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
#21651
Harold Crouch
#21662
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Harold Arthur Crouch was an Australian political science scholar and author. He had been described as "one of the pre-eminent scholars of Indonesian politics." Most of his books were published under "Harold Crouch".
Go to Profile#21652
Suresh Garimella
#21663
Overall Influence
Suresh Garimella is an Indian American mechanical engineer and university administrator. He is the current and 27th president of the University of Vermont. Before assuming the presidency in 2019, Garimella was executive vice president for research and partnerships at the Purdue University College of Engineering at Purdue University.
Go to Profile#21653
Tamiaki Yoneya
#21664
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Tamiaki Yoneya is a Japanese physicist. Independently of Joël Scherk and John H. Schwarz, he realized that string theory describes, among other things, the force of gravity. Yoneya has worked on the stringy extension of the uncertainty principle for many years.
Go to Profile#21654
Valarie Zeithaml
#21665
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Valarie Zeithaml is a marketing professor and author. She is the David S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Zeithml is an expert in the area of services marketing and service quality. In the 1980s Zeithaml and her co-authors developed SERVQUAL, a quality management framework for services. She was named a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in the report on "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds."
Go to Profile#21655
Erhard Blankenburg
#21666
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Erhard Blankenburg was a German sociologist, specializing in the sociology of law. Education and career Blankenburg studied philosophy, sociology and German literature at the University of Freiburg and the Free University Berlin. He received an MA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Basel . After working as an assistant to the sociologist Heinrich Popitz at the University of Freiburg , he received there his habilitation . From 1975 to 1980, Blankenburg worked at the renowned Wissenschaftszentrums Berlin. In 1980 he became professor of sociology of law at the Free...
Go to Profile#21656
Gerald Gazdar
#21667
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Gerald James Michael Gazdar, FBA is a British linguist and computer scientist. Education He was educated at Heath Mount School, Bradfield College, the University of East Anglia and the University of Reading .
Go to Profile#21657
William H. Calvin
#21668
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
William H. Calvin is an American theoretical neurophysiologist and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is known for popularizing neuroscience and evolutionary biology, including the hybrid of those two fields, neural Darwinism. He relates abrupt climate change to human evolution and more recently has been working on global climate change issues.
Go to Profile#21658
Alexei Ratmansky
#21669
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Alexei Osipovich Ratmansky is a Russian-American choreographer and former ballet dancer. From 2004 to 2008 he was the director of the Moscow Bolshoi Ballet. He left Russia in 2008. In 2009 he was appointed the artist in residence at the American Ballet Theatre, and as artist in residence at the New York City Ballet from August 2023.
Go to Profile#21659
Eran Elhaik
#21670
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Eran Elhaik is an Israeli-American geneticist and bioinformatician, an associate professor of bioinformatics at Lund University in Sweden and Chief of Science Officer at an ancestry testing company called Ancient DNA Origins owned by Enkigen Genetics Limited, registered in Ireland. His research uses computational, statistical, epidemiological and mathematical approaches to fields such as complex disorders, population genetics, personalised medicine, molecular evolution, genomics, paleogenomics and epigenetics.
Go to Profile#21660
Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan
#21671
Overall Influence
1979 - 2012 (33 years)
Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was an Iranian nuclear scientist who was assassinated in 2012. He was also deputy of commerce at the Natanz nuclear power plant. Life Ahmadi Roshan was born on 8 September 1979 in the village of Sangestan in Hamedan province, and grew up in a poor family. He was among the students of Aziz Khoshvaght , studied polymer engineering at the Sharif University of Technology, and had published several ISI articles in English and Persian by the time he was 32 years old.
Go to Profile#21661
Christopher Boehm
#21672
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
Christopher Boehm was an American cultural anthropologist with a subspecialty in primatology, who researched conflict resolution, altruism, the evolution of morality, and feuding and warfare. He was also the Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at University of Southern California, a multi-media interactive database focusing on the social and moral behavior of world hunter gatherers. Boehm died on November 23, 2021, at the age of 90.
Go to Profile#21662
Flora Nwapa
#21673
Overall Influence
1931 - 1993 (62 years)
Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa , was a Nigerian author who has been called the mother of modern African Literature. She was the forerunner to a generation of African women writers, and the first African woman novelist to be published in the English language in Britain. She achieved international recognition with her first novel Efuru, published in 1966 by Heinemann Educational Books. While never considering herself a feminist, she was best known for recreating life and traditions from an Igbo woman's viewpoint.
Go to Profile#21663
Len Dawson
#21674
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Leonard Ray Dawson was an American football quarterback who played in the National Football League and American Football League for 19 seasons, primarily with the Kansas City Chiefs franchise. After playing college football at Purdue, Dawson began his professional career with the NFL in 1957, spending three seasons with the Pittsburgh Steelers and two with the Cleveland Browns. He left the NFL in 1962 to sign with the AFL's Chiefs , where he spent the last 14 seasons of his career, and rejoined the NFL after the AFL–NFL merger.
Go to Profile#21664
Paul Scofield
#21675
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
David Paul Scofield was an English actor. During a six-decade career, Scofield achieved the Triple Crown of Acting, winning an Academy Award, Emmy, and Tony for his work. Scofield established a reputation as one of the greatest Shakespearean performers. He declined the honour of a knighthood, but was appointed CBE in 1956 and became a CH in 2001.
Go to Profile#21665
Alastair Hannay
#21676
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Robert Alastair Hannay is professor emeritus at the University of Oslo. Educated in Edinburgh and London, where he studied under A. J. Ayer and Bernard Williams and since 1961 resident in Norway. Hannay has written extensively on the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. His book "The Public" as well as examining the roles of the 'public' as audience and political participant, brings several Kierkegaardian insights to bear on contemporary political life. Hannay has written a novella and several pocket books on philosophical themes, as well as a memoir . From 2006 to 2020 he was a member of the te...
Go to Profile#21666
Matei Machedon
#21677
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Matei Machedon is a Romanian–American mathematician, specializing in partial differential equations and mathematical physics. Machedon graduated from the University of Chicago with B.A./M.S. in 1982. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1986 with thesis advisor Charles Fefferman. Machedon was a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1986 to 1988. At Princeton University he was an assistant professor from 1988 to 1994. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study for the academic year 1994–1995. At the University of Maryland he was an associate profes...
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Don Catlin
#21678
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Don H. Catlin is an anti-doping scientist and one of the founders of modern drug-testing in sport. Career Catlin has overseen testing for performance-enhancing drugs at the three most recent Olympics held in the United States since the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, as well as testing for the United States Olympic Committee, the National Collegiate Athletic Association , Major League Baseball's minor leagues and the National Football League . He has also developed drug identification techniques currently in use at the Olympic, professional and collegiate levels.
Go to Profile#21668
AnnaLee Saxenian
#21679
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
AnnaLee Saxenian is a professor and the former Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information, known widely for her work on technology clusters and social networks in Silicon Valley. She received her BA from Williams College in 1976 and her PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989.
Go to Profile#21669
Brenda Laurel
#21680
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Brenda Laurel is an American interaction designer, video game designer, and researcher. She is an advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in video games, a "pioneer in developing virtual reality", a public speaker, and an academic.
Go to Profile#21670
Klaus Schulten
#21681
Overall Influence
1947 - 2016 (69 years)
Klaus Schulten was a German-American computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schulten used supercomputing techniques to apply theoretical physics to the fields of biomedicine and bioengineering and dynamically model living systems. His mathematical, theoretical, and technological innovations led to key discoveries about the motion of biological cells, sensory processes in vision, animal navigation, light energy harvesting in photosynthesis, and learning in neural networks.
Go to Profile#21671
Eric Walter Elst
#21682
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Eric Walter Elst was a Belgian astronomer at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Uccle and a prolific discoverer of asteroids. The Minor Planet Center ranks him among the top 10 discoverers of minor planets with thousands of discoveries made at ESO's La Silla Observatory in northern Chile and at the Rozhen Observatory in Bulgaria during 1986–2009.
Go to Profile#21672
Rabindra Mohapatra
#21683
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Rabindra Nath Mohapatra is an Indian American theoretical physicist, known for his work on the seesaw mechanism in neutrino physics. Mohapatra was born in the small village Musagadia in Mayurbhanj State. He studied at Utkal University in Bhubaneswar and the University of Delhi . In 1969 he earned his PhD under Robert Marshak at the University of Rochester. Subsequently he was a post-doc at Stony Brook University and at the University of Maryland. In 1974 he became an assistant professor and in 1976 associate professor at City College of CUNY under Bunji Sakita. In the academic year 1980/1 he was a visiting professor at Max Planck Institute for Physics.
Go to Profile#21673
David Gauntlett
#21684
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
David Gauntlett is a British sociologist and media theorist, and the author of several books including Making is Connecting. His earlier work concerned contemporary media audiences, and has moved towards a focus on the everyday making and sharing of digital media and social media and the role of these activities in self-identity and building creative cultures.
Go to Profile#21674
Noriko Yui
#21685
Overall Influence
Noriko Yui is a professor of mathematics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Career A native of Japan, Yui obtained her B.S. from Tsuda College, and her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Rutgers University in 1974 under the supervision of Richard Bumby.
Go to Profile#21675
Hans Neurath
#21686
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
Hans Neurath was a biochemist, a leader in protein chemistry, and the founding chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was born in Vienna, Austria, and received his doctorate in 1933 from the University of Vienna. He then studied in London and at the University of Minnesota. In 1938, he was appointed professor at Duke University, where he established a research program on the physical chemistry of proteins.
Go to Profile#21676
Kimberly Noble
#21687
Overall Influence
Kimberly G. Noble is an American neuroscientist and pediatrician known for her work in socioeconomic disparities and children's cognitive development. She is Professor of Neuroscience and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and Director of the Neurocognition, Early Experience and Development Lab.
Go to Profile#21677
Yuji Ichioka
#21688
Overall Influence
1936 - 2002 (66 years)
Yuji Ichioka was an American historian and civil rights activist best known for his work in ethnic studies, particularly Asian American Studies and for being a leader in the Asian American movement. An adjunct professor at UCLA, he and Emma Gee coined the term "Asian American" in 1968 during the founding of the Asian American Political Alliance, to help unify different Asian ethnic groups , and was considered the preeminent scholar of Japanese American history.
Go to Profile#21678
Ian Deary
#21689
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Ian John Deary OBE, FBA, FRSE, FMedSci is a Scottish psychiatrist known for work in the fields of intelligence, cognitive ageing, cognitive epidemiology, and personality. Deary is Professor of Differential Psychology at The University of Edinburgh. He is former Director of the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology and co-Director of the Alzheimer Scotland Dementia Research Centre.
Go to Profile#21679
Alfred Menezes
#21690
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Alfred Menezes is co-author of several books on cryptography, including the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and is a professor of mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Education Alfred Menezes' family is from Goa, a state in western India, but he was born in Tanzania and grew up in Kuwait except for a few years at a boarding school in India. His undergraduate and post-graduate degrees are from the University of Waterloo.
Go to Profile#21680
Kim Wilde
#21691
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Kim Wilde is an English pop singer. She first saw success in 1981 with her debut single "Kids in America", which peaked at No. 2 in the UK. In 1983, she received the Brit Award for Best British Female solo artist. In 1986, she had a UK No. 2 hit with a reworked version of the Supremes' song "You Keep Me Hangin' On", which also topped the US Billboard Hot 100 in 1987. Between 1981 and 1996, she had 25 singles that charted within the Top 50 of the UK Singles Chart. Her other hits include "Chequered Love" , "You Came" , and "Never Trust a Stranger" . In 2003, she collaborated with Nena on the so...
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Glyn Johns
#21692
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Glyn Thomas Johns is an English recording engineer and record producer. He has worked with many of the most famous rock recording acts from both the UK and abroad, such as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Kinks, Eagles, Bob Dylan, the Band, Eric Clapton, the Clash, the Steve Miller Band, Small Faces, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils and Joan Armatrading.
Go to Profile#21682
Helenio Herrera
#21693
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Helenio Herrera Gavilán was an Argentine-French football player and manager. He is best remembered for his success with the Inter Milan team known as Grande Inter in the 1960s. During his managerial career, Herrera won four La Liga titles in Spain and three Serie A titles in Italy with Inter. He also guided Inter to European glory, winning two consecutive European Cups, among several other honours. He is regarded as one of the greatest managers of all time.
Go to Profile#21683
Larry Csonka
#21694
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Larry Richard Csonka is an American former professional football fullback in the National Football League for the Miami Dolphins for the majority of his career, along with the New York Giants for three years. He also had a short stint with the Memphis Southmen in the WFL. Nicknamed "Zonk", Csonka is widely regarded as one of the greatest running backs of all time. Csonka is mostly remembered for his success during his tenure with the Dolphins, which included being a member of their 17–0 perfect season in 1972, and winning Super Bowl championships in 1972 and 1973, the latter of which he was named Super Bowl MVP when he ran for a then-record 145 yards.
Go to Profile#21684
M. Salah Baouendi
#21695
Overall Influence
1937 - 2011 (74 years)
Mohammed Salah Baouendi was a Tunisian-American mathematician who worked as a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. His research concerned partial differential equations and the theory of several complex variables.
Go to Profile#21685
Yahya Jammeh
#21696
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Yahya Abdul-Aziz Jemus Junkung Jammeh is a Gambian politician and former military officer, who served as President of the Gambia from 1996 to 2017, as well as Chairman of the Armed Forces Provisional Ruling Council from 1994 to 1996.
Go to Profile#21686
Margaret Gowing
#21697
Overall Influence
1921 - 1998 (77 years)
Margaret Mary Gowing , was an English historian. She was involved with the production of several volumes of the officially sponsored History of the Second World War, but was better known for her books, commissioned by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, covering the early history of Britain's nuclear weapons programmes: Britain and Atomic Energy 1939–1945, published in 1964, and the two-volume Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–52, published in 1974.
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Dave Brock
#21698
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
David Anthony Brock is an English musician. He plays electric guitar, keyboards, bass and oscillators. He is a founder, sole constant member and musical focus of the space rock group Hawkwind. Brock was honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the annual Progressive Music Awards in 2013.
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Victor Burgin
#21699
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Victor Burgin is a British artist and writer. Burgin first came to attention as a conceptual artist in the late 1960s and at that time was most noted for being a political photographer of the left, who would fuse photographs and words in the same picture. He has worked with photography and film, calling painting "the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud" . His work is influenced by a variety of theorists and philosophers, most especially thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Lefebvre, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.
Go to Profile#21689
Abbas Zaryab
#21700
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
Abbas Zaryab or 'Abbās Zaryāb was a historian, translator, literature Professor and Iranologist. He was the author of several books, including a life of Muhammad, and articles in The Persian Encyclopedia , Western peer reviewed Journals as well as Iranica.
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Bob Newhart
#21701
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
George Robert Newhart is an American comedian and actor. He is known for his deadpan and stammering delivery style. Beginning as a stand-up comedian, he transitioned his career to acting in television. He has received numerous accolades, including three Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe Award. He was honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2002.
Go to Profile#21691
Bob Rae
#21702
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Robert Keith Rae is a Canadian diplomat and former politician who is the current Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations since 2020. He previously served as the 21st premier of Ontario from 1990 to 1995, leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party from 1982 to 1996, and interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2011 to 2013. Between 1978 and 2013, he was elected 11 times to federal and provincial parliaments.
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Egon Bondy
#21703
Overall Influence
1930 - 2007 (77 years)
Egon Bondy, born Zbyněk Fišer , was a Czech philosopher, writer, and poet, one of the leading personalities of the Prague underground. In the late 1940s, Bondy was active in a surrealistic group. From 1957 to 1961, he studied philosophy and psychology at Charles University in Prague. From the 1960s he was considered to be one of the main figures of the Prague underground, particularly once his texts were set to music by The Plastic People of the Universe in the 1970s. His non-conformism brought him into conflict with the totalitarian communist regime in Czechoslovakia. His works were circulate...
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Cynthia Rudin
#21704
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Cynthia Diane Rudin is an American computer scientist and statistician specializing in machine learning and known for her work in interpretable machine learning. She is the director of the Interpretable Machine Learning Lab at Duke University, where she is a professor of computer science, electrical and computer engineering, statistical science, and biostatistics and bioinformatics. In 2022, she won the Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for her work on the importance of transparency f...
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Marjory Gordon
#21705
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Marjory Gordon was a nursing theorist and professor who created a nursing assessment theory known as Gordon's functional health patterns. Gordon served in 1973 as the first president of the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association until 1988. She was a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing beginning in 1977 and was designated a Living Legend by the same organization in 2009.
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Scott Steiner
#21706
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Scott Rechsteiner , better known by the ring name Scott Steiner, is an American professional wrestler. Steiner is perhaps best known for his time in World Championship Wrestling , and has also wrestled for Jim Crockett Promotions , World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment , Total Nonstop Action Wrestling , and Extreme Championship Wrestling . He is a four-time world champion in wrestling, being a one-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion, a one-time WWA World Heavyweight Champion, and a one-time WWC Universal Heavyweight Champion and a one-time WWA World Heavyweight Champion . He is the eighth W...
Go to Profile#21696
David Edward
#21707
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Sir David Alexander Ogilvy Edward is a Scottish lawyer and academic, and former Judge of the Court of Justice of the European Communities. Sir David is an Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford; Honorary Professor of the University of Edinburgh and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is also an Honorary Sheriff of the Sheriffdom of Tayside, Central and Fife at Perth, Scotland.
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Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson
#21708
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Gilbert de Beauregard Robinson, MBE was a Canadian mathematician most famous for his work on combinatorics and representation theory of the symmetric groups, including the Robinson-Schensted algorithm.
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Stephen K. White
#21709
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Stephen K. White , is James Hart Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on critical social and political theory, philosophy of social science, and continental political thought. He has contributed to several scholarly works on Jürgen Habermas, including The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, which he edited. He is also a past editor of the journal Political Theory.
Go to Profile#21699
Malcolm McKenna
#21710
Overall Influence
1930 - 2008 (78 years)
Malcolm Carnegie McKenna was an American paleontologist and author on the subject. Paleontologist McKenna began his paleontology career at the Webb School of California in Claremont, California, under noted paleontologist and teacher, Raymond Alf. He attended the California Institute of Technology and Pomona College, then graduated in paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also earned his Ph.D.
Go to Profile#21700
Deborah Harkness
#21711
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Deborah Harkness is an American scholar and novelist, best known as a historian and as the author of the All Souls Trilogy, which consists of The New York Times best-selling novel A Discovery of Witches and its sequels Shadow of Night and The Book of Life. Her latest book is Time's Convert: A Novel, both an origin story of the trilogy's Marcus Whitmore character, set in the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, and a sequel to the All Souls Trilogy.
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