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
#201
Joel David Hamkins
#7948
Overall Influence
Joel David Hamkins is an American mathematician and philosopher who is O'Hara Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. He has made contributions in mathematical and philosophical logic, set theory and philosophy of set theory , in computability theory, and in group theory.
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James M. Bardeen
#7958
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
James Maxwell Bardeen was an American physicist, well known for his work in general relativity, particularly his role in formulating the laws of black hole mechanics. He also discovered the Bardeen vacuum, an exact solution of the Einstein field equation.
Go to Profile#203
Stefan Karpinski
#7995
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (46 years)
Stefan Karpinski is an American computer scientist known for being a co-creator of the Julia programming language. He is an alumnus of Harvard and works at Julia Computing, which he co-founded with Julia co-creators, Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson, Viral B. Shah as well as Keno Fischer and Deepak Vinchhi.
Go to Profile#204
Ronald W. Davis
#8008
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Ronald Wayne "Ron" Davis is professor of biochemistry and genetics, and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center at Stanford University. Davis is a researcher in biotechnology and molecular genetics, particularly active in human and yeast genomics and the development of new technologies in genomics, with over 30 biotechnology patents. In 2013, it was said of Davis that "A substantial number of the major genetic advances of the past 20 years can be traced back to Davis in some way."
Go to Profile#205
David Korn
#8050
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
David G. Korn is an American UNIX programmer and the author of the Korn shell , a command line interface/programming language. Education and work David Korn received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1965 and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1969. After working on computer simulations of transsonic airfoils and developing the Korn airfoil, he switched fields to computer science and became a member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories in 1976. He developed Korn shell in response to probl...
Go to Profile#206
George S. Hammond
#8078
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
George Simms Hammond was an American scientist and theoretical chemist who developed "Hammond's postulate", and fathered organic photochemistry,–the general theory of the geometric structure of the transition state in an organic chemical reaction. Hammond's research is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. His research garnered him the Norris Award in 1968, the Priestley Medal in 1976, the National Medal of Science in 1994, and the Othmer Gold Medal in 2003. He served as the executive chairman of the Allied Chemical Corporation from 1979 to 1989.
Go to Profile#207
Robert W. Fuller
#8162
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Robert Works Fuller is an American physicist, author, social reformer, and former president of Oberlin College. Biography Robert Fuller attended Oberlin College, leaving without graduating in order to earn his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton University in 1961. He taught at Columbia University, where he co-authored the book Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics.
Go to Profile#208
Emile Zuckerkandl
#8232
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
Émile Zuckerkandl was an Austrian-born French biologist considered one of the founders of the field of molecular evolution. He introduced, with Linus Pauling, the concept of the "molecular clock", which enabled the neutral theory of molecular evolution.
Go to Profile#209
Alexander Varshavsky
#8235
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Alexander J. Varshavsky is a Russian-American biochemist and geneticist. He works at the California Institute of Technology as the Morgan Professor of Biology. Varshavsky left Russia in 1977, emigrating to United States.
Go to Profile#210
James Thomson
#8295
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
James Alexander Thomson is an American developmental biologist best known for deriving the first human embryonic stem cell line in 1998 and for deriving human induced pluripotent stem cells in 2007.
Go to Profile#211
Hugh Bradner
#8301
Overall Influence
1915 - 2008 (93 years)
Hugh Bradner was an American physicist at the University of California who is credited with inventing the neoprene wetsuit, which helped to revolutionize scuba diving and surfing. A graduate of Ohio's Miami University, he received his doctorate from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, in 1941. He worked at the US Naval Ordnance Laboratory during World War II, where he researched naval mines. In 1943, he was recruited by Robert Oppenheimer to join the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory. There, he worked with scientists including Luis Alvarez, John von Neuman...
Go to Profile#212
Richard W. Conway
#8310
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Richard Walter Conway is an American industrial engineer and computer scientist who is the Emerson Electric Company Professor of Manufacturing Management, Emeritus in the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. Conway has spent his entire academic career, both as a student and a professor, at Cornell and has held faculty positions at Cornell in several different areas: industrial engineering, operations research, computer science, and management science. He is especially known for his work and publications in foundational questions about computer simulation methodology;...
Go to Profile#213
John N. Bahcall
#8317
Overall Influence
1934 - 2005 (71 years)
John Norris Bahcall was an American astrophysicist and the Richard Black Professor for Astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was known for a wide range of contributions to solar, galactic and extragalactic astrophysics, including the solar neutrino problem, the development of the Hubble Space Telescope and for his leadership and development of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Go to Profile#214
Lee Alvin DuBridge
#8475
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Lee Alvin DuBridge was an American educator and physicist, best known as president of the California Institute of Technology from 1946–1969. Background Lee Alvin DuBridge was born on , in Terre Haute, Indiana. His father was Fred DuBridge, a football coach at Indiana State Normal School. He graduated from Cornell College in 1922, and then began a teaching assignment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, from which he received an M.A. degree in 1924 and a Ph.D. in 1926. DuBridge continued his academic work at the California Institute of Technology, as assistant, then associate professor at Washington University in St.
Go to Profile#215
Steven Frautschi
#8509
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Steven C. Frautschi is an American theoretical physicist, currently professor of physics emeritus at the California Institute of Technology . He is known principally for his contributions to the bootstrap theory of the strong interactions and for his contribution to the resolution of the infrared divergence problem in quantum electrodynamics . He was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015 for "contributions to the introduction of Regge poles into particle physics, elucidation of the role of infrared photons in high energy scattering, and for seminal contributions to undergra...
Go to Profile#216
Siva S. Banda
#8521
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Siva Subrahmanyam Banda is an Indian-American aerospace engineer. He is Director of the Control Science Center of Excellence and Chief Scientist for the Aerospace Systems Directorate at the United States Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He has taught at Wright State University, the University of Dayton, and the Air Force Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#217
Joseph F. Traub
#8561
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Joseph Frederick Traub was an American computer scientist. He was the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He held positions at Bell Laboratories, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and Columbia, as well as sabbatical positions at Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, California Institute of Technology, and Technical University, Munich.
Go to Profile#218
Sergei Gukov
#8671
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Sergei Gukov is a professor of mathematics and theoretical physicist. Gukov graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in Moscow, Russia before obtaining a doctorate in physics from Princeton University under the supervision of Edward Witten.
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Rachid Yazami
#8746
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Rachid Yazami is a Moroccan scientist, engineer, and inventor. He is best known for his critical role in the development of the graphite anode for lithium-ion batteries and his research on fluoride ion batteries.
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Virginia Vassilevska Williams
#8749
Overall Influence
Virginia Vassilevska Williams is a theoretical computer scientist and mathematician known for her research in computational complexity theory and algorithms. She is currently the Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is notable for her breakthrough results in fast matrix multiplication, for her work on dynamic algorithms, and for helping to develop the field of fine-grained complexity.
Go to Profile#221
Harden M. McConnell
#8773
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Harden M. McConnell was an American physical chemist. His many awards included the National Medal of Science and the Wolf Prize, and he was elected to the National Academy of Science." Education and career Harden earned a B.S. degree in chemistry from George Washington University in 1947, and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1951 with Norman Davidson. After serving for two years as a National Research Fellow in physics at the University of Chicago with Robert S. Mulliken and John Platt, he held a position as research chemist at Shell Development Company. He was recruited by Norman Davidson, John D.
Go to Profile#222
Jenijoy La Belle
#8822
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Jenijoy La Belle is an American professor emeritus of English literature at California Institute of Technology. Hired in 1969, she became the first female professor in Caltech history. She is known for her fight to attain tenure in the early '70s, also at Caltech. She was granted tenure in 1979. She retired in 2007.
Go to Profile#223
Douglas Osheroff
#8921
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Douglas Dean Osheroff is an American physicist known for his work in experimental condensed matter physics, in particular for his co-discovery of superfluidity in Helium-3. For his contributions he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics along with David Lee and Robert C. Richardson. Osheroff is currently the J. G. Jackson and C. J. Wood Professor of Physics, emeritus, at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#224
John G. Cramer
#8960
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (91 years)
John Gleason Cramer, Jr. is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, known for his development of the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. He has been an active participant with the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#225
K. Mani Chandy
#9020
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Kanianthra Mani Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology . He has been the Executive Officer of the Computer Science Department twice, and he has been a professor at Caltech since 1989. He also served as Chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology.
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Baldomero Olivera
#9052
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
Baldomero Olivera is a Filipino chemist known for discovery of many cone snail toxins important for neuroscience. These molecules, called conotoxins, led to a breakthrough in the study of ion channels and neuromuscular synapses. He discovered and first characterized E. coli DNA ligase, a key enzyme of genetic engineering and recombinant DNA technology.
Go to Profile#227
Kenneth Pitzer
#9106
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Kenneth Sanborn Pitzer was an American physical and theoretical chemist, educator, and university president. He was described as "one of the most influential physical chemists of his era" whose work "spanned almost all of the important fields of physical chemistry: thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, molecular structure, quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, chemical bonding, relativistic chemical effects, properties of concentrated aqueous salt solutions, kinetics, and conformational analysis."
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Robert A. Parker
#9174
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Robert Allan Ridley Parker is an American physicist and astronomer, former director of the NASA Management Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a retired NASA astronaut. He was a mission specialist on two Space Shuttle missions, STS-9 and STS-35.
Go to Profile#229
Igor Klebanov
#9309
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Igor R. Klebanov is an American theoretical physicist. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at Princeton University where he is currently a Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and the director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2022, he is the director of the Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings.
Go to Profile#230
Sidney W. Fox
#9315
Overall Influence
1912 - 1998 (86 years)
Sidney Walter Fox was a Los Angeles-born biochemist responsible for discoveries on the origins of biological systems. Fox explored the synthesis of amino acids from inorganic molecules, the synthesis of proteinous amino acids and amino acid polymers called "proteinoids" from inorganic molecules and thermal energy, and created what he thought was the world's first protocell out of proteinoids and water. He called these globules "microspheres". Fox believed in the process of abiogenesis where life spontaneously organized itself from the colloquially known "primordial soup;" poolings of various simple organic molecules that existed during the time before life on Earth.
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Emmanuel Rashba
#9323
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (98 years)
Emmanuel I. Rashba is a Soviet-American theoretical physicist of Jewish origin who worked in Ukraine, Russia and in the United States. Rashba is known for his contributions to different areas of condensed matter physics and spintronics, especially the Rashba effect in spin physics, and also for the prediction of electric dipole spin resonance , that was widely investigated and became a regular tool for operating electron spins in nanostructures, phase transitions in spin-orbit coupled systems driven by change of the Fermi surface topology, Giant oscillator strength of impurity excitons, and coexistence of free and self-trapped excitons.
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Arthur E. Bryson
#9343
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (100 years)
Arthur Earl Bryson Jr. is the Paul Pigott Professor of Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University and the "father of modern optimal control theory". With Henry J. Kelley, he also pioneered an early version of the backpropagation procedure, now widely used for machine learning and artificial neural networks.
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Wojciech H. Zurek
#9419
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Wojciech Hubert Zurek is a theoretical physicist and a leading authority on quantum theory, especially decoherence and non-equilibrium dynamics of symmetry breaking and resulting defect generation .
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Kenneth V. Thimann
#9428
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
Kenneth Vivian Thimann was an English-American plant physiologist and microbiologist known for his studies of plant hormones, which were widely influential in agriculture and horticulture. He isolated and determined the structure of auxin, the first known plant hormone. He spent most of his early career at Harvard University, and his later career at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Nathan Lewis
#9449
Overall Influence
Nathan S. Lewis is the George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology . He specializes in functionalization of silicon and other semiconductor surfaces, chemical sensing using chemiresistive sensor arrays, and alternative energy and artificial photosynthesis.
Go to Profile#236
Ardem Patapoutian
#9468
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Ardem Patapoutian is an Lebanese-American molecular biologist, neuroscientist, and Nobel Prize laureate of Armenian descent. He is known for his work in characterizing the PIEZO1, PIEZO2, and TRPM8 receptors that detect pressure, menthol, and temperature. Patapoutian is a neuroscience professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. In 2021, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with David Julius.
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Shrinivas Kulkarni
#9524
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Shrinivas Ramchandra Kulkarni is a US-based astronomer born and raised in India. He is currently a professor of astronomy and planetary science at California Institute of Technology, and he served as director of Caltech Optical Observatory at California Institute of Technology, in which capacity he oversaw the Palomar and Keck among other telescopes. He is the recipient of a number of awards and honours.
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Steven E. Koonin
#9551
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Steven Elliot Koonin is an American theoretical physicist and former director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. He is also a professor in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. From 2004 to 2009, Koonin was employed by BP as the oil and gas company’s Chief Scientist. From 2009 to 2011, he was Under Secretary for Science, Department of Energy, in the Obama administration.
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Lawrence Paulson
#9644
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (70 years)
Lawrence Charles Paulson is an American computer scientist. He is a Professor of Computational Logic at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Education Paulson graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1977, and obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981 for research on programming languages and compiler-compilers supervised by John L. Hennessy.
Go to Profile#240
Detlef Weigel
#9673
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Detlef Weigel is a German American scientist working at the interface of developmental and evolutionary biology. Education Weigel was an undergraduate in biology and chemistry at the universities of Bielefeld and Cologne. In 1986, he graduated with a Diploma in biology for this thesis on Drosophila neurogenesis with the late José Campos-Ortega. In 1988, he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen. During his PhD work with , he discovered the founding member of an important class of transcription factors, the Forkhead/FOX proteins. In 1988, he graduated with a Ph...
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Arthur Galston
#9704
Overall Influence
1920 - 2008 (88 years)
Arthur W. Galston was an American plant physiologist and bioethicist. As a plant biologist, Galston studied plant hormones and the effects of light on plant development, particularly phototropism. He identified riboflavin and other flavins as the photoreceptors for phototropism, the bending of plants toward light, challenging the prevailing view that carotenoids were responsible.
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David Luenberger
#9720
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
David Gilbert Luenberger is a mathematical scientist known for his research and his textbooks, which center on mathematical optimization. He is a professor in the department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#243
Edward Gibson
#9807
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Edward George Gibson is a former NASA astronaut, pilot, engineer, and physicist. Before becoming an astronaut, Gibson graduated from the University of Rochester and the California Institute of Technology. He became a research assistant in jet propulsion while completing his studies, and eventually became a research scientist for Philco Corporation until joining NASA in 1965. Gibson is the last surviving crew member of Skylab 4.
Go to Profile#244
Oleg A. Mukhanov
#9815
Overall Influence
Oleg A. Mukhanov is a Russian electrical engineer. He is an IEEE fellow who has focused on superconductivity. He is the co-inventor of SFQ digital technology. He authored and co-authored over 200 scientific papers and holds 24 patents. He is American and resides in the United States.
Go to Profile#245
Richard S. Westfall
#9849
Overall Influence
1924 - 1996 (72 years)
Richard S. Westfall was an American academic, biographer and historian of science. He is best known for his biography of Isaac Newton and his work on the scientific revolution of the 17th century. Life Born in Fort Collins, Colorado, Westfall graduated from high school in 1942 and enrolled at Yale University. His time at Yale was interrupted by two years of service in World War II, but he returned to complete his B.A. degree in 1948. He subsequently earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale, with a dissertation entitled Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England. The work was an early ...
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Dieter Seebach
#9950
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Dieter Seebach is a German chemist known for his synthesis of biopolymers and dendrimers, and for his contributions to stereochemistry. He was born on 31 October 1937 in Karlsruhe. He studied chemistry at the University of Karlsruhe under the supervision of Rudolf Criegee and at Harvard University with Elias Corey finishing in 1969. After his habilitation he became professor for organic chemistry at the University of Giessen. After six years he was appointed professor at the ETH Zurich where he worked until he retired in 2003.
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David Gabai
#10001
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
David Gabai is an American mathematician and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. Focused on low-dimensional topology and hyperbolic geometry, he is a leading researcher in those subjects.
Go to Profile#248
Barton Zwiebach
#10254
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Barton Zwiebach is a Peruvian string theorist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Work Zwiebach's undergraduate work was in Electrical Engineering at the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería in Peru, from which he graduated in 1977.
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Taylor Wang
#10276
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Taylor Gun-Jin Wang is a Chinese-born American scientist and in 1985, became the first person of Chinese origin to go into space. While an employee of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Wang was a payload specialist on the Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-51-B.
Go to Profile#250
Xiang Zhang
#10341
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Zhang Xiang is a Chinese-American academic administrator, material scientist, optical engineer and physicist. He is the current vice-chancellor and president of the University of Hong Kong, where he also serves as professor.
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