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
#2051
Thomas E. Kurtz
#2053
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Thomas Eugene Kurtz is a retired Dartmouth professor of mathematics and computer scientist, who along with his colleague John G. Kemeny set in motion the then revolutionary concept of making computers as freely available to college students as library books were, by implementing the concept of time-sharing at Dartmouth College. In his mission to allow non-expert users to interact with the computer, he co-developed the BASIC programming language and the Dartmouth Time Sharing System during 1963 to 1964.
Go to Profile#2052
Peter Salovey
#2054
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Peter Salovey is an American social psychologist and current president of Yale University. He previously served as Yale's provost, dean of Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and dean of Yale College. Salovey is one of the early pioneers in emotional intelligence.
Go to Profile#2053
Albert-László Barabási
#2055
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Albert-László Barabási is a Romanian-born Hungarian-American physicist, best known for his discoveries in network science and network medicine. He is a distinguished university professor and Robert Gray Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University, and holds appointments at the department of medicine, Harvard Medical School and the department of network and data science at Central European University. He is the former Emil T. Hofmann Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame and former associate member of the Center of Cancer Systems Biology at the Dana–Farber Cancer In...
Go to Profile#2054
Tomás Maldonado
#2056
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Tomás Maldonado was an Argentine painter, designer and thinker, considered one of the main theorists of design theory of the legendary Ulm Model, a design philosophy developed during his tenure at the Ulm School of Design in Germany.
Go to Profile#2055
Peyton Manning
#2057
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Peyton Williams Manning is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 18 seasons. Nicknamed "the Sheriff", he spent 14 seasons with the Indianapolis Colts and four with the Denver Broncos. Manning is widely considered to be one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. A member of the Manning football dynasty, he is the second son of former NFL quarterback Archie Manning and an older brother of former NFL quarterback Eli Manning. He played college football for the Tennessee Volunteers, winning the Maxwell, Davey O'Brien, and Johnny Unitas Golden Ar...
Go to Profile#2056
Nikolas Kompridis
#2058
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Nikolas Kompridis is a Canadian philosopher and political theorist. His major published work addresses the direction and orientation of Frankfurt School critical theory; the legacy of philosophical romanticism; and the aesthetic dimension of politics. His writing touches on a variety of issues in social and political thought, aesthetics, and the philosophy of culture, often in terms of re-worked concepts of receptivity and world disclosure—a paradigm he calls "reflective disclosure".
Go to Profile#2057
James Ellroy
#2059
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Lee Earle "James" Ellroy is an American crime fiction writer and essayist. Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential .
Go to Profile#2058
Kofi Annan
#2060
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Kofi Atta Annan was a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. He was the founder and chairman of the Kofi Annan Foundation, as well as chairman of The Elders, an international organisation founded by Nelson Mandela.
Go to Profile#2059
Steven M. Wise
#2061
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Steven M. Wise is an American legal scholar who specializes in animal protection issues, primatology, and animal intelligence. He teaches animal rights law at Harvard Law School, Vermont Law School, John Marshall Law School, Lewis & Clark Law School, and Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. He is a former president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund and founder and president of the Nonhuman Rights Project. The Yale Law Journal has called him "one of the pistons of the animal rights movement."
Go to Profile#2060
François Furet
#2062
Overall Influence
1927 - 1997 (70 years)
François Furet was a French historian and president of the Saint-Simon Foundation, best known for his books on the French Revolution. From 1985 to 1997, Furet was a professor of French history at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#2061
John R. Pierce
#2063
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
John Robinson Pierce , was an American engineer and author. He did extensive work concerning radio communication, microwave technology, computer music, psychoacoustics, and science fiction. Additionally to his professional career he wrote science fiction for many years using the names John Pierce, John R. Pierce, and J. J. Coupling. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he earned his PhD from Caltech, and died in Sunnyvale, California, from complications of Parkinson's Disease.
Go to Profile#2062
Dale Chihuly
#2064
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Dale Chihuly is an American glass artist and entrepreneur. He is well known in the field of blown glass, "moving it into the realm of large-scale sculpture". Early life Dale Patrick Chihuly was born on September 20, 1941, in Tacoma, Washington. His parents were George and Viola Chihuly; his paternal grandfather was born in Slovakia. In 1957, his older brother and only sibling George died in a Navy aviation training accident in Pensacola, Florida. In 1958, Chihuly's father died of a heart attack at the age of 51.
Go to Profile#2063
Thomas L. Saaty
#2065
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Thomas L. Saaty was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. He is the inventor, architect, and primary theoretician of the Analytic Hierarchy Process , a decision-making framework used for large-scale, multiparty, multi-criteria decision analysis, and of the Analytic Network Process , its generalization to decisions with dependence and feedback. Later on, he generalized the mathematics of the ANP to the Neural Network Process with application to neural firing and synthesis but none of them gain s...
Go to Profile#2064
Zahi Hawass
#2066
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Zahi Abass Hawass is an Egyptian archaeologist, Egyptologist, and former Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, serving twice. He has also worked at archaeological sites in the Nile Delta, the Western Desert, and the Upper Nile Valley.
Go to Profile#2065
Brian Eno
#2067
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , also known by the mononym Eno, is an English musician, composer, record producer and visual artist. He is best known for his pioneering contributions to the ambient music and electronic genres, and for producing, recording, and writing works in rock and pop music. A self-described "non-musician", Eno has helped introduce unconventional concepts and approaches to contemporary music. He has been described as one of popular music's most influential and innovative figures. In 2019, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a me...
Go to Profile#2066
Barry Eichengreen
#2068
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
#2067
Gabriel Almond
#2069
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Gabriel Abraham Almond was an American political scientist best known for his pioneering work on comparative politics, political development, and political culture. Biography Almond was born on January 12, 1911, in Rock Island, Illinois, the son of Russian-Jewish and Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, raised "in a strict orthodox Jewish home." He attended the University of Chicago, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, and worked with Harold Lasswell. Almond completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1938, but his doctoral dissertation, Plutocracy and Politics in New York City, was not published until 1998, because it included unflattering references to John D.
Go to Profile#2068
Bruce Nauman
#2070
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Bruce Nauman is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico.
Go to Profile#2069
Richard Borcherds
#2071
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Richard Ewen Borcherds is a British mathematician currently working in quantum field theory. He is known for his work in lattices, group theory, and infinite-dimensional algebrass, for which he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998.
Go to Profile#2070
Mikio Sato
#2072
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Mikio Sato was a Japanese mathematician known for founding the fields of algebraic analysis, hyperfunctions, and holonomic quantum fields. He was a professor at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto.
Go to Profile#2071
John Fowles
#2073
Overall Influence
1926 - 2005 (79 years)
John Robert Fowles was an English novelist of international renown, critically positioned between modernism and postmodernism. His work was influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, among others.
Go to Profile#2072
George Wald
#2074
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
George Wald was an American scientist and activist who studied pigments in the retina. He won a share of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit.
Go to Profile#2073
Ezra Klein
#2075
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (40 years)
Ezra Klein is an American progressive journalist, political analyst, New York Times columnist, and the host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast. He is a co-founder of Vox and formerly served as the website's editor-at-large. He has held editorial positions at The Washington Post and The American Prospect, and was a regular contributor to Bloomberg News and MSNBC. His first book, Why We're Polarized, was published by Simon & Schuster in January 2020.
Go to Profile#2074
Andrew Motion
#2076
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson.
Go to Profile#2075
Paul Goldberger
#2077
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Paul Goldberger is an American author, architecture critic and lecturer. He is known for his "Sky Line" column in The New Yorker. Biography Shortly after starting as a reporter at The New York Times in 1972, he was assigned to write the obituary of architect Louis Kahn, who had died suddenly of a heart attack in a bathroom in New York's Pennsylvania Station. The next year, he was named an architecture critic, working alongside Ada Louise Huxtable until 1982.
Go to Profile#2076
Scott Aaronson
#2078
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
#2077
Pierre Macherey
#2079
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Pierre Macherey is a French Marxist philosopher and literary critic at the University of Lille Nord de France. A former student of Louis Althusser and collaborator on the influential volume Reading Capital, Macherey is a central figure in the development of French post-structuralism and Marxism. His work is influential in literary theory and Continental philosophy in Europe though it is generally little read in the United States.
Go to Profile#2078
Michael Billington
#2080
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Michael Keith Billington is a British author and arts critic. He writes for The Guardian, and was the paper's chief drama critic from 1971 to 2019. Billington is "Britain's longest-serving theatre critic" and the author of biographical and critical studies relating to British theatre and the arts. He is the authorised biographer of the playwright Harold Pinter .
Go to Profile#2079
Alexei Starobinsky
#2081
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Alexei Alexandrovich Starobinsky is a Soviet and Russian astrophysicist and cosmologist. He received the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics "for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation", together with Alan Guth and Andrei Linde in 2014.
Go to Profile#2080
Maurice Godelier
#2082
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Maurice Godelier is a French anthropologist who works as a Director of Studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences. He is one of the most influential French anthropologists and is best known as one of the earliest advocates of Marxism's incorporation into anthropology. He is also known for his field work among the Baruya in Papua New Guinea from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Go to Profile#2081
Alberto Fujimori
#2083
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Alberto Kenya Fujimori Inomoto is a Peruvian former politician, professor and engineer who served as President of Peru from 28 July 1990 until 22 November 2000, though de facto leadership was reportedly held by Vladimiro Montesinos, the then head of the National Intelligence Service. Frequently described as a dictator, he remains a controversial figure in Peruvian politics. He is currently in prison, serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses during his presidency.
Go to Profile#2082
Bryan A. Garner
#2084
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Bryan Andrew Garner is an American legal scholar and lexicographer. He has written more than two dozen books about English usage and style such as Garner's Modern English Usage for a general audience, and others for legal professionals. Garner also wrote two books with Justice Antonin Scalia: Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges and Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts . He is the founder and president of LawProse Inc.
Go to Profile#2083
Kamil Zvelebil
#2085
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Kamil Václav Zvelebil was a Czech scholar in Indian literature and linguistics, notably Tamil, Sanskrit, Dravidian linguistics and literature and philology. Life and career Zvelebil studied at the Charles University in Prague from 1946 to 1952 where he majored in Indology, English, literature and philosophy. After obtaining his PhD in 1952 and until 1970 he was a senior research fellow in Tamil and Dravidian linguistics and literature at the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He held the role of associate professor of Tamil and Dravidian at Charles University in Pragu...
Go to Profile#2084
Charles H. Townes
#2086
Overall Influence
1915 - 2015 (100 years)
Charles Hard Townes was an American physicist. Townes worked on the theory and application of the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated with both maser and laser devices. He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov. Townes was an adviser to the United States Government, meeting every US president from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton .
Go to Profile#2085
Paul Thagard
#2087
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Paul Richard Thagard is a Canadian philosopher who specializes in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science and medicine. Thagard is a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Waterloo. He is a writer, and has contributed to research in analogy and creativity, inference, cognition in the history of science, and the role of emotion in cognition.
Go to Profile#2086
Philip José Farmer
#2088
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Philip José Farmer was an American author known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories. Farmer is best known for his sequences of novels, especially the World of Tiers and Riverworld series. He is noted for the pioneering use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for, and reworking of, the lore of celebrated pulp heroes, and occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters. Farmer often mixed real and classic fictional characters and worlds and real and fake authors as epitomized by his Wold Newton family books, ...
Go to Profile#2087
Robertson Davies
#2089
Overall Influence
1913 - 1995 (82 years)
William Robertson Davies was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", a term Davies gladly accepted for himself. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#2088
Wolfhart Pannenberg
#2090
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Wolfhart Pannenberg was a German Lutheran theologian. He made a number of significant contributions to modern theology, including his concept of history as a form of revelation centered on the resurrection of Christ, which has been widely debated in both Protestant and Catholic theology, as well as by non-Christian thinkers.
Go to Profile#2089
Dean Baker
#2091
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Dean Baker is an American macroeconomist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research with Mark Weisbrot. Baker has been credited as one of the first economists to have identified the 2007–08 United States housing bubble.
Go to Profile#2090
Jules Vuillemin
#2092
Overall Influence
1920 - 2001 (81 years)
Jules Vuillemin was a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy of Knowledge at the prestigious Collège de France, in Paris, from 1962 to 1990, succeeding Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Professor emeritus from 1991 to 2001. He was an Invited Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey .
Go to Profile#2091
Jacques Dubochet
#2093
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jacques Dubochet is a retired Swiss biophysicist. He is a former researcher at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and an honorary professor of biophysics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
Go to Profile#2092
Larry Constantine
#2094
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Larry LeRoy Constantine is an American software engineer, professor in the Center for Exact Sciences and Engineering at the University of Madeira Portugal, and considered one of the pioneers of computing. He has contributed numerous concepts and techniques forming the foundations of modern practice in software engineering and applications design and development.
Go to Profile#2093
Ariel Dorfman
#2095
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, since 1985.
Go to Profile#2094
Julie Taymor
#2096
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Julie Taymor is an American director and writer of theater, opera, and film. Her stage adaptation of The Lion King debuted in 1997 and received eleven Tony Award nominations, with Taymor receiving Tony Awards for her direction and costume design. Her film Frida, about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, was nominated for five Academy Awards, including a Best Original Song nomination for Taymor's composition "Burn It Blue". She also directed the 2007 jukebox musical film Across the Universe, based on the music of the Beatles.
Go to Profile#2095
Judy Chicago
#2097
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Judy Chicago is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her inclusion in hundreds of publications in various areas of the world showcases her influence in the worldwide art community. Additionally, many of her books have been published in other countries, making her work more accessible to international readers.
Go to Profile#2096
John Lennox
#2098
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
John Carson Lennox is an Irish mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian philosopher. He has written many books on religion, ethics, the relationship between science and God , and has had public debates with atheists including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
Go to Profile#2097
Paul Gottfried
#2099
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Paul Edward Gottfried is an American paleoconservative political philosopher, historian, and writer. He is a former Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles. He is an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the US correspondent of Nouvelle École, a Nouvelle Droite journal.
Go to Profile#2098
John Henrik Clarke
#2100
Overall Influence
1915 - 1998 (83 years)
John Henrik Clarke was an African-American historian, professor, prominent Afrocentrist, and pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s.
Go to Profile#2099
Thomas Pogge
#2101
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge is a German philosopher and is the Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. In addition to his Yale appointment, he is the Research Director of the Centre for the Study of the Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo, a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Central Lancashire's Centre for Professional Ethics. Pogge is also an editor for social and politic...
Go to Profile#2100
Jean Ziegler
#2102
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Jean Ziegler is a Swiss former professor of sociology at the University of Geneva and the Sorbonne, Paris, and former vice-president of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations Human Rights Council. He was previously Member of the Swiss Parliament for the Social Democrats from 1981 to 1999. He has also held several positions with the United Nations, especially as Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2000 to 2008, and as a member of the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council from 2008 to 2012. Ziegler has authored numerous works, is a lecturer, and is well known for this...
Go to Profile