The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#20851
Edward Jones
#20862
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Prof. Edward Jones, CBE RIBA is an English architect, born in St Albans 20 October 1939. He is married to Canadian architect Margot Griffin. Career After schooling at Haileybury, Jones trained at the Architectural Association, where he met his future architectural partner Jeremy Dixon. They formed an informal practice in the mid sixties, which Peter Cook referred to as "The Grunt Group" to promote the modernist agenda.
Go to Profile#20852
John L. Behler
#20863
Overall Influence
1946 - 2006 (60 years)
John L. Behler was an American naturalist, herpetologist, author, and activist known for his work in conserving endangered species of turtles, snakes, and other reptiles. He served as curator of herpetology at the Bronx Zoo, part of the Wildlife Conservation Society from 1976 to 2006. He co-chaired the IUCN Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group, and was a founding member of the Turtle Survival Alliance, which co-present the Behler Turtle Conservation Award with the Turtle Conservancy and Turtle Conservation Fund. The Behler Turtle Conservation Award is a major annual award to honor leadership in the field of freshwater turtle and tortoise conservation.
Go to Profile#20853
Peter Kitson
#20864
Overall Influence
Peter J. Kitson is a British academic and author. He is a Professor of Romantic Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia where he teaches and researches the literature and culture of the British Romantic era.
Go to Profile#20854
Servais-Théodore Pinckaers
#20865
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Servais-Théodore Pinckaers OP was a noted moral theologian, Roman Catholic priest, and member of the Dominican Order . He has been especially influential in the renewal of a theological and Christological approach to Christian virtue ethics.
Go to Profile#20855
Rahul Gandhi
#20866
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Rahul Rajiv Gandhi is an Indian politician and a member of the Indian Parliament, who represents the constituency of Wayanad, Kerala in the Lok Sabha. He previously represented the constituency of Amethi, Uttar Pradesh. He is a member of the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress and was the party president from December 2017 to July 2019. He is the chairperson of the Indian Youth Congress, the National Students Union of India and a trustee of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust. He is the son of the former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi
Go to Profile#20856
Rafael Robb
#20867
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Rafael Robb is an economist and former professor at the University of Pennsylvania who confessed to killing his wife in 2006. Academic career Robb received his bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He went on to obtain a Ph.D. in economics at UCLA. Robb joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1984, and was a tenured professor at the time of his arrest in 2007.
Go to Profile#20857
Gadis Arivia
#20868
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Gadis Arivia is an Indonesian feminist philosopher, lecturer, scholar, and activist. While teaching feminism and philosophy at the University of Indonesia, Arivia founded , Indonesia's first feminist journal, in 1996. She was arrested by the Suharto government for protesting against the regime in 1998.
Go to Profile#20858
Franciszek Kokot
#20869
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Franciszek Kokot was a Polish nephrologist and endocrinologist. He was known as a pioneer of nephrology in Eastern Europe. Kokot was a full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, having previously served as its rector.
Go to Profile#20859
James Purdy
#20870
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
James Otis Purdy was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, from his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and in 2013 his short stories were collected in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy.
Go to Profile#20860
William J. Abraham
#20871
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
William James Abraham was a Northern Irish theologian, analytic philosopher, and Methodist pastor known for his contributions to the philosophy of religion, religious epistemology, evangelism, and church renewal. Abraham spent most of his career in the United States and was the Albert Cook Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. He previously taught at Seattle Pacific University and was a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School. Abraham was associated with the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church and was a propone...
Go to Profile#20861
Charles Spence
#20872
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Charles Spence is an experimental psychologist at the University of Oxford. He is the head of the Crossmodal Research group which specializes in the research about the integration of information across different sensory modalities. He also teaches Experimental Psychology to undergraduates at Somerville College. He is currently a consultant for a number of multinational companies advising on various aspects of multisensory design. He has also conducted research on human-computer interaction issues on the Crew Work Station on the European Space Shuttle, and currently works on problems associated...
Go to Profile#20862
Steve Schneider
#20873
Overall Influence
Steven Emil Schneider was an American Branch Davidian commonly called a "lieutenant" to David Koresh, the leader of the new religious movement. He was formally married to Judy Schneider, but in the community Koresh impregnated Judy and she bore a child with him. Steve Schneider was raised in a Seventh-day Adventist household in Wisconsin. Schneider studied at Newbold College in the United Kingdom, and eventually worked to receive a Ph.D. in comparative religion at the University of Hawaiʻi. In approximately 1986, Schneider encountered Marc Breault, an indigenous Hawaiian Branch Davidian, and ...
Go to Profile#20863
Jack Collom
#20874
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
John Aldridge "Jack" Collom was an American poet, essayist, and creative writing pedagogue. Included among the twenty-five books he published during his lifetime were Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955–2000; Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community; and Second Nature, which won the 2013 Colorado Book Award for Poetry. In the fields of education and creative writing, he was involved in eco-literature, ecopoetics, and writing instruction for children.
Go to Profile#20864
Svetlana Boym
#20875
Overall Influence
1959 - 2015 (56 years)
Svetlana Boym was a Russian-American cultural theorist, visual and media artist, playwright and novelist. She was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University. She was an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at Harvard University. Much of her work focused on developing the new theoretical concept of the off-modern.
Go to Profile#20865
Kwame Alexander
#20876
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kwame Alexander is an American writer of poetry and children's fiction. Personal life and education Alexander was born in Manhattan, New York, and grew up in Virginia. His father was a scholar and book publisher and his mother was an educator so he was always surrounded by books.
Go to Profile#20866
George Brett
#20877
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
George Howard Brett is an American former professional baseball third baseman who played 21 seasons in Major League Baseball for the Kansas City Royals. Brett's 3,154 career hits are second most by any third baseman in major league history and rank 18th all-time. He is one of five players in MLB history to accumulate 3,000 hits, 300 home runs, and a career .300 batting average . He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1999 on the first ballot and is the only player in MLB history to win a batting title in three different decades. He was also a member of the Royals' 1985 World Series victory over the St.
Go to Profile#20867
Mikhail Kasyanov
#20878
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Mikhail Mikhailovich Kasyanov is a Russian politician who served as Prime Minister of Russia from 2000 to 2004. Previously, he had served as First Deputy Prime Minister in 2000 and Minister of Finance from 1999 to 2000. During the 1990s, he worked in President Boris Yeltsin's administration in different positions before joining President Vladimir Putin's first administration. He has the federal state civilian service rank of 1st class Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation.
Go to Profile#20868
Bill Nichols
#20879
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
See also Bill Nichols . Bill Nichols is an American film critic and theoretician best known for his pioneering work as founder of the contemporary study of documentary film. His 1991 book, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, applied modern film theory to the study of documentary film for the first time. It has been followed by scores of books by others and by additional books and essays by Nichols. The first volume of his two-volume anthology Movies and Methods helped to establish film studies as an academic discipline. Nichols is Professor Emeritus in the Cinema Depar...
Go to Profile#20869
Oliver Rathkolb
#20880
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Oliver Rathkolb is an Austrian historian and professor for contemporary history at the University of Vienna. Career Rathkolb studied history and law at the University of Vienna and achieved his doctorate in 1982 at the same university.
Go to Profile#20870
François Ortalo-Magné
#20881
Overall Influence
François Ortalo-Magné is a UK-based European academic. He became the dean of the London Business School in August 2017, succeeding Andrew Likierman. Early life François Ortalo-Magné graduated from the École d'ingénieurs de Purpan, where he earned a master's degree in 1990. He went on to earn a PhD in Economics from the University of Minnesota in 1995.
Go to Profile#20871
Samuel Hynes
#20882
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Samuel Lynn Hynes was an American author. He won a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for The Soldiers' Tale in 1998. Biography Hynes was born in Chicago, Illinois. He attended the University of Minnesota and Columbia University.
Go to Profile#20872
Elisa New
#20883
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Elisa New is an American academic who is the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. Early life and education She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in Maryland. New's father was an engineer and computer scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and her mother worked as a party planner. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brandeis University , as well as a Master of Arts and PhD from Columbia University .
Go to Profile#20873
Rosario Fernández
#20884
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Rosario del Pilar Fernández Figueroa is a Peruvian politician. She is a former Prime Minister of Peru and Minister of Justice. Biography Fernández was born in Lima, Peru. She is the daughter of Joffré Fernández Valdivieso, a constitutional lawyer and former Deputy and Minister of Justice from 1985 to 1990.
Go to Profile#20874
C. Terry Warner
#20885
Overall Influence
C. Terry Warner is an American academic, author and business consultant. He founded the Arbinger Institute, which does consulting and training based on his academic work on the foundations of human behavior and self-deception. In writings and seminars, Warner argues that people are responsible for their own actions and even negative emotions which are often used to accuse others rather than responding to their needs, and that people therefore have the power to free their relationships with others from negativity.
Go to Profile#20875
W. David Sincoskie
#20886
Overall Influence
1954 - 2010 (56 years)
Walter David "Dave" Sincoskie was an American computer engineer. Sincoskie installed the first Ethernet local area network at Bellcore, and helped invent voice over IP technology. Sincoskie authored the first local ATM specification. He is also the inventor of the VLAN.
Go to Profile#20876
Frank Bournois
#20887
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Frank Bournois is a French academic. He was appointed on 17 February 2023 to be the vice-president and dean of CEIBS, effective 1 April 2023, under the presidency of Professor Wang Hong and Dominique Turpin. He was previously the Executive President and dean of ESCP Business School from August 2014 to January 2023, and professor of general management, European management and cross-cultural leadership at Panthéon-Assas University . He specialises in the study of how very large corporate organisations identify, develop and manage their future top level leaders.
Go to Profile#20877
Juan Mata
#20888
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Juan Manuel Mata García is a Spanish professional footballer who plays for J1 League club Vissel Kobe. He primarily plays as an attacking midfielder, but he can also play as a winger. A graduate of Real Madrid's youth academy, Mata played for Real Madrid Castilla in 2006–07, before joining Valencia in the summer of 2007. He became an integral part of the club's midfield, making 174 appearances over the course of four seasons and winning the Copa del Rey. In 2011, Mata signed for English club Chelsea for a fee believed to be in the region of €28 million and established himself as the team's focal player.
Go to Profile#20878
Sharon Traweek
#20889
Overall Influence
Sharon Jean Traweek is associate professor in the Department of Gender Studies and History at University of California, Los Angeles. Her book Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists, which explores the social world of particle physicists, has been cited in thousands of books and articles relating to the sociology of science and translated into Chinese in 2003.
Go to Profile#20879
Charles F. McMillan
#20890
Overall Influence
Charles F. McMillan is an American nuclear physicist and served as the 10th director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His appointment was effective June 1, 2011. He succeeded Michael R. Anastasio. On September 5, 2017, McMillan announced he would be leaving the director position at the end of the year.
Go to Profile#20880
Daniel Yankelovich
#20891
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Daniel Yankelovich was an American public opinion analyst and social scientist. Education and career After attending Boston Latin School, Yankelovich graduated from Harvard University in 1946 and 1950 before completing postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne in France. As a psychology professor he has taught at New York University and The New School for Social Research. In 1996 he served as Senior Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Go to Profile#20881
Ishmael Beah
#20892
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Ishmael Beah is a Sierra Leonean author and human rights activist who rose to fame with his acclaimed memoir, A Long Way Gone. His novel Radiance of Tomorrow was published in January 2014. His most recent novel Little Family was published in April 2020.
Go to Profile#20882
Lawrence Blum
#20893
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Lawrence Alan Blum is an American philosopher who is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is known for his work in the philosophy of education, moral philosophy, and race.
Go to Profile#20883
Elina Haavio-Mannila
#20894
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Elina Haavio-Mannila is a Finnish social scientist and Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Helsinki where she served as the Docent of Sociology , Assistant Professor , and Professor . She is known for researching gender roles and gender in Finnish life. Much of the research in the latter field was done together with Osmo Kontula. In 1958, she became the first woman in Finland to earn the Doctor in Social Sciences degree.
Go to Profile#20884
Ebrahim Moosa
#20895
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ebrahim Moosa is the Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought & Muslim Societies at the University of Notre Dame with appointments in the Department of History and in the Kroc Institute for International Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs. He is co-director of the Contending Modernities program at Notre Dame. He was previously Professor of Religion and Islamic Studies at Duke University. He is considered a leading scholar of contemporary Muslim thought. Moosa has been named as one of the top 500 Influential Muslims in the World.
Go to Profile#20885
Emmanuel Haven
#20896
Overall Influence
Emmanuel Haven is an academic, author and researcher. He previously held a personal Chair at the University of Leicester and is currently full professor and the Dr. Alex Faseruk Chair in Financial Management at the Faculty of Business Administration, Memorial University.
Go to Profile#20886
Åke Senning
#20897
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Åke Senning was a Swedish cardiac surgeon who worked at Zurich University Hospital from 1961 until his retirement in 1985. Biography Åke Senning was born to the Swedish veterinarian David Senning and the nurse Elly Senning, née Säfström. He finished his schooling in Uppsala with the baccalaureate. He actually wanted to become an engineer. However, as a nurse in World War 1, his mother persuaded him to study medicine. He subsequently completed the pre-clinical part of his studies in Uppsala, the clinical part and his state examination in Stockholm in 1948. His subsequent further training in Stockholm included general surgery, orthopaedics and thoracic and neurosurgery.
Go to Profile#20887
Tom Wigley
#20898
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Tom Michael Lampe Wigley is a climate scientist at the University of Adelaide. He is also affiliated with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research . He was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his major contributions to climate and carbon cycle modeling and to climate data analysis, and because he is "one of the world's foremost experts on climate change and one of the most highly cited scientists in the discipline." His Web of Science h-index is 75, and his Google Scholar h-index is 114 . He has contributed to many of the reports publishe...
Go to Profile#20888
Manohla Dargis
#20899
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Manohla June Dargis is an American film critic. She is the chief film critic for The New York Times. She is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Career Before being a film critic for The New York Times, Dargis was a chief film critic for the Los Angeles Times, the film editor at the LA Weekly, and a film critic at The Village Voice, where she had two columns on avant-garde cinema . Her work has been included in a number of books, including Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader and American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, published by the Library of America.
Go to Profile#20889
Margalit Finkelberg
#20900
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Margalit Finkelberg is an Israeli historian and linguist. She is the professor emerita of Classics at Tel Aviv University. She became a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2005 and served as president of the Israel Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies from 2011 to 2016.In 2021, she was elected Vice President of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Go to Profile#20890
Andrzej Walicki
#20901
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Andrzej Stanisław Walicki was a Polish historian. He was a professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, United States. He specialized in philosophy of sociopolitics, history of Polish and Russian philosophy, Marxism and liberal thought. He was one of the scholars who formed the "Warsaw School of the History of Ideas".
Go to Profile#20891
Dean Zimmerman
#20902
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Dean W. Zimmerman is an American professor of philosophy at Rutgers University specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of religion. Education and career Zimmerman received his bachelor's degree from Mankato State University in 1987 in French, philosophy, and English. He went on to receive a Master of Arts degree from Brown University in 1990 and then a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the same institution in 1992, where he worked with Jaegwon Kim and Roderick Chisholm. He taught at the University of Notre Dame and Syracuse University prior to joining Rutgers University, where he is also now Director of the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion.
Go to Profile#20892
Saba Soomekh
#20903
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Saba T. Soomekh is an American professor and author. Early life and education Soomekh was born in Tehran, Iran, to a Persian-Jewish family. to Hamid and Manijeh Soomekh. She is a sister of Hollywood actress Bahar Soomekh. The Iranian-Jewish family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1978 to escape the Islamic Revolution of Iran with Soomekh only two years old.
Go to Profile#20893
Samuel Kotz
#20904
Overall Influence
1930 - 2010 (80 years)
Samuel Kotz was a professor and research scholar in the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science at The George Washington University since 1997 until his death on March 16, 2010. He was an author or editor of several standard reference works in statistics and probability theory.
Go to Profile#20894
George Erik Rupp
#20905
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
George Erik Rupp is an American educator and theologian, who served successively as president of Rice University, Columbia University, and the International Rescue Committee. Biography Rupp was born in Summit, New Jersey, the son of German immigrant parents, and was raised in Springfield Township, Union County, New Jersey. He studied in Germany before graduating from Princeton University with an A.B. in English in 1964 after completing a senior thesis titled "A Theatre of Ideas: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century German and English Drama." He then received a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School and, after studying for a year in Sri Lanka, a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#20895
Roxana Mehran
#20906
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Roxana Mehran is an Iranian-American cardiologist and Mount Sinai Endowed Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is known for her work in interventional cardiology.
Go to Profile#20896
David McLellan
#20907
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
David McLellan is an English scholar of Marxism. He has written extensively on the thought of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Simone Weil. Life David McLellan was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St. John's College, Oxford University.
Go to Profile#20897
Henry de Lumley
#20908
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Henry de Lumley is a French archeologist, geologist and prehistorian. He is director of the Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris, and Professor Emeritus at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. He is also a corresponding member of the Academy of Humanities of the Institute of France and former director of the French National Museum of Natural History. He is best known for his work on archeological sites in France and Spain, notably Arago cave in Tautavel, Southern France, Terra Amata in Nice and Grotte du Lazaret near Nice, and Baume Bonne at Quinson, where some of the earliest ev...
Go to Profile#20898
Leela Majumdar
#20909
Overall Influence
1908 - 2007 (99 years)
Leela Majumdar was an Indian Bengali-language writer. Early life Born to Surama Devi and Pramada Ranjan Ray , Leela spent her childhood days at Shillong, where she studied at the Loreto Convent. Surama Devi had been adopted by Upendra Kishor Ray Choudhuri . Lila's grandfather had left his younger two daughters in care of his friends after his wife died. The eldest daughter was sent to a boarding house. Her maternal grandfather was Ramkumar Bhattacharya, who later became a sannyasi and was christened Ramananda Bharati. He was the first among Indians to visit Kailash and Mansarovar and wrote a travelogue Himaranya.
Go to Profile#20899
Zoghman Mebkhout
#20910
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Zoghman Mebkhout is a French-Algerian mathematician. He is known for his work in algebraic analysis, geometry and representation theory, more precisely on the theory of D-moduless. Career Mebkhout is currently a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and in 2002 Zoghman received the Servant Medal from the CNRS a prize given every two years with an amount of €10,000.
Go to Profile#20900
Michael Gambon
#20911
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sir Michael John Gambon was an Irish-English actor. Gambon started his acting career with Laurence Olivier as one of the original members of the Royal National Theatre. Over his six-decade-long career, he received three Olivier Awards and four BAFTA TV Awards. In 1998, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to drama.
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