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
#20801
I. Glenn Cohen
#20812
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
I. Glenn Cohen is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is also the director of Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. Cohen has written a number of articles, appearing in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine; JAMA; Cell; Nature; the Harvard, Stanford, Southern California, Minnesota, Iowa, and Hastings Law Reviews; the Harvard Journal of Law and Negotiation; the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology; the Food and Drug Law Journal; the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics; and the Hastings Center Reports. He has giv...
Go to Profile#20802
Dick Durbin
#20813
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Richard Joseph Durbin is an American lawyer and politician serving as the senior United States senator from Illinois, a seat he has held since 1997. A member of the Democratic Party, Durbin is in his fifth Senate term and has served as the Senate Democratic whip since 2005 and as the Senate majority whip since 2021. He chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, and led the Ketanji Brown Jackson Supreme Court nomination hearings.
Go to Profile#20803
John Prescott
#20814
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
John Leslie Prescott, Baron Prescott is a British politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and as First Secretary of State from 2001 to 2007. A member of the Labour Party, he was Member of Parliament for Kingston upon Hull East for 40 years, from 1970 to 2010. He was seen as the political link to the working class in a Labour Party increasingly led by modernising, middle-class professionals such as Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson and developed a reputation as a key conciliator in the often stormy relationship between Blair and Gordon Brown.
Go to Profile#20804
Fritz G. A. Kraemer
#20815
Overall Influence
1908 - 2003 (95 years)
Fritz Gustav Anton Kraemer was an American military educator and advisor. He was Senior Civilian Advisor to the Army Chief of Staff. He is often credited with discovering Henry Kissinger, with whom he maintained a close relationship, and Alexander Haig.
Go to Profile#20805
Mitchell Wand
#20816
Overall Influence
Mitchell Wand is a computer science professor at Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has centred on programming languages and he is a member of the Northeastern Programming Research Lab. He is also the co-author, with Daniel P. Friedman and Christopher T. Haynes, of Essentials of Programming Languages.
Go to Profile#20806
Daniel Chandler
#20817
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Daniel Chandler is a British visual semiotician based since 2001 at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University, where he has taught since 1989. His best-known publication is Semiotics: The Basics , which is frequently used as a basis for university courses in semiotics, and the online version Semiotics for Beginners . He has a particular interest in the visual semiotics of gender and advertising.
Go to Profile#20807
Sting
#20818
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Steve Borden , better known by the ring name Sting, is an American professional wrestler currently signed to All Elite Wrestling . Sting was an active professional wrestler from 1985 to 2015, returned to wrestling in 2020, and will retire from competition in 2024.
Go to Profile#20808
Mohammad Tabibian
#20819
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Seyed Mohammad Tabibian is an Iranian economist who served under the administration of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as deputy director of the Planning and Budget Organization. He left to help found the Institute for Management and Planning studies in Tehran as of the early 1990s. He has also taught at the Isfahan University of Technology. Tabibian was head of groups made First Five Year Plan and Second Five Year Plan of Iran .
Go to Profile#20809
Brian Morris
#20820
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Brian Morris is emeritus professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. He is a specialist on folk taxonomy, ethnobotany and ethnozoology, and on religion and symbolism. He has carried out fieldwork among South Asian hunter-gatherers and in Malawi. Groups that he has studied include the Ojibwa.
Go to Profile#20810
Bertrand Stern
#20821
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Bertrand Stern is a German author and philosopher living in Siegburg. He describes himself as a freischaffender Philosoph . He focuses on issues critical to civilization with regard to human dignity, in particular the outbreak from the school ideology and aspects of free education, as well as questions about medicine and health, money and work, and transport and mobility.
Go to Profile#20811
Lawrence Stepelevich
#20822
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Lawrence S. Stepelevich was an Americann philosopher associated with a renewed interest in the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union, with less emphasis placed on Karl Marx's interpretations than had previously been the case. Stepelevich also wrote on the works of Max Stirner.
Go to Profile#20812
Leonard Lerman
#20823
Overall Influence
1925 - 2012 (87 years)
Leonard Solomon Lerman was an American scientist most noted for his work on DNA. Life and career Lerman was born and raised in Pittsburgh, the son of Freamah and Meyer Lerman, Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. His father was a department store buyer. Lerman began attending the Carnegie Institute of Technology before graduating from high school and received his BS in five semesters. As a graduate student with Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology, Lerman discovered that antibodies have two binding sites. Later, perhaps his most important discovery was that certain molecules bind to DNA by intercalation.
Go to Profile#20813
Kenneth Murray
#20824
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Sir Kenneth "Ken" Murray FRS FRSE FRCPath was a British molecular biologist and the Biogen Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Edinburgh. An important early figure in genetic engineering, Murray cofounded Biogen. There, he and his team developed one of the first vaccines against hepatitis B. Along with his wife, biologist Lady Noreen , Murray also founded the Darwin Trust of Edinburgh, a charity supporting young biologists in their doctoral studies.
Go to Profile#20814
Deborah Fouts
#20825
Overall Influence
Deborah Fouts was the co-director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute . CHCI was the home of Washoe, the first non-human to acquire a human language, and three other chimpanzees who use the signs of American Sign Language to communicate with each other and their human caregivers. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington. She is married to former co-director, now retired Roger Fouts.
Go to Profile#20815
David L. Kirp
#20826
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David Kirp is a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the National Academy of Education, a contributing writer to The New York Times and a senior scholar at the Learning Policy Institute, a "think-and-do" tank. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education. In his seventeen books and hundreds of articles, he has concentrated on pivotal education and youth issues from cradle to college and career.
Go to Profile#20816
Amit Sheth
#20827
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Amit Sheth is a computer scientist at University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. He is the founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute, and a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. From 2007 to June 2019, he was the Lexis Nexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, director of the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing, and a Professor of Computer Science at Wright State University. Sheth's work has been cited by over 48,800 publications. He has an h-index of 106, which puts him among the top 100 computer scientists with the highest h-index. Prior to f...
Go to Profile#20817
Keith Pavitt
#20828
Overall Influence
1937 - 2002 (65 years)
Keith Pavitt was an English scholar in the field of Science and Technology Policy and Innovation Management. He was professor of Science and Technology Policy at the Science Policy Research Unit of the University of Sussex from 1984 to his death.
Go to Profile#20818
Peter Andreas
#20829
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Peter Andreas is an American political scientist. Since 2014, he has been the John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Common themes of across his work include war, borders, and shadow economies in Europe and the Americas.
Go to Profile#20819
Rajeev Masand
#20830
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Rajeev Masand is an Indian film critic and journalist. He has worked for Noida based English language news channel CNN-Indian Broadcasting Network . He usually reviews Bollywood films and major Hollywood films released in India in his weekend show Now Showing.
Go to Profile#20820
R. Bowen Loftin
#20831
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Richard Bowen Loftin , better known as R. Bowen Loftin, is an American academic and physicist who was the 22nd Chancellor of the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. Prior to his appointment as chancellor, he served as the 24th president of Texas A&M University.
Go to Profile#20821
Umesh Waghmare
#20832
Overall Influence
Umesh Waghmare is an Indian physicist, and presently a Professor in the Theoretical Sciences Unit at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. Research in his Materials Theory Group is fundamentally based on computer simulations of electronic motion governed by quantum physics and resulting electron-mediated inter-atomic interactions which are responsible for multi-scale behaviour of materials. Deriving material-specific information on chemical bonding and microscopic couplings that are essential to the specific properties of a material, they develop fundamental understanding of a material in terms of its atomic structure and electronic structure.
Go to Profile#20822
Dan Inosanto
#20833
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Dan Inosanto is an American martial arts instructor. Inosanto is an authority on Jeet Kune Do, Filipino Martial Arts, and Pencak Silat. Inosanto is credited for training martial arts to a number of Hollywood actors including Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris and others.
Go to Profile#20823
John Galvin
#20834
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
John Rogers Galvin was an American army general who served as the sixth dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a member of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century.
Go to Profile#20824
Magda B. Arnold
#20835
Overall Influence
1903 - 2002 (99 years)
Magda Blondiau Arnold was a Canadian psychologist who was the first contemporary theorist to develop appraisal theory of emotions, which moved away from "feeling" theories and "behaviorist" theories toward the cognitive approach. She also created a new method of scoring the Thematic Apperception Test called Story Sequence Analysis.
Go to Profile#20825
Joia Mukherjee
#20836
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Joia Stapleton Mukherjee is an associate professor with the Division of Global Health Equity at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Since 2000, she has served as the Chief Medical Officer of Partners In Health, an international medical non-profit founded by Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl, and Jim Kim. She trained in Infectious Disease, Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics at the Massachusetts General Hospital and has an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Mukherjee has been involved in health care access and ...
Go to Profile#20826
Richard C. Anderson
#20837
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Richard C. Anderson is an American educational psychologist who has published influential research on children's reading, vocabulary growth, and story discussions that promote thinking. He is the director of the Center for the Study of Reading and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Anderson is a past president of the American Educational Research Association.
Go to Profile#20827
Ralph Bakshi
#20838
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Ralph Bakshi is an American animator, film-maker and painter. In the 1970s, he established an alternative to mainstream animation through independent and adult-oriented productions. Between 1972 and 1992, he directed nine theatrically released feature films, predominantly urban dramass and fantasy films, five of which he wrote. He has also been involved in numerous television projects as director, writer, producer and animator.
Go to Profile#20828
Siouxsie Sioux
#20839
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Susan Janet Ballion , known professionally as Siouxsie Sioux , is an English singer, songwriter, musician and record producer. She came to prominence as the leader and main lyricist of the rock band Siouxsie and the Banshees, who were active from 1976 to 1996. They released 11 studio albums, and had several UK Top 20 singles including "Hong Kong Garden", "Happy House" and "Peek-a-Boo", plus a US Top 25 single in the Billboard Hot 100, with "Kiss Them for Me".
Go to Profile#20829
Irene Fonseca
#20840
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Irene Maria Quintanilha Coelho da Fonseca is a Portuguese-American applied mathematician, the Kavčić-Moura University Professor of Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, where she directs the Center for Nonlinear Analysis.
Go to Profile#20830
Angelika Neuwirth
#20841
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Angelika Neuwirth is a German Islamic studies scholar and professor of Quranic studies at Freie University in Berlin. Quranic education Born in Nienburg, Lower Saxony, she studied Islamic studies, semitic studies and classical philology at the Universities of Berlin, Tehran, Göttingen, Jerusalem, and Munich.
Go to Profile#20831
Gunnar Öquist
#20842
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Gunnar Öquist is a Swedish biologist and professor of plant physiology at Umeå University, and served as the permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 2003 to 2010. He graduated from Uppsala University in 1967 and enrolled in postgraduate studies in Umeå in 1968. He earned his Ph.D. at Umeå University in 1972 with the Thesis Some effects of light intensity and iron deficiency on pigmentation and photosynthesis in the blue-green alga Anacystis nidulans. He was made docent in plant physiology 1974. After two years at Lund University he returned to Umeå in 1976 and was ma...
Go to Profile#20832
Anna Wienhard
#20843
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Anna Katharina Wienhard is a German mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry, and especially the use of higher Teichmüller spaces to study the deformation theory of symmetric geometric structures. She is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences.
Go to Profile#20833
Amin J. Barakat
#20844
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Amin J. Barakat is a Lebanese-American physician known for the diagnosis Barakat syndrome. Barakat was in full-time pediatric practice at Northern Virginia Pediatric Associates before retiring in 2020. He is certified by the American Board of Pediatrics. He is also clinical professor of pediatrics and pediatric nephrology at Georgetown University. Barakat is a member of the ALSAC/St Jude Children's Research Hospital Leadership Council, and president of the American Foundation for Saint George Hospital.
Go to Profile#20834
Robert C. Tucker
#20845
Overall Influence
1918 - 2010 (92 years)
Robert Charles Tucker was an American political scientist and historian. Tucker is best remembered as a biographer of Joseph Stalin and as an analyst of the Soviet political system, which he saw as dynamic rather than unchanging.
Go to Profile#20835
Harry Shearer
#20846
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Harry Julius Shearer is an American actor, comedian, musician, radio host, writer, and producer. Born in Los Angeles, California, Shearer began his career as a child actor. From 1969 to 1976, Shearer was a member of The Credibility Gap, a radio comedy group. Following the breakup of the group, Shearer co-wrote the film Real Life with Albert Brooks and worked as a writer on Martin Mull's television series Fernwood 2 Night.
Go to Profile#20836
Andreas Rett
#20847
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
Andreas Rett was an Austrian neurologist and author. He is famous for his research on neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly for his description of Rett syndrome, which was named after him, and for pioneering treatment based on the belief that disabled children also have a right to fulfillment of their physical, emotional, and psychological needs. He received many awards, including the Grand Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria.
Go to Profile#20837
Faruk Gül
#20848
Overall Influence
Faruk R. Gül is a Turkish American economist, a professor of economics at Princeton University, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Gül did his undergraduate studies at Boğaziçi University, and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1986, where he was a student of Hugo F. Sonnenschein. He has been on the Princeton faculty since 1995.
Go to Profile#20838
Judy Ho
#20849
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Judy Ho is a triple board-certified and licensed clinical and forensic neuropsychologist, media personality, motivational speaker, clinical researcher, and published author, born in Taipei, Taiwan with dual U.S. citizenship.
Go to Profile#20839
Svetha Venkatesh
#20850
Overall Influence
Svetha Venkatesh is one of the top 15 women in the world in Artificial Intelligence. She is Indian/Australian and is an Alfred Deakin Professor in the Faculty of Science, Engineering & Built Environments, in the Department of Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics at Deakin University, as well as a professor of computer science and director of the Centre for Pattern Recognition and Data Analytics at Deakin. She was elected a Fellow of the International Association of Pattern Recognition in 2004 for her contributions to the "formulation and extraction of semantics in multimedia data". She was...
Go to Profile#20840
Cyrus Habib
#20851
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Kamyar Cyrus Habib is an American Jesuit, former politician, lawyer, and educator who served as the 16th Lieutenant Governor of Washington from 2017 to 2021. As of the time of his departure from office, he was the first and only Iranian American official to hold statewide elected office in the United States.
Go to Profile#20841
John Montague
#20852
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
John Montague was an Irish poet. Born in America, he was raised in Ireland. He published a number of volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories and two volumes of memoir. He was one of the best known Irish contemporary poets. In 1998 he became the first occupant of the Ireland Chair of Poetry . In 2010, he was made a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur, France's highest civil award.
Go to Profile#20842
Samir Khalil Samir
#20853
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Samir Khalil Samir, SJ , is an Egyptian Jesuit priest, Islamic scholar, Orientalist, and Catholic theologian. A professor at the Pontifical Oriental Institute , at the Centre Sèvres , at St Joseph University , and a visiting professor at many academic institutions.
Go to Profile#20843
Hervé Moulin
#20854
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Hervé Moulin is a French mathematician who is the Donald J. Robertson Chair of Economics at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. He is known for his research contributions in mathematical economics, in particular in the fields of mechanism design, social choice, game theory and fair division. He has written five books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles.
Go to Profile#20844
Idriss Déby
#20855
Overall Influence
1952 - 2021 (69 years)
Idriss Déby Itno was a Chadian politician and military officer who was the president of Chad from 1990 until his death in 2021 during the Northern Chad offensive. His term of office of more than 30 years makes him Chad's longest-serving president.
Go to Profile#20845
Martha Farah
#20856
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Martha Julia Farah is a cognitive neuroscience researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. She has worked on an unusually wide range of topics; the citation for her lifetime achievement award from the Association for Psychological Science states that “Her studies on the topics of mental imagery, face recognition, semantic memory, reading, attention, and executive functioning have become classics in the field.”
Go to Profile#20846
Angela Bassett
#20857
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Angela Evelyn Bassett is an American actress. Known for her work in film and television since the 1980s, she has received various accolades, including two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards and seven Primetime Emmy Awards. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2023. She will receive the Academy Honorary Award later in the year.
Go to Profile#20847
Hal Anger
#20858
Overall Influence
1920 - 2005 (85 years)
Hal Oscar Anger was an American electrical engineer and biophysicist at Donner Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, known for his invention of the gamma camera. In all, Anger held 15 patents, many of them for work at the Ernest O. Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. Anger received several awards in recognition of his inventions and their contributions to the field of nuclear medicine. Anger died in Berkeley, California.
Go to Profile#20848
Peter B. Evans
#20859
Overall Influence
1944 - 2012 (68 years)
Peter Evans is an American political sociologist who is Faculty Fellow in International and Public Affairs at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and Professor of Sociology emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#20849
Chris Blattman
#20860
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Christopher Blattman is a Canadian-American economist and political scientist working on conflict, crime, and international development. He is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies and The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts. He is active on Twitter as well as an early blogger on international economics and politics. He is the author of Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, published by Viking Press in 2022.
Go to Profile#20850
Christopher Lloyd
#20861
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Christopher Allen Lloyd is an American actor. He has appeared in many theater productions, films, and on television since the 1960s. He is known for portraying Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown in the Back to the Future trilogy and Jim Ignatowski in the comedy series Taxi , for which he won two Emmy Awards.
Go to Profile