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
#21301
Sheila Widnall
#21312
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Sheila Marie Evans Widnall is an American aerospace researcher and Institute Professor Emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . She served as United States Secretary of the Air Force from 1993 to 1997, making her the first woman to hold that post and the first woman to lead an entire branch of the United States Armed Forces in the Department of Defense. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2003.
Go to Profile#21302
Barbara Simons
#21313
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Barbara Bluestein Simons is an American computer scientist and the former president of the Association for Computing Machinery . She is a Ph.D. graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and spent her early career working as an IBM researcher. She is the founder and former co-chair of USACM, the ACM U.S. Public Policy Council. Her main areas of research are compiler optimization, scheduling theory and algorithm analysis and design.
Go to Profile#21303
Megan Ranney
#21314
Overall Influence
Megan L. Ranney is a practicing American emergency physician currently serving as the Dean of the Yale School of Public Health. Previously, Ranney served as the Deputy Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, was Warren Alpert Endowed Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital and the Alpert Medical School of Brown University. Ranney was the founding Director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health.
Go to Profile#21304
Margaret Mitchell
#21315
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Margaret Mitchell is a computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and fairness in machine learning. She is most well known for her work on automatically removing undesired biases concerning demographic groups from machine learning models, as well as more transparent reporting of their intended use.
Go to Profile#21305
Peter Gabel
#21316
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Peter Gabel was an American law academic and associate editor of Tikkun, a bi-monthly Jewish critique of politics, culture, and society, He wrote a number of articles for the magazine on subjects ranging from the original intent of the framers of the Constitution to the creationism/evolution controversy .
Go to Profile#21306
Susan Stokes
#21317
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Susan Carol Stokes is an American political scientist and the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science department of the University of Chicago, and the faculty director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. Her academic focus is on Latin American politics, comparative politics, and how democracies function in developing countries. Stokes is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Go to Profile#21307
Eduardo Engel
#21318
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Eduardo Engel is the former president and current board member of the think tank Espacio Público and professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Chile. From 2001 to 2012 he was Professor of Economics at the Yale University. He chaired the Presidential Advisory Council on Conflicts of Interest, Influence Peddling, and Corruption – also known as the Engel Commission – in 2015.
Go to Profile#21308
Nemanja Vidić
#21319
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Nemanja Vidić is a Serbian former professional footballer who played as a centre-back. He is best known for his time at Manchester United, was part of the Serbia national team, and is considered as one of the greatest defenders in the history of the sport. He is one of only four players to win the Premier League Player of the Season award twice, alongside Thierry Henry, Kevin De Bruyne and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Go to Profile#21309
Radim Palouš
#21320
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Radim Palouš was a Czech dissident, philosopher, educator, and former spokesman for Charter 77, and from 1990 to 1994, was the rector of Charles University in Prague. Life Palouš was born into a family of journalists and active athletes. After graduating in Prague, he was placed in forced labor during World War II. From 1945 onwards, he studied philosophy at Charles University , and in 1948 he defended his doctoral thesis on Masarykss philosophy of youth. He worked as a teacher and studied chemistry at the pedagogical branch in Charles University, where, since 1957, he worked as an assistant....
Go to Profile#21310
Oriza Hirata
#21321
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Oriza Hirata is a Japanese playwright, director, and academic. For the majority of his life, he has been best known for his work in theater and creating what he has coined, “contemporary colloquial theater,” or as theater critics call it, “quiet drama.”
Go to Profile#21311
Ronald A. Kuipers
#21322
Overall Influence
Ronald A. Kuipers is a Canadian philosopher of religion based in Toronto, Ontario. History Ronald A. Kuipers was born in Edmonton, Canada. From 1989 to 1990, Kuipers worked as the Entertainment Editor of The Gateway newspaper. In 2012, Kuipers became an Associate Professor of the philosophy of religion at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Canada.
Go to Profile#21312
Mike Bossy
#21323
Overall Influence
1957 - 2022 (65 years)
Michael Dean Bossy was a Canadian professional ice hockey player with the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League. He spent his entire NHL career, which lasted from 1977 to 1987, with the Islanders, and was a crucial part of their four consecutive Stanley Cup championships in the early 1980s.
Go to Profile#21313
Liu Yuanfang
#21324
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Liu Yuanfang is a Chinese nuclear chemist. He is a chemist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences , who is now Professor of Chemistry at Shanghai University. He has studied nuclear chemistry and radiochemistry for forty years and pioneered education in that field in China.
Go to Profile#21314
Lothar Machtan
#21325
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Lothar Machtan is a German historian, writer, as well as professor of Modern and Current History at the University of Bremen. Early life Born in Gelsenkirchen, Machtan studied history and political sciences at Heidelberg University from 1968 to 1974. 15 years later he became professor of modern history at the University of Bremen. Furthermore, he worked as a researcher in Konstanz, Berlin, Kassel, Halle and at the Claremont McKenna College in California. The main field of his historical work is the cultural history of politics.
Go to Profile#21315
Jan Willem Klop
#21326
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jan Willem Klop is a professor of applied logic at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematical logic from Utrecht University. Klop is known for his work on the algebra of communicating processes, co-author of TeReSe and his fixed point combinatorYk = whereL = λabcdefghijklmnopqstuvwxyzr. Klop became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.
Go to Profile#21316
Roman Stanisław Ingarden
#21327
Overall Influence
1920 - 2011 (91 years)
Roman Stanisław Ingarden was a Polish physicist, specialised mainly in optics and statistical mechanics, son of the Polish philosopher Roman Witold Ingarden. In 1938 he began his physics studies at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów as student of professors Juliusz Schauder, Stefan Banach and Hugo Steinhaus and Stanisław Loria and Wojciech Rubinowicz .
Go to Profile#21317
Don Craig Wiley
#21328
Overall Influence
1944 - 2001 (57 years)
Don Craig Wiley was an American structural biologist. Education Wiley received his doctoral degree in biophysics in 1971 from Harvard University, where he worked under the direction of the subsequent 1976 chemistry Nobel Prize winner William N. Lipscomb, Jr. There, Wiley did early work on the structure of aspartate carbamoyltransferase, the largest molecular structure determined at that time. Noteworthy in this effort was that Wiley managed to grow crystals of aspartate carbamoyltransferase suitable for obtaining its X-ray structure, a particularly difficult task in the case of this molecular...
Go to Profile#21318
Harold B. Segel
#21329
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Harold Bernard Segel was professor emeritus of Slavic literatures and of comparative literature at Columbia University. Segel was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Boston Latin School. He majored in Modern Languages at Boston College and did graduate work at Harvard University .
Go to Profile#21319
Billy McNeill
#21330
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
William McNeill was a Scottish football player and manager. He had a long association with Celtic, spanning more than sixty years as a player, manager and club ambassador. McNeill captained Celtic's 'Lisbon Lions' to their European Cup victory in 1967 and later spent two spells as the club's manager. As a player and manager, he won 31 major trophies with Celtic.
Go to Profile#21320
Claus E. Heinrich
#21331
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Claus E. Heinrich is a German manager, entrepreneur, who is an honorary professor for operations research at both the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Mannheim and served as board member of SAP between 1996 and 2009. Since 2009 he serves as honorary senator of the Heidelberg University.
Go to Profile#21321
Stephen A. Webb
#21332
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Stephen A. Webb is a social theorist and researcher in social work, social welfare and policy. He was born in Margate Kent, in 1958, the son of Mary and Philip Webb and has a younger brother Richard and sister Nicola Webb. He attended Heath Junior School, Chesterfield Boys Grammar School and University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#21322
Jenny Strauss Clay
#21333
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jenny Strauss Clay is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. After completing studies at Reed College and the University of Chicago, Strauss Clay completed her doctorate at the University of Washington. She taught at the University of California at Irvine and Johns Hopkins University. She is currently a member of the Nominating Committee of the Society for Classical Studies , until 2018.
Go to Profile#21323
Dimitar Berbatov
#21334
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Dimitar Ivanov Berbatov is a Bulgarian former professional footballer who played as a striker. Known for his technique and ball control, Berbatov is regarded as one of the greatest Bulgarian players of all time. He captaineded the Bulgaria national team from 2006 to 2010 and is the country's all-time leading goalscorer.
Go to Profile#21324
William Kovacic
#21335
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
William Evan Kovacic is an American legal scholar who served as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission from 2006 to 2011, including as its chairman from 2008 to 2009. He is a member of the Republican Party.
Go to Profile#21325
Jessica Hodgins
#21336
Overall Influence
Jessica K. Hodgins is an American roboticist and researcher who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and School of Computer Science. Hodgins is currently also Research Director at the Facebook AI Research lab in Pittsburgh next to Carnegie Mellon. She was elected the president of ACM SIGGRAPH in 2017. Until 2016, she was Vice President of Research at Disney Research and was the Director of the Disney Research labs in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#21326
John Friedmann
#21337
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
John Friedmann was an Honorary Professor in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and Professor Emeritus at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He was the founding professor of the Program for Urban Planning in the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning at UCLA and served as its head for a total of 14 years between 1969 and 1996.
Go to Profile#21327
Nicholas Lash
#21338
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Nicholas Langrishe Alleyne Lash was an English Roman Catholic theologian. Having served in the British Army, he trained for Holy Orders at St Mary's College, Oscott, and worked as a Catholic priest until 1975. He left the priesthood and turned to full-time academia, working as a lecturer and then Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#21328
Jad Abumrad
#21339
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Jad Nicholas Abumrad is an American radio host, composer, and producer. He is the founder and former host of the syndicated public radio program Radiolab alongside Robert Krulwich. Early life and education Abumrad was raised in Tennessee where his Lebanese father, Naji Abumrad, is a doctor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and his mother is a scientist. Abumrad attended Oberlin College, where he studied creative writing and music composition with a special interest in electronic and electroacoustic music, receiving his B.A. in 1995.
Go to Profile#21329
Behrokh Khoshnevis
#21340
Overall Influence
Behrokh Khoshnevis is the President and CEO of Contour Crafting Corporation and the Louise L. Dunn Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern California , where he has affiliations with the Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, Astronautics Engineering, Civil & Environmental Engineering and Industrial & Systems Engineering departments. He is the Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies at USC. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow Member of the National Academy of Inventors and is a Fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#21330
Stephen L. Harris
#21341
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Stephen L. Harris was Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at California State University, Sacramento. He served there ten years as department chair and was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He received his MA and PhD degrees from Cornell University. Harris was a member of the American Academy of Religion, a fellow at the Westar Institute, a fellow of the controversial Jesus Seminar, and authored several books on religion, some of which are used in introductory university courses.
Go to Profile#21331
Yossi Dahan
#21342
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Yossi Dahan is a law professor and the Head of the Human Rights Division at the College of Law and Business. He is the chairperson and cofounder of Adva Center, an editor and cofounder of Haokets.org, and teaches philosophy at the Open University. Dahan is an expert in labor law, workers' rights and global justice, theories of social justice, the right to education and educational justice.
Go to Profile#21332
Frank Bowe
#21343
Overall Influence
1947 - 2007 (60 years)
Frank G. Bowe was a deaf American disability studies academic who served as the Dr. Mervin Livingston Schloss Distinguished Professor for the Study of Disabilities at Hofstra University. As a disability rights activist, author, and teacher, he accomplished a series of firsts for individuals with disabilities.
Go to Profile#21333
Heini Hediger
#21344
Overall Influence
1908 - 1992 (84 years)
Heini Hediger was a Swiss biologist noted for work in proxemics in animal behavior and is known as the "father of zoo biology". Hediger was formerly the director of Tierpark Dählhölzli , Zoo Basel and Zürich Zoo .
Go to Profile#21334
Peter Rosenthal
#21345
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Peter Michael Rosenthal is Canadian-American Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, an adjunct professor of Law at the University of Toronto, and a lawyer in private practice.
Go to Profile#21335
Jean Daujat
#21346
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Jean Daujat was a French philosopher of neo-Thomism, a disciple of Jacques Maritain, and the founder of the Centre d'études religieuses, the Center for Religious Studies, specializing in teaching Christian doctrine.
Go to Profile#21336
Robert McNeill Alexander
#21347
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Robert McNeill Alexander, CBE FRS was a British zoologist and a leading authority in the field of biomechanics. For thirty years he was Professor of Zoology at the University of Leeds. Early life and education Alexander was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, one of the four sons of Robert Alexander and his wife Janet McNeill. His father was the chief engineer of the city of Belfast. His mother was a novelist and playwright who wrote more than 20 children’s books and two opera libretti. He was educated at Tonbridge School and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge where he gained an MA and a PhD. His PhD research at Cambridge was supervised by Professor Sir James Gray, FRS.
Go to Profile#21337
Gret Palucca
#21348
Overall Influence
1902 - 1993 (91 years)
Gret Palucca was a German dancer and dance teacher, notable for her dance school, the Palucca School of Dance, founded in Dresden in 1925. Life and work Margarethe Paluka was born in Munich. Shortly after birth, her family moved to San Francisco, returning with her mother to Dresden in 1909. She had ballet lessons with Heinrich Kröller from 1914 to 1916 and from 1917 to 1918, she attended Margarete Balsat's school for upper-class girls in Dresden.
Go to Profile#21338
Heather Ashton
#21349
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Heather Ashton was a British psychopharmacologist and physician. She is best known for her clinical and research work on benzodiazepine dependence. Biography Chrystal Heather Champion was born in Dehradun, northern India, to Harry Champion, a British silviculturist, and Chrystal Champion, a secretary. From the age of six, she attended a boarding school in Swanage, Dorset, England. When WWII began, she was evacuated to West Chester, Pennsylvania; during the crossing, her ship was attacked by a U-boat.
Go to Profile#21339
Jeffrey Brown
#21350
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jeffrey Brown is an American journalist, who is a senior correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. His reports focus on arts and literature, and he has interviewed numerous writers, poets, and musicians. Brown has worked most of his professional career at PBS and has written a poetry collection called The News.
Go to Profile#21340
Anatoly Lysenko
#21351
Overall Influence
1937 - 2021 (84 years)
Anatoly Grigorievich Lysenko was a Soviet and Russian television figure, journalist, director, producer. Honored Artist of Russia, laureate of the State Prize of the USSR. On 18 July 2012 he was appointed general director of Public Television of Russia.
Go to Profile#21341
Frank Van Dun
#21352
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Frank Van Dun is a Belgian philosopher of law and classical liberal natural law theorist. He is associated with the law faculty of the University of Ghent. In 2013 he was awarded the Prize for Liberty by the Flemish classical-liberal think tank Libera!.
Go to Profile#21342
Oral Roberts
#21353
Overall Influence
1918 - 2009 (91 years)
Granville Oral Roberts was an American Charismatic Christian televangelist, who was one of the first to propagate Prosperity Gospel Theology. He was ordained in both the Pentecostal Holiness and United Methodist churches. He is considered one of the forerunners of the charismatic movement, and at the height of his career was one of the most recognized preachers in the US. He founded the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association and Oral Roberts University.
Go to Profile#21343
Damian Lillard
#21354
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Damian Lamonte Ollie "Dame" Lillard Sr. is an American professional basketball player for the Milwaukee Bucks of the National Basketball Association . He played college basketball for the Weber State Wildcats and earned third-team All-American honors in 2012. After being selected by the Portland Trail Blazers with the sixth overall pick in the 2012 NBA draft, Lillard was unanimously voted the NBA Rookie of the Year. Nicknamed Dame Time for his history of making big shots in the clutch, he has received seven NBA All-Star and seven All-NBA Team selections, the only player in Trail Blazers franchise history to do so.
Go to Profile#21344
Glen Rice
#21355
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Glen Anthony Rice Sr. is an American former professional basketball player who played in the National Basketball Association . As a small forward, Rice was a three-time NBA All-Star and made 1,559 three-point field goals during his 15-year career. Rice won both an NCAA championship and NBA championship during his collegiate and professional career. In recent years, Rice has taken up mixed martial arts fight promotion as owner of G-Force Fights based in Miami, Florida.
Go to Profile#21345
Susan Cheever
#21356
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Susan Cheever is an American author and a prize-winning best-selling writer well known for her memoir, her writing about alcoholism, and her intimate understanding of American history. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award. She currently teaches in the MFA program at The New School in New York City.
Go to Profile#21346
Alexander A. Clerk
#21357
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Alexander Adu Clerk, is a Ghanaian American academic, psychiatrist and sleep medicine specialist who was the Director of the world's first sleep medical clinic, the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine from 1990 to 1998. Clerk is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Go to Profile#21347
Nelson Lichtenstein
#21358
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Nelson Lichtenstein is an American historian. He is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is labor historian who has written also about 20th-century American political economy, including the automotive industry and Wal-Mart.
Go to Profile#21348
Jim Coan
#21359
Overall Influence
James Arthur Coan, Jr. is an American affective neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, writer, podcast host, human rights activist, and psychology professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he serves as director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory.
Go to Profile#21349
Siniša Mihajlović
#21360
Overall Influence
1969 - 2022 (53 years)
Siniša Mihajlović was a Serbian professional football player and manager. During his career as a footballer, he played as a defender or midfielder. He won the European Cup with Red Star Belgrade in 1991, and played for the majority of his career in the Italian Serie A, making 353 appearances for Roma, Sampdoria, Lazio and Inter Milan and winning league titles with the latter two clubs. Considered by many to be among the best free kick takers of all time, he holds the all-time record in Serie A for most goals from free-kicks with 28 goals. He won 63 caps and scored 10 goals for Yugoslavia from...
Go to Profile#21350
Angelo Dundee
#21361
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Angelo Dundee was an American boxing trainer and cornerman. Internationally known for his work with Muhammad Ali , he also worked with 15 other world boxing champions, including Sugar Ray Leonard, Sean Mannion, José Nápoles, George Foreman, George Scott, Jimmy Ellis, Carmen Basilio, Luis Manuel Rodríguez, and Willie Pastrano.
Go to Profile