month after graduating West Point, and had three children.
Go to Profile#19710
David Pleat
#19721
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David John Pleat is an English football player turned manager, and sports commentator. Pleat made 185 Football League appearances for five clubs, scoring 26 goals. He had two spells as manager of Luton Town, and four as manager of Tottenham Hotspur .
Go to Profile#19711
Kate Millett
#19722
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Katherine Murray Millett was an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. She attended the University of Oxford and was the first American woman to be awarded a degree with first-class honors after studying at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has been described as "a seminal influence on second-wave feminism", and is best known for her book Sexual Politics , which was based on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Journalist Liza Featherstone attributes the attainment of previously unimaginable "legal abortion, greater professional equality between the sexes, and a ...
Go to Profile#19712
Boris Tsirelson
#19723
Overall Influence
1950 - 2020 (70 years)
Boris Semyonovich Tsirelson was a Russian–Israeli mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Tel Aviv University in Israel, as well as a Wikipedia editor. Biography Tsirelson was born in Leningrad to a Russian Jewish family. From his father Simeon's side, he was the great-nephew of rabbi Yehuda Leib Tsirelson, chief rabbi of Bessarabia from 1918 to 1941, and a prominent posek and Jewish leader. He obtained his Master of Science from the University of Leningrad and remained there to pursue graduate studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1975, with thesis "General properties of bounded Gaussian...
Go to Profile#19713
Ulrich L. Lehner
#19724
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Ulrich L. Lehner is the Warren Foundation Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is a trained philosopher, theologian and historian. Life and Education After graduating from the in Straubing in 1996 he received a B.A. in philosophy from the Munich School of Philosophy and a B.A. in theology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1999, and a diploma in theology from the University of Munich in 2003. In 2006 he received his PhD in theology from the Universität Regensburg with a thesis on the concept of providence of Immanuel Kant and Protestant scholasticism. In ...
Go to Profile#19714
Hasia Diner
#19725
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Hasia R. Diner is an American historian. Diner is the Paul S. and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History; Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, History; Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History at New York University and Interim Director of Glucksman Ireland House NYU.
Go to Profile#19715
Gotthard Graubner
#19726
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Gotthard Graubner was a German painter, born in Erlbach, in Saxony, Germany. Graubner studied at the Academy of Arts, Berlin, the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts in Germany, before becoming a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg in 1969 and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1976. His work Black Skin , was selected to be featured in one of the 100 Great Paintings programmes by the BBC in 1980. For the last decades of his life, he lived and worked in Düsseldorf and on the Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss, where he died shortly before his 83rd birthday.
Go to Profile#19716
Robert Legvold
#19727
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Robert Legvold , is an American political scientist, specializing in the international relations of the post-Soviet states. He is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#19717
Victor Assad Najjar
#19728
Overall Influence
1914 - 2002 (88 years)
Victor Assad Najjar was a Lebanese-born American pediatrician and microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Vanderbilt University and Tufts University. Along with John Fielding Crigler, Najjar is known for Crigler–Najjar syndrome.
Go to Profile#19718
Anatoly Vasiliev
#19729
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Anatoly Alexandrovitch Vasiliev is a Russian theatre director. He is artistic director of the Moscow Theatre "School of Dramatic Arts", Théâtre de l'Europe, and professor of drama in Lyon, France.
Go to Profile#19719
Thomas Tuschl
#19730
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Thomas Tuschl is a German biochemist and molecular biologist, known for his research on RNA. Biography Tuschl was born in Altdorf bei Nürnberg. After graduating in Chemistry from Regensburg University, Tuschl received his PhD in 1995 from the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen. He spent four years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA.
Go to Profile#19720
Muriel Cooper
#19731
Overall Influence
1925 - 1994 (69 years)
Muriel Cooper was a pioneering book designer, digital designer, researcher, and educator. She was the first design director of the MIT Press, instilling a Bauhaus-influenced design style into its many publications. She moved on to become founder of MIT's Visible Language Workshop, and later became a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. In 2007, a New York Times article called her "the design heroine you've probably never heard of".
Go to Profile#19721
Dean Falk
#19732
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Dean Falk is an American academic neuroanthropologist who specializes in the evolution of the brain and cognition in higher primates. She is the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology and a Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University.
Go to Profile#19722
Charbel Farhat
#19733
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Charbel Farhat is the Vivian Church Hoff Professor of Aircraft Structures in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, where from 2008 to 2023, he chaired the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. From 2022 to 2023, he chaired this department as the inaugural James and Anna Marie Spilker Chair of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is also Professor in the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, and Director of the Stanford-King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Center of Excellence for Aeronautics and Astronautics. From 2017 to 2023, he served on the Space...
Go to Profile#19723
Philip J. Cook
#19734
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Philip Jackson Cook is the ITT/Terry Sanford Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University in the United States. He also holds faculty appointments in Duke's departments of sociology, and economics. His research has focused on crime and criminal justice policy; weapons and violent crime; health and safety regulation including alcohol taxation and the societal costs of drinking; the economics of state lotteries; and income distribution.
Go to Profile#19724
Helge Holden
#19735
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Helge Holden is a Norwegian mathematician working in the field of differential equations and mathematical physics. He was Praeses of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters from 2014 to 2016.
Go to Profile#19725
Claude Lelouch
#19736
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Claude Barruck Joseph Lelouch is a French film director, writer, cinematographer, actor and producer. Lelouch grew up in an Algerian Jewish family. He emerged as a prominent director in the 1960s. Lelouch gained critical acclaim for his 1966 romantic melodrama film A Man and A Woman. At the 39th Academy Awards in 1967, A Man and a Woman won Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film. Lelouch was also nominated for Best Director. While his films have gained him international recognition since the 1960s, Lelouch's methods and style of film are known for attracting criticism.
Go to Profile#19726
Graeme Davies
#19737
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Sir Graeme John Davies was a New Zealand engineer, academic and administrator. During his career, he was Vice-Chancellor of three universities: the University of Liverpool, the University of Glasgow and the University of London.
Go to Profile#19727
Wolfgang Schäuble
#19738
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Wolfgang Schäuble is a German lawyer, politician and statesman whose political career has spanned for more than five decades. A member of the Christian Democratic Union , he is one of the longest-serving politicians in German history. Schäuble served as 13th president of the Bundestag from 2017 to 2021.
Go to Profile#19728
Sydney Pollack
#19739
Overall Influence
1934 - 2008 (74 years)
Sydney Irwin Pollack was an American film director, producer and actor. Pollack is known for directing commercially and critically acclaimed studio films. Over his forty year career he received numerous accolades including two Academy Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award as well as nominations for three Golden Globe Awards and six BAFTA Awards.
Go to Profile#19729
Francesca Trivellato
#19740
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Francesca Trivellato is an Italian historian, focusing on cultural, economic and social history in the early modern period. Her publications have covered Italian history, Jewish history and trade and cultural networks. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#19730
Garrett Reisman
#19741
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Garrett Erin Reisman is an American engineer and former NASA astronaut. He was a backup crew member for Expedition 15 and joined Expedition 16 aboard the International Space Station for a short time before becoming a member of Expedition 17. He returned to Earth on June 14, 2008 on board STS-124 on Space Shuttle Discovery. He was a member of the STS-132 mission that traveled to the International Space Station aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis from May 14 to 26, 2010. He is a consultant at SpaceX and a Professor of Astronautics Practice at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of...
Go to Profile#19731
Octávio Mateus
#19742
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Octávio Mateus is a Portuguese dinosaur paleontologist and biologist Professor of Paleontology at the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He graduated in Universidade de Évora and received his PhD at Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 2005. He collaborates with Museu da Lourinhã, known for their dinosaur collection.
Go to Profile#19732
Dai Yi
#19743
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Dai Yi is a Chinese historian who primarily focuses on the Qing dynasty's history. He is a professor at Renmin University of China. He is also the honorary director of the university's Qing dynasty's history institute as well as a doctoral student supervisor. Additionally, he is a member of the Communist Party of China.
Go to Profile#19733
Ruy Mauro Marini
#19744
Overall Influence
1932 - 1997 (65 years)
Ruy Mauro Marini was a Brazilian economist and sociologist. Marini is internationally known as one of the creators of dependency theory. He is the author of the work "Dialéctica de la Dependencia" , in which, using elements of the theory of economic development of Karl Marx adapted to the study of Latin American reality, he explains the necessity of overcoming the developmentalism of ECLAC. He was an activist of the Revolutionary Left Movement of Chile, becoming a member of the Central Community in 1972 and director of his theoretical journal Marxismo y Revolución.
Go to Profile#19734
Wang Yuan
#19745
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
Wang Yuan was a Chinese mathematician and writer known for his contributions to the Goldbach conjecture. He was a president of the Chinese Mathematical Society and head of the Institute of Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#19735
Nihad Awad
#19746
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Nihad Awad is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations . Early life Nihad Awad was born in Amman New Camp, a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. He studied at Second Amman Preparatory School for Boys, located at the camp and belongs to UNRWA, and at Salaheddine High School in Achrafieh in Jordan. He moved to Italy and later to the United States to pursue his university studies.
Go to Profile#19736
Basil Hirschowitz
#19747
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Basil Isaac Hirschowitz was an academic gastroenterologist from the University of Alabama at Birmingham best known in the field for having invented an improved optical fiber which allowed the creation of a useful flexible endoscope. This invention revolutionized the practice of gastroenterology and also was a key invention in optical fiber communication in multiple industries.
Go to Profile#19737
Anita Goel
#19748
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Anita Goel is an American physicist, physician, and scientist in the emerging field of Nanobiophysics. At the Nanobiosym Research Institute , Goel examines the physics of life and the way nanomotors read and write information into DNA.
Go to Profile#19738
Thomas Huang
#19749
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Thomas Shi-Tao Huang was a Chinese-born American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and writer. He was a researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . Huang was one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition and human computer interaction.
Go to Profile#19739
Dwijesh Dutta Majumdar
#19750
Overall Influence
Dwijesh Kumar Dutta Majumder INSA was a Professor Emeritus in the Computer and Communication Sciences Division of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and Honorary Director-Secretary of the Institute of Cybernetics Systems and Information Technology in the same city. He is also an Emeritus Scientist of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research, operated by the Government of India.
Go to Profile#19740
Joseph Abboud
#19751
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Joseph Abboud is an American menswear fashion designer and author. Early life and education Joseph Abboud was born in Boston, Massachusetts. The Abbouds were a working-class Lebanese Maronite Catholic family that started out in the South End of Boston, and later moved to Roslindale. Abboud's father Joseph worked in a candy factory and his mother, Lila, was a seamstress. He had one sister, Nancy Ash; she and Lila died of breast cancer.
Go to Profile#19741
Andrew David Irvine
#19752
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Andrew David Irvine, FSCC is a Canadian academic who teaches at the University of British Columbia. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Sydney University and is a professor of philosophy and mathematics at UBC Okanagan. He has served as vice-chair of the UBC Board of Governors, as head of the UBCO Department of Economics, Philosophy and Political Science, as president of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, and as a member of the board of directors of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship. An advocate of traditional democratic civil liberties, Irvine has written about the importance of the rule of law for both modern and ancient democracies.
Go to Profile#19742
Robert S. Gold
#19753
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert S. Gold is a researcher in the field of application of computer technology to health education and health promotion. He was the founding dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Health and is the current chair of its Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.
Go to Profile#19743
Howard Zehr
#19754
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Howard J. Zehr is an American criminologist. Zehr is considered to be a pioneer of the modern concept of restorative justice. He is Distinguished Professor of Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and Co-director Emeritus of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice.
Go to Profile#19744
Tom Gerety
#19755
Overall Influence
Tom Gerety, a lawyer, philosopher, is the former president of both Trinity College and Amherst College . Biography After leaving Amherst College, he became the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law where he is now Collegiate Professor. He is the author of law review articles and The Freshman Who Hated Socrates, a book on liberal arts education.
Go to Profile#19745
Oleg Atkov
#19756
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Oleg Yur'yevich At'kov is a Russian cardiologist and former Soviet cosmonaut. With a doctorate from the Russian Academy of Medical Science, Atkov was chosen to be the health specialist on board Soyuz T-10 and Soyuz T-11. After Atkov's rather long time in space, he returned to work at the Myasnikov Institute of Clinical Cardiology to continue his research on the adaptation of weightlessness and cardiology. With his published research and time in space, Atkov holds two of the USSR's highest honors; the Order of Lenin and the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Atkov is a professor of medicine at...
Go to Profile#19746
Itsuko Hasegawa
#19757
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
is a Japanese architect. Biography Itsuko Hasegawa was born in Yaizu City, Japan in 1941. She studied at the Department of Architecture at Kanto Gakuin University, graduating in 1964. From then until 1969, she worked with Kiyonori Kikutake and then spent two years studying at Tokyo Institute of Technology. From 1971-78 she worked under Kazuo Shinohara at the institute. She has lectured in Rotterdam, Australia, Norway and Los Angeles between 1984-7. She became the principal of her own design studio in Tokyo, called Itsuko Hasegawa Architectural Design Studio in 1976, which was renamed the Arch...
Go to Profile#19747
Paul Ekins
#19758
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Professor Paul Ekins OBE is a British academic in the field of sustainable economics, currently Professor of Resources and Environment Policy at University College London. He was formerly co-director of the UK Energy Research Centre . He is a former member of the Green Party.
Go to Profile#19748
Daniel Roche
#19759
Overall Influence
1935 - 2023 (88 years)
Daniel Roche was a French social and cultural historian, widely recognized as one of the foremost experts of his generation on the cultural history of France during the later years of the Ancien Régime. Roche was elected an International member of the American Philosophical Society in 2009.
Go to Profile#19749
Pål Spilling
#19760
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Pål Spilling was a Norwegian Internet pioneer and professor at the University of Oslo and the UNIK Graduate Center at Kjeller in Norway. He obtained his cand.real. degree in physics from the University of Oslo in 1963. In January 1964 he started on a PhD program at Utrecht University in The Netherlands, and finished his degree in summer 1968 in experimental low-energy neutron physics. Subsequently he joined the nuclear physics group at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. In January 1972 Spilling joined the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment at Kjeller in Norway, and ...
Go to Profile#19750
Bhob Stewart
#19761
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Robert Marion Stewart, known as Bhob Stewart was an American writer, editor, cartoonist, filmmaker, and active fan who contributed to a variety of publications over a span of five decades. His articles and reviews appeared in TV Guide, Publishers Weekly, and other publications, along with online contributions to Allmovie, the Collecting Channel, and other sites. In 1980, he became the regular film columnist for Heavy Metal.
Go to Profile