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
#21401
Jermain Defoe
#21412
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Jermain Colin Defoe is an English football coach and former professional footballer. He is the under-18s coach at Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur. Defoe was a striker and began his career with Charlton Athletic, joining their youth team aged 14, before moving to West Ham United aged 16 and rising through the ranks. He made his first-team debut for West Ham in 2000 and, after a season-long loan spell at AFC Bournemouth during the 2000–01 season, established himself in the West Ham line-up. After West Ham's relegation in 2003, a move to Tottenham Hotspur in January 2004 soon followed, where Defoe played for four years before being sold to Portsmouth in January 2008.
Go to Profile#21402
Jeffrey C. Stewart
#21413
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jeffrey Conrad Stewart is an American Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He won the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for his book The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, described as "a panoramic view of the personal trials and artistic triumphs of the father of the Harlem Renaissance and the movement he inspired".
Go to Profile#21403
Rubin Braunstein
#21414
Overall Influence
1922 - 2018 (96 years)
Rubin Braunstein was an American physicist and educator. In 1955 he published the first measurements of light emission by semiconductor diodes made from crystals of gallium arsenide , gallium antimonide , and indium phosphide . GaAs, GaSb, and InP are examples of III-V semiconductors. The III-V semiconductors absorb and emit light much more strongly than silicon, which is the best-known semiconductor. Braunstein's devices are the forerunners of contemporary LED lighting and semiconductor lasers, which typically employ III-V semiconductors. The 2000 and 2014 Nobel Prizes in Physics were awarde...
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Robert Connelly
#21415
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Robert Connelly is a mathematician specializing in discrete geometry and rigidity theory. Connelly received his Ph.D. from University of Michigan in 1969. He is currently a professor at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#21405
John Langford
#21416
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
John Langford is a computer scientist working in machine learning and learning theory, a field that he says, "is shifting from an academic discipline to an industrial tool". He is well known for work on the Isomap embedding algorithm, CAPTCHA challenges, Cover Trees for nearest neighbor search, Contextual Bandits for reinforcement learning applications, and learning reductions.
Go to Profile#21406
Elizabeth Rauscher
#21417
Overall Influence
2000 - 2019 (19 years)
Elizabeth A. Rauscher was an American physicist and parapsychologist. She was born in Berkeley, California on March 18, 1937. She died on July 3, 2019 . She was a former researcher with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Stanford Research Institute, and NASA.
Go to Profile#21407
Wafaa El-Sadr
#21418
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Wafaa El-Sadr is a Columbia University Professor and the director of ICAP at Columbia University, Columbia World Projects and the Center for Infectious Disease Epidemiologic Research at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#21408
John Tooze
#21419
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
John Tooze FRS was a British research scientist, research administrator, author, science journalist, former executive director of EMBO/EMBC, director of research services at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute and a vice president at The Rockefeller University.
Go to Profile#21409
Meredith Gardner
#21420
Overall Influence
1912 - 2002 (90 years)
Meredith Knox Gardner was an American linguist and codebreaker. Gardner worked in counter-intelligence, decoding Soviet intelligence traffic regarding espionage in the United States, in what came to be known as the Venona project.
Go to Profile#21410
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz
#21421
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is a Polish-American historian specializing in Central European history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He teaches at the Patrick Henry College and at the Institute of World Politics. He has been described as conservative and nationalistic, and his attitude towards minorities has been widely criticized.
Go to Profile#21411
Jim Cummings
#21422
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
James Jonah Cummings is an American voice actor. Since beginning his career in the 1980s, he has appeared in almost 400 roles. Cummings has frequently worked with The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros., including as the official voice of Winnie the Pooh since 1988, Tigger since 1989, the Tasmanian Devil since 1991, and Pete since 1992. Other roles include Fat Cat and Monterey Jack on Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers , the title character of Darkwing Duck , Dr. Robotnik on the Sonic the Hedgehog animated series , Kaa on Jungle Cubs and The Jungle Book 2, Cat on CatDog , and Fuzzy Lumpkins on Th...
Go to Profile#21412
Chris Froome
#21423
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Christopher Clive Froome [kɹɪs fɹuːm], is a Kenyan-British professional road racing cyclist who currently rides for UCI ProTeam . He has won seven Grand Tours: four editions of the Tour de France , one Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España twice . He has also won several other stage races, and the Vélo d'Or three times. Froome has also won two Olympic bronze medals in road time trials, in 2012 and 2016, and took bronze in the 2017 World Championships.
Go to Profile#21413
Ilya Glazunov
#21424
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
Ilya Sergeyevich Glazunov was a Soviet and Russian artist from Saint Petersburg. He was the founder of the Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Moscow where he also served as a rector up until his death. He held the title of People's Artist of the RSFSR.
Go to Profile#21414
Mark Pennington
#21425
Overall Influence
Mark Pennington is a British political scientist and economist. He serves as a Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy at King's College London. Early life Pennington received a PhD from the London School of Economics. His thesis, dated 1998, was titled Property rights, public choice and urban containment: A study of the British planning system.
Go to Profile#21415
Sarah Silverman
#21426
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Sarah Kate Silverman is an American stand-up comedian, actress, and writer. Silverman first rose to prominence for her brief stint as a writer and cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live during its 19th season between 1993 and 1994. She then starred in and produced The Sarah Silverman Program, which ran from 2007 to 2010 on Comedy Central. For her work on the program, Silverman was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
Go to Profile#21416
Antony Blinken
#21427
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Antony John Blinken is an American lawyer and diplomat currently serving as the 71st United States secretary of state. He previously served as deputy national security advisor from 2013 to 2015 and deputy secretary of state from 2015 to 2017 under President Barack Obama. Blinken was previously national security advisor to then-vice president Joe Biden from 2009 to 2013.
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Richard Lyons
#21428
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Richard Kent Lyons was the 14th Dean of the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, until 2018. In 2020 he became UC Berkeley's first Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer.
Go to Profile#21418
K. G. Ramanathan
#21429
Overall Influence
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Kollagunta Gopalaiyer Ramanathan was an Indian mathematician known for his work in number theory. His contributions are also to the general development of mathematical research, and teaching in India.
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Dave Forney
#21430
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
George David Forney Jr. is an American electrical engineer who made contributions in telecommunication system theory, specifically in coding theory and information theory. Biography Forney received the B.S.E. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1961, summa cum laude, and the M.S. and Sc.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 and 1965, respectively. His Sc.D thesis introduced the idea of concatenated codes. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences . He is ...
Go to Profile#21420
Azra Raza
#21431
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Azra Raza is the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and Director of Myelodysplastic Syndrome Center at Columbia University. She has previously held positions at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Cincinnati, Rush University, and the University of Massachusetts. Raza's research focuses on myelodysplastic syndrome and acute myeloid leukemia.
Go to Profile#21421
Sean Bean
#21432
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Sean Bean is an English actor. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Bean made his professional debut in a theatre production of Romeo and Juliet in 1983. Retaining his Yorkshire accent, he first found mainstream success for his portrayal of Richard Sharpe in the ITV series Sharpe, which originally ran from 1993 to 1997.
Go to Profile#21422
Clarence Lusane
#21433
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Clarence Lusane is an American author, activist, lecturer and freelance journalist. His most recent major work is his book The Black History of the White House. Background Clarence Lusane received his Ph.D. in political science from Howard University in 1997. For more than 30 years, Lusane has written about and been active in national and international anti-racism politics, globalization, U.S. foreign policy, human rights and social issues such as education and drug policy.
Go to Profile#21423
Jane Pratt
#21434
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jane Pratt is the founding editor of Sassy, Jane and xoJane. She is the host of the talk show Jane Radio on Sirius XM Radio. Early life Jane Pratt was born in San Francisco, California, to Sheila Marks Blake, an artist, and Vernon Pratt, a minimalist painter and professor of art at Duke University. Her mother grew up in Queens, New York, and her maternal grandfather, Joseph Marks, was a vice-president of the Doubleday publishing company. Her paternal grandfather was Gaither Pratt, a paranormal psychology researcher at the University of Virginia. Pratt's parents were divorced when she was 13.
Go to Profile#21424
David M. Friedman
#21435
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
David Melech Friedman is an American bankruptcy lawyer and the former United States Ambassador to Israel. He joined the law firm Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman in 1994, where he met and represented Donald Trump, then chairman and president of The Trump Organization.
Go to Profile#21425
Marlène Laruelle
#21436
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Marlène Laruelle is a French historian, sociologist, and political scientist specializing on Eurasia and Europe. She is Research Professor and Director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University . Laruelle is also a Co-Director of PONARS , Director of GW’s Central Asia Program, and Director of GW's Illiberalism Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in history at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures and spent time as a post-doc in the area of political science at Sciences Po in Paris. She is Senior Associate Scholar at the Institut français des relations internationales .
Go to Profile#21426
Warren M. Washington
#21437
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Warren Morton Washington is an American atmospheric scientist, a former chair of the National Science Board, and currently a Distinguished Scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Go to Profile#21427
Stephen Stahl
#21438
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Stephen Michael Stahl is an author and professor of psychiatry with expertise in psychopharmacology. He is currently a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and serves as Honorary Fellow in psychiatry department at the University of Cambridge. He is also the chairman of Neuroscience Education Institute and Arbor Scientia Group.
Go to Profile#21428
Richard S. Kayne
#21439
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Richard Stanley Kayne is Professor of Linguistics in the Linguistics Department at New York University. Born in 1944, after receiving an A.B. in mathematics from Columbia College, New York City in 1964, he studied linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving his Ph.D. in 1969. He then taught at the University of Paris VIII , MIT and the City University of New York , becoming Professor at New York University in 1997.
Go to Profile#21429
Hideaki Sena
#21440
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Hideaki Sena, Ph.D. is a Japanese pharmacologist and novelist. Sena was a graduate student at Tohoku University when he wrote his prizewinning debut novel, Parasite Eve. Writing career His most famous novel, Parasite Eve, was adapted into a film directed by Masayuki Ochiai in 1997 and a popular horror role-playing video game by Square. When Parasite Eve was adapted as a video game, Hideaki Sena did not learn the title's plot until it was completed, since the game was a collaboration between Square and his publisher. He is also the author of Brain Valley, for which he won the Nihon SF Taisho A...
Go to Profile#21430
James H. Schwartz
#21441
Overall Influence
1932 - 2006 (74 years)
James H. Schwartz was an American neurobiologist and professor at Columbia University in New York City. He was a co-editor, with Eric R. Kandel and Thomas Jessell, of the well-known textbook Principles of Neural Science. His research focused on explaining the biochemical basis of learning and memory and focused on the origins of learning and animal behaviors at the cellular and molecular level.
Go to Profile#21431
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
#21442
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Arturo Pérez-Reverte Gutiérrez is a Spanish novelist and journalist. He worked as a war correspondent for RTVE for 21 years . His first novel, El húsar, set in the Napoleonic Wars, was released in 1986.
Go to Profile#21432
Arnošt Lustig
#21443
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Arnošt Lustig was a renowned Czech Jewish author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays whose works have often involved the Holocaust. Life and work Lustig was born in Prague. As a Jewish boy in Czechoslovakia during World War II, he was sent in 1942 to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, from where he was later transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, followed by time in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In 1945, he escaped from a train carrying him to the Dachau concentration camp when the engine was destroyed by an American fighter-bomber. He returned to Prague in ti...
Go to Profile#21433
Bert Vaux
#21444
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Bert Vaux teaches phonology and morphology at the University of Cambridge. Previously, he taught for nine years at Harvard and three years at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Vaux specializes in phonological theory, dialectology, field methodology, and languages of the Caucasus. Vaux was editor of the journal Annual of Armenian Linguistics from 2001 to 2006 and is co-editor of the book series Oxford Surveys in Generative Phonology.
Go to Profile#21434
Ernest W. Adams
#21445
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
#21435
Piotr Lenartowicz
#21446
Overall Influence
1934 - 2012 (78 years)
Piotr Lenartowicz was a Polish philosopher, vitalist, professor of philosophy at the Jesuit University of Philosophy and Education Ignatianum, jesuit. Life Lenartowicz was born in Warsaw, Poland, the son of Wiesław Lenartowicz and Krystyna Schneider. He completed his medical studies at School of Medicine in Warsaw in 1958. In 1961 he obtained a doctorate in neurophysiology at the School of Medicine in Warsaw. Studied philosophy
Go to Profile#21436
Ayanna Howard
#21447
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Ayanna MacCalla Howard is an American roboticist, entrepreneur and educator currently serving as the dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University. Assuming the post in March 2021, Howard became the first woman to lead the Ohio State College of Engineering.
Go to Profile#21437
I. Michael Ross
#21448
Overall Influence
Isaac Michael Ross is a Distinguished Professor and Program Director of Control and Optimization at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He has published a highly-regarded textbook on optimal control theory and seminal papers in pseudospectral optimal control theory, energy-sink theory, the optimization and deflection of near-Earth asteroids and comets, robotics, attitude dynamics and control, orbital mechanics, real-time optimal control and unscented optimal control. The Kang–Ross–Gong theorem, Ross' lemma, Ross' time constant, the Ross–Fahroo lemma, and the Ross–Fahroo pseudosp...
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Elgar Fleisch
#21449
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Elgar Fleisch is an Austrian/Swiss Professor of Information and Technology Management at ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen. Besides his academic career, Elgar Fleisch is also locally known as a singer, songwriter and musician. He is part of the duo Fleisch & Fleisch and has recorded nine albums together with his brother Gerald.
Go to Profile#21439
Chen Jia'er
#21450
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Chen Jia'er is a Chinese nuclear physicist, an accelerator physicist and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences . Chen was born in Shanghai, and graduated from the department of physics of Northeast China People's University in Changchun in 1954. From 1955, he was a teacher in the department of technology physics at Peking University, and was elevated to vice department chair. From 1963 to 1965, Chen was invited by British Royal Society and became a visiting scholar in department of nuclear physics at Oxford University and Rutherfold High Energy Institute, studying serial electro-static accelerator and synchrotron.
Go to Profile#21440
Octavio Ianni
#21451
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Octavio Ianni , Brazilian sociologist graduated, mastered and doctored at the University of São Paulo and was one of the founders of Cebrap. Ianni was a pupil of Florestan Fernandes from whom he got great influence. These two sociologists and the former president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, are considered to be of great importance in Brazilian sociology. Octavio Ianni had his political rights suspended in 1969 by the Brazilian military government of the time, what made him unable to continue lecturing in Brazil, right which would be recovered only in 1977, in Pontifíca Universidade Católica de São Paulo .
Go to Profile#21441
Ahmad Milad Karimi
#21452
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Ahmad Milad Karimi is an Afghan-born German philosopher of religion, scholar of Islam, translator of the Koran, and poet. Karimi is professor of Islamic Philosophy at the University of Münster. Early life Ahmad Milad Karimi was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1979. He and his family fled the Afghan civil war when he was 13.
Go to Profile#21442
Seyed E. Hasnain
#21453
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Seyed Ehtesham Hasnain is an Indian academic. Biography Hasnain spent several years at the Texas A&M University, U.S. and returned to India in 1987 to work as a Staff Scientist at the National Institute of Immunology . Hasnain was appointed as the first director of Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics in February 1999. He served as the 7th Vice-Chancellor of University of Hyderabad from 2005 to 2011. He took charge as Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi on 2 September 2016 and served the office till 2021.
Go to Profile#21443
A. Dirk Moses
#21454
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Anthony Dirk Moses is an Australian scholar who researches various aspects of genocide. In 2022 he became the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York, after having been the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of genocide, especially in colonial contexts, as well as of the political development of the concept itself. He is known for coining the term racial century in reference to the period 1850–1950. He is editor-in-chief of the Jou...
Go to Profile#21444
George Sugihara
#21455
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
George Sugihara is currently a professor of biological oceanography in the Physical Oceanography Research Division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where he is the inaugural holder of the McQuown Chair in Natural Science. Sugihara is a theoretical biologist who works across a variety of fields ranging from ecology and landscape ecology, to epidemiology, to genetics, to geoscience and atmospheric science, to quantitative finance and economics.
Go to Profile#21445
Jennifer Saunders
#21456
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Jennifer Jane Saunders is an English actress, comedian, and screenwriter. Saunders originally found attention in the 1980s, when she became a member of The Comic Strip after graduating from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama with her best friend and comedy partner, Dawn French. With French, she co-wrote and starred in their eponymous sketch show, French and Saunders, for which they jointly received a BAFTA Fellowship in 2009. Saunders later received acclaim in the 1990s for writing and playing her character Edina Monsoon in her sitcom Absolutely Fabulous.
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Dave Bassett
#21457
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David Thomas Bassett is an English football manager and a former player. Bassett won a total of seven promotions and is one of a select number of managers who took charge of over 1,000 matches. After a playing career at semi-professional level, Bassett took charge of Fourth Division Wimbledon in 1981, and led them to the First Division within five years; he resigned in 1987 after leading the Dons to 6th place in the top flight. Following a brief stint at Watford, he took over at Sheffield United, leading United to two consecutive promotions from 1988–90. United remained in the top-flight until 1994, when they were relegated on the final day of the season.
Go to Profile#21447
Garth Gibson
#21458
Overall Influence
Garth Alan Gibson is a computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon University. Gibson's developed the RAID taxonomy of redundant data storage systems, along with David A. Patterson and Randy Katz. Born in Aurora, Ontario, he holds a Ph.D. and an MSc in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.Math in computer science from the University of Waterloo. He was involved in informed prefetch computing and network-attached secure disks, a precursor to the SCSI object storage device command set. Gibson was the initial director of the Parallel Data Laboratory at Carnegie Mello...
Go to Profile#21448
Amir Khajepour
#21459
Overall Influence
Amir Khajepour Is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at University of Waterloo. He holds Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Mechatronics Vehicle Systems. He is Co-author of Laser Cladding book published by CRC Press.
Go to Profile#21449
Yitzhak Apeloig
#21460
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Yitzhak Apeloig is a pioneer in the computational chemistry field of the Ab initio quantum chemistry methods for predicting and preparing the physical and chemical properties of materials. He was the president of the Technion from 2001 until 2009 where the position was handed off to Peretz Lavie. Distinguished Prof. Apeloig currently holds the Joseph Israel Freund Chair in Chemistry and is the co-director of the Lise Meitner Minerva Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the Technion. He served as dean of the Faculty of Chemistry from 1995 to 1999, where he was named Teacher of the Yea...
Go to Profile#21450
Ellen Winner
#21461
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ellen Winner is a psychologist and a professor at Boston College. She specializes in psychology of art. Winner graduated from the Putney School in 1965 and received a PhD in developmental psychology from Harvard University in 1978. She collaborated on Project Zero to conduct studies about the way people experience and perceive art. Winner noted how psychological explorations beginning in the realm of philosophy pertained to art.
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