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
#201
Luce Irigaray
#201
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examined the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray's first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman , which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One , which discusses Lacan's work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions can be read as a res...
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Oliver Sacks
#202
Overall Influence
1933 - 2015 (82 years)
Oliver Wolf Sacks was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer. Born in London, Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from The Queen's College, Oxford, before moving to the United States, where he spent most of his career. He interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed his residency in neurology and neuropathology at the University of California, Los Angeles . Later, he served as neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital's chronic-care facility in the Bronx, where he worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica, who had been unable to move on their own for decades.
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William S. Burroughs
#203
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
William Seward Burroughs II was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and literature. Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays, and five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences; he was initially briefly known by the pen name William Lee. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, made many appearances in films, and created and exhibit...
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Bernard Lewis
#204
Overall Influence
1916 - 2018 (102 years)
Bernard Lewis, was a British American historian specialized in Oriental studies. He was also known as a public intellectual and political commentator. Lewis was the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Lewis's expertise was in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West.
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Francis Fukuyama
#205
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Francis Yoshihiro Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist, international relations scholar and writer. Fukuyama is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man , which argues that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and political struggle and become the final form of human government, an assessment met with numerous and substantial criticisms. In his subsequent book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity , he modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics.
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Slavoj Žižek
#206
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy. He primarily works on continental philosophy and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
Go to Profile#207
Terry Eagleton
#207
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Terence Francis Eagleton is an English literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. Eagleton has published over forty books, but remains best known for Literary Theory: An Introduction , which has sold over 750,000 copies. The work elucidated the emerging literary theory of the period, as well as arguing that all literary theory is necessarily political. He has also been a prominent critic of postmodernism, publishing works such as The Illusions of Postmodernism and After Theory . He argues that, influenced by postmodernism, cultural theory has wrongly devalued objectivity and ethics.
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Harlan Ellison
#208
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
Harlan Jay Ellison was an American writer, known for his prolific and influential work in New Wave speculative fiction and for his outspoken, combative personality. His published works include more than 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, comic book scripts, teleplays, essays, and a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. Some of his best-known works include the 1967 Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever", considered by some to be the greatest episode of Star Trek ever, his A Boy and His Dog cycle , and his short stories "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" and "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman".
Go to Profile#209
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
#209
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death in 2020. She was nominated by President Bill Clinton to replace retiring justice Byron White, and at the time was viewed as a moderate consensus-builder. Ginsburg was the first Jewish woman and the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O'Connor. During her tenure, Ginsburg authored the majority opinions in cases such as United States v. Virginia, Olmstead v. L.C., Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc., and City of Sherrill v.
Go to Profile#210
Karl Lagerfeld
#210
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Karl Otto Lagerfeld was a German fashion designer. Lagerfeld began his career in fashion in the 1950s, working for several top fashion houses including Balmain, Patou, and Chloé before joining Chanel in 1983. As the creative director of Chanel from 1983 until his death, he oversaw every aspect of the fashion house's creative output, from designing collections to overseeing advertising campaigns and store displays. He was instrumental in revitalizing the Chanel brand, helping it regain its position as one of the top fashion houses in the world. He was also creative director of the Italian fur and leather goods fashion house Fendi, as well as his own eponymous fashion label.
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Paul Halmos
#211
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Paul Richard Halmos was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and statistician who made fundamental advances in the areas of mathematical logic, probability theory, statistics, operator theory, ergodic theory, and functional analysis . He was also recognized as a great mathematical expositor. He has been described as one of The Martians.
Go to Profile#212
Neil Gaiman
#212
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and a screenwriter. His works include the comic book series The Sandman and the novels Good Omens, Stardust, Anansi Boys, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. In 2023, he starred as the voice of Gef the talking mongoose in the black comedy film Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose.
Go to Profile#213
David Baltimore
#213
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Areas of Specialization: Microbiology David Baltimore is director of the Joint Center for Translational Medicine and President Emeritus and Robert Andrews Milliken Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and a PhD in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also conducted his postdoctoral research on virus replication. His research has produced remarkable contributions to cancer research, biotechnology, recombinant DNA research virology, and immunology. In 1975, he shared the Nobel Prize for P...
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Marc Jacobs
#214
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Marc Jacobs is an American fashion designer. He is the head designer for his own fashion label, Marc Jacobs, and formerly Marc by Marc Jacobs, a diffusion line, which was produced for approximately 15 years, before it was discontinued after the 2015 fall/winter collection. At its peak, it had over 200 retail stores in 80 countries. He was the creative director of the French design house Louis Vuitton from 1997 to 2014. Jacobs was on Time magazine's "2010 Time 100" list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and was #14 on Out magazine's 2012 list of "50 Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America".
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Edsger W. Dijkstra
#215
Overall Influence
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, and science essayist. Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, Dijkstra studied mathematics and physics and then theoretical physics at the University of Leiden. Adriaan van Wijngaarden offered him a job as the first computer programmer in the Netherlands at the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, where he worked from 1952 until 1962. He formulated and solved the shortest path problem in 1956, and in 1960 developed the first compiler for the programming language ALGOL 60 in conjunction with colleague . In 1962 he mov...
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Ralph Lauren
#216
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Ralph Lauren is an American fashion designer, philanthropist, and billionaire businessman, best known for the Ralph Lauren Corporation, a global multibillion-dollar enterprise. He has become well known for his collection of rare automobiles, some of which have been displayed in museum exhibits. He stepped down as CEO of the company in September 2015 but remains executive chairman and chief creative officer. As of April 2022, his net worth was estimated at US$6.9 billion.
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Janet Maslin
#217
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Janet R. Maslin is an American journalist, best known as a film and literary critic for The New York Times. She served as a Times film critic from 1977 to 1999 and as a book critic from 2000 to 2015. In 2000, Maslin helped found the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York. She is president of its board of directors.
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Michael Atiyah
#218
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Sir Michael Francis Atiyah was a British-Lebanese mathematician specialising in geometry. His contributions include the Atiyah–Singer index theorem and co-founding topological K-theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 and the Abel Prize in 2004.
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Félix Guattari
#219
Overall Influence
1930 - 1992 (62 years)
Pierre-Félix Guattari was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, and is best known for his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
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Umberto Eco
#220
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Umberto Eco was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, as well as Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes.
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Ralph Nader
#221
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Ralph Nader is an American perennial presidential candidate, political activist, author, lecturer, and attorney noted for his involvement in consumer protection, environmentalism, and government reform causes. He became famous in the 1960s and 1970s for his book Unsafe at Any Speed, which criticized the automotive industry for its safety record and helped lead to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966.
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Abdullah Öcalan
#222
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Abdullah Öcalan , also known as Apo , is a political prisoner and founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party . Öcalan was based in Syria from 1979 to 1998. He helped found the PKK in 1978, and led it into the Kurdish–Turkish conflict in 1984. For most of his leadership, he was based in Syria, which provided sanctuary to the PKK until the late 1990s.
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Erik Erikson
#223
Overall Influence
1902 - 1994 (92 years)
Erik Homburger Erikson was a German-American child psychoanalyst known for his theory on psychosocial development of human beings. He coined the phrase identity crisis. Despite lacking a university degree, Erikson served as a professor at prominent institutions, including Harvard, University of California, Berkeley, and Yale. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Erikson as the 12th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
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Gabriel García Márquez
#224
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. He pursued a self-directed education that resulted in leaving law school for a career in journalism. From early on he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. In 195...
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Steven Weinberg
#225
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
#226
Donald Davies
#226
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
Donald Watts Davies, was a Welsh computer scientist who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory . In 1965 he conceived of packet switching, which is today the dominant basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide. Davies proposed a commercial national data network in the United Kingdom and designed and built the local-area NPL network to demonstrate the technology. Many of the wide-area packet-switched networks built in the 1970s were similar "in nearly all respects" to his original 1965 design. The ARPANET project credited Davies for his influence, which was key ...
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George Stigler
#227
Overall Influence
1911 - 1991 (80 years)
George Joseph Stigler was an American economist. He was the 1982 laureate in Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and is considered a key leader of the Chicago school of economics. Early life and education Stigler was born in Seattle, Washington, the son of Elsie Elizabeth and Joseph Stigler. He was of German descent and spoke German in his childhood. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1931 with a B.A. and then spent a year at Northwestern University, from which he obtained his MBA in 1932. It was during his studies at Northwestern that Stigler developed an interest in e...
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Richard Lewontin
#228
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Areas of Specialization: Evolutionary Bioogy, Population Genetics Richard Lewontin is a geneticist, evolutionary biologist, mathematician, and commentator. He earned a BS in biology from Harvard University, a master’s degree in mathematical statistics, and a PhD in zoology from Columbia University. Lewontin is best known for his work in theoretical and experimental population genetics. In 1960, he worked with Ken-Ichi Kojima to become the first population geneticist to identify the equations for change of haplotype frequencies with interacting national selection at two loci. He has become a vo...
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Rowan Williams
#229
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Rowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, is a Welsh Anglican bishop, theologian and poet. He was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, a position he held from December 2002 to December 2012. Previously the Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales, Dr Williams was the first Archbishop of Canterbury in modern times not to be appointed from within the Church of England.
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Bob Dylan
#230
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter. Generally regarded as one of the greatest songwriters ever, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his 60 year career. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when songs such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin' became anthems for the civil rights and antiwar movements. His lyrics during this period incorporated political, social, philosophical, and literary influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the burgeoning counterculture.
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I. M. Pei
#231
Overall Influence
1917 - 2019 (102 years)
Ieoh Ming Pei was a Chinese-American architect. Raised in Shanghai, Pei drew inspiration at an early age from the garden villas at Suzhou, the traditional retreat of the scholar-gentry to which his family belonged. In 1935, he moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, but he quickly transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was unhappy with the focus on Beaux-Arts architecture at both schools, and spent his free time researching emerging architects, especially Le Corbusier.
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Eugene Fama
#232
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Eugene Francis "Gene" Fama is an American economist, best known for his empirical work on portfolio theory, asset pricing, and the efficient-market hypothesis. He is currently Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In 2013, he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Robert J. Shiller and Lars Peter Hansen. The Research Papers in Economics project ranked him as the 9th-most influential economist of all time based on his academic contributions, . He is regarded as "the father of modern fina...
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Thomas Piketty
#233
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
#234
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
#234
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under Werner Heisenberg's leadership. There is ongoing debate as to whether or not he and the other members of the team actively and willingly pursued the development of a nuclear bomb for Germany during this time.
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John Horton Conway
#235
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
#236
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#236
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer. A prominent Soviet dissident, Solzhenitsyn was an outspoken critic of communism and helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, in particular the Gulag system.
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Bob Ludwig
#237
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Robert C. Ludwig is an American mastering engineer. He mastered recordings on all the major recording formats for all the major record labels, and on projects by more than 1,300 artists including Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, Queen, Jimi Hendrix, Bryan Ferry, Paul McCartney, Nirvana, Bruce Springsteen and Daft Punk resulting in over 3,000 credits. He is the recipient of numerous Grammy and other awards. In 2023, Ludwig announced his retirement.
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George F. Kennan
#238
Overall Influence
1904 - 2005 (101 years)
George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men."
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Robert Anton Wilson
#239
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Robert Anton Wilson was an American author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews. In 1999 he described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". Wilson's goal was "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."
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Gary Snyder
#240
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Gary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis, and for a time ser...
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Harry Markowitz
#241
Overall Influence
1927 - 2023 (96 years)
Harry Max Markowitz was an American economist who received the 1989 John von Neumann Theory Prize and the 1990 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Markowitz was a professor of finance at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego . He is best known for his pioneering work in modern portfolio theory, studying the effects of asset risk, return, correlation and diversification on probable investment portfolio returns.
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Seamus Heaney
#242
Overall Influence
1939 - 2013 (74 years)
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist , his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known ...
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Nelson Goodman
#243
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Henry Nelson Goodman was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics. Life and career Goodman was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, the son of Sarah Elizabeth and Henry Lewis Goodman. He was of Jewish origins. He graduated from Harvard University, AB, magna cum laude . During the 1930s, he ran an art gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, while studying for a Harvard PhD in philosophy, which he completed in 1941. His experience as an art dealer helps explain his later turn towards aesthetics, where he became better known than in logic and analytic philosophy.
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Vernon L. Smith
#244
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Vernon Lomax Smith is an American economist and professor of business economics and law at Chapman University. He was formerly a professor of economics at the University of Arizona, professor of economics and law at George Mason University, and a board member of the Mercatus Center. Along with Daniel Kahneman, Smith shared the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to behavioral economics and his work in the field of experimental economics. He worked to establish 'laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternat...
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Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
#245
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the creator of Transcendental Meditation and leader of the worldwide organization that has been characterized in multiple ways, including as a new religious movement and as non-religious. He became known as Maharishi and Yogi as an adult.
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John Harsanyi
#246
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
John Charles Harsanyi was a Hungarian-American economist and the recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994. He is best known for his contributions to the study of game theory and its application to economics, specifically for his developing the highly innovative analysis of games of incomplete information, so-called Bayesian games. He also made important contributions to the use of game theory and economic reasoning in political and moral philosophy as well as contributing to the study of equilibrium selection. For his work, he was a co-recipient along with John Nash...
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Leonard Susskind
#247
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#248
Renzo Piano
#248
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Renzo Piano is an Italian architect. His notable buildings include the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris , The Shard in London , the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City , İstanbul Modern in Istanbul and Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens . He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1998.
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Joseph Raz
#249
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
#250
Herman Goldstine
#250
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Herman Heine Goldstine was a mathematician and computer scientist, who worked as the director of the IAS machine at the Institute for Advanced Study and helped to develop ENIAC, the first of the modern electronic digital computers. He subsequently worked for many years at IBM as an IBM Fellow, the company's most prestigious technical position.
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