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
#21701
Setsuro Ebashi
#21712
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
was a prominent Japanese physiologist who uncovered the regulatory role of calcium in cells. He is famous for the discovery of Troponin in 1965, which is integral to muscle contraction, as well as for the contribution of diagnosis of muscular dystrophy.
Go to Profile#21702
Wilbur Zelinsky
#21713
Overall Influence
1921 - 2013 (92 years)
Wilbur Zelinsky was an American cultural geographer. He was most recently a professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University. He also created the Zelinsky Model of Demographic Transition. Background and education An Illinoisan by birth, but a "northeasterner by choice and conviction", Zelinsky received his Bachelor's Degree and his Master's Degree from the University of Madison, Wisconsin. He earned a PhD at University of California, Berkeley, where he was a student of Carl Sauer.
Go to Profile#21703
John Doebley
#21714
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
John F. Doebley is an American botanical geneticist whose main area of interest is how genes drive plant development and evolution. He has spent the last two decades examining the genetic differences and similarities between teosinte and maize and has cloned the major genes that cause the visible differences between these two very different plants.
Go to Profile#21704
John Calvert
#21715
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John Calvert is the holder of the Henry W. Casper, SJ Associate Professorship in History at Creighton University. He is the author of several academic works on radical Islam, most notably one on the Islamist intellectual Sayyid Qutb entitled Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism.
Go to Profile#21705
Gary T. Marx
#21716
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Gary T. Marx is Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and retired from the University of Colorado in 1996. He has worked in the areas of race and ethnicity, collective behavior and social movements, law and society and surveillance studies.
Go to Profile#21706
Davide Vione
#21717
Overall Influence
Davide Vione is an Italian chemist and academic. He is a professor of chemistry at the University of Torino. His research is focused on photochemistry of surface and atmospheric waters, heterogeneous photocatalysis and other advanced oxidation processes for water treatment. Vione has authored over 350 publications, has been cited over 12,000 times.
Go to Profile#21707
Max Welling
#21718
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Max Welling is a Dutch computer scientist in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam. In August 2017, the university spin-off Scyfer BV, co-founded by Welling, was acquired by Qualcomm. He has since then served as a Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Netherlands. He is also currently the Lead Scientist of the new Microsoft Research Lab in Amsterdam.
Go to Profile#21708
Desmond Child
#21719
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John Charles Barrett , known professionally as Desmond Child, is an American songwriter and producer. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2008. His hits as a songwriter include Kiss's "I Was Made for Lovin' You"; Joan Jett & the Blackhearts' "I Hate Myself for Loving You"; Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name", "Livin' on a Prayer", "Bad Medicine", and "Born to Be My Baby"; Aerosmith's "Dude ", "Angel", "What It Takes" and "Crazy"; Cher's "We All Sleep Alone" and "Just Like Jesse James"; Alice Cooper's "Poison"; Michael Bolton's "How Can We Be Lovers?"; and Ricky Martin's "The...
Go to Profile#21709
Wilson Pickett
#21720
Overall Influence
1941 - 2006 (65 years)
Wilson Pickett was an American singer and songwriter. A major figure in the development of soul music, Pickett recorded over 50 songs which made the US R&B charts, many of which crossed over to the Billboard Hot 100. Among his best-known hits are "In the Midnight Hour" , "Land of 1,000 Dances", "634-5789 ", "Mustang Sally", "Funky Broadway", "Engine No. 9", and "Don't Knock My Love".
Go to Profile#21710
Dan Freed
#21721
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Daniel Stuart Freed is an American mathematician, specializing in global analysis and its applications to supersymmetry, string theory, and quantum field theory. He is currently the Shiing-Shen Chern Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#21711
Naomi Watts
#21722
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Naomi Ellen Watts is a British actress. After her family moved to Australia, she made her film debut there in the drama For Love Alone and then appeared in three television series, Hey Dad..! , Brides of Christ , and Home and Away , and the film Flirting . After moving to the United States, Watts initially struggled as an actress, taking roles in small-scale films until she starred in David Lynch's psychological thriller Mulholland Drive in 2001 as an aspiring actress. The role began her rise to international prominence.
Go to Profile#21712
Tejinder Virdee
#21723
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee, , is a Kenyan-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project. CMS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1991 and now has over 3500 participants from 45 countries.
Go to Profile#21713
Martin Kreitman
#21724
Overall Influence
Martin Edward Kreitman is an American geneticist at the University of Chicago, most well known for the McDonald–Kreitman test that is used to infer the amount of adaptive evolution in population genetic studies.
Go to Profile#21714
David E. Kaiser
#21725
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David E. Kaiser is an American historian whose published works have covered a broad range of topics, from European warfare to American League baseball. He was a Professor in the Strategy and Policy Department of the United States Naval War College from 1990 until 2012 and has taught at Carnegie Mellon, Williams College, and Harvard University.
Go to Profile#21715
Jennifer Garner
#21726
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Jennifer Anne Garner is an American actress. Born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Charleston, West Virginia, Garner studied theater at Denison University and began acting as an understudy for the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City. She made her screen debut in the television film adaptation of Danielle Steel's romance novel Zoya in 1995. She had a starring role on the Fox teen drama series Time of Your Life , and supporting roles in the war drama film Pearl Harbor and the comedy-drama film Catch Me If You Can .
Go to Profile#21716
David Dolphin
#21727
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
David H. Dolphin, is a Canadian biochemist. He is an internationally recognized expert in porphyrin chemistry and biochemistry. He was the lead creator of Visudyne, a medication used in conjunction with laser treatment to eliminate the abnormal blood vessels in the eye associated with conditions such as the wet form of macular degeneration.
Go to Profile#21717
Jonathan Weissman
#21728
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jonathan S. Weissman is the Landon T. Clay Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of the Whitehead Institute, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. From 1996 to 2020, he was a faculty member in the department of cellular molecular pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco.
Go to Profile#21718
Ira Herskowitz
#21729
Overall Influence
1946 - 2003 (57 years)
Ira Herskowitz was an American phage and yeast geneticist who studied genetic regulatory circuits and mechanisms. He was particularly noted for his work on mating type switching and cellular differentiation, largely using Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model organism.
Go to Profile#21719
Deborah Coyne
#21730
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Deborah Margaret Ryland Coyne is a Canadian constitutional lawyer, professor, and author. She is the cousin of journalist Andrew Coyne and actress Susan Coyne, and the niece of former Bank of Canada governor James Elliott Coyne.
Go to Profile#21720
Ronald M. Sega
#21731
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ronald "Ron" Michael Sega is an American former astronaut who is professor of systems engineering and Vice President for Energy and the Environment at the Colorado State University Research Foundation, a non-profit advocacy organization supporting CSU. He is also the Vice President and Enterprise Executive for Energy and Environment at Ohio State University. From August 2005 to August 2007, he served as Under Secretary of the Air Force. He is a retired major general in the United States Air Force and a former NASA astronaut. Sega was born in Cleveland, Ohio, he is of Slovene origin. He was married to fellow astronaut Bonnie J.
Go to Profile#21721
Jacqueline Liebergott
#21732
Overall Influence
Jacqueline Weis Liebergott assumed the presidency of Emerson College as its first female president in September 1993 and during her tenure spearheaded the college's move from Boston's Back Bay to the theatre district. This move resulted in unprecedented growth and success for the institution.
Go to Profile#21722
Ronald Baecker
#21733
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ronald Baecker is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Bell Chair in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Toronto , and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He was the co-founder of the Dynamic Graphics Project , and the founder of the Knowledge Media Design Institute and the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab at UofT. He was the founder of Canada's research network on collaboration technologies , a founding researcher of AGE-WELL, Canada's Technology and Agine research network, the founder of Springer Nature's Synthesis Lectures on Technology and Health, and the founder of computers-society.org.
Go to Profile#21723
Eli Amir
#21734
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Eli Amir is an Iraqi-born Israeli writer and civil servant. He served as director general of the Youth Aliyah Department of the Jewish Agency. Biography Amir was born Fuad Elias Nasah Halschi in Baghdad, Iraq. He immigrated to Israel with his family in 1950, and went to school in Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek. He is now living in Gilo, Jerusalem. Amir studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#21724
Marshall Scott Poole
#21735
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Marshall Scott Poole is an American communication researcher and professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Biography Poole received his BA in Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1973, his MA in Communication at the Michigan State University in 1976, and back at the University of Wisconsin-Madison his PhD in Communication Arts in 1980 with a minor in Management.
Go to Profile#21725
Saba Valadkhan
#21736
Overall Influence
Saba Valadkhan is an Iranian American biomedical scientist, and an Assistant Professor and RNA researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2005, she was awarded the GE / Science Young Scientist Award for her breakthrough in understanding the mechanism of spliceosomes - "akin to finding the Holy Grail of the splicing catalysis field" - a critical area of research, given that "20 percent or 30 percent of all human genetic diseases are caused by mistakes that the spliceosome makes".
Go to Profile#21726
Klaus Berger
#21737
Overall Influence
1940 - 2020 (80 years)
Klaus Berger was a German academic theologian. Berger was Professor of New Testament Theology at the University of Heidelberg. Biography He is known for his study and publications on the New Testament. He had been quoted in several Catholic news sources to the effect that he was Catholic or somehow "both Catholic and Protestant." This idea was rejected by the Roman Catholic Church and, after this controversy, he left the Protestant Church in Baden and became a member once more of the Roman Catholic Church .
Go to Profile#21727
Robert W. Rosenthal
#21738
Overall Influence
1945 - 2002 (57 years)
Robert W. Rosenthal was an American economist, most known for his contributions to game theory. He obtained a B.A. in political economy from Johns Hopkins University , M.S. and Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University, advised by Robert B. Wilson. He worked as assistant professor in the department of Industrial Engineering and management science at Northwestern University , was member of the technical staff at Bell Labs , was professor of economics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University , State University of New York at Stony Brook and Boston University where he worked until his death from a heart attack.
Go to Profile#21728
Helga Hernes
#21739
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Helga Marie Hernes is a German-born Norwegian political scientist, diplomat, and politician for the Labour Party. Educated in the United States, she moved to Norway following her marriage to Norwegian sociologist and politician Gudmund Hernes whom she met during her studies. She was on faculty at the at the University of Bergen from 1970 to 1980 and subsequently held a number of positions in research management. Her research during the 1970s and 1980s focused on international politics, women's studies and the welfare state, and she is well known for her concept of state feminism, articulated in 1987.
Go to Profile#21729
Robert R. Korfhage
#21740
Overall Influence
1930 - 1998 (68 years)
Robert Roy Korfhage was an American computer scientist, famous for his contributions to information retrieval and several textbooks. He was son of Dr. Roy Korfhage who was a chemist at Nestlé in Fulton, Oswego County, New York. Korfhage earned his bachelor's degree in engineering mathematics at University of Michigan, while working part-time at United Aircraft and Transport Corporation in East Hartford as programmer. At the same university, he earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in mathematics, his PhD dissertation being On Systems of Distinct Representatives for Several Collections of Set...
Go to Profile#21730
Alexander Markham
#21741
Overall Influence
Sir Alexander Fred Markham, born 1950, is Professor of Medicine at the University of Leeds, Director of the Molecular Medicine Institute at St James's University Hospital, and a former Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK.
Go to Profile#21731
Arthur J. Bachrach
#21742
Overall Influence
1923 - 2011 (88 years)
Arthur J. Bachrach was an American psychologist and administrator, who was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University, and Director of the Environmental Stress Program and Chair of Psychophysiology at the Naval Medical Research Institute at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.
Go to Profile#21732
Cheng-Chih Wu
#21743
Overall Influence
Cheng-Chih Wu is currently the president of the National Taiwan Normal University, and was the director of the Graduate Institute of Information and Computer Education at NTNU. During his deanship at NTNU, he has put through many reforms, including abolishing the rule of expelling students who fail more than half of the registered courses. Wu once said, “students should be responsible for their own education, while we should give them a second chance instead of depriving them of their right to education with this rule.”
Go to Profile#21733
Dietrich Schwanitz
#21744
Overall Influence
1940 - 2004 (64 years)
Dietrich Schwanitz was a German writer and literary scholar. He became known to larger audiences after publishing the bestselling campus novel Der Campus in 1995. Life Schwanitz's parents were teaching and living in the northern Ruhr area. In the late phase of World War II his mother send him with help of the Red Cross to Switzerland to escape the bombing raids in war torn Germany. In Switzerland Schwanitz stayed for six years with Mennonite mountain farmers rather isolated from society and without attending a school. He returned to his parents in 1950 and school director who took a liking in him got him accepted directly into a gymnasium and helped him to catch up with the curriculum.
Go to Profile#21734
Yoshihide Suga
#21745
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Yoshihide Suga is a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Liberal Democratic Party from 2020 to 2021. He had served as Chief Cabinet Secretary during the second administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe from 2012 to 2020. During Abe's first administration, Suga served as Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications from 2006 to 2007.
Go to Profile#21735
Lenore E. Walker
#21746
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Lenore Edna Walker is an American psychologist who founded the Domestic Violence Institute, documented the cycle of abuse and wrote The Battered Woman, published in 1979, for which she won the Distinguished Media Award that year. She was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame in 1987.
Go to Profile#21736
Herbert Lindinger
#21747
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Herbert Lindinger is an Austrian graphic artist, exhibition designer, industrial designer, and university professor. He is known for designing trains and trams such as the S-DT8.12 Stuttgart light rail cars, and the TW 6000 and TW 2000 for the city of Hanover, Germany, as well as the associated urban furniture and infrastructure. The logo of the University of Hannover, which evokes Leibniz's exploration of the binary number system, was also designed by Lindinger.
Go to Profile#21737
Bob O. Evans
#21748
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Bob Overton Evans , also known as "Boe" Evans, was an American computer pioneer and corporate executive at IBM . He led the groundbreaking development of compatible computers that changed the industry.
Go to Profile#21738
Gennaro Gattuso
#21749
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Gennaro Ivan Gattuso is an Italian professional football coach and former player, who is currently the manager of Ligue 1 club Marseille. As a player, he mainly played in the centre as a defensive midfielder, although he was also capable of playing on the wing. He initially played for Perugia, Salernitana, and Rangers, though he is mostly remembered for his time with AC Milan in Serie A, where he won the Champions League, in 2002–03 and 2006–07, the Coppa Italia in 2002–03, and also the Serie A title in 2003–04 and 2010–11. In addition to these titles, he won two Italian Supercups, two UEFA Supercups, and a FIFA Club World Cup.
Go to Profile#21739
Veselin Topalov
#21750
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Veselin Aleksandrov Topalov is a Bulgarian chess grandmaster and former FIDE World Chess Champion. Topalov became FIDE World Chess Champion by winning the FIDE World Chess Championship 2005. He lost his title in the World Chess Championship 2006 against Vladimir Kramnik. He challenged Viswanathan Anand at the World Chess Championship 2010, losing 6½–5½. He won the 2005 Chess Oscar.
Go to Profile#21740
Marjorie Rice
#21751
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Marjorie Ruth Rice was an American amateur mathematician most famous for her discoveries of pentagonal tilings in geometry. Background Rice was born February 16, 1923, in St. Petersburg, Florida. Marjorie Rice was a San Diego mother of five, who had become an ardent follower of Martin Gardner's long-running column, "Mathematical Games", which appeared monthly, 1957–1986, in the pages of Scientific American magazine. By the 1970s, Gardner was a popular science writer and amateur mathematician. Rice said later that she would rush to grab each issue from the mail before anyone else could get it,...
Go to Profile#21741
Kevin Hoover
#21752
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kevin Douglas Hoover is Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Duke University. He has previously held positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, University of Oxford , and the University of California, Davis, where he served eight years as chair of the Economics Department. Hoover is most noted for his work in the philosophy and methodology of economics with issues surrounding the modelling of causation. He has been the president of the History of Economics Society and chaired the International Network for Economic Method. He is the editor of the journal History of Political ...
Go to Profile#21742
Brad Nessler
#21753
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Bradley Ray Nessler is an American sportscaster, who currently calls college football and college basketball games for CBS Sports. Career Early assignments Nessler began his professional broadcasting career sharing play–by–play radio duties with Al Ciraldo on Georgia Tech basketball on WGST from 1980–81 through 1984–85 and handled the play–by–play for the Atlanta Falcons from 1982 to 1988 on WGST and WSB before assuming the same position for the Minnesota Vikings during the 1988 and 1989 seasons. He also called preseason telecasts for the Miami Dolphins for several years and has done play–by...
Go to Profile#21743
George C. Scott
#21754
Overall Influence
1927 - 1999 (72 years)
George Campbell Scott was an American actor, director, and producer who had a celebrated career on both stage and screen. With a gruff demeanor and commanding presence, Scott became known for his portrayal of stern but complex authority figures. Described by The Guardian as "a battler and an actor of rare courage", his roles earned him numerous accolades including two Golden Globes, and two Primetime Emmys as well as nominations for two BAFTA Awards and five Tony Awards.
Go to Profile#21744
Alan Schriesheim
#21755
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Alan Schriesheim is the Director Emeritus and the retired CEO of Argonne National Laboratory, one of the U.S. Department of Energy's largest research centers. In a January 2008 announcement issued by Penn State University upon the establishment of the Schriesheim Distinguished Graduate Fellowship, it was noted that "Schriesheim is an internationally acclaimed chemist and technology executive. With a career spanning 50 years in industry, academia, and government, Schriesheim was a pioneer in transforming large and highly complex research organizations to yield productive commercialized technolo...
Go to Profile#21745
Glenda Glover
#21756
Overall Influence
Glenda Baskin Glover, Ph.D, J.D., CPA, began serving as the eighth president of Tennessee State University on January 2, 2013. Early life and education Glover was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and was raised in the Weaver Road vicinity near Boxtown. She began her educational development as a student at Tennessee State University, where she majored in mathematics. After graduating with honors with a Bachelor of Science degree, she earned the Master of Business Administration at Clark Atlanta University in 1976. She completed her doctorate in business from George Washington University in 1990, a...
Go to Profile#21746
R. Kent Dybvig
#21757
Overall Influence
R. Kent Dybvig is a professor emeritus of computer science at Indiana University Bloomington, in Bloomington, Indiana. His research focuses on programming languages, and he is the principal developer of the optimizing Chez Scheme compiler and runtime system which were initially released in 1985. Together with Daniel P. Friedman, he has long advocated the use of the Scheme language in teaching computer science. He retired from Indiana University to join Cisco in 2011.
Go to Profile#21747
Ludger Wößmann
#21758
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Ludger Wößmann is a German economist and professor of economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich . Moreover, being one of the world's foremost education economists, he is the director of the ifo Center for the Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. Beyond the economics of education, his research interests also include economic growth and economic history. In 2014, Wößmann's empirical research on the effects of education and his corresponding contribution to public debate were awarded the Gossen Prize , followed by the Gustav Stolper Prize in 2017.
Go to Profile#21748
Yvette Cauchois
#21759
Overall Influence
1908 - 1999 (91 years)
Yvette Cauchois was a French physicist known for her contributions to x-ray spectroscopy and x-ray optics, and for pioneering European synchrotron research. Education Cauchois attended school in Paris, and pursued undergraduate studies at the Sorbonne who awarded her a degree in the physical sciences in July 1928. Cauchois undertook graduate studies at the Laboratory of Physical Chemistry with the support of a National Fund for Science studentship, and was awarded her doctorate in 1933 for her work on the use of curved crystals for high-resolution x-ray analysis.
Go to Profile#21749
Gavin Wright
#21760
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Gavin Wright is an economic historian and the William Robertson Coe Professor of American economic history at Stanford University. He received his B.A from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University. He has taught at that institution, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Cambridge, and Oxford University.
Go to Profile#21750
Leslie Brent
#21761
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Leslie Baruch Brent was a British immunologist and zoologist. He was Professor Emeritus, University of London, from 1990. An immunologist, he was the co-discoverer, with Peter Medawar and Rupert Billingham, of acquired immunological tolerance. They injected cells from donor mice into fetal mice, and later neonatal mice, which would as adults receive donor skin grafts without rejection.
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