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
#20701
Alan M. Davis
#20712
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Alan Mark Davis is president and CEO of Offtoa, Inc. in Westminster, Colorado. He is a retired Professor of Business Strategy and Entrepreneurship in the College of Business at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and in the Executive MBA program at the University of Colorado at Denver. Davis earned his master's degree in Computer Science under Donald B. Gillies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1973 and Ph.D. in Computer Science under Thomas R. Wilcox at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975. He has held academic positions at George Mason University and the University of Tennessee.
Go to Profile#20702
Lil Uzi Vert
#20713
Overall Influence
1995 - Present (31 years)
Symere Bysil Woods , known professionally as Lil Uzi Vert, is an American rapper, singer, and songwriter. Born and raised in Philadelphia, they gained initial recognition following the release of the commercial mixtape Luv Is Rage , which led to a recording contract with Atlantic Records, to whom they signed under DJ Drama's Generation Now imprint.
Go to Profile#20703
Thomas Rockwell Mackie
#20714
Overall Influence
Thomas “Rock” Mackie is a medical physicist. He grew up in Saskatoon and received his undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Saskatchewan in 1980. He went on to earn his doctorate in Physics at the University of Alberta in 1984. His expertise is in radiation therapy treatment planning and intensity modulated radiation therapy. He is a primary inventor and algorithm designer of the helical tomotherapy concept. Mackie is a professor in the departments of Medical Physics, Human Oncology, Biomedical Engineering and Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has ...
Go to Profile#20704
Casey Stoner
#20715
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Casey Joel Stoner is an Australian retired professional motorcycle racer, and a two-time MotoGP World Champion, in and . During his MotoGP career, Stoner raced for the factory teams of Ducati and Honda, winning a title for each team.
Go to Profile#20705
Marcelle Machluf
#20716
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Marcelle Machluf is an israeli biologist. Biography Machluf was born in Morocco and moved to Israel with her mother and grandmother when she was one year old. She grew up in Ashdod. Her mother supported the family as a seamstress and a cleaning lady.
Go to Profile#20706
Terry Riley
#20717
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape music techniques, and delay systemss. His best known works are the 1964 composition In C and the 1969 LP A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental music, rock, and contemporary electronic music.
Go to Profile#20707
Tim Hardaway
#20718
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Timothy Duane Hardaway Sr. is an American former professional basketball player. Hardaway played in the National Basketball Association for the Golden State Warriors, Miami Heat, Dallas Mavericks, Denver Nuggets and Indiana Pacers. He was a five-time NBA All-Star and All-NBA Team selection. Hardaway won a gold medal with the United States national basketball team at the 2000 Summer Olympics. He was known for his crossover dribble which was dubbed the "UTEP two-step" by television analysts.
Go to Profile#20708
Dominique Bakry
#20719
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Roger-Dominique Bakry , known as Dominique Bakry, is a French mathematician, a professor at the Université Paul-Sabatier in Toulouse, and a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France. Bakry graduated from , and prepared his PhD under the advisory of Paul-André Meyer and Marc Yor. Before coming to Toulouse, he was chargé de recherches at CNRS in Université Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg. His scientific work is at the interface of Analysis, Probability, and Geometry. His most influential works concern Riesz transforms and Markov semigroups. He gave his name to the Bakry-Émery criterion, deve...
Go to Profile#20709
Jane Humphries
#20720
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Katherine Jane Humphries, CBE FBA , is a Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford with the Title of Distinction of professor of economic history. Her research interest has been in economic growth and development and the industrial revolution. She is the former president of the Economic History Society and the current vice-president of the Economic History Association.
Go to Profile#20710
Gennady Mesyats
#20721
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Gennady Andreyevich Mesyats is a Soviet and Russian physicist, founder of several scientific schools — high-current electronics and pulse electrophysics, one of the acknowledged world leaders in these areas.
Go to Profile#20711
Ednan Aslan
#20722
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ednan Aslan is an Austrian-Turkish scholar of Islam and professor of Islamic religious education at the University of Vienna. Biography Aslan was born on November 7, 1959, in Bayburt, Turkey. Aslan graduated from the University of Applied Sciences in Esslingen in 1988. He studied pedagogy and political science at the Universities of Tübingen and Stuttgart from 1990 to 1992. In 1996, he received his doctorate for his research on the religious education of Muslim children in Austria and Germany. Aslan has been a professor of Islamic religious education at the University of Vienna's Institute of...
Go to Profile#20712
Ferdi Schüth
#20723
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ferdi Schüth is a German chemist. He was born 8 July 1960 in Allagen/Warstein. He studied chemistry at the University of Münster from 1978 till 1984 and law from 1983 till 1988. After finishing his Ph.D. thesis on inorganic chemistry at the University of Münster in 1988 he did a postdoctoral studies in the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He did his habilitation in 1995 at the University of Mainz. After being professor for inorganic chemistry at the University of Frankfurt am Main from 1995 till 1998 he became director at the Max Planck Institute für Kohlenforschung Mülheim/Ruhr.
Go to Profile#20713
Augustin Berque
#20724
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Augustin Berque , is a French geographer, Orientalist and philosopher. He is the son of the famous Egyptologist Jacques Berque. He is professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris . His specialist field of interest is Japan.
Go to Profile#20714
Yevgeny Primakov
#20725
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov was a Russian politician and diplomat who served as Prime Minister of Russia from 1998 to 1999. During his long career, he also served as Foreign Minister, Speaker of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, and chief of the intelligence service. Primakov was an academician and a member of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#20715
Ike Turner
#20726
Overall Influence
1931 - 2007 (76 years)
Izear Luster "Ike" Turner Jr. was an American musician, bandleader, songwriter, record producer, and talent scout. An early pioneer of 1950s rock and roll, he is best known for his work in the 1960s and 1970s with his wife Tina Turner as the leader of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue.
Go to Profile#20716
Lucio Russo
#20727
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Lucio Russo is an Italian physicist, mathematician and historian of science. Born in Venice, he teaches at the Mathematics Department of the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Among his main areas of interest are Gibbs measure of the Ising model, percolation theory, and finite Bernoulli schemes, within which he proved an approximate version of the classical Kolmogorov's zero–one law.
Go to Profile#20717
Alan Axelrod
#20728
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Alan Axelrod is a prolific author of history, business and management books. As of October 2018, he had written more than 150 books. Axelrod resides in Atlanta, Georgia. Axelrod received his doctorate in English from the University of Iowa in 1979, specializing in the literature and culture of colonial America and the early republic of the United States. He has taught at Lake Forest College and Furman University, worked as a publishing executive, and has been a consultant to historical museums, cultural institutions, television's Civil War Journal, the WB Network, and the Discovery Channel.
Go to Profile#20718
Jerry Hey
#20729
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jerry Hey is an American trumpeter, flugelhornist, horn arranger, string arranger, orchestrator and session musician who has played on hundreds of commercial recordings, including Michael Jackson's Thriller, Rock with You, Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough, Workin’ Day and Night and the flugelhorn solo on Dan Fogelberg's hit "Longer". Additionally, he has performed with artists such as George Benson, Nik Kershaw, Al Jarreau, Barbra Streisand, Donna Summer, Earth, Wind & Fire, Whitney Houston, Frank Sinatra, George Duke, Lionel Richie, Rufus and Chaka Khan, Natalie Cole, Aretha Franklin, Patti Au...
Go to Profile#20719
Craig Stanford
#20730
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Craig Stanford is Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at the University of Southern California. He is also a Research Associate in the herpetology section of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. He is known for his field studies of the behavior, ecology and conservation biology of chimpanzees, mountain gorillas and other tropical animals, and has published more than 140 scientific papers and 17 books on animal behavior, human evolution and wildlife conservation. He is best known for his field study of the predator–prey ecology of chimpanzees and the animals they hunt ...
Go to Profile#20720
Étienne Borne
#20731
Overall Influence
1907 - 1993 (86 years)
Étienne Vincent Borne was born in Manduel . He was a professor of philosophy Hypokhâgne at Lycée Henri-IV in Paris. Étienne Borne founded the Mouvement republicain populaire , and the French Christian Democratic Party. He was a columnist in the newspaper La Croix. Jacques Derrida was one of his students.
Go to Profile#20721
Toby Berger
#20732
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
Toby Berger was an American information theorist. Early life and education Berger was born in New York City, to a Jewish family. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Yale University in 1962, and doctoral degree in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1968.
Go to Profile#20722
Peter Hook
#20733
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Peter Hook is an English musician, best known as the bassist and co-founder of the rock bands Joy Division and New Order. Hook often used the bass as a lead instrument, playing melodies on the high strings with a signature heavy chorus effect. In New Order, he would do this, leaving the actual basslines to keyboards or sequencers.
Go to Profile#20723
Ralph Weissleder
#20734
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Ralph Weissleder is an American clinician scientist. Biography Ralph Weissleder is a professor at Harvard Medical School, director of the Center for Systems Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and an attending interventional radiologist at MGH.
Go to Profile#20724
Adam D. Smith
#20735
Overall Influence
Adam D. Smith is a computer scientist at Boston University, where he is a founding member of the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences. His areas of research include cryptography and information privacy. He is known, along with Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, and Kobbi Nissim, as one of the co-inventors of differential privacy, for which he won the 2017 Gödel Prize.
Go to Profile#20725
David A. Snow
#20736
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
David A. Snow is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Intellectual Contributions Snow's research constitutes one of the most original and groundbreaking bodies of work in the discipline. While it addresses a number of discrete theoretical and empirical problems, it has the common goal of creating general conceptual tools to comprehend the dynamics of everyday social interaction. Snow’s influence is particularly deep in two areas of the discipline: social movements and social inequality.
Go to Profile#20726
Keith Boykin
#20737
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Keith Boykin is an American TV and film producer, national political commentator, author, and former White House aide to President Bill Clinton. He has made much of this public in his 2022 memoir, Quitting: Why I Left My Job to Live a Life of Freedom.
Go to Profile#20727
Sargent Shriver
#20738
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Robert Sargent Shriver Jr. was an American diplomat, politician, and activist. As the husband of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, he was part of the Kennedy family. Shriver was the driving force behind the creation of the Peace Corps, and founded the Job Corps, Head Start, VISTA, Upward Bound, and other programs as the architect of the 1960s War on Poverty. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for vice president in the 1972 presidential election.
Go to Profile#20728
Paul Henry Lang
#20739
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Paul Henry Lang was a Hungarian-American musicologist and music critic. Career Lang was born as "Pál Láng" in Budapest, Hungary, and was educated in Catholic schools. In 1918, as World War I was coming to an end, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army though he had not completed school, and sent to the Italian front. When the war ended, he had to make his own way home, and then studied at the University of Budapest and the Budapest Music Academy, under Zoltán Kodály and Erno Dohnanyi, among others. Kodály, learning that he only played piano, assigned him to learn to play the bassoon. A...
Go to Profile#20729
Monica Grady
#20740
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Monica Mary Grady, CBE , is a leading British space scientist, primarily known for her work on meteorites. She is currently Professor of Planetary and Space Science at the Open University and is also the Chancellor of Liverpool Hope University.
Go to Profile#20730
Cory Ondrejka
#20741
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Cory Ondrejka was the Chief Technology Officer of Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. With Philip Rosedale, Ondrejka co-founded Second Life and played a significant role in the architecture of the product. After leaving Linden Lab, Ondrejka became Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy for the EMI Group until he left EMI in September 2009. He also was vice president of engineering at Facebook.
Go to Profile#20731
Peter Drucker
#20742
Overall Influence
1909 - 2005 (96 years)
Peter Ferdinand Drucker was an Austrian American management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of modern management theory. He was also a leader in the development of management education, and invented the concepts known as management by objectives and self-control, and he has been described as "the founder of modern management".
Go to Profile#20732
Raymond L. Orbach
#20743
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Raymond Lee Orbach is an American physicist and administrator. He served as Under Secretary for Science in the United States Department of Energy from 2006 until 2009, when he was replaced by Steven E. Koonin. Until his resignation in December 2012, Orbach was director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Orbach continues to do research as a tenured professor in the Cockrell Family Dean's Chair for Engineering Excellence at the University of Texas.
Go to Profile#20733
John McCracken
#20744
Overall Influence
1934 - 2011 (77 years)
John Harvey McCracken was a minimalist artist. He lived and worked in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and New York. Education/teaching After graduating from high school, McCracken served in the United States Navy for four years before enrolling in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, earning a B.F.A. in 1962 and completing most of the work for an M.F.A. During these years he studied with Gordon Onslow Ford and Tony DeLap.
Go to Profile#20734
Tom Turner
#20745
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Tom Turner is an English landscape architect, garden designer and garden historian teaching at the University of Greenwich in London. He is the author of books and articles on landscape and gardens and is the editor of the Garden History Reference Encyclopedia. Educated at the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, he studied landscape architecture under Frank Clark.
Go to Profile#20735
Carlotta Walls LaNier
#20746
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Carlotta Walls LaNier is the youngest of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students who, in 1957, were the first black students ever to attend classes at Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States. She was the first black female to graduate from Central High School. In 1999, LaNier and the rest of the Little Rock Nine were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Bill Clinton. LaNier was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 2004 and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2015.
Go to Profile#20736
Barclay Kamb
#20747
Overall Influence
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Walter Barclay Kamb was a longtime professor and researcher at the California Institute of Technology . Professor Kamb was one of the first scientists to journey to the Antarctic to study how the glacier sheets move and operate. He is listed as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the Geology department.
Go to Profile#20737
Yale Kamisar
#20748
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Yale Kamisar was an American legal scholar and writer who was the Clarence Darrow Distinguished University Professor of Law Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. A "nationally recognized authority on constitutional law and criminal procedure", Kamisar is known as the "father of Miranda" for his influential role in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona .
Go to Profile#20738
Forrest Gander
#20749
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#20739
Idith Zertal
#20750
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Idith Zertal is an Israeli historian, considered one of the "New Historians". Career After a career in journalism, Zertal began a career as a professor of history and cultural anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Chicago and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.
Go to Profile#20740
Janet Napolitano
#20751
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Janet Ann Napolitano is an American politician, lawyer, and university administrator who served as the 21st governor of Arizona from 2003 to 2009 and third United States secretary of homeland security from 2009 to 2013, under President Barack Obama. She was named president of the University of California system in September 2013, and stepped down from that position on August 1, 2020 to join the faculty at the Goldman School of Public Policy. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
Go to Profile#20741
Maynard James Keenan
#20752
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Maynard James Keenan is an American singer, songwriter, philanthropist, record producer, and winemaker. He is best known as the singer and primary lyricist of the rock bands Tool, A Perfect Circle, and Puscifer.
Go to Profile#20742
Marcus Allen
#20753
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Marcus LeMarr Allen is an American former football running back who played in the National Football League for 16 seasons, primarily with the Los Angeles Raiders. Considered one of the greatest goal line and short-yard runners in NFL history, he was selected 10th overall by the Raiders in the 1982 NFL Draft, following a successful college football career at USC. He was a member of the Raiders for 11 seasons and spent his last five seasons with the Kansas City Chiefs.
Go to Profile#20743
Martha Schwartz
#20754
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Martha Schwartz is an American landscape architect and educator. Schwartz is the founding principal of Martha Schwartz Partners, an architecture firm based in London, New York City, and Shanghai. She is also Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Go to Profile#20744
Martin Hautzinger
#20755
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Martin Hautzinger is a German psychologist and professor. Early life Hautzinger was born in Frankenbach, Heilbronn in 1950. Career Martin Hautzinger studied psychology from 1971 to 1976 in Bochum and at the Free University of Berlin. In 1980 he was awarded his doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#20745
Thorsten Altenkirch
#20756
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Thorsten Altenkirch is a German Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham known for his research on logic, type theory, and homotopy type theory. Altenkirch was part of the 2012/2013 special year on univalent foundations at the Institute for Advanced Study. At Nottingham he co-chairs the Functional Programming Laboratory with Graham Hutton.
Go to Profile#20746
Helen Dunmore
#20757
Overall Influence
1952 - 2017 (65 years)
Helen Dunmore FRSL was a British poet, novelist, and short story and children's writer. Her best known works include the novels Zennor in Darkness, A Spell of Winter and The Siege, and her last book of poetry Inside the Wave. She won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction, the National Poetry Competition, and posthumously the Costa Book Award.
Go to Profile#20747
Robert D. Braun
#20758
Overall Influence
Robert David Braun is an American aerospace engineer and academic. He has served as the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, the David and Andrew Lewis Professor of Space Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the NASA Chief Technologist. Currently, Dr. Braun is the Space Sector Head at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory .
Go to Profile#20748
Chuck Hagel
#20759
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Charles Timothy Hagel is an American military veteran and former politician who served as a United States senator from Nebraska from 1997 to 2009 and as the 24th United States secretary of defense from 2013 to 2015 in the Obama administration.
Go to Profile#20749
Christopher Shackle
#20760
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Christopher Shackle, is Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages of South Asia at the University of London. Life and career Christopher Shackle was born on 4 March 1942. He was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College, and went up to Merton College, Oxford in 1959 to read Oriental Studies, graduating with a first class degree in 1963. He then went on to study as a postgraduate at St Antony's College.
Go to Profile#20750
Moncef Slaoui
#20761
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Moncef Mohamed Slaoui is a Moroccan-born Belgian-American researcher who served as the head of Operation Warp Speed under President Donald Trump from 2020 to 2021. Slaoui is the former head of the vaccines department at GlaxoSmithKline . He worked at the company for thirty years, retiring in 2017. On May 15, 2020, President Donald Trump announced that Slaoui would manage the U.S. government's development of a vaccine used to treat coronavirus disease in OPWASP; Slaoui resigned on January 12, 2021 after successfully having helped introduce a number of vaccines to the US and global markets. In...
Go to Profile