Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

Max Deen Larsen

#147019

Overall Influence

1943 - 2018 (75 years)

Max Deen Larsen founder and director of the :de:Franz-Schubert-Institut in Baden, Austria. Biography Deen, son of Max and Maida Larsen, was born in Richfield, Utah. He has lived in Baden by Vienna since 1973. Larsen received his degrees in literature and philosophy at Reed College, Yale University and the Universität Wien.

#202

Jayne Loader

#158633

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Jayne Loader is an American director and writer best known for the 1982 Cold War documentary The Atomic Cafe. Early life She was born in 1951 in Weatherford, Texas. She graduated from Reed College and the University of Michigan .

#203

Roger M. Perlmutter

#158848

Overall Influence

Roger M. Perlmutter is the former executive vice president of Merck & Co. and former president of Merck Research Laboratories. He is currently a non-executive director of Merck Research Laboratories.

#204

Pozzi Escot

#159293

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (91 years)

Olga Pozzi-Escot Zapata is a Peruvian-born American composer, music theorist, and faculty member at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts. Life Pozzi Escot was born in Lima, Peru, her father was a French professor at the University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, Marius Emmanuel Pozzi Escot, and her mother was Lucía María Zapata Hurtado. After living in Peru, she went to France.

#205

Mark A. Bedau

#159350

Overall Influence

#206

Jacob Avshalomov

#159722

Overall Influence

1919 - 2013 (94 years)

Jacob Avshalomov was a composer and conductor. Early life and education Jacob Avshalomov was born on March 28, 1919, in Tsingtao, China. His father was Aaron Avshalomov, the Siberian-born composer known for "oriental musical materials cast in western forms and media"; his mother was from San Francisco. Jacob received musical instruction from his father starting at a young age. At eight years old Avshalomov visited Portland from China with his parents and were guests of Jacques Gershkovitch for several months in 1927. Aaron Avshalomov had become friends with Gershkovitch in the Orient . Howev...

#207

Cyma Van Petten

#160269

Overall Influence

Cyma Kathryn Van Petten is an American cognitive neuroscientist known for electrophysiological studies of language, memory, and cognition. She is Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton where she directs the Event-Related Potential Lab. Van Petten was recipient of the Early Career Award from the Society for Psychophysiological Research in 1994.

#208

Ronald M. Levy

#160552

Overall Influence

#209

Peter Sears

#163130

Overall Influence

1937 - 2017 (80 years)

Peter H. Sears was an American poet based in Oregon. In 2014, he was named the seventh poet laureate of the U.S. state of Oregon. Literary career Sears was born in New York City on May 18, 1937. He graduated from Yale University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He won the 1999 Peregrine Smith Poetry Competition and the 2000 Western States Poetry Prize for his book of poems, The Brink. His first book-length collection, Tour, was published in 1987. He has also published four chapbooks of poetry and two teaching books, Secret Writing and Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. His work has been published i...

#210

Gary Miranda

#167660

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Gary Miranda is an American poet. Life Miranda was raised in the Pacific Northwest. He spent six years in a Jesuit seminary, then did graduate work at San Jose State College and the University of California, Irvine. He has published poems in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

#211

Helen A. Stafford

#168622

Overall Influence

1922 - 2011 (89 years)

Helen Adele Stafford was an American plant physiologist and phytochemist. She was from 1977 to 1978 the president of the Phytochemical Society of North America. Biography Helen A. Stafford attended Quaker schools in Philadelphia. She became interested in botany when tending her father's garden.

#212

Lamar Crowson

#170187

Overall Influence

1926 - 1998 (72 years)

John Lamar Crowson was an American concert pianist and a chamber musician. Crowson was born in Tampa, Florida. His early education was in Portland, Oregon, with noted pedagogue Nellie Tholen, where he attended Reed College , majoring in art, history and literature. He later studied piano under Arthur Benjamin, who invited him to study at the Royal College of Music in 1948 and was appointed to the staff in 1957. During the 1950s he won many major prizes, including the Chappell Gold Medal, the Dannreuther Prize and the Harriet Cohen International Medal. In 1952 he was laureate in the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels.

#213

Peter Child

#172127

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Peter Burlingham Child is an American composer, teacher, and musical analyst. He is Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a composer in residence with the New England Philharmonic.

#214

Amelia Haviland

#173542

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Amelia M. Haviland is an American statistician currently the Anna Loomis McCandless Professor of Statistics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She was named a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2021.

#215

Elyssa East

#173620

Overall Influence

Elyssa East is an American nonfiction writer. She is the author of the creative nonfiction book Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town, which chronicles a murder that occurred in an area known as Dogtown, Massachusetts, just outside Gloucester, in 1984. As part of her research for the book, East interviewed the murderer, Peter Hodgkins, in prison. This nonfiction book won the 2010 L. L. Winship/P.E.N. New England Award and has been critically reviewed. According to East, the book was inspired in part by the paintings of Dogtown by Marsden Hartley.

#216

Mary James

#174540

Overall Influence

Mary B. James is an American physicist and educator. She is the Dean for Institutional Diversity and the A. A. Knowlton Professor of Physics at Reed College. James specializes in particle physics and accelerators.

#217

Michael E. Levine

Michael E. Levine

#178671

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Michael E. Levine was a "Distinguished Research Scholar" at the New York University School of Law. He was involved in the world of air transportation and its regulation as a senior airline executive, an academic and a government official. He retired from Northwest Airlines in 1999 to return to academic life.

#218

Gerald D. Suttles

#178835

Overall Influence

1932 - 2017 (85 years)

Gerald Dale Suttles was an American urban sociologist. Gerald Suttles was born in North Carolina to parents Gertrude and Berlin Suttles. He served in the United States Navy from 1951 to 1955 before attending Reed College. Suttles earned his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. While researching his first book, Suttles moved to what became the Tri-Taylor area of Chicago's Near West Side, where he lived for three years. The Social Order of the Slum was published in 1968, and won the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems that year, followed by the University of Chicago's Gordon J.

#219

Kenneth O. Hanson

#179243

Overall Influence

1922 - 2003 (81 years)

Kenneth O. Hanson was an American teacher, translator, and poet. Works Growing Old Alive Copper Canyon Press 1978 Anthologies Norton Anthology of Poets in 1979 External links Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library

#220

Paul H. Taghert

#182681

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Paul H. Taghert is an American chronobiologist known for pioneering research on the roles and regulation of neuropeptide signaling in the brain using Drosophila melanogaster as a model. He is a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis.

#221

Frederick Keith Barker

#182700

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

#222

Stephen Burks

#189196

Overall Influence

Stephen V. Burks is professor of economics and management at the University of Minnesota. He is an expert in the economic history of the trucking industry in the United States and is a former truck driver. Burks is chairperson of the standing technical Committee on Trucking Industry Research at the Transportation Research Board. He received his BA from Reed College in 1973, MAs from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Indiana University Bloomington in 1976, and his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst .

#223

Esther Shephard

1891 - 1975 (84 years)

Esther Shephard was an American folklorist, poet, playwright, literary critic, and educator known for her collection of tales about the legendary figure Paul Bunyan. Early life and education Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1891, Esther Maria Lofstrand's parents were John August Lofstrand and Justina Lofstrand . The 1900 census lists the family as farmers in Stanchfield, Minnesota, a township approximately north of Minneapolis. Both her parents were born in Sweden.

#224

John Backus

1911 - 1988 (77 years)

John Graham Backus was a Lithuanian American physicist and acoustician. John Backus was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, where he studied at Reed College, receiving a BA in 1932. He went on to graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did research in nuclear physics at the Radiation Laboratory under Ernest Lawrence. He received an MA in 1936, and a PhD in 1940. In 1945 he was appointed professor of physics at the University of Southern California, a post he retained until his retirement in 1980. During the early part of his career, his research focussed on gaseous discharges in strong magnetic fields.

#225

David L. Hoggan

1923 - 1988 (65 years)

David Leslie Hoggan was an American author of The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed and other works in the German and English languages. He was antisemitic, maintained a close association with various neo-Nazi groups, chose a publishing house run by an unregenerate Nazi, and engaged in Holocaust denial.

#226

Henry Scheffé

1907 - 1977 (70 years)

Henry Scheffé was an American statistician. He is known for the Lehmann–Scheffé theorem and Scheffé's method. Education and career Scheffé was born in New York City on April 11, 1907, the child of German immigrants. The family moved to Islip, New York, where Scheffé went to high school. He graduated in 1924, took night classes at Cooper Union, and a year later entered the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. He transferred to the University of Wisconsin in 1928, and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics there in 1931. Staying at Wisconsin, he married his wife Miriam in 1934 and finished his...

#227

John F. Benton

1931 - 1988 (57 years)

John F. Benton was the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. Education He graduated from Haverford College, with a BA in 1953, from Princeton University with an MA in 1955, and PhD in 1959. He taught at Reed College and the University of Pennsylvania.

#228

Karl Aschenbrenner

1911 - 1988 (77 years)

Karl W. Aschenbrenner was an American philosopher, translator and prominent American specialist in analytic philosophy and aesthetics, author and editor of more than 48 publications including five monographs, 27 articles and 16 book reviews. His principal academic post was at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Philosophy. Aschenbrenner co-edited, with Arnold Isenberg, a collection of essays on the subject of aesthetic theory. As co-translator with William B. Holther, Aschenbrenner published the principal work of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and, with Donald Nichol...

#229

Dorothy Brady

1903 - 1977 (74 years)

Dorothy Elizabeth Stahl Brady was an American mathematician and economist. She was a professor of economics at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from 1958 to 1970. Early life Born in Elk River, Minnesota, she grew up in Portland, Oregon, attending Lincoln High School and later Reed College studying mathematics and physics. She was married to fellow Reed student Robert A. Brady from 1924 to 1936, they had a son in 1933.

#230

Harry Harlow

1905 - 1981 (76 years)

Harry Frederick Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow worked with him for a short period of time.

#231

James Beard

1903 - 1985 (82 years)

James Andrews Beard was an American chef, cookbook author, teacher and television personality. He pioneered television cooking shows, taught at The James Beard Cooking School in New York City and Seaside, Oregon, and lectured widely. He emphasized American cooking, prepared with fresh, wholesome, American ingredients, to a country just becoming aware of its own culinary heritage. Beard taught and mentored generations of professional chefs and food enthusiasts. He published more than twenty books, and his memory is honored by his foundation's annual James Beard Awards.

#232

Robert A. Brady

1901 - 1963 (62 years)

Robert Alexander Brady was an American economist who analyzed the dynamics of technological change and the structure of business enterprise. Brady developed a potent analysis of fascism and other emerging authoritarian economic and cultural practices. His essential work is "about power and the organization of power around the logic of technology as operated under capitalism", yielding insights and understanding of modern society's careening path between enhancing or destroying "life and culture".

#233

Clara Eliot

1896 - 1976 (80 years)

Clara Eliot was an economist known for her work in consumer economics. She taught economics at Barnard College for many years. Biography Eliot was born in 1896, the granddaughter of Thomas Lamb Eliot and part of a prominent Unitarian branch of the Eliot family. She did her undergraduate studies at Reed College, which her grandfather had founded, graduating in 1917. She taught at Mills College from 1917 to 1918, and then worked as an assistant to Yale economist Irving Fisher from 1918 to 1920. She also worked as an elementary school teacher; one of her students from this time, Margaret E. Mart...

#234

Jeanne Block

1923 - 1981 (58 years)

Jeanne Lavonne Humphrey Block was an American psychologist and expert on child development. She conducted research into sex-role socialization and, with her husband Jack Block, created a person-centered personality framework. Block was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and conducted her research with the National Institute of Mental Health and the University of California, Berkeley. She was an active researcher when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1981.

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