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
#20301
Tyson Chandler
#20312
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Tyson Cleotis Chandler is an American former professional basketball player and coach. Chandler was drafted directly out of high school as the second overall pick of the 2001 NBA draft by the Los Angeles Clippers, then was immediately traded to the Chicago Bulls. He has also played for the New Orleans Hornets, Charlotte Bobcats, Dallas Mavericks, New York Knicks, Phoenix Suns and Los Angeles Lakers. As starting center for Dallas, he played an integral role in the franchise's first NBA championship in 2011.
Go to Profile#20302
Karen Davis
#20313
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Karen Davis was an American animal rights advocate, and president of United Poultry Concerns, a non-profit organization founded in 1990 to address the treatment of domestic fowl—including chickens, turkeys, and ducks—in factory farming. Davis also maintained a sanctuary.
Go to Profile#20303
Frederik Harhoff
#20314
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Frederik Harhoff is a Danish jurist. He was a member of the faculty of the University of Copenhagen and served as an ad litem judge for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia from 9 January 2007 to 28 August 2013. After acquittals of mid-level Serbian suspects in war crimes trials, Harhoff circulated a letter to colleagues stating that the higher bar for convictions in this case was established by ICTY Chief Justice Theodor Meron, and strongly hinted that Meron was acting on behalf of the U.S. and Israel in enacting the policy . The Harhoff letter was highly controversi...
Go to Profile#20304
José Tribolet
#20315
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
José Manuel Nunes Salvador Tribolet is a Portuguese engineer, and Professor of Information Systems at the Instituto Superior Técnico - University of Lisbon, Portugal, who became known for his work on speech coding in the late 1970s.
Go to Profile#20305
Eugene Borowitz
#20316
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Eugene B. Borowitz was an American leader and philosopher in Reform Judaism, known largely for his work on Jewish theology and Jewish ethics. He also edited a Jewish journal, Sh'ma, and taught at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
Go to Profile#20306
Nick Lowe
#20317
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Nicholas Drain Lowe is an English singer-songwriter, musician and producer. A noted figure in power pop and new wave, Lowe has recorded a string of well-reviewed solo albums. Along with being a vocalist, Lowe plays guitar, bass guitar, piano and harmonica.
Go to Profile#20307
Edwin Edwards
#20318
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Edwin Washington Edwards was an American politician and member of the Democratic Party who served as the U.S. representative for from 1965 to 1972 and as the 50th governor of Louisiana for four terms , twice as many elected terms as any other Louisiana chief executive. He served a total of almost 16 years in gubernatorial office, which at 5,784 days is the sixth-longest such tenure in post-Constitutional U.S. history.
Go to Profile#20308
Gonzalo Higuaín
#20319
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Gonzalo Gerardo Higuaín is an Argentine former professional footballer who played as a striker. He is nicknamed El Pipita or Pipa. Considered to be one of the best strikers of his generation, Higuaín was a prolific striker known for his eye for goal, strong physique, offensive movements and predatory finishing. He won six European league titles across La Liga and Serie A.
Go to Profile#20309
Michael Naimark
#20320
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Michael Naimark is an artist, inventor, and scholar in the fields of virtual reality and new media art. He is best known for his work in projection mapping, virtual travel, live global video, and cultural preservation, and often refers to this body of work as “place representation”.
Go to Profile#20310
Kayla Barron
#20321
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Kayla Jane Barron is an American submarine warfare officer, engineer and NASA, astronaut. Barron was selected in June 2017 as a member of the NASA Astronaut Group 22, and later qualified as an astronaut in 2020. Barron took part in her first spaceflight, SpaceX Crew-3, as part of the crew of Expedition 66/67, which launched to the International Space Station on November 10, 2021. Before joining NASA, Barron was a submarine warfare officer and Flag Aide to the Superintendent at the Naval Academy.
Go to Profile#20311
Peter Gowan
#20322
Overall Influence
1946 - 2009 (63 years)
Peter Gowan was a Professor of International Relations at London Metropolitan University, activist, published author and public speaker. He was a member of the editorial committee of New Left Review and was one of the founders of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe.
Go to Profile#20312
Daniel D. McCracken
#20323
Overall Influence
1930 - 2011 (81 years)
Daniel D. McCracken was a computer scientist in the United States. He was a professor of Computer Sciences at the City College of New York, and the author of over two dozen textbooks on computer programming, with an emphasis on guides to programming in widely used languages such as Fortran and COBOL. His A Guide to Fortran Programming and its successors were the standard textbooks on that language for over two decades. His books have been translated into fourteen languages.
Go to Profile#20313
György Buzsáki
#20324
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
György Buzsáki is the Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at New York University School of Medicine. Education Buzsáki completed his M.D. in 1974 at the University of Pécs in Hungary, and obtained his PhD in neuroscience under the supervision of Endre Grastyán.
Go to Profile#20314
Don Cheadle
#20325
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Donald Frank Cheadle Jr. is an American actor. He is the recipient of multiple accolades, including two Grammy Awards, a Tony Award, two Golden Globe Awards and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. He has also earned nominations for an Academy Award, two British Academy Film Awards and 11 Primetime Emmy Awards. His Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony nominations make him one of few black individuals to be nominated for the four major American entertainment awards .
Go to Profile#20315
Gilbert Plass
#20326
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Gilbert Norman Plass was a Canadian physicist who in the 1950s made predictions about the increase in global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the 20th century and its effect on the average temperature of the planet that closely match measurements reported half a century later.
Go to Profile#20316
Shen Chun-shan
#20327
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Shen Chun-shan was a Taiwanese physicist who served as president of National Tsing Hua University from 1994 to 1997. He was known as one of the "four princes of Taiwan" along with Chen Li-an, Fredrick Chien, and Lien Chan, all of whose fathers attained prominence in politics prior to their sons' successes.
Go to Profile#20317
Park Seo-bo
#20328
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Park Seo-bo was a South Korean painter known for his "Écriture" series , involvement in the Korean Art Informel movement, and particular formal concerns around painting that have led critics and art historians to identify him as a leading Dansaekhwa artist.
Go to Profile#20318
Mark Geier
#20329
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Mark R. Geier is an American former physician and controversial professional witness who testified in more than 90 cases regarding allegations of injury or illness caused by vaccines. Since 2011, Geier's medical license has been suspended or revoked in every state in which he was licensed over concerns about his autism treatments and his misrepresentation of his credentials to the Maryland Board of Health, where he falsely claimed to be a board-certified geneticist and epidemiologist.
Go to Profile#20319
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve
#20330
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve is a Belgian economist and professor at the University of Oxford where he directs the Wellbeing Research Centre. De Neve is also the KSI Fellow and Vice-Principal of Harris Manchester College. He is best known for his research on the economics of wellbeing which has led to new insights into the relationship between wellbeing and income, productivity, firm performance, and economic growth. De Neve is also an editor of the World Happiness Report and co-founder of the World Wellbeing Movement.
Go to Profile#20320
Truman Bewley
#20331
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Truman Fassett Bewley is an American economist. He is the Alfred Cowles Professor of Economics at Yale University. Originally specializing in mathematical economics and general equilibrium theory, since the late 1990s Bewley has gained renown for his work on sticky wages. In Bewley's 1999 book Why Wages Don't Fall During a Recession, hundreds of interviews with executives, labor leaders, and other professionals establish morale as an important factor in why businesses are reluctant to decrease employee compensation at times of low demand.
Go to Profile#20321
Joseph Vogl
#20332
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Joseph Vogl is a German philosopher who has written on literature, culture and media. He is professor of modern German literature, literary, media and cultural studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#20322
Walter Goldschmidt
#20333
Overall Influence
1913 - 2010 (97 years)
Walter Rochs Goldschmidt was an American anthropologist. Goldschmidt was of German descent, born in San Antonio, Texas, on February 24, 1913, to Hermann and Gretchen Goldschmidt. He earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Texas at Austin in 1933, followed by a master's degree in 1935. Goldschmidt completed doctoral studies in 1942 at the University of California, Berkeley. Goldschmidt began work at the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, remaining a social science analyst there until 1946, when he joined the University of California, Los Angeles faculty. He served as editor of the journal American Anthropologist from 1956 to 1959, and was founding editor of another journal, Ethos.
Go to Profile#20323
Basanti Dulal Nagchaudhuri
#20334
Overall Influence
1917 - 2006 (89 years)
Basanti Dulal Nagchaudhuri was an Indian physicist and academic, and a scientific advisor to the Government of India. He is known as one of the pioneers of nuclear physics in India and for building the nation's first cyclotron at the University of Calcutta.
Go to Profile#20324
Jerzy Tabeau
#20335
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Jerzy Tabeau , an imprisoned Polish medical student, was one of the first escapees from Auschwitz to give a detailed report to the outside world on the genocide occurring there. First reports in early 1942 had been made by the Polish officer Witold Pilecki. Zabłotów-born Tabeau's report was known as that of the "Polish major" in the Auschwitz Protocols. After the war, he became a noted cardiologist in Kraków.
Go to Profile#20325
Nasir Ahmed
#20336
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Nasir Ahmed is an Indian-American electrical engineer and computer scientist. He is Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of New Mexico . He is best known for inventing the discrete cosine transform in the early 1970s. The DCT is the most widely used data compression transformation, the basis for most digital media standards and commonly used in digital signal processing. He also described the discrete sine transform , which is related to the DCT.
Go to Profile#20326
Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón
#20337
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Eduardo Sáenz de Cabezón Irigaray is a Spanish mathematician, and professor of computer languages and systems at the University of La Rioja since 2001. He is a recognized specialist in scientific monologues. He develops his research in the area of computational algebra, to which he has contributed 25 research publications and collaborations with Spanish and European mathematicians such as Henry P. Wynn.
Go to Profile#20327
Ian G. McKeith
#20338
Overall Influence
Ian G. McKeith is a professor of Old Age Psychiatry at Newcastle University in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North-East of England. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
Go to Profile#20328
Ron G. Mason
#20339
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Ronald George Mason was one of the oceanographers whose pioneering Cold War geomagnetic survey work lead to the discovery of magnetic striping on the seafloor. First discovering magnetic stripes on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the United States West Coast, he later also identified them around the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Go to Profile#20329
Marvin Wolfgang
#20340
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
Marvin Eugene Wolfgang was an American sociologist and criminologist. Biography Wolfgang was a soldier in World War II and participated in the Battle of Monte Cassino. After the war he studied at Dickinson College, graduating in 1948, and the University of Pennsylvania, where his principal teacher was Thorsten Sellin. At Penn, Wolfgang took his MA and PhD in sociology/criminology. Until his death in 1998 he was a professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#20330
Barend Jan Terwiel
#20341
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Barend Jan Terwiel is a Dutch-Australian anthropologist, historian and Thai studies scholar. He has written books on ethnology of Tai peoples and Ahom, the history and culture of Thailand as well as historical travel of Europeans to mainland Southeast Asia. He retired in 2007, although he still writes about Thailand, releasing a new edition of his book Thailand's Political History in 2010. He authored 11 articles over 47 years from 1972 to 2019 for Journal of the Siam Society.
Go to Profile#20331
Hideo Sasaki
#20342
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
Hideo Sasaki was a Japanese American landscape architect. Biography Hideo Sasaki was born in Reedley, California, on 25 November 1919. He grew up working on his family's California truck farm, and harvesting crops on Arizona farms. He began his college studies at the University of California, Berkeley during the time of World War II. Owing to his Japanese descent, he was forced into the Poston internment camp in Arizona after the signing of Executive Order 9066. He was able to leave the camp upon volunteering to work as a farm hand in Sterling, Colorado.
Go to Profile#20332
Robert Shapiro
#20343
Overall Influence
1935 - 2011 (76 years)
Robert Shapiro was professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University. He is best known for his work on the origin of life, having written two books on the topic: Origins, a Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth and Planetary Dreams . He opposed the RNA world hypothesis, and held that the spontaneous emergence of a molecule as complicated as RNA is highly unlikely. Instead, he proposed that life arose from some self-sustaining and compartmentalized reaction of simple molecules: "metabolism first" instead of "RNA first". This reaction would have to be able to reproduce and evolve, eventually leading to RNA.
Go to Profile#20333
Michael Manley
#20344
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
Michael Norman Manley was a Jamaican politician who served as the fourth Prime Minister of Jamaica from 1972 to 1980 and from 1989 to 1992. Manley championed a democratic socialist program, and has been described as a populist. He remains one of Jamaica's most popular prime ministers.
Go to Profile#20334
Ruth DeFries
#20345
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
#20335
Linda Melvern
#20346
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Linda Melvern is a British investigative journalist. Early in her career, she worked for The Evening Standard and then The Sunday Times , including on the investigative Insight Team. Since leaving the newspaper she has written seven books of non-fiction. She is a former Honorary Professor of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in the Department of International Politics.
Go to Profile#20336
Patty Jo Watson
#20347
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Patty Jo Watson is an American archaeologist noted for her work on Pre-Columbian Native Americans, especially in the Mammoth Cave region of Kentucky. Her early investigations focused on the origins of agriculture and pastoralism in the Near East.
Go to Profile#20337
John Wetton
#20348
Overall Influence
1949 - 2017 (68 years)
John Kenneth Wetton was an English musician, singer and songwriter. Known for his dexterous bass playing and booming baritone voice, Wetton first began to gain fame in 1971 when he joined Family for a short time before joining King Crimson in 1972.
Go to Profile#20338
Achille Bonito Oliva
#20349
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Achille Bonito Oliva is an Italian art critic and historian of contemporary art. Since 1968 he has taught history of contemporary art at La Sapienza, the university of Rome. He has written extensively on contemporary art and contemporary artists; he originated the term Transavanguardia to describe the new direction taken in the late 1970s by artists such as Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria, and Mimmo Paladino. He has organised or curated numerous contemporary art events and exhibitions; in 1993 he was artistic director of the Biennale di Venezia.
Go to Profile#20339
Shunya Yoshimi
#20350
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Shunya Yoshimi is a Japanese sociologist. He is a professor at the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, the University of Tokyo. He is one of the most influential cultural sociologists in Japan and best known for helping introduce cultural studies to Japan. His research topics include cultural studies, media studies and urban sociology.
Go to Profile#20340
Jane Dammen McAuliffe
#20351
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jane Dammen McAuliffe is an American educator, scholar of Islam and the inaugural director of national and international outreach at the Library of Congress. She is a president emeritus of Bryn Mawr College and former dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University. As a specialist in the Qur'an and its interpretation, McAuliffe has edited the six-volume Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān and continues to lead the editorial team for the online edition of the work.
Go to Profile#20341
Marie Edmonds
#20352
Overall Influence
Marie Edmonds is a professor of volcanology and geology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge whose research focuses on the physics and chemistry of volcanic eruptions and magmatism and understanding volatile cycling in the solid Earth as mediated by plate tectonics. She is interested in the social and economic impacts of natural hazards; and the sustainable use of Earth's mineral and energy resources. Professor Edmonds is the Vice President and Ron Oxburgh Fellow in Earth Sciences at Queens' College, Cambridge; and the Deputy Head of Department and Director of R...
Go to Profile#20342
Peter Goldie
#20353
Overall Influence
1946 - 2011 (65 years)
Peter Goldie was a British businessman and then academic philosopher with interests in ethics and aesthetics. He was the Samuel Hall Chair in Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Discipline Area of the School of Social Sciences at University of Manchester. He was educated at Felsted.
Go to Profile#20343
Robert Muldoon
#20354
Overall Influence
1921 - 1992 (71 years)
Sir Robert David Muldoon was a New Zealand politician who served as the 31st prime minister of New Zealand, from 1975 to 1984, while leader of the National Party. Serving as a corporal and sergeant in the army in the Second World War, Muldoon completed his training as an accountant and returned to New Zealand as its first fully qualified cost accountant. He was first elected to the House of Representatives at the 1960 general election as the Member of Parliament for Tamaki, representing the National Party. In this time of political stability, Muldoon served successively as Minister of Tourism , Minister of Finance , and Deputy Prime Minister .
Go to Profile#20344
M. Jagadesh Kumar
#20355
Overall Influence
Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar is an Indian academician, electrical engineer, education administrator. He is currently the chairman of University Grants Commission, since February 2022. He is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Delhi. Kumar also served as the VC of JNU from in January 2016 to 2022.
Go to Profile#20345
Robert Brandenberger
#20356
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Robert H. Brandenberger is a Swiss-Canadian theoretical cosmologist and a professor of physics at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Biography Brandenberger completed his undergraduate degree at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, and went on to receive his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral student under Stephen Hawking at the DAMTP at Cambridge University. He also did postdoctoral work at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Brandenberger joined the faculty of Brown University in 1987 and then in 2004, he joined McGill University where he is a Canada Research Chair holder.
Go to Profile#20346
Holger Herwig
#20357
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Dr. Holger H. Herwig is a German-born Canadian historian and professor. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including the award-winning, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918 and The Origins of World War I, written with Richard F. Hamilton. His research focuses on World War I and German military and political history. Dr. Herwig holds a dual position at the University of Calgary as Professor of History and as Canada Research Chair in the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies.
Go to Profile#20347
Wang Hui
#20358
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Wang Hui is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University, Beijing. His researches focus on contemporary Chinese literature and intellectual history. He was the executive editor of the influential magazine Dushu from May 1996 to July 2007. The US magazine Foreign Policy named him as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world in May 2008. Wang Hui has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, Edinburgh, Bologna , Stanford, UCLA, Berkeley, and the University of Washington, among others. In March 2010, he appeared as the keynote speaker at the annual...
Go to Profile#20348
Samuel Issacharoff
#20359
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Samuel Issacharoff is an American law professor, whose scholarly work focuses on constitutional law, voting rights and civil procedure. Career Issacharoff graduated from Binghamton University in 1975 and Yale Law School in 1983. He was a member of the Spartacist League as a student. Issacharoff was born in Argentina in Buenos Aires. He is currently the Bonnie and Richard Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. He served as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School for the Fall 2008 semester. Prior to joining NYU Law's faculty, he taught at Columbia Law Sc...
Go to Profile#20349
Carol Armstrong
#20360
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Carol Armstrong is an American professor, art historian, art critic, and photographer. Armstrong teaches and writes about 19th-century French art, the history of photography, the history and practice of art criticism, feminist theory and women and gender representation in visual culture.
Go to Profile#20350
Philippe Michel
#20361
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Philippe Gabriel Michel is a French mathematician who holds the chair in analytic number theory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Early life, education and career Michel was born in Lyon. He studied from 1989 to 1993 at the École normale supérieure de Cachan, and then moved to the University of Paris-Sud, where he earned a doctorate in 1995 under the supervision of Étienne Fouvry and then a habilitation in 1998. He was a professor at the University of Montpellier from 1998 to 2008, when he moved to EPFL.
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