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
#21251
Leslie Kish
#21262
Overall Influence
1910 - 2000 (90 years)
Leslie Kish was a Hungarian-American statistician and survey methodologist. Life and career Kish emigrated with his family to the USA in 1925. His father soon died, and Kish helped support the family by working while continuing his studies in the evenings. In 1937 he volunteered for the International Brigade to fight against Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He saw action in a Hungarian battalion, was wounded, and returned to the United States in 1939. In 1939, he finished his baccalaureate in mathematics at the City College of New York.
Go to Profile#21252
Russell McCormmach
#21263
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Russell Keith McCormmach , the husband of the late Christa Jungnickel, is an American historian of physics. McCormmach grew up in Walla Walla, Washington and studied physics at Washington State College with bachelor's degree in 1955. As a Rhodes scholar, he studied politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University with bachelor's degree in 1959. He then worked as an electronics engineer at Bell Laboratories. In 1967 he received a Ph.D. in the history of science from Case Institute of Technology under Martin J. Klein. McCormmach was then a professor of the history of science at the University of Pennsylvania and the Johns Hopkins University , and then at the University of Oregon.
Go to Profile#21253
Wang Daheng
#21264
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Wang Daheng was a Chinese optical physicist, engineer, and inventor widely considered the "father of optical engineering" in China. He was a founding academician of both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He was the founder of the Changchun Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Changchun University of Science and Technology, and the Chinese Optical Society.
Go to Profile#21254
John McNamara
#21265
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John M. McNamara is an English mathematical biologist and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Biology in the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. In 2013, he and Alasdair Houston jointly received the ASAB Medal, and in 2014, he received the Weldon Memorial Prize. In 2018, he was awarded the Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists.
Go to Profile#21255
Keith Yamamoto
#21266
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Keith R. Yamamoto is vice chancellor of Science Policy and Strategy and professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco, . He is known for his Molecular Biology and Biochemistry research on nuclear receptors and his involvement in science policy and precision medicine.
Go to Profile#21256
Selma James
#21267
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Selma James is an American writer, and feminist and social activist who is co-author of the women's movement book The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community , co-founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and coordinator of the Global Women's Strike.
Go to Profile#21257
Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt
#21268
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt was an Austrian ethologist in the field of human ethology. In authoring the book which bears that title, he applied ethology to humans by studying them in a perspective more common to volumes studying animal behavior.
Go to Profile#21258
Eleftherios Diamandis
#21269
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Eleftherios Phedias Diamandis is a Greek Cypriot-Canadian biochemist who specializes in clinical chemistry. He is Professor & Head of Clinical Biochemistry in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is also Division Head of Clinical Biochemistry at Mount Sinai Hospital and Biochemist-in-Chief at the University Health Network, both of which are also located in Toronto.
Go to Profile#21259
Kenneth P. Thompson
#21270
Overall Influence
1966 - 2016 (50 years)
Kenneth P. Thompson was an American lawyer who served as the District Attorney of Kings County, New York, from 2014 until his death from cancer on October 9, 2016. Early life and education Kenneth Thompson's parents, William and Clara Thompson, divorced in his early childhood. William was a city highway worker. In 1973, Clara became one of the first patrolwomen in the New York City Police Department.
Go to Profile#21260
Reihaneh Safavi-Naini
#21271
Overall Influence
Reihaneh "Rei" Safavi-Naini is the NSERC/Telus Industrial Research Chair and the Alberta Innovates Strategic Chair in Information Security at the University of Calgary, Canada. Education Reihaneh received her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Waterloo, Canada, under supervision of Prof. Ian F. Blake. She obtained her BSc and MSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran.
Go to Profile#21261
Jean Leclant
#21272
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Jean Leclant was a renowned Egyptologist who was an Honorary Professor at the College of France, Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions and Letters of the Institut de France, and Honorary Secretary of the International Association of Egyptologists.
Go to Profile#21262
Stephen K. Sanderson
#21273
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Stephen K. Sanderson is an American sociologist. His area of focus includes comparative sociology, historical sociology, sociological theory and sociocultural evolution. He is a specialist in sociological theory and comparative and historical sociology and is one of the leading sociologists to develop an evolutionist, yet non-Darwinist, understanding of human society. He has written or edited ten books and about sixty peer-reviewed articles, and is the author of numerous articles and many books, including Evolutionism and Its Critics.
Go to Profile#21263
Manuel Peimbert
#21274
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Manuel Peimbert Sierra is a Mexican astronomer and a faculty member at the National Autonomous University of Mexico . He was named a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences in 1987. Biography Peimbert was born in 1941 in Mexico City. In his first year of college at UNAM, Peimbert went to the Tonantzintla Observatory in Puebla with a friend, Gerardo Bátiz, and they told the observatory director, Guillermo Haro, that they wanted to help at the observatory. Haro put them to work with a Schmidt camera, and Peimbert and Bátiz found a number of planetary nebulae, ten of which had never been described.
Go to Profile#21264
Ben Carson
#21275
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Benjamin Solomon Carson Sr. is an American retired neurosurgeon, academic, author, and politician who served as the 17th United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2017 to 2021. A pioneer in the field of neurosurgery, he was a candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 Republican primaries. Carson is one of the most prominent Black conservatives in America.
Go to Profile#21265
Arnold Oberschelp
#21276
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Arnold Oberschelp is a German mathematician and logician. He was for many years professor of logic and in Kiel. Life Oberschelp studied mathematics and physics at the universities of Göttingen and Münster. In Münster he received in December 1957 his doctorate in mathematical logic under Hans Hermes. In 1958 he was a research assistant at the Mathematical Institute of the Technical College of Hannover where he habilitated in mathematics in 1961. In 1968, he accepted an appointment as full professor of logic and science at the University of Kiel. Oberschelp has been emeritus professor since 1...
Go to Profile#21266
Ankhi Mukherjee
#21277
Overall Influence
Ankhi Mukherjee is an academic specialising in Victorian and Modern English literature, critical theory and postcolonial and world literature. In 2015, she was appointed a Professor of English and World Literatures by the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#21267
Richard Taylor
#21278
Overall Influence
1919 - 2003 (84 years)
Richard Clyde Taylor was an American philosopher renowned for his contributions to metaphysics. He was also an internationally known beekeeper. Biography Taylor received his PhD at Brown University, where his supervisor was Roderick Chisholm. He taught at Brown University, Columbia and the University of Rochester, and had visiting appointments at about a dozen other institutions. His best-known book was Metaphysics . Other works included Action and Purpose , Good and Evil and Virtue Ethics . Professor Taylor was also the editor of The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. He was an enthusiastic advocate of virtue ethics.
Go to Profile#21268
Ferdinando Gliozzi
#21279
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Ferdinando Gliozzi is a string theorist at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare. Along with David Olive and Joël Scherk, he proposed the GSO projection to map out the tachyonic states in the Neveu–Schwarz sector.
Go to Profile#21269
Patty Schnyder
#21280
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Patty Schnyder is a Swiss retired tennis player. A former top 10 player in singles, she twice defeated a reigning world No. 1 player in her career: Martina Hingis at the 1998 Grand Slam Cup and Jennifer Capriati at the Family Circle Cup in 2002. In addition, she has notable wins over such former No. 1 players as Lindsay Davenport, Serena Williams, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, Steffi Graf, Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin, Amélie Mauresmo, Maria Sharapova, Jelena Janković, Ana Ivanovic, and Caroline Wozniacki.
Go to Profile#21270
Tara Spires-Jones
#21281
Overall Influence
Tara Spires-Jones is professor of neurodegeneration and deputy director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. She is also a group leader in the UK Dementia Research Institute.
Go to Profile#21271
Neil W. Chamberlain
#21282
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Neil Cornelius Wolverton Chamberlain was an American economist who was the Armand G. Erpf Professor of Modern Corporations of the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. Before that he was a professor in the Department of Economics at Yale University. His scholarly efforts concerned industrial relations and labor economics, the economies of corporations and corporate planning, national planning, and social values and corporate social responsibility. He was the author of nineteen books, editor of six more, published numerous articles in academic journals, and wrote an intellectual memoir as well.
Go to Profile#21272
Paul Johnsgard
#21283
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Paul Austin Johnsgard was an ornithologist, artist and emeritus professor at the University of Nebraska. His works include nearly fifty books including several monographs, principally about the waterfowl and cranes.
Go to Profile#21273
Usha Mehta
#21284
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Usha Mehta was a Gandhian and freedom fighter of India. She is also remembered for organizing the Congress Radio, also called the Secret Congress Radio, an underground radio station, which functioned for few months during the Quit India Movement of 1942. In 1998, the Government of India conferred on her Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award of the Republic of India.
Go to Profile#21274
Patrick K. O'Brien
#21285
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Patrick Karl O'Brien is a British historian who serves as professor emeritus of global economic history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He received a DPhil from Nuffield College in 1960 for a thesis entitled Government Revenue, 1793–1815: A Study of Fiscal and Financial Policy in the Wars Against France .
Go to Profile#21275
Saif Ali Khan
#21286
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Saif Ali Khan Pataudi is an Indian actor and film producer who primarily works in Hindi films. Part of the Pataudi family, he is the son of actress Sharmila Tagore and cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi. Khan has won several awards, including a National Film Award and seven Filmfare Awards, and received the Padma Shri, the fourth highest Indian civilian award in 2010.
Go to Profile#21276
Michael Leunig
#21287
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Michael Leunig , typically referred to as Leunig , is an Australian cartoonist. His works include The Curly Pyjama Letters, cartoon books The Essential Leunig, The Wayward Leunig, The Stick, Goatperson, Short Notes from the Long History of Happiness and Curly Verse, among others and The Lot, a compilation of his 'Curly World' newspaper columns. Leunig has also written a book of prayers, When I Talk To You.
Go to Profile#21277
Brad Hooker
#21288
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Brad Hooker is a British-American philosopher who specialises in moral philosophy. He is a professor at the University of Reading and is best known for his work defending rule consequentialism . His book Ideal Code, Real World received a number of favourable reviews from high-profile philosophers. Derek Parfit, for example, wrote: "This book seems to me the best statement and defence, so far, of one of the most important moral theories."
Go to Profile#21278
Gwendolyn Boyd
#21289
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Boyd is an American scientist and university administrator. She served as president of Alabama State University from 2014 to 2016, and was previously national president of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority from 2000 to 2004. Before entering administration she worked as a mechanical engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Go to Profile#21279
Burt Ovrut
#21290
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Burt Ovrut is an American theoretical physicist best known for his work on heterotic string theory. He is currently Professor of Theoretical High Energy Physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Ovrut earned his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1978. His doctoral advisors were Benjamin W. Lee and Yoichiro Nambu, and his thesis was on an Sp x U Theory of the Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions.
Go to Profile#21280
Sanjaya Baru
#21291
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Sanjaya Baru is a political commentator and policy analyst. He served as Secretary General of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry until his resignation in April 2018. Prior to this, he was Director for Geo-Economics and Strategy at the International Institute of Strategic Studies. He was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's media advisor and chief spokesperson from May 2004 until August 2008. He has also served as associate editor at The Economic Times and The Times of India, and then chief editor at Business Standard. Baru writes a column for Civil Society Magazine called Delhi Darbar.
Go to Profile#21281
Marc Levine
#21292
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Marc N. Levine is an American mathematician. Life and work Levine graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his doctorate in 1979 from Brandeis University under Teruhisa Matsusaka. He was assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia from 1979 and at Northeastern University from 1984 in Boston, where he has been associate professor since 1986 and since 1988 professor. He was a visiting professor at University Duisburg-Essen, where he worked with Hélène Esnault. Since 2009 he has been Alexander von Humboldt Professor there. He was also a visit...
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Murray Milgate
#21293
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Murray Milgate , is an Australian-born academic economist and Sometime Fellow and director of studies in economics at Queens' College in the University of Cambridge, where he is now a Life Fellow. He is the co-creator and co-editor of the celebrated original edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics together with John Eatwell and Peter Newman.
Go to Profile#21283
Thomas R. Holtz Jr.
#21294
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Thomas Richard Holtz Jr. is an American vertebrate palaeontologist, author, and principal lecturer at the University of Maryland's Department of Geology. He has published extensively on the phylogeny, morphology, ecomorphology, and locomotion of terrestrial predators, especially on tyrannosaurids and other theropod dinosaurs. He wrote the book Dinosaurs and is the author or co-author of the chapters "Saurischia", "Basal Tetanurae", and "Tyrannosauroidea" in the second edition of The Dinosauria. He has also been consulted as a scientific advisor for the Walking with Dinosaurs BBC series as wel...
Go to Profile#21284
Eric Neumayer
#21295
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Eric Neumayer is a professor of Environment and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science and is Pro-Director of Faculty Development. He holds a Diplom in Economics from Saarland University, a Master of Science and PhD in Development Studies from LSE, awarded by the University of London. In 2003, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Geography. He is an Associate of the Center for the Study of Civil War at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
Go to Profile#21285
Friedrich St. Florian
#21296
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Friedrich St. Florian is an Austrian-American architect. He moved to the United States in 1961, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1973. Early life and education St. Florian was born Friedrich St. Florian Gartler in the Austrian city of Graz. He has been quoted a saying "When I was 10 or 11, I was a sandcastle-builder, a dam-builder. I wanted to build for the pleasure, the delight of it really was amazing."
Go to Profile#21286
Michael Banner
#21297
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Michael Banner is Dean and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. From 2004–2006 he was Director of the UK Economic and Social Research Council's Genomics Research Forum and Professor of Public Policy and Ethics in the Life Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, and from 1994 to 2004 F.D. Maurice Professor of Moral and Social Theology, King’s College, London. Well known in science and public policy arenas, he was also a member of the Human Tissue Authority, Chairman of the Home Office Animal Procedures Committee from 1998 to 2006 and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics from 2014 to...
Go to Profile#21287
Paul Malliavin
#21298
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Paul Malliavin was a French mathematician who made important contributions to harmonic analysis and stochastic analysis. He is known for the Malliavin calculus, an infinite dimensional calculus for functionals on the Wiener space and his probabilistic proof of Hörmander's theorem. He was Professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and a member of the French Academy of Sciences from 1979 to 2010.
Go to Profile#21288
Steve Buscemi
#21299
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Steven Vincent Buscemi is an American actor. Buscemi is known for his work as an acclaimed character actor. His early credits consist of major roles in independent film productions such as the AIDS drama Parting Glances , Mystery Train , In the Soup , and his breakout role as Mr. Pink in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs .
Go to Profile#21289
Jörg Rüpke
#21300
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jörg Rüpke is a German scholar of comparative religion and classical philology, recipient of the Gay-Lussac Humboldt Prize in 2008, and of the Advanced Grant of the European Research Council in 2011. In January 2012, Rüpke was appointed by German Federal President Christian Wulff to the German Council of Science and Humanities.
Go to Profile#21290
Leslie Hill
#21301
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Leslie Hill is professor of French at the University of Warwick. He has written several influential books on French writers and philosophers including Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski and Jacques Derrida. Hill was elected to a fellowship of the British Academy in 2003.
Go to Profile#21291
Alice F. Healy
#21302
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Alice Fenvessy Healy is a psychologist and College Professor of Distinction Emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder where she founded and directed the Center for Research on Training. She is known for her research in the field of cognitive psychology, spanning diverse topics including short-term memory, long-term memory, psycholinguistics, reading, decision-making, and cognitive training.
Go to Profile#21292
Roberto Alemann
#21303
Overall Influence
1922 - 2020 (98 years)
Roberto Alemann was an Argentine lawyer, economist, publisher, and academic. Twice Minister of Economy, he was also the Argentine ambassador to the United States and director of the traditional Argentine-German newspaper Argentinisches Tageblatt.
Go to Profile#21293
Jean Béliveau
#21304
Overall Influence
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
Joseph Jean Arthur Béliveau was a Canadian professional ice hockey player who played parts of 20 seasons with the National Hockey League's Montreal Canadiens from 1950 to 1971. Inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1972, "Le Gros Bill" Béliveau is widely regarded as one of the ten greatest NHL players of all time. Born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Béliveau first played professionally in the Quebec Major Hockey League . He made his NHL debut with the Canadiens in 1950, but chose to remain in the QMHL full-time until 1953.
Go to Profile#21294
Ronald Kaplan
#21305
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Ronald M. Kaplan has served as a Vice President at Amazon.com and Chief Scientist for Amazon Search . He was previously Vice President and Distinguished Scientist at Nuance Communications and director of Nuance' Natural Language and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Prior to that he served as Chief Scientist and a Principal Researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information . He was previously a Research Fellow at the Palo...
Go to Profile#21295
Barry Humphries
#21306
Overall Influence
1934 - 2023 (89 years)
John Barry Humphries was an Australian comedian, actor, author and satirist. He was best known for writing and playing his stage and television characters Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson. Humphries' characters brought him international renown. He appeared in numerous stage productions, films, and television shows. Originally conceived as a dowdy Moonee Ponds housewife who caricatured Australian suburban complacency and insularity, Dame Edna Everage evolved over four decades to become a satire of stardom – a gaudily dressed, acid-tongued, egomaniacal, internationally fêted "Housewife...
Go to Profile#21296
Herbert P. Bix
#21307
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Herbert P. Bix is an American historian. He wrote Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, an account of the Japanese Emperor and the events which shaped modern Japanese imperialism, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2001.
Go to Profile#21297
George Barker
#21308
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
George Granville Barker was an English poet, identified with the New Apocalyptics movement, which reacted against 1930s realism with mythical and surrealistic themes. His long liaison with Elizabeth Smart was the subject of her cult-novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.
Go to Profile#21298
Parveen Kumar
#21309
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Dame Parveen June Kumar is a British doctor who is currently Professor of Medicine and Education at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry. She worked in the NHS for over 40 years as a consultant gastroenterologist and physician at Barts and the London Hospitals and the Homerton University Hospital. She was the President of the British Medical Association in 2006, of the Royal Society of Medicine from 2010 to 2012, of the Medical Women's Federation from 2016 to 2018 and of the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund from 2013 to 2020. She was also Vice President of the Royal College of Physicians from 2003 to 2005.
Go to Profile#21299
Shwetak Patel
#21310
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Shwetak Naran Patel is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur best known for his work on developing novel sensing solutions and ubiquitous computing. He is the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor at the University of Washington in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering, where he joined in 2008. His technology start-up company on energy sensing, Zensi, was acquired by Belkin International, Inc. in 2010. He was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. In 2016, He was elected as an ACM Fellow for contributions to sustainability sensing, low-power wi...
Go to Profile#21300
Robert Haralick
#21311
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Robert M. Haralick is Distinguished Professor in Computer Science at Graduate Center of the City University of New York . Haralick is one of the leading figures in computer vision, pattern recognition, and image analysis. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Fellow and past president of the International Association for Pattern Recognition. Professor Haralick is the King-Sun Fu Prize winner of 2016, "for contributions in image analysis, including remote sensing, texture analysis, mathematical morphology, consistent labeling, and system performance ev...
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