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
#2001
Nicolaas Bloembergen
#2003
Overall Influence
1920 - 2017 (97 years)
Nicolaas Bloembergen was a Dutch-American physicist and Nobel laureate, recognized for his work in developing driving principles behind nonlinear optics for laser spectroscopy. During his career, he was a professor at Harvard University and later at the University of Arizona and at Leiden University in 1973 .
Go to Profile#2002
Nikki Giovanni
#2004
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she has been named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends".
Go to Profile#2003
Vernor Vinge
#2005
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Vernor Steffen Vinge is an American science fiction author and retired professor. He taught mathematics and computer science at San Diego State University. He is the first wide-scale popularizer of the technological singularity concept and among the first authors to present a fictional "cyberspace". He has won the Hugo Award for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep , A Deepness in the Sky , Rainbows End , and novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High , and The Cookie Monster .
Go to Profile#2004
Jimmy Swaggart
#2006
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Jimmy Lee Swaggart is an American Pentecostal televangelist. Jimmy Swaggart Ministries owns and operates the SonLife Broadcasting Network . Swaggart is the senior pastor of the Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Go to Profile#2005
Sara Duterte
#2007
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Sara Zimmerman Duterte-Carpio , commonly known as Inday Sara, is a Filipina lawyer and politician who is the 15th and current vice president of the Philippines. She is the third female vice president, the third vice president to come from Mindanao, and the youngest vice president in Philippine history. Duterte is also the secretary of education, holding the post in a concurrent capacity. A daughter of 16th president Rodrigo Duterte, she previously served as the mayor of Davao City from 2016 to 2022, and from 2010 to 2013. She was also Davao City's vice mayor from 2007 to 2010.
Go to Profile#2006
Dave Barry
#2008
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David McAlister Barry is an American author and columnist who wrote a nationally syndicated humor column for the Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005. He has also written numerous books of humor and parody, as well as comic novels and children's novelss. Barry's honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary and the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism .
Go to Profile#2007
Francisco J. Ayala
#2009
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
Francisco José Ayala Pereda was a Spanish-American evolutionary biologist, philosopher, and Catholic priest who was a longtime faculty member at the University of California, Irvine and University of California, Davis.
Go to Profile#2008
Jan Karski
#2010
Overall Influence
1914 - 2000 (86 years)
Jan Karski was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940–1943 to the Polish government-in-exile and to Poland's Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland. He reported about the state of Poland, its many competing resistance factions, and also about Germany's destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and its operation of extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, Poles, and others.
Go to Profile#2009
Stanley Donwood
#2011
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Dan Rickwood , known professionally as Stanley Donwood, is an English artist and writer. Since 1994, he has created all the artwork for the rock band Radiohead with their singer, Thom Yorke, plus Yorke's other projects, including Atoms for Peace and the Smile. He also creates artwork for Glastonbury Festival and has published books of writing.
Go to Profile#2010
John Sulston
#2012
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
Sir John Edward Sulston was a British biologist and academic who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans in 2002 with his colleagues Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He was a leader in human genome research and Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester. Sulston was in favour of science in the public interest, such as free public access of scientific information and against the patenting of genes and the privatisation...
Go to Profile#2011
Richard Sennett
#2013
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Richard Sennett is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. Sennett has studied social ties in cities, and the effects of urban living on individuals in the modern world.
Go to Profile#2012
Alan Baddeley
#2014
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Alan David Baddeley CBE FRS is a British psychologist. He is known for his research on memory and for developing the three-component model of working memory. He is a professor of psychology at the University of York.
Go to Profile#2013
Arundhati Roy
#2015
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things , which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.
Go to Profile#2014
Ariel Sharon
#2016
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Ariel Sharon was an Israeli general and politician who served as the 11th prime minister of Israel from March 2001 until April 2006. Born in Kfar Malal in Mandatory Palestine to Russian Jewish immigrants, he rose in the ranks of the Israeli Army from its creation in 1948, participating in the 1948 Palestine war as platoon commander of the Alexandroni Brigade and taking part in several battles. Sharon became an instrumental figure in the creation of Unit 101 and the reprisal operations, including the 1953 Qibya massacre, as well as in the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War of 1967, the War of Attrition, and the Yom-Kippur War of 1973.
Go to Profile#2015
Ramzi bin al-Shibh
#2017
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Ramzi Mohammed Abdullah bin al-Shibh is a Yemeni citizen currently being held by the U.S. as an enemy combatant detainee at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He is accused of being a "key facilitator for the September 11 attacks" in 2001 in the United States.
Go to Profile#2016
Michael Ruse
#2018
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Michael Ruse is a British-born Canadian philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology and works on the relationship between science and religion, the creation–evolution controversy, and the demarcation problem within science. Ruse currently teaches at Florida State University.
Go to Profile#2017
Joe Arpaio
#2019
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Joseph Michael Arpaio is an American former law enforcement officer and politician. He was the Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona for 24 years, from 1993 to 2017, losing reelection to Democrat Paul Penzone in 2016.
Go to Profile#2018
Michael Mullen
#2020
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Michael Glenn Mullen is a retired United States Navy admiral, who served as the 17th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 1, 2007, to September 30, 2011. Mullen previously served as the Navy's 28th chief of Naval Operations from July 22, 2005, to September 29, 2007. He was only the third officer in the Navy's history to be appointed to four different four-star assignments; the other appointments being the Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Commander, Allied Joint Force Command Naples from October 2004 to May 2005, and as the 32nd vice chief of Naval Operations from August 2003 to August 2004.
Go to Profile#2019
G. William Domhoff
#2021
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
George William "Bill" Domhoff is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and research professor of psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a founding faculty member of UCSC's Cowell College. He is best known as the author of several best-selling sociology books, including Who Rules America? and its seven subsequent editions .
Go to Profile#2020
Kim Il Sung
#2022
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
Kim Il Sung was a Korean politician and the founder of North Korea, which he ruled as Supreme Leader from the country's establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994. Afterwards, he was declared eternal president.
Go to Profile#2021
Zinedine Zidane
#2023
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Zinedine Yazid Zidane , popularly known as Zizou, is a French professional football manager and former player who played as an attacking midfielder. He most recently coached Spanish club Real Madrid and is one of the most successful coaches in the world. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, Zidane was a playmaker renowned for his elegance, vision, passing, ball control, and technique. He received many individual accolades as a player, including being named FIFA World Player of the Year in 1998, 2000 and 2003, and winning the 1998 Ballon d'Or.
Go to Profile#2022
Irina Bokova
#2024
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Irina Georgieva Bokova is a Bulgarian politician and the former Director-General of UNESCO . During her political and diplomatic career in Bulgaria, she served, among others, two terms as a member of the National parliament, and deputy minister of foreign affairs and minister of foreign affairs ad interim under Prime Minister Zhan Videnov. She also served as Bulgaria's ambassador to France and to Monaco, and was Bulgaria's Permanent Delegate to UNESCO. Bokova was also the personal representative of Bulgaria's president to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie .
Go to Profile#2023
Paul Cohen
#2025
Overall Influence
1934 - 2007 (73 years)
Paul Joseph Cohen (April 2, 1934 – March 23, 2007) was an American mathematician. He is best known for his proofs that the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice are independent from Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, for which he was awarded a Fields Medal. Source: Wikipedia
Go to Profile#2024
Gene Sharp
#2026
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Gene Sharp was an American political scientist. He was the founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the study of nonviolent action, and professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He was known for his extensive writings on nonviolent struggle, which have influenced numerous anti-government resistance movements around the world.
Go to Profile#2025
Charles Fefferman
#2027
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#2026
Helmut Jahn
#2028
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Helmut Jahn was a German-American architect, known for projects such as the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Germany; the Messeturm in Frankfurt, Germany; the Thompson Center in Chicago; One Liberty Place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Suvarnabhumi Airport, in Bangkok, Thailand, among others.
Go to Profile#2027
Ancel Keys
#2029
Overall Influence
1904 - 2004 (100 years)
Ancel Benjamin Keys was an American physiologist who studied the influence of diet on health. In particular, he hypothesized that replacing dietary saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduced cardiovascular heart disease. Modern dietary recommendations by health organizations, systematic reviews, and national health agencies corroborate this.
Go to Profile#2028
Dick DeGuerin
#2030
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Dick DeGuerin is an American criminal defense attorney based in Houston, most notable for defending Tom DeLay, Allen Stanford, David Koresh and Robert Durst. In 1994, DeGuerin was named Outstanding Criminal Defense Lawyer of the Year by the State Bar of Texas Criminal Justice Section.
Go to Profile#2029
David Canter
#2031
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
David Victor Canter is a psychologist. He began his career as an architectural psychologist studying the interactions between people and buildings, publishing and providing consultancy on the designs of offices, schools, prisons, housing and other building forms as well as exploring how people made sense of the large scale environment, notably cities. He set up the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 1980. His work in architecture led to studies of human reactions in fires and other emergencies. He wrote about investigative psychology in Britain. He helped police in 1985 on the Railway Rapist case.
Go to Profile#2030
John Hersey
#2032
Overall Influence
1914 - 1993 (79 years)
John Richard Hersey was an American writer and journalist. He is considered one of the earliest practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, in which storytelling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reportage. In 1999, Hiroshima, Hersey's account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, was adjudged the finest work of American journalism of the 20th century by a 36-member panel associated with New York University's journalism department.
Go to Profile#2031
Kenny Everett
#2033
Overall Influence
1944 - 1995 (51 years)
Kenny Everett was an English radio DJ and television entertainer. After spells on pirate radio and Radio Luxembourg in the mid-1960s, he was one of the first DJs to join BBC Radio's newly created BBC Radio 1 in 1967. It was here he developed his trademark voices and comical characters which he later adapted for television.
Go to Profile#2032
Charles P. Thacker
#2034
Overall Influence
1943 - 2017 (74 years)
Charles Patrick "Chuck" Thacker was an American pioneer computer designer. He designed the Xerox Alto, which is the first computer that used a mouse-driven graphical user interface . Biography Thacker was born in Pasadena, California, on February 26, 1943. His father was Ralph Scott Thacker, born 1906, an electrical engineer in the aeronautical industry. His mother was the former Fern Cheek, born 1922 in Oklahoma, a cashier and secretary, who soon raised their two sons on her own.
Go to Profile#2033
Pedro Domingos
#2035
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Pedro Domingos is a Professor Emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. He is a researcher in machine learning known for Markov logic network enabling uncertain inference.
Go to Profile#2034
Orhan Pamuk
#2036
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, he has sold over 13 million books in 63 languages, making him the country's best-selling writer.
Go to Profile#2035
E. Jerome McCarthy
#2037
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Edmund Jerome McCarthy was an American marketing professor and author. He proposed the concept of the 4 Ps marketing mix in his 1960 book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, which has been one of the top textbooks in university marketing courses since its publication. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Marketing, McCarthy was a "pivotal figure in the development of marketing thinking". He was also a founder, advisory board member, and consultant for Planned Innovation Institute, which was established to bolster Michigan industry. In 1987, McCarthy received the American Marketing Associ...
Go to Profile#2036
Rick Swan
#2038
Overall Influence
Rick Swan is a game designer and author who worked for TSR. His work for TSR, mostly for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, appeared from 1989 to 1995. Swan also wrote The Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games , published by St. Martin's Press. He was a regular columnist for InQuest Gamer.
Go to Profile#2037
William Styron
#2039
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
William Clark Styron Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work. Significant work Styron was best known for his novels, including:Lie Down in Darkness , his acclaimed first work, published when he was 26;The Confessions of Nat Turner , narrated by Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginia slave revolt;Sophie's Choice , a story "told through the eyes of a young aspiring writer from the South, about a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz and her brilliant but psychotic Jewish lover in postwar Brooklyn".In 1985, he had his first serious bout with depression.
Go to Profile#2038
Raoul Vaneigem
#2040
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Raoul Vaneigem is a Belgian writer known for his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday Life. He was born in Lessines and studied romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1956. He was a member of the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970.
Go to Profile#2039
Michael Berry
#2041
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Sir Michael Victor Berry, , is a mathematical physicist at the University of Bristol, England. He is known for the Berry phase, a phenomenon observed e.g. in quantum mechanics and optics, as well as Berry connection and curvature. He specialises in semiclassical physics , applied to wave phenomena in quantum mechanics and other areas such as optics.
Go to Profile#2040
Juliet Mitchell
#2042
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Juliet Mitchell, Lady Goody is a British psychoanalyst, socialist feminist, research professor and author. Early life and education Mitchell was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1940, and then moved to England in 1944, where she stayed with her grandparents in the midlands. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, where she received a degree in English in 1962, as well as doing postgraduate work. She taught English literature from 1962 to 1970 at Leeds University and Reading University. Throughout the 1960s, Mitchell was active in leftist politics, and was on the editorial committee of...
Go to Profile#2041
Harold Demsetz
#2043
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Harold Demsetz was an American professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles . Career Demsetz grew up on the West Side of Chicago, the grandchild of Jewish immigrants from central and eastern Europe. He studied engineering, forestry, and philosophy at four universities before being awarded a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois, and an MBA and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. While a graduate student, he published an article each in Econometrica and the Journal of Political Economy.
Go to Profile#2042
Sumio Iijima
#2044
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#2043
Gary Webb
#2045
Overall Influence
1955 - 2004 (49 years)
Gary Stephen Webb was an American investigative journalist. He began his career working for newspapers in Kentucky and Ohio, winning numerous awards, and building a strong reputation for investigative writing. Hired by the San Jose Mercury News, Webb contributed to the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake.
Go to Profile#2044
Victor Kac
#2046
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Victor Gershevich Kac is a Soviet and American mathematician at MIT, known for his work in representation theory. He co-discovered Kac–Moody algebras, and used the Weyl–Kac character formula for them to reprove the Macdonald identities. He classified the finite-dimensional simple Lie superalgebras, and found the Kac determinant formula for the Virasoro algebra. He is also known for the Kac–Weisfeiler conjectures with Boris Weisfeiler.
Go to Profile#2045
Pol Pot
#2047
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Pol Pot was a Cambodian revolutionary, dictator, and politician who ruled Cambodia as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea between 1976 and 1979. Ideologically a communist and a Khmer ethnonationalist, he was a leading member of Cambodia's communist movement, the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 to 1997 and served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea from 1963 to 1981. His administration converted Cambodia into a one-party communist state and perpetrated the Cambodian genocide.
Go to Profile#2046
Robert Coover
#2048
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Robert Lowell Coover is an American novelist, short story writer, and T.B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction.
Go to Profile#2047
Ken Tucker
#2049
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Kenneth Tucker is an American arts, music and television critic, magazine editor, and non-fiction book writer. Early life and education Tucker was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York, and raised in Stamford, Connecticut. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from New York University.
Go to Profile#2048
Lev Grossman
#2050
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Lev Grossman is an American novelist and journalist who wrote The Magicians Trilogy: The Magicians , The Magician King , and The Magician's Land . He was the book critic and lead technology writer at Time magazine from 2002 to 2016. His recent work includes the children's book The Silver Arrow, and the screenplay for the film The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, based on his short story.
Go to Profile#2049
Yoko Ono
#2051
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York City in 1952 to join her family. She became involved with New York City's downtown artists scene in the early 1960s, which included the Fluxus group, and became well known in 1969 when she married English musician John Lennon of the Beatles, with whom she would subsequently record as a duo in the Plastic Ono Band. The couple used their honeymoon as a stage for public protests against the Vietnam War. She and Lenn...
Go to Profile#2050
Fernando Botero
#2052
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Fernando Botero Angulo was a Colombian figurative artist and sculptor. His signature style, also known as "Boterismo", depicts people and figures in large, exaggerated volume, which can represent political criticism or humor, depending on the piece. He was considered the most recognized and quoted artist from Latin America in his lifetime, and his art can be found in highly visible places around the world, such as Park Avenue in New York City and the Champs-Élysées in Paris, at different times.
Go to Profile