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
#21051
Jianhong Wu
#21062
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jianhong Wu is a Canadian applied mathematician and the founding Director of the Laboratory for Industrial and Applied Mathematics at York University. He is the inaugural Director of the York Emergency Mitigation, Engagement, Response, and Governance Institute .
Go to Profile#21052
Helaine Selin
#21063
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Helaine Selin is an American librarian, historian of science, author and the editor of several bestselling books. Career Selin attended Binghamton University, where she earned her bachelor's degree. She received her MLS from SUNY Albany. She was a Peace Corps volunteer from the fall of 1967 through the summer of 1969 as a teacher of English and African History in Karonga, Malawi. She retired in 2012 from being the science librarian at Hampshire College.
Go to Profile#21053
Manny Ramirez
#21064
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Manuel Arístides Ramírez Onelcida is a Dominican-American former professional baseball outfielder. He played in Major League Baseball for parts of 19 seasons. He played with the Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago White Sox, and Tampa Bay Rays before playing one season at the Chinese Professional Baseball League in Taiwan. Ramirez is recognized for having great batting skill and power. He was a nine-time Silver Slugger and was one of 28 players to hit 500 career home runs. His 21 grand slams are third all-time, and his 29 postseason home runs are the most in MLB history.
Go to Profile#21054
Denis Twitchett
#21065
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Denis Crispin Twitchett was a British Sinologist and historian, and is well known as one of the co-editors of The Cambridge History of China. Biography Denis Twitchett was born on 23 September 1925 in London, England, the son of an architectural draughtsman, and attended Isleworth County Grammar School. During World War II he took a crash course in Japanese, and for the remainder of the war he was part of the Bletchley Park operations acting as a listener at one of the forward listening stations in Sri Lanka. He also spent a great deal of time in Japan, and was able to learn from the best Japanese historians of China .
Go to Profile#21055
John Cunningham Wood
#21066
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
John Cunningham Wood is an Australian economist, author, and the chief executive officer of the University Division at Navitas, known as series editor of the "Critical Assessment of Leading Economists" series of Taylor & Francis.
Go to Profile#21056
Steve Kurtz
#21067
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Steve Kurtz is an American artist and co-founder of the art collective Critical Art Ensemble . His work with CAE is considered pioneering in the areas of politically engaged art, interventionist practices, and cultural research and action in the field of biotechnology and ecological struggle. He is also a writer and educator.
Go to Profile#21057
Tarek Mitri
#21068
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Tarek Mitri is a Lebanese university professor, independent politician and former government minister. Early life and education Mitri was born on 16 September 1950. He has a PhD. in political science from the University of Paris X.
Go to Profile#21058
Moisés Silva
#21069
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Moisés Silva is a Cuban-born American biblical scholar and translator. Life He was born in Havana, Cuba, and has lived in the US since 1960. Education Silva holds degrees from Bob Jones University , Westminster Theological Seminary , and the University of Manchester . At Manchester he studied under New Testament and Biblical Studies luminaries, F. F. Bruce and James Barr. The latter's The Semantics of Biblical Language was a strong influence on Silva's Biblical Words and Their Meaning , which challenged many common linguistic fallacies in biblical interpretation.
Go to Profile#21059
Helmut Zahn
#21070
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Helmut Zahn was a German chemist who is often credited as the first to synthesize Insulin in 1963. His results synthesizing insulin were achieved almost simultaneously with that of Panayotis Katsoyannis at the University of Pittsburgh. His work was not honoured by the Nobel prize because in 1958 Frederick Sanger was the first who discovered the chemical structure of Insulin.
Go to Profile#21060
Donald McHenry
#21071
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Donald Franchot McHenry is a former American diplomat. He was the United States Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations from September 1979 until January 20, 1981. Biography McHenry was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up across the river in East St. Louis, Illinois. He attended Illinois State University, graduating with a BS in 1957. He then continued on to earn a master's degree from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 1959 and began a doctoral program at Georgetown University.
Go to Profile#21061
John A. Powell
#21072
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
John A. Powell is an African-American law professor. He leads the UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute and holds the Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair in Equity and Inclusion, Professor of Law and Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Powell spells his name in lowercase based on the idea that we should be "part of the universe, not over it, as capitals signify".
Go to Profile#21062
Malcolm Pasley
#21073
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Sir John Malcolm Sabine Pasley, 5th Baronet, FBA , also known as Malcolm Pasley, was an eminent British philologist and literary scholar. At University of Oxford, Pasley became the foremost authority of his generation on German literature, particularly well known for his dedication to and publication of the works of Franz Kafka.
Go to Profile#21063
Shelly Chaiken
#21074
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Rochelle Lynne "Shelly" Chaiken is an American social psychologist. She first received her BS from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1971 for mathematics. She later earned her MS and her PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in social psychology. She was a professor of psychology at New York University, but is now retired.
Go to Profile#21064
Ruut Veenhoven
#21075
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ruut Veenhoven is a Dutch sociologist and a pioneer on the scientific study of happiness, in the sense of subjective enjoyment of life. His work on the social conditions for human happiness at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, has contributed to a renewed interest in happiness as an aim for public policy. He has shown that happiness can be used a reliable measure to assess progress in societies which was one of the sources of inspiration for the United Nations to adopt happiness measures as a holistic approach to development. Veenhoven is the founding director of the World Database of Happiness and a founding editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies.
Go to Profile#21065
Hitoshi Igarashi
#21076
Overall Influence
1947 - 1991 (44 years)
Hitoshi Igarashi was a Japanese scholar of Arabic and Persian literature and history and the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses. He was murdered in the wake of fatwas issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran – who, by the time of Igarashi's murder, had died – calling for the death of the book's author and "those involved in its publication." His murder remains unsolved.
Go to Profile#21066
Reuven Tsur
#21077
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Reuven Tsur was professor emeritus of Hebrew literature and literary theory at Tel Aviv University. He was born in Oradea , Romania his mother tongue was Hungarian. Literary scholarship In his doctoral dissertation Tsur developed an approach which he later called "Cognitive Poetics". This is an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary theory, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy. It explores the relationship between the structure of the text and the human qualities perceived in it, and the mediating processes that take place in the reader's mind. He applied Cognitive Poetics to ...
Go to Profile#21067
Richard O'Keefe
#21078
Overall Influence
Richard A. O'Keefe is a computer scientist best known for writing the influential 1990 book on Prolog programming, The Craft of Prolog. He was a lecturer and researcher at the department of computer science at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand and concentrates on programming languages for logic programming and functional programming, including Prolog, Haskell, and Erlang.
Go to Profile#21068
Michelle Thaller
#21079
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Michelle Lynn Thaller is an American astronomer and research scientist. Thaller is the assistant director for Science Communication at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. From 1998 to 2009 she was a staff scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, and later Manager of the Education and Public Outreach program for the Spitzer Space Telescope, at the California Institute of Technology. She is a frequent on-camera contributor to programming on The History Channel and Science Channel.
Go to Profile#21069
Robert Kraichnan
#21080
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Robert Harry Kraichnan , a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was an American theoretical physicist best known for his work on the theory of fluid turbulence. Life Kraichnan received his B.S. and Ph.D. in physics from MIT, graduating in 1949. He became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1949/50, and was one of the last assistants to Albert Einstein.
Go to Profile#21070
Peter Freund
#21081
Overall Influence
1936 - 2018 (82 years)
Peter George Oliver Freund was a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Chicago. He made important contributions to particle physics and string theory. He was also active as a writer.
Go to Profile#21071
Jacques Ellul
#21082
Overall Influence
1912 - 1994 (82 years)
Jacques Ellul was a French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, and professor. Noted as a Christian anarchist, Ellul was a longtime Professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions on the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences at the University of Bordeaux. A prolific writer, he authored more than 60 books and more than 600 articles over his lifetime, many of which discussed propaganda, the impact of technology on society, and the interaction between religion and politics.
Go to Profile#21072
Paddy O'Connell
#21083
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Guy Patrick O'Connell is an English television and radio presenter, working mainly for the BBC. He presents BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House programme each Sunday morning. He is also an occasional presenter of Radio 4's PM programme. O'Connell is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Go to Profile#21073
Thomas Jerome Schaefer
#21084
Overall Influence
Thomas Jerome Schaefer is an American mathematician. He obtained his Ph.D. in December 1978 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked in the Department of Mathematics. His Ph.D. advisor was Richard M. Karp.
Go to Profile#21074
Alexander Tzonis
#21085
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Alexander Tzonis is a Greek-born architect, author, and researcher. He has made contributions to architectural theory, history and design cognition, bringing together scientific and humanistic approaches in a synthesis. Since 1975, he has been collaborating in most projects with Liane Lefaivre. In 1985, he founded and directed Design Knowledge Systems , a multidisciplinary research institute for the study of architectural theory and the development of design thinking tools at TU Delft. Tzonis is known for his work on the classical canon, history of the emergence and development of modern arc...
Go to Profile#21075
Michael Parkinson
#21086
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Sir Michael Parkinson was an English television presenter, broadcaster, journalist and author. He presented his television talk show Parkinson from 1971 to 1982 and from 1998 to 2007, as well as other talk shows and programmes both in the UK and internationally. He also worked in radio and was described by The Guardian as "the great British talkshow host".
Go to Profile#21076
Josh Groban
#21087
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Joshua Winslow Groban is an American singer, songwriter, and actor. His first four solo albums have been certified multi-platinum, and he was charted in 2007 as the number-one best selling artist in the United States, with over 22.3 million records. , he had sold over 25 million records worldwide.
Go to Profile#21077
Donald Metcalf
#21088
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Donald Metcalf AC FRS FAA was an Australian medical researcher who spent most of his career at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. In 1954 he received the Carden Fellowship from the Anti-Cancer Council of Victoria; while he officially retired in 1996, he continued working and held his fellowship until his death in December 2014.
Go to Profile#21078
Taitetsu Unno
#21089
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Taitetsu Unno was a scholar, lecturer, and author on the subject of Pure Land Buddhism. His work as a translator has been responsible for making many important Buddhist texts available to the English-speaking world and he is considered one of the leading authorities in the United States on Shin Buddhism, a branch of Pure Land Buddhism. Dr. Unno was an ordained Shin Buddhist minister and the founding Sensei of the Northampton Shin Buddhist Sangha.
Go to Profile#21079
Archie Manning
#21090
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Elisha Archibald Manning III is an American former football quarterback who played in the National Football League for 13 seasons, primarily with the New Orleans Saints from 1971 to 1982. He also had brief stints with the Houston Oilers and the Minnesota Vikings. He played college football for the Ole Miss Rebels and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1989. Manning is the patriarch of the Manning football dynasty, having preceded sons Peyton and Eli as successful NFL quarterbacks.
Go to Profile#21080
Andrew Sessler
#21091
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Andrew Marienhoff Sessler was an American physicist, academic , former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , humanitarian and former president of the American Physical Society. Biography Sessler was born in New York City in 1928. He was educated at Harvard University and Columbia University with dissertation Hyperfine structure of 3He. From 1954 to 1959, he was a member of the faculty at Ohio State University before moving to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he served as Lab Director in 1973-80.
Go to Profile#21081
Svetlana Roudenko
#21092
Overall Influence
Svetlana A. Roudenko is a Russian-American mathematician known for her work in functional analysis and partial differential equations, and in particular in scattering theory and nonlinear Schrödinger equations. She is also known for her mentorship of women in mathematics, and is a Diversity Mentor Professor and professor of mathematics and statistics at Florida International University.
Go to Profile#21082
Raymond E. Goldstein
#21093
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Raymond Ethan Goldstein FRS FInstP is Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#21083
Robert Woodson
#21094
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Robert Leon Woodson Sr. is an American civil rights activist, community development leader, author, and founder and president of the Woodson Center, a non-profit research and demonstration organization that supports neighborhood-based initiatives to revitalize low-income communities.
Go to Profile#21084
Neelam Sanjiva Reddy
#21095
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Neelam Sanjiva Reddy was an Indian politician who served as the sixth president of India, serving from 1977 to 1982. Beginning a long political career with the Indian National Congress Party in the independence movement, he went on to hold several key offices in independent India — as Deputy Chief minister of Andhra state and the first Chief Minister of United Andhra Pradesh, a two-time Speaker of the Lok Sabha and a Union Minister— before becoming the Indian president.
Go to Profile#21085
John Klensin
#21096
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John C. Klensin is a political scientist and computer science professional who is active in Internet-related issues. Career His career includes 30 years as a principal research scientist at MIT, including a period as INFOODS Project Coordinator for the United Nations University, distinguished engineering fellow at MCI WorldCom, and Internet architecture vice president at AT&T; he is now an independent consultant.
Go to Profile#21086
Alessandro Vespignani
#21097
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Alessandro Vespignani is an Italian-American physicist, best known for his work on complex networks, and particularly for work on the applications of network theory to the mathematical modeling of infectious disease, applications of computational epidemiology, and for studies of the topological properties of the Internet. He is currently the Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor of Physics, Computer Science and Health Sciences at Northeastern University, where he is the director of the Network Science Institute.
Go to Profile#21087
Walter Reich
#21098
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Walter Reich is an American magazine editor, psychiatrist, and writer. He was the 2003 recipient of the AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. Appointments In the past, Reich held the roles of director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, located in Washington, D.C. ensuring its establishment as an educational institute with serious scholarship; at Yale University, located in New Haven, Connecticut; a resident in psychiatry, working at the National Institute of Mental Health, located in Washington, D.C.; and was co-chair of the Committee of Concerned Scientists, located in New...
Go to Profile#21088
James L. Cox
#21099
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
James L. Cox is an American cardiothoracic surgeon and medical innovator best known for the development of the Cox maze procedure for treatment of atrial fibrillation in 1987. Early background James Cox started his college education on a baseball scholarship at the University of Mississippi. On the day he received an offer to play professional baseball with the Los Angeles Dodgers he also received his acceptance to medical school at the University of Tennessee. He wanted to be a surgeon, so he chose medical school. He received his MD from Tennessee and began his surgical residency at Duke University in 1967.
Go to Profile#21089
Bernard Teissier
#21100
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Bernard Teissier is a French mathematician and a member of the Nicolas Bourbaki group. He has made major contributions to algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, specifically to singularity theory, multiplicity theory and valuation theory.
Go to Profile#21090
William Canfield
#21101
Overall Influence
William Canfield is a glycobiologist, chief scientific officer and founder of an Oklahoma City-based biotechnology company, Novazyme, which was acquired by Genzyme in August 2001 and developed, among other things, an enzyme that can stabilize Pompe disease, based on Canfield's ongoing research since 1998. Canfield subsequently left Genzyme and established, with his partner in the Novazyme operation, John Crowley, another research laboratory , which he still heads. He saved Cytovance from bankruptcy by forming an investor group and raising $9 million after Crowley suddenly left the lab in 200...
Go to Profile#21091
Shawn Wong
#21102
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Shawn K. Wong is a Chinese American author and scholar. He has served as the Professor of English, Director of the University Honors Program , Chair of the Department of English , and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington, where he has been on the faculty since 1984 and teaches courses covering critical theory, Asian American studies, which he is considered a pioneer in, and fiction writing. Wong received his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California Berkeley and a master's degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University .
Go to Profile#21092
Yuri Zhuravlyov
#21103
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Yuri Ivanovich Zhuravlyov was a Soviet and Russian mathematician specializing in the algebraic theory of algorithms. His research in applied mathematics and computer science was foundational for a number of specialties within discrete mathematics, pattern recognition, and predictive analysis. Zhuravlyov was a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the chairman of its "Applied Mathematics and Informatics" section. He was also the editor-in-chief of the international journal Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis.
Go to Profile#21093
Dimitar Ouzounov
#21104
Overall Influence
Dimitar Ouzounov is a Bulgarian–American geophysicist, research scientist, academic, and author. He is a research professor of geophysics at Institute for Earth, Computing, Human and Observing , Chapman University.
Go to Profile#21094
Gary Giddins
#21105
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Gary Giddins is an American jazz critic and author. He wrote for The Village Voice from 1973; his "Weather Bird" column ended in 2003. In 1986 Gary Giddins and John Lewis created the American Jazz Orchestra which presented concerts using a jazz repertory with musicians such as Tony Bennett.
Go to Profile#21095
Richard Thompson Ford
#21106
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Richard Thompson Ford is the George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. His scholarship includes work on critical race theory, local government law, housing segregation, and employment discrimination. He has served as a housing commissioner for the San Francisco Housing Commission, and continues to work with local governments on issues of affordable housing and segregation. His book Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality was chosen as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2011. His 2021 book on dress codes explores the relationship between fashi...
Go to Profile#21096
Craig Melchert
#21107
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Harold Craig Melchert is an American linguist known particularly for his work on the Anatolian branch of Indo-European. Biography He received his B.A. in German from Michigan State University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University in 1977. From 1968 to 1972 he served in the United States Air Force, where he learned Chinese and worked as a Chinese radio listener. In 1978 he accepted a position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he became Paul Debreczeny Distinguished Professor of Linguistics. In 2005 he was the Collitz Professor at the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute.
Go to Profile#21097
Olga Sánchez Cordero
#21108
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Olga María del Carmen Sánchez Cordero Dávila is a Mexican politician and former jurist. She was the Secretary of the Interior of Mexico, and the first woman to ever hold this position. She previously served as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, Mexico's highest federal court, from 26 January 1995 to 30 November 2015. She currently serves as a Senator and was President of the Senate of the Republic from 2021 to 2022.
Go to Profile#21098
David Reinking
#21109
Overall Influence
David Reinking is a researcher known for his work with formative and design experiments and how literacy is affected by technology. Currently Reinking is a Eugine T. Moore Professor of Teacher Education at Clemson University. He was inducted in the Reading Hall of Fame in 2008 and is a highly regarded in researcher in his field. Prior to his career in higher education, Reinking was an elementary teacher for eight years. After graduating from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis with his PhD he worked at Rutgers University and later at the University of Georgia.
Go to Profile#21099
Hans Fleischhacker
#21110
Overall Influence
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
Hans Fleischhacker was a German anthropologist with the Ahnenerbe and a commander in the SS of Nazi Germany. He worked with Bruno Beger on some projects, making measurements of Jewish people. He was with Beger at Auschwitz when the people were selected to be part of the Jewish skull collection, a project of the Ahnenerbe. At their post-war trial, Beger was found guilty of full knowledge of the scope of that project, while Fleischhacker was found not to be aware that the purpose of the measurements was to select the 86 people to be murdered at Natzweiler-Struthof camp.
Go to Profile#21100
George Yancopoulos
#21111
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
George D. Yancopoulos is a Greek-American biomedical scientist who is the co-founder, president and chief scientific officer of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Yancopoulos is the holder of more than 100 patents. He is a principal inventor and developer of Regeneron's ten FDA-approved or -authorized treatments, as well as of Regeneron's foundational technologies for target and drug development, such as its proprietary TRAP technology, and the VelociGene and VelocImmune antibody technologies.
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