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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people

#20651

Mick Taylor

#20662

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Michael Kevin Taylor is an English guitarist, best known as a former member of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and the Rolling Stones . As a member of the Stones, he appeared on Let It Bleed , Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert , Sticky Fingers , Exile on Main St. , Goats Head Soup and It's Only Rock 'n Roll .

#20652

Teuku Jacob

#20663

Overall Influence

1929 - 2007 (78 years)

Teuku Jacob was an Indonesian paleoanthropologist. As a student of Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald in the 1950s, Jacob claimed to have discovered and studied numerous specimens of Homo erectus. He came to international prominence as a vocal critic of scientists who believed remains discovered in Flores belonged to a new species in the genus Homo, Homo floresiensis.

#20653

Mark Diesendorf

Mark Diesendorf

#20664

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Mark Diesendorf is an Australian academic and environmentalist, known for his work in sustainable development and renewable energy. He currently teaches environmental studies at the University of New South Wales , Australia. He was formerly professor of environmental science and founding director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney and before that a principal research scientist with CSIRO, where he was involved in early research on integrating wind power into electricity grids. His most recent book is Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change...

#20654

Johnnetta Cole

#20665

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Johnnetta Betsch Cole is an American anthropologist, educator, museum director, and college president. Cole was the first female African-American president of Spelman College, a historically black college, serving from 1987 to 1997. She was president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007. During 2009–2017 she was Director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art. Cole served as the national chair and 7th president for the National Council of Negro Women from 2018 to 2022.

#20655

Wes Unseld

#20666

Overall Influence

1946 - 2020 (74 years)

Westley Sissel Unseld Sr. was an American professional basketball player, coach and executive. He spent his entire National Basketball Association career with the Baltimore/Capital/Washington Bullets. Unseld played college basketball for the Louisville Cardinals and was selected with the second overall pick by the Bullets in the 1968 NBA draft. He was named the NBA Most Valuable Player and NBA Rookie of the Year during his rookie season and joined Wilt Chamberlain as the only two players in NBA history to accomplish the feat. Unseld won an NBA championship with the Bullets in 1978, and the Finals MVP award to go with it.

#20656

Joseph D. Sneed

#20667

Overall Influence

1938 - 2020 (82 years)

Joseph D. Sneed was an American physicist, and philosopher at the Colorado School of Mines. Early life He was born in Durant, OK. His father, Dabney W. Sneed, was a civil servant with the Postal Service and later an architect for the Federal Housing Administration. His mother, Sallabelle Atkison Sneed, was a homemaker and elementary school teacher.

#20657

Teemu Selänne

#20668

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Teemu Ilmari Selänne is a Finnish former professional ice hockey winger. He began his professional career in 1989–90 with Jokerit of the SM-liiga and played 21 seasons in the National Hockey League for the Winnipeg Jets, Anaheim Ducks, San Jose Sharks, and Colorado Avalanche. Nicknamed "the Finnish Flash", Selänne is the highest scoring Finn in NHL history, and one of the highest overall; he retired in 2014 11th all-time with 684 goals and 15th with 1,457 points. He holds numerous team scoring records for both the Winnipeg/Arizona franchise and the Anaheim Ducks. His jersey number 8 was retired by the Ducks in 2015.

#20658

James Kennedy

#20669

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

James Carleton Kennedy is an American historian. He is the son of E.W. and Nella Kennedy. The elder Dr. Kennedy was for years an eminent professor of religion at Northwestern College . Biography Kennedy grew up in Orange City, Iowa, a Reformed village with a large portion of the population having roots in Netherlands. His mother is a Dutch-born immigrant.

#20659

Souleymane Mboup

#20670

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Souleymane Mboup is a Senegalese microbiologist, medical researcher, and colonel in the Armed Forces of Senegal. In 1985, he was a member of the first team to identify HIV-2, a form of HIV that is typically found in West Africa and is less transmissible than the more common HIV-1. Mboup has contributed to the improvement of Senegal's research infrastructure throughout his career. Among his published works, he is known for editing the 1994 reference book AIDS in Africa. Mboup is currently the President of L'Institut de Recherche en Santé, de Surveillance Épidémiologique et de Formations in D...

#20660

John Matteson

#20671

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

John Matteson is an American professor of English and legal writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his first book, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.

#20661

Stephen Jones

#20672

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Stephen Jones is an English editor of horror anthologies, and the author of several book-length studies of horror and fantasy films as well as an account of H. P. Lovecraft's early British publications.

#20662

David Jang

#20673

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

David Jang is a Korean professor, Christian theologian, and pastor. He has founded several Christian organizations, including Olivet University in San Francisco, Christian Today headquartered in Korea, Christian Daily Korea, and Christianity Daily in Los Angeles, CA. He served as a member of the North American Council of the World Evangelical Alliance from 2007 to 2018, the former president of World Olivet Assembly, the founder and first international president of Olivet University, and current president of the Holy Bible Society. Jang was also the 88th President of the General Assembly of ...

#20663

Una Canger

#20674

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Una Canger is a Danish linguist specializing in languages of Mesoamerica. She has published mostly about the Nahuatl language with a particular focus on the dialectology of Modern Nahuatl, and is considered among the world's leading specialists in this area. She held tenure at the University of Copenhagen, leading the department for Native American Languages and Cultures until she reached the age of 70 in 2008 and was forced into retirement. In 2012 she was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for her contributions to the study of Mexican culture. In 2005 she received the teaching prize of Co...

#20664

Shanto Iyengar

#20675

Overall Influence

Shanto Iyengar is an American political scientist and professor of political science at Stanford University. He is also the Harry & Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford, the director of Stanford's Political Communication Lab, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

#20665

Andy Serkis

#20676

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Andrew Clement Serkis is an English actor, director and producer. He is best known for his motion-capture roles comprising motion capture acting, animation and voice work for computer-generated characters such as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey , King Kong in the eponymous 2005 film, Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy , Captain Haddock / Sir Francis Haddock in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin , Baloo in his self-directed film Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle and Supreme Leader Snoke in the Star Wars sequel trilogy films ...

#20666

Siobhan Roberts

#20677

Overall Influence

1980 - Present (46 years)

Siobhan Roberts is a Canadian science journalist, biographer, and historian of mathematics. Education Roberts was born in Belleville, Ontario. She earned a degree in history at Queen's University, then a graduate degree in journalism from Ryerson University in 1997.

#20667

Mark Rutte

#20678

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Mark Rutte is a Dutch politician who has served as prime minister of the Netherlands since 2010. He was also the leader of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy from 2006 through 2023. He is currently acting in a demissionary capacity, and will not return to politics following the installation of a new cabinet, after the 2023 Dutch general election.

#20668

Graciela Boente

#20679

Overall Influence

Graciela Lina Boente Boente is an Argentine mathematical statistician at the University of Buenos Aires. She is known for her research in robust statistics, and particularly for robust methods for principal component analysis and regression analysis.

#20669

Richard H. Steckel

#20680

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Richard Hall Steckel is an American heterodox economist with a focus on economic history. Steckel is the SBS Distinguished Professor of Economics, Anthropology and History at Ohio State University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research . He is well known for his work on health and well-being, in which he is a major contributor to anthropometric history along with John Komlos. Their work was highlighted in a 1996 Time magazine front page article. Between 2004 and 2005 he served as president of the Social Science History Association.

#20670

Klaus Koch

#20681

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Klaus Koch was an Old Testament scholar. Koch first studied in the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and later at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. He did his doctoral dissertation at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg under Gerhard von Rad.

#20671

Alfred Cuschieri

#20682

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Sir Alfred Cuschieri is a Maltese-British surgeon and academic. He is most notable for his pioneering contribution to the development and clinical implementation of minimal access surgery, also known as key-hole surgery. He has been Professor of Surgery at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy, since 2003 as well as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Institute of Medical Science and Technology at the University of Dundee since 2008.

#20672

Ted Stevens

#20683

Overall Influence

1923 - 2010 (87 years)

Theodore Fulton Stevens Sr. was an American politician and lawyer who served as a U.S. Senator from Alaska from 1968 to 2009. He was the longest-serving Republican Senator in history at the time he left office. Stevens was the president pro tempore of the United States Senate in the 108th and 109th Congresses from 2003 to 2007, and was the third U.S. Senator to hold the title of president pro tempore emeritus. He was previously Solicitor of the Interior Department from 1960 to 1961. Stevens has been described as one of the most powerful members of Congress and as the most powerful member of C...

#20673

Richard Crandall

#20684

Overall Influence

1947 - 2012 (65 years)

Richard E. Crandall was an American physicist and computer scientist who made contributions to computational number theory. Background Crandall was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and spent two years at Caltech before transferring to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he graduated in physics and wrote his undergraduate thesis on randomness. He earned his Ph.D in theoretical physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#20674

Haim Shapira

#20685

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Haim Shapira is an Israeli mathematician, pianist, speaker, philosopher and game theorist. He writes in Hebrew, and his books have been translated into English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Bengali and Korean. He is a sought-after lecturers in Israel, and was also was a speaker at TEDxJaffa on game theory and strategy. His first two books in English are Happiness and Other Small Things of Absolute Importance and Gladiators, Pirates and Games of Trust. He also arranged and performed music on the soundtrack for John Wick: Chapter 2.

#20675

John McKay

#20686

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

John McKay is an English songwriter and guitarist. He was the first studio guitarist of Siouxsie and the Banshees. He was a member of the group from July 1977 until September 1979. He played a "jagged unorthodox chording", and created a "metal-shard roar" with his guitar. Q magazine included McKay's work on "Hong Kong Garden" in its list of the "100 Greatest Guitar Tracks Ever". He recorded two studio albums with the band, their debut album The Scream in 1978 and Join Hands in 1979.

#20676

Tomaž Pisanski

#20687

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Tomaž Pisanski is a Slovenian mathematician working mainly in discrete mathematics and graph theory. He is considered by many Slovenian mathematicians to be the "father of Slovenian discrete mathematics."

#20677

Brian Matthews

#20688

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Brian W. Matthews is a biochemist and biophysicist educated at the University of Adelaide, contributor to x-ray crystallographic methodology at the University of Cambridge, and since 1970 at the University of Oregon as Professor of Physics and HHMI investigator in the Institute of Molecular Biology.

#20678

Nihat Berker

#20689

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Ahmet Nihat Berker is a Turkish scientist, theoretical chemist, physicist and emeritus professor of physics at MIT. Currently, he is the acting Dean of Engineering and Natural Sciences in Kadir Has University, Turkey. He is the son of a notable scientist and engineer Ratip Berker, who was deceased on 17 October 1997. His wife, Bedia Erim Berker is a professor of chemistry at Istanbul Technical University, and one of his sons, Selim Berker is a professor of epistemology in the department of philosophy at Harvard University and his other son, Ratip Emin Berker is currently a junior at Harvard.

#20679

Mary Garrard

#20690

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Mary DuBose Garrard is an American art historian and emerita professor at American University. She is recognized as "one of the founders of feminist art theory" and is particularly known for her work on the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi.

#20680

Tsvi Piran

#20691

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Tsvi Piran is an Israeli theoretical physicist and astrophysicist, best known for his work on Gamma-ray Bursts and on numerical relativity. The recipient of the 2019 EMET prize award in Physics and Space Research.

#20681

Al Kooper

#20692

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Al Kooper is a retired American songwriter, record producer, and musician, known for organizing Blood, Sweat & Tears, although he did not stay with the group long enough to share its popularity. Throughout much of the 1960s and 1970s he was a prolific studio musician, including playing organ on the Bob Dylan song "Like a Rolling Stone", French horn and piano on the Rolling Stones song "You Can't Always Get What You Want", and lead guitar on Rita Coolidge's "The Lady's Not for Sale". Kooper produced a number of one-off collaboration albums, such as the Super Session album that saw him work separately with guitarists Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills.

#20682

Joachim Gauck

#20693

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Joachim Wilhelm Gauck is a German politician who served as President of Germany from 2012 to 2017. A former Lutheran pastor, he came to prominence as an anti-communist civil rights activist in East Germany.

#20683

Anita Shreve

#20694

Overall Influence

1946 - 2018 (72 years)

Anita Hale Shreve was an American writer, chiefly known for her novels. One of her first published stories, Past the Island, Drifting , was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1976. Early years and education Born in Boston, the eldest of three daughters, Shreve grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts. She was a member of the Dedham High School class of 1964.

#20684

Tom Hubbard

#20695

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Tom Hubbard was the first librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library and is the author, editor or co-editor of over thirty academic and literary works. Biography Tom Hubbard was born in Kirkcaldy. After obtaining first class honours from Aberdeen University and a Diploma in Librarianship from Strathclyde University, Hubbard worked at the Scottish Poetry Library and as a visiting lecturer at the universities of Grenoble, Connecticut, Budapest , and North Carolina .

#20685

Wendy Barclay

#20696

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Wendy Sue Fox is a British virologist. She is currently head of Department of Infectious Disease and chair in Influenza Virology at Imperial College London. She leads a team of scientists studying the influenza virus and its physiology and morphology to discover novel vaccines. In particular, they are trying to understand more about influenza virus mutations, and how they can allow scientists to create new vaccines against possible flu pandemics.

#20686

Stefanos Tsitsipas

Stefanos Tsitsipas

#20697

Overall Influence

1998 - Present (28 years)

Stefanos Tsitsipas is a Greek professional tennis player. He has been ranked as high as world No. 3 by the Association of Tennis Professionals , which he first achieved on 9 August 2021, making him the highest-ranked Greek player in history alongside Maria Sakkari.

#20687

John Dillenberger

#20698

Overall Influence

1918 - 2008 (90 years)

John Dillenberger was professor of historical theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He was instrumental in forming the Graduate Theological Union which he headed during its first decade, first as dean from 1964 to 1969 and then, from 1967 to 1972, as its first president, a post to which he returned in 1999–2000. He also served as president of Hartford Seminary, dean of the faculty at San Francisco Theological Seminary, chair of the program in history and philosophy at Harvard University, and as president of the American Academy of Religion.

#20688

Sarah B. Pomeroy

#20699

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Sarah B. Pomeroy is an American Professor of Classics. Early life and education Sarah Pomeroy was born in New York City in 1938. She attended the Birch Wathen School, taking Latin and ancient history among other subjects. She graduated high school at age 16, and began a degree course at Barnard College in Classics, taking courses at Columbia University alongside those at Barnard, due to the small size of the Barnard department at the time. Pomeroy graduated in 1957, at the age of nineteen, and began a course of graduate study at Columbia, under the supervision of Eve Harrison and Otto Brendel....

#20689

Donald McKayle

#20700

Overall Influence

1930 - 2018 (88 years)

Donald McKayle was an American modern dancer, choreographer, teacher, director and writer best known for creating socially conscious concert works during the 1950s and '60s that focus on expressing the human condition and, more specifically, the black experience in America. He was "among the first black men to break the racial barrier by means of modern dance." His work for the concert stage, especially Games and Rainbow Round My Shoulder , has been the recipient of widespread acclaim and critical attention. In addition, McKayle was the first black man to both direct and choreograph major Br...

#20690

Andy Summers

#20701

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Andrew James Summers is an English guitarist who was a founding member of the rock band the Police. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a band member in 2003. Summers has recorded solo albums, collaborated with other musicians, composed film scores, written fiction, and exhibited his photography in galleries.

#20691

Diana Strassmann

Diana Strassmann

#20702

Overall Influence

Diana Louise Strassmann is an American economist, currently Carolyn and Fred McManis Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Rice University, and also co-founder of International Association for Feminist Economics and its journal Feminist Economics.

#20692

Frank McSherry

#20703

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Frank McSherry is a computer scientist. McSherry's areas of research include distributed computing and information privacy. McSherry is known, along with Cynthia Dwork, Adam D. Smith, and Kobbi Nissim, as one of the co-inventors of differential privacy, for which he won the 2017 Gödel Prize. Along with Kunal Talwar, he is the co-creator of the exponential mechanism for differential privacy, for which they won the 2009 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

#20693

Glen Bowersock

#20704

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Glen Warren Bowersock is a historian of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East, and former Chairman of Harvard’s classics department. Early life Bowersock was born in Providence, Rhode Island and attended The Rivers School in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard University , another B.A. with First Class Honors in Literae humaniores from Oxford University ; and his M.A., D.Phil. also at Oxford. His mentor was the renowned Roman historian Ronald Syme.

#20694

Joel Sternfeld

#20705

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Joel Sternfeld is an American fine-art photographer. He is best known for his large-format color pictures of contemporary American life and identity. His work contributed to the establishment of color photography as a respected artistic medium. Furthering the tradition of roadside photography started by Walker Evans in the 1930s, Sternfeld documents people and places with unexpected excitement, despair, tenderness, and hope. Ever since the 1987 publication of his landmark “American Prospects,” Sternfeld’s work has interwoven the conceptual and political, while being steeped in history, landscape theory and his passion for the passage of the seasons.

#20695

E. V. Sampathkumaran

#20706

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Echur Varadadesikan Sampathkumaran is an Indian condensed matter physicist and a Distinguished Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Known for his research on the thermal and transport behaviour of magnetic systems, Sampathkumaran is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and National Academy of Sciences, India as well as The World Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him th...

#20696

Stephen G. Emerson

#20707

Overall Influence

Stephen Gould Emerson is an American academic who was the 13th president of Haverford College from July 1, 2007, to August 10, 2011. In February 2012, he was appointed Director of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, and he will also hold the Clyde ’56 and Helen Wu Professorship in Immunology at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

#20697

H. Jeff Kimble

#20708

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Harry Jeffrey Kimble , was the William L. Valentine Professor and professor of physics at Caltech. His research is in quantum optics and is noted for groundbreaking experiments in physics including one of the first demonstrations of teleportation of a quantum state , quantum logic gate, and the development of the first single atom laser. According to Elizabeth Rogan, OSA CEO, "Jeff has led a revolution in modern physics through his pioneering research in the coherent control of the interactions of light and matter." Kimble's main research focus is in quantum information science and the qua...

#20698

Allen G. Debus

#20709

Overall Influence

1926 - 2009 (83 years)

Allen George Debus was an American historian of science, known primarily for his work on the history of chemistry and alchemy. In 1991 he was honored at the University of Chicago with an academic conference held in his name. Paul H. Theerman and Karen Hunger Parshall edited the proceedings, and Debus contributed his autobiography of which this article is a digest.

#20699

John Olney

#20710

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

John Olney was a medical doctor and a professor of psychiatry, pathology, and immunology at the Washington University School of Medicine. He is known for his work on brain damage. He coined the term excitotoxicity in his 1969 paper published in Science. Olney's lesions are named after him. In 1996 he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He had campaigned for greater regulation of monosodium glutamate , aspartame and other excitotoxins for over twenty years. He died at his residence on April 14, 2015 at the age of 83.

#20700

Rachel Bromwich

Rachel Bromwich

#20711

Overall Influence

1915 - 2010 (95 years)

Rachel Bromwich born Rachel Sheldon Amos, was a British scholar. Her focus was on medieval Welsh literature, and she taught Celtic Languages and Literature in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, from 1945 to 1976. Among her most important contributions to the study of Welsh literature is Trioedd Ynys Prydein, her edition of the Welsh Triads.

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