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).
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List of the most influential people
#2151
Joseph Heller
#2153
Overall Influence
1923 - 1999 (76 years)
Joseph Heller was an American author of novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays. His best-known work is the 1961 novel Catch-22, a satire on war and bureaucracy, whose title has become a synonym for an absurd or contradictory choice. He was nominated in 1972 for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Herbert Robbins
#2154
Overall Influence
1915 - 2001 (86 years)
Herbert Ellis Robbins was an American mathematician and statistician. He did research in topology, measure theory, statistics, and a variety of other fields. He was the co-author, with Richard Courant, of What is Mathematics?, a popularization that is still in print. The Robbins lemma, used in empirical Bayes methods, is named after him. Robbins algebras are named after him because of a conjecture that he posed concerning Boolean algebras. The Robbins theorem, in graph theory, is also named after him, as is the Whitney–Robbins synthesis, a tool he introduced to prove this theorem. The we...
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Toshihide Maskawa
#2155
Overall Influence
1940 - 2021 (81 years)
Toshihide Maskawa was a Japanese theoretical physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one quarter of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
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Joseph Kosuth
#2156
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Joseph Kosuth is an American conceptual artist, who lives in New York and London, after having resided in various cities in Europe, including Ghent and Rome. Early life and career Born in Toledo, Ohio, Kosuth had an American mother and a Hungarian father. Joseph Kosuth attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963 Kosuth enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art on a scholarship. He spent the following year in Paris and traveled throughout Europe and North Africa. He moved to New York in 1965 and attended the School of Visual Arts there until 1967.
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Robert Curl
#2157
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Robert Floyd Curl Jr. was an American chemist who was Pitzer–Schlumberger Professor of Natural Sciences and professor of chemistry at Rice University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for the discovery of the nanomaterial buckminsterfullerene, and hence the fullerene class of materials, along with Richard Smalley and Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex.
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Robert Dorfman
#2158
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Robert Dorfman was professor of political economy at Harvard University. Dorfman made great contributions to the fields of economics, statistics, group testing and in the process of coding theory. His paper—'The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations' is a landmark in the sphere of Combinatorial Group Testing. To quote collaborator and Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow—"After starting his career as a statistician—his paper 'The Detection of Defective Members of Large Populations' is still a landmark—he turned to economics at the moment when linear models of production and allocati...
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Daniel J. Bernstein
#2159
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Daniel Julius Bernstein is an American German mathematician, cryptologist, and computer scientist. He is a visiting professor at CASA at Ruhr University Bochum, as well as a research professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before this, he was a visiting professor in the department of mathematics and computer science at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
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Andrew Benson
#2160
Overall Influence
1917 - 2015 (98 years)
Andrew Alm Benson was an American biologist and a professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, until his retirement in 1989. He is known for his work in understanding the carbon cycle in plants.
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Michael Martin Hammer
#2161
Overall Influence
1948 - 2008 (60 years)
Michael Martin Hammer was born in Annapolis, Maryland. Hammer is Jewish-American engineer, management author, and a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Michael Hammer and James A. Champy are the founders of The management theory of Business process reengineering . In which, they wrote "Re-engineering the Corporation: Manifesto for Business Revolution" in 1993.
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Bret Easton Ellis
#2162
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Bret Easton Ellis is an American author and screenwriter. Ellis was one of the literary Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a writer, is the expression of extreme acts and opinions in an affectless style. His novels commonly share recurring characters.
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Junot Díaz
#2163
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Junot Díaz is a Dominican-American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former fiction editor at Boston Review. He also serves on the board of advisers for Freedom University, a volunteer organization in Georgia that provides post-secondary instruction to undocumented immigrants. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.
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Alice Waters
#2164
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Alice Louise Waters is an American chef, restaurateur, and author. In 1971, she opened Chez Panisse, a restaurant in Berkeley, California, famous for its role in creating the farm-to-table movement and for pioneering California cuisine.
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Richard Goldstone
#2165
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Richard Joseph Goldstone is a South African former judge. After working for 17 years as a commercial lawyer, he was appointed by the South African government to serve on the Transvaal Supreme Court from 1980 to 1989 and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of South Africa from 1990 to 1994.
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Thomas Starzl
#2166
Overall Influence
1926 - 2017 (91 years)
Thomas Earl Starzl was an American physician, researcher, and expert on organ transplants. He performed the first human liver transplants, and has often been referred to as "the father of modern transplantation." A documentary, entitled "Burden of Genius," covering the medical and scientific advances spearheaded by Starzl himself, was released to the public in 2017 in a series of screenings. Dr. Starzl also penned his autobiography, "The Puzzle People: Memoirs Of A Transplant Surgeon," which was published in 1992.
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John Lewis Gaddis
#2167
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
John Lewis Gaddis is an American military historian, political scientist, and writer. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is best known for his work on the Cold War and grand strategy, and he has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times. Gaddis is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th-century American statesman George F. Kennan. George F. Kennan: An American Life , his biography of Kennan, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
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Alexander Prokhorov
#2168
Overall Influence
1916 - 2002 (86 years)
Alexander Mikhailovich Prokhorov was an Australian-born Russian physicist known for his pioneering research on lasers and masers in the former Soviet Union for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Charles Hard Townes and Nikolay Basov.
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Hironobu Sakaguchi
#2169
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Hironobu Sakaguchi is a Japanese game designer, director, producer, and writer. Originally working for Square from 1983 to 2003, he departed the company and founded independent studio Mistwalker in 2004. He is known as the creator of the Final Fantasy franchise, in addition to other titles during his time at Square. At Mistwalker, he is known for creating the Blue Dragon and Terra Battle series among several standalone titles, moving away from home consoles and creating titles for mobile platforms.
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Margaret Singer
#2170
Overall Influence
1921 - 2003 (82 years)
Margaret Thaler Singer was an American clinical psychologist and researcher with her colleague Lyman Wynne on family communication. She was a prominent figure in the study of undue influence in social and religious contexts, and a proponent of the brainwashing theory of new religious movements.
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Jean E. Sammet
#2171
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Jean E. Sammet was an American computer scientist who developed the FORMAC programming language in 1962. She was also one of the developers of the influential COBOL programming language. She received her B.A. in Mathematics from Mount Holyoke College in 1948 and her M.A. in Mathematics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1949. She received an honorary D.Sc. from Mount Holyoke College in 1978.
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Rosemary Radford Ruether
#2172
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Rosemary Radford Ruether was an American feminist scholar and Roman Catholic theologian known for her significant contributions to the fields of feminist theology and ecofeminist theology. Her teaching and her writings helped establish these areas of theology as distinct fields of study; she is recognized as one of the first scholars to bring women's perspectives on Christian theology into mainstream academic discourse. She was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and her own work was influenced by liberation and black theologies. She taught at Howard University for ten years, and later at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
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Joseph E. LeDoux
#2173
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Joseph E. LeDoux is an American neuroscientist whose research is primarily focused on survival circuits, including their impacts on emotions such as fear and anxiety. LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at New York University, and director of the Emotional Brain Institute, a collaboration between NYU and New York State with research sites at NYU and the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, New York. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the band The Amygdaloids.
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Maclyn McCarty
#2174
Overall Influence
1911 - 2005 (94 years)
Maclyn McCarty was an American geneticist, a research scientist described in 2005 as "the last surviving member of a Manhattan scientific team that overturned medical dogma in the 1940s and became the first to demonstrate that genes were made of DNA." He had worked at Rockefeller University "for more than 60 years." 1994 marked 50 years since this work's release.
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Tom Robbins
#2175
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Thomas Eugene Robbins is an American novelist. His most notable works are "seriocomedies" . Tom Robbins has lived in La Conner, Washington since 1970, where he has written nine books. His 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was adapted into the 1993 film version by Gus Van Sant. His latest work, published in 2014, is Tibetan Peach Pie, which is a self-declared "un-memoir".
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Paul Werbos
#2176
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Paul John Werbos is an American social scientist and machine learning pioneer. He is best known for his 1974 dissertation, which first described the process of training artificial neural networks through backpropagation of errors. He also was a pioneer of recurrent neural networks.
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Alex Callinicos
#2177
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Alexander Theodore Callinicos is a Rhodesian-born British political theorist and activist. An adherent of Trotskyism, he is a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party and serves as its International Secretary. He is also editor of International Socialism, the SWP's theoretical journal, and has published a number of books.
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Sergei Novikov
#2178
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Sergei Petrovich Novikov is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, noted for work in both algebraic topology and soliton theory. In 1970, he won the Fields Medal. Early life Novikov was born on 20 March 1938 in Gorky, Soviet Union .
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James Hansen
#2179
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
James Edward Hansen is an American adjunct professor directing the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is best known for his research in climatology, his 1988 Congressional testimony on climate change that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. In recent years, he has become a climate activist to mitigate the effects of global warming, on a few occasions leading to his arrest.
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Gerhard Frey
#2180
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Gerhard Frey is a German mathematician, known for his work in number theory. Following an original idea of Hellegouarch, he developed the notion of Frey–Hellegouarch curves, a construction of an elliptic curve from a purported solution to the Fermat equation, that is central to Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
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Marilyn French
#2181
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Marilyn French was an American radical feminist author, most widely known for her second book and first novel, the 1977 work The Women's Room. Life French was born in Brooklyn to E. Charles Edwards, an engineer, and Isabel Hazz Edwards, a department store clerk. In her youth, she was a journalist, writing a neighborhood newsletter. She played the piano and dreamed of becoming a composer. She received a bachelor's degree from Hofstra University in 1951, in philosophy and English literature. Marilyn Edwards married Robert M. French Jr. in 1950 and supported him while he attended law school. The couple had two children.
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Jim DeRogatis
#2182
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
James Peter DeRogatis is an American music critic and co-host of Sound Opinions. DeRogatis has written articles for magazines such as Rolling Stone, Spin, Guitar World and Modern Drummer, and for 15 years was the pop music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.
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Clifford Stein
#2183
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Clifford Seth Stein , a computer scientist, is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University in New York, NY, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Computer Science. Stein is chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, Stein was a professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
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Malcolm Bradbury
#2184
Overall Influence
1932 - 2000 (68 years)
Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury, was an English author and academic. Life Bradbury was born in Sheffield, the son of a railwayman. His family moved to London in 1935, but returned to Sheffield in 1941 with his brother and mother. The family later moved to Nottingham and in 1943 Bradbury attended West Bridgford Grammar School, where he remained until 1950. He read English at University College, Leicester, gaining a first-class degree in 1953. He continued his studies at Queen Mary College, University of London, where he gained his MA in 1955.
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Raymond Benson
#2185
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Raymond Benson is an American writer known for his James Bond novels published between 1997 and 2003. Early life and education Benson was born in Midland, Texas and graduated from Permian High School in Odessa in 1973. In primary school Benson took an interest in the piano which would later in his life develop into an interest in composing music, mostly for theatrical productions. Benson also took part in drama at school and became the vice president of his high school's drama department, an interest that he would later pursue by directing stage productions in New York City after attending an...
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Thomas Keneally
#2186
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Thomas Michael Keneally, AO is an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and actor. He is best known for his non-fiction novel Schindler's Ark, the story of Oskar Schindler's rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, which won the Booker Prize in 1982. The book would later be adapted into Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List, which won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
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Phillip E. Johnson
#2187
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Phillip E. Johnson was a UC Berkeley law professor, opponent of evolutionary science, co-founder of the pseudoscientific intelligent design movement, author of the "Wedge strategy" and co-founder of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture . He described himself as "in a sense the father of the intelligent design movement". He was a critic of Darwinism, which he described as "fully naturalistic evolution, involving chance mechanisms and natural selection". The wedge strategy aims to change public opinion and scientific consensus, and seeks to convince the scientific community to allow a role for theism, or causes beyond naturalistic explanation, in scientific discourse.
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Yasser Arafat
#2188
Overall Influence
1929 - 2004 (75 years)
Yasser Arafat was a Palestinian political leader. He was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969 to 2004 and President of the Palestinian National Authority from 1994 to 2004. Ideologically an Arab nationalist and a socialist, Arafat was a founding member of the Fatah political party, which he led from 1959 until 2004.
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Takaaki Kajita
#2189
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
is a Japanese physicist, known for neutrino experiments at the Kamioka Observatory – Kamiokande and its successor, Super-Kamiokande. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Canadian physicist Arthur B. McDonald. On 1 October 2020, he became the president of the Science Council of Japan.
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Robert Costanza
#2190
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Robert Costanza is an American/Australian ecological economist and Professor at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Full Member of the Club of Rome.
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Anna Wierzbicka
#2191
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Anna Wierzbicka is a Polish linguist who is Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra. Brought up in Poland, she graduated from Warsaw University and emigrated to Australia in 1972, where she has lived since. With over twenty published books, many of which have been translated into other languages, she is a prolific writer.
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Mike Newell
#2192
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Michael Cormac Newell is an English film and television director and producer. He won the BAFTA for Best Direction for Four Weddings and a Funeral , which also won the BAFTA Award for Best Film, and directed the films Donnie Brasco and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire .
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Linda B. Buck
#2193
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Linda Brown Buck is an American biologist best known for her work on the olfactory system. She was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Richard Axel, for their work on olfactory receptors. She is currently on the faculty of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
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Nancy Chodorow
#2194
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Nancy Julia Chodorow is an American sociologist and professor. She began her career as a professor of Women's studies at Wellesley College in 1973, and from 1974 on taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until 1986. She then was a professor in the departments of sociology and clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley until she resigned in 1986, after which she taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. Chodorow is often described as a leader in feminist thought, especially in the realms of psychoanalysis and psychology.
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Erich von Däniken
#2195
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Erich Anton Paul von Däniken is a Swiss author of several books which make claims about extraterrestrial influences on early human culture, including the best-selling Chariots of the Gods?, published in 1968. Von Däniken is one of the main figures responsible for popularizing the "paleo-contact" and ancient astronauts hypotheses.
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Duncan Kennedy
#2196
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Duncan Kennedy is a legal scholar and held the Carter Professorship of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School until 2015. Now emeritus, he is best known as one of the founders of the critical legal studies movement.
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Pierre-Louis Lions
#2197
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Pierre-Louis Lions is a French mathematician. He is known for a number of contributions to the fields of partial differential equations and the calculus of variations. He was a recipient of the 1994 Fields Medal and the 1991 Prize of the Philip Morris tobacco and cigarette company.
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Barry Barish
#2198
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Barry Clark Barish is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate. He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology and a leading expert on gravitational waves.
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Warren E. Burger
#2199
Overall Influence
1907 - 1995 (88 years)
Warren Earl Burger was an American attorney and jurist who served as the 15th chief justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Burger graduated from the St. Paul College of Law in 1931. He helped secure the Minnesota delegation's support for Dwight D. Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican National Convention. After Eisenhower won the 1952 presidential election, he appointed Burger to the position of Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division. In 1956, Eisenhower appointed Burger to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
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Jerome Kagan
#2200
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Jerome Kagan was an American psychologist, who was the Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, as well as, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology.
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Ernest Sosa
#2201
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Ernest Sosa is an American philosopher primarily interested in epistemology. Since 2007 he has been Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, but he spent most of his career at Brown University.
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Eben Moglen
#2202
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Eben Moglen is an American legal scholar who is professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center. Biography Moglen started out as a computer programming language designer and then received his bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College in 1980. In 1985, he received a Master of Philosophy in history and a JD from Yale University. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University and the University of Virginia since 1987.
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