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
#21801
Jona Lendering
#21812
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jona Lendering is a Dutch historian and the author of books on antiquity, Dutch history and modern management. He has an MA in history from Leiden University and an MA in Mediterranean culture from the Amsterdam Free University, taught history at the Free University, and worked as an archivist employed by the Dutch government, before becoming one of the founders of the history school Livius Onderwijs.
Go to Profile#21802
Julius L. Chambers
#21813
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Julius LeVonne Chambers was an American lawyer, civil rights leader and educator. Early life and education Chambers grew up during the Jim Crow era in rural Montgomery County, North Carolina. As a child, Chambers saw first hand the effects of discrimination when his father's auto repair business became a target of racial injustice in 1948. A white customer refused to pay his father and his father could not find a lawyer who was willing to file suit on behalf of a black man against a white man. Chambers has said that this experience made him resolved to pursue a career in law, in order to help end segregation and racial discrimination.
Go to Profile#21803
María Ángeles Durán
#21814
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
María Ángeles Durán Heras is a Spanish sociologist best known for being a pioneer in research on unpaid work, the social situation of women and their social and work environment, health economics, and inequality in the use of time. She was the first woman to attain a chair of sociology in Spain, in 1982. She was one of the first researchers in her field who carried out works with a feminist perspective in the Spanish academic world. In 1979, she was the founder and director of the of the Autonomous University of Madrid, the first university institute for women's studies created in Spain. In 2002 she received the in Economic and Legal Sciences.
Go to Profile#21804
David Schizer
#21815
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
David M. Schizer is an American lawyer and academic. He was named the fourteenth Dean of Columbia Law School in 2004. He was appointed Dean at the age of 35, making him the youngest dean in the school's history. He served in this position until June 30, 2014. He went on to serve three years as the CEO of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Go to Profile#21805
Kirsten Gillibrand
#21816
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Kirsten Elizabeth Gillibrand is an American lawyer and politician serving as the junior United States senator from New York since 2009. A member of the Democratic Party, she served as member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2009.
Go to Profile#21806
Matthew Kramer
#21817
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Matthew Henry Kramer is an American philosopher, currently Professor of Legal and Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He writes mainly in the areas of metaethics, normative ethics, legal philosophy, and political philosophy. He is a leading proponent of legal positivism. He has been Director of the Cambridge Forum for Legal and Political Philosophy since 2000. He has been teaching at Cambridge University and at Churchill College since 1994.
Go to Profile#21807
Felix Unger
#21818
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Felix Unger is a heart specialist who served as the president of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts for three decades. He is the president of Alma Mater Europaea. In 1986 he performed the first artificial heart transplantation in Europe.
Go to Profile#21808
Annette Baier
#21819
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Annette Claire Baier was a New Zealand philosopher and Hume scholar, focused in particular on Hume's moral psychology. She was well known also for her contributions to feminist philosophy and to the philosophy of mind, where she was strongly influenced by her former colleague, Wilfrid Sellars.
Go to Profile#21809
Georgios Babiniotis
#21820
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Georgios Babiniotis is a Greek linguist and philologist and former Minister of Education and Religious Affairs of Greece. He previously served as rector of Athens University. As a linguist, he is best known as the author of a Dictionary of Modern Greek , which was published in 1998.
Go to Profile#21810
Hwang Sok-yong
#21821
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Xinjing Hwang Sok-yong is a South Korean novelist. Life Hwang was born in Xinjing , Manchukuo, during the period of Japanese rule. His family returned to Korea after liberation in 1945. He later obtained a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Dongguk University.
Go to Profile#21811
Paul Vallas
#21822
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Paul Gust Vallas Sr. is an American politician and former education superintendent. He served as the superintendent of the Bridgeport Public Schools and the Recovery School District of Louisiana, the CEO of both the School District of Philadelphia and the Chicago Public Schools, and a budget director for the city of Chicago.
Go to Profile#21812
Edgar Choueiri
#21823
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Edgar Y. Choueiri is a Lebanese American plasma physicist and previously president of the Lebanese Academy of Sciences. He is best known for clarifying the role of plasma instabilities in spacecraft electric thrusters , for conceiving and developing new spacecraft propulsion concepts and, more recently, for his work on 3D audio.
Go to Profile#21813
Geoffrey Colin Shephard
#21824
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Geoffrey Colin Shephard is a mathematician who works on convex geometry and reflection groups. He asked Shephard's problem on the volumes of projected convex bodies, posed another problem on polyhedral nets, proved the Shephard–Todd theorem in invariant theory of finite groups, began the study of complex polytopes, and classified the complex reflection groups.
Go to Profile#21814
Suniti Namjoshi
#21825
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Suniti Namjoshi is a poet and a fabulist. She grew up in India, worked in Canada and at present lives in the southwest of England with English writer Gillian Hanscombe. Her work is playful, inventive and often challenges prejudices such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. She has written many collections of fables and poetry, several novels, and more than a dozen children's books. Her work has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, Hindi and Turkish.
Go to Profile#21815
Richard Sorabji
#21826
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Sir Richard Rustom Kharsedji Sorabji, is a British historian of ancient Western philosophy, and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at King's College London. He has written his 'Intellectual Autobiography' in his Festschrift: R. Salles ed., Metaphysics, Soul and Ethics in Ancient Thought , 1–36. He is the nephew of Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to practice law in Britain and India.
Go to Profile#21816
Nandini Trivedi
#21827
Overall Influence
Nandini Trivedi is an Indian-American physicist and Professor of Physics at Ohio State University. Her research is on the emergence of new states of matter arising from strong interactions between electrons in quantum materials. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2020.
Go to Profile#21817
Benjamin Radcliff
#21828
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Benjamin Radcliff is an American political scientist and a professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is also affiliated with the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy and the Higgins Labor Studies Program. Best known for his work on the connections between politics and human happiness, his research also encompasses democratic theory, political economy, and the study of organized labor.
Go to Profile#21818
Melissa Febos
#21829
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart , and the essay collections, Abandon Me and Girlhood . Early life and education Febos grew up in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Her father was a sea captain, and her mother a therapist. She left home at 16 after passing the GED, moved to Boston, and worked at an assortment of jobs including as a boatyard hand and as a chambermaid. She attended night courses at Harvard Extension School, then enrolled in The New School and moved to New York City in August 1999. She later earned an MF...
Go to Profile#21819
Robert Frucht
#21830
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
Robert Wertheimer Frucht was a German-Chilean mathematician; his research specialty was graph theory and the symmetries of graphs. Education and career In 1908, Frucht's family moved from Brünn, Austria-Hungary , where he was born, to Berlin. Frucht entered the University of Berlin in 1924 with an interest in differential geometry, but switched to group theory under the influence of his doctoral advisor, Issai Schur; he received his Ph.D. in 1931.
Go to Profile#21820
Sonja Petrović
#21831
Overall Influence
Sonja Petrović is a Serbian-American statistician and associate professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics, College of Computing, at Illinois Institute of Technology. Her research is focused on mathematical statistics and algebraic statistics, applied and computational algebraic geometry and random graph models. She was elected to the International Statistics Institute in 2015.
Go to Profile#21821
Ernst Mohr
#21832
Overall Influence
Ernst Mohr was a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wuppertal. He developed the meteorological Mohr Rocket, on behalf of the German Rocket Society. The rocket was first launched successfully on September 14, 1958 near Cuxhaven.
Go to Profile#21822
Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi
#21833
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Mohammed Aziz Lahbabi was a Moroccan philosopher, novelist and poet writing in Arabic and French. Career Some of his books were translated into more than 30 languages. Lahbabi studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and received a doctorate of philosophy. He was professor of philosophy and dean of the faculty of letters at the Mohammed V University in Rabat. Characteristic of his philosophical writings is the union of Arab-Islamic and Western-humanistic ideas. He also wrote poetry, fiction, and non-fiction books on economics, politics, and literature. Lahbabi was one of the founders of the Union of Arab Writers of the Maghreb and the review Afaq .
Go to Profile#21823
Joseph Kitagawa
#21834
Overall Influence
1915 - 1992 (77 years)
Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa was an eminent Japanese American scholar in religious studies. He was professor emeritus and dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is considered one of the founders of the field of the history of religions. He is particularly known for his outstanding contributions to the study of religious traditions in Asia and intercultural understanding of the East and the West.
Go to Profile#21824
Jacquelynne Eccles
#21835
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jacquelynne Sue Eccles is an American educational psychologist. She is the Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of California, Irvine and formerly the McKeachie/Pintrich Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Education at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#21825
Alistair Moffat
#21836
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Alistair Murray Moffat is a Scottish writer and journalist, former director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and former Rector of the University of St Andrews. Education Moffat graduated from the University of St Andrews in 1972 with an honours degree in medieval history. He also attended the University of Edinburgh and the University of London, where he earned a Master of Philosophy degree in 1975.
Go to Profile#21826
Naseeruddin Shah
#21837
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Naseeruddin Shah is an Indian actor. He is notable in Indian parallel cinema and has starred in various international productions. He has won numerous awards in his career, including three National Film Awards, three Filmfare Awards and the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival. The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan awards for his contributions to Indian cinema. He is widely regarded as one of the finest actors in the World Cinema.
Go to Profile#21827
Miguel Cabrera
#21838
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
José Miguel Cabrera Torres , nicknamed "Miggy", is a Venezuelan former professional baseball first baseman, third baseman, and designated hitter who played in Major League Baseball for the Florida Marlins and Detroit Tigers. Debuting in 2003, he was a two-time American League Most Valuable Player award winner, a four-time AL batting champion, and a 12-time MLB All-Star. He played at first and third base for most of his major league career, but primarily played left and right field before 2006. He claimed the 17th MLB Triple Crown in 2012, the first to do so in 45 seasons. Cabrera is one of ...
Go to Profile#21828
Caroline Moser
#21839
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Caroline Olivia Nonesi Moser is an academic specializing in social policy and urban social anthropology. She is primarily known for her field-based approach to research on the informal sector generally - but particularly aspects such as poverty, violence, asset vulnerability and strategies for accumulation in the urban setting. Gender analysis is central to her approach. She has looked at many countries, but the Americas have been her main interest. Countries studied closely include Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Jamaica.
Go to Profile#21829
Daniel Greenberg
#21840
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Daniel A. Greenberg , was one of the founders of the Sudbury Valley School, has published several books on the Sudbury model of school organization, and was described by Sudbury Valley School trustee Peter Gray as the "principal philosopher" among its founders. He was a physics professor at Columbia University, and was described by Lois Holzman as the school's "chief 'philosophical writer'".
Go to Profile#21830
Reiner Schürmann
#21841
Overall Influence
1941 - 1993 (52 years)
Father Reiner Schürmann, O.P., Ph.D. was a German Dominican priest and philosopher. From 1975 to his death, he was Professor in the department of philosophy of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City. He wrote all his major published work in French.
Go to Profile#21831
David Aldous
#21842
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
David John Aldous FRS is a mathematician known for his research on probability theory and its applications, in particular in topics such as exchangeability, weak convergence, Markov chain mixing times, the continuum random tree and stochastic coalescence. He entered St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1970 and received his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1977 under his advisor, D. J. H. Garling. Aldous was on the faculty at University of California, Berkeley from 1979 until his retirement in 2018.
Go to Profile#21832
Elliot Valenstein
#21843
Overall Influence
1923 - 2023 (100 years)
Elliot Spiro Valenstein was an American psychologist who was professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan. He is a noted authority on brain stimulation and psychosurgery. Biography Valenstein was born in New York City on December 9, 1923, to Louis and Helen Valenstein . He fought in World War II. After returning from the war he attended City College of New York for his B.S. and University of Kansas for his M.A and PhD.
Go to Profile#21833
Chris Moulin
#21844
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Chris Moulin is professor at the Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition , Université Grenoble Alpes, and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Moulin is a cognitive neuropsychologist known for his work in the field of déjà vu which he conducts with his former PhD student Akira O’Connor . Both psychologists have appeared in BBC radio broadcasts and featured heavily in the popular media in Britain and elsewhere, such as The Guardian, the New York Times Magazine, New Scientist, The Independent and Der Spiegel.
Go to Profile#21834
Wolf Liebeschuetz
#21845
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon Liebeschuetz was a German-born British historian who specialized in late antiquity. Early life John Hugo Wolfgang Gideon Liebeschuetz was born in Hamburg on 22 June 1927, the son of historian Hans Liebeschuetz and physician Rahel Plaut. His father was a prominent medievalist who taught at the University of Hamburg. The family had been wealthy, having inherited a large fortune from Wolf's great-grandfather Brach, who amassed wealth trading in Texas and Mexico though much was lost in the German inflation. The Liebeschuetz family was Jewish, and were subjected to increasing persecution following the Adolf Hitler's seizure of power by the Nazis.
Go to Profile#21835
George C. Papanicolaou
#21846
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
[[File:|thumb|George C. Papanicolaou]] George C. Papanicolaou is a Greek-American mathematician who specializes in applied and computational mathematics, partial differential equations, and stochastic processes. He is currently the Robert Grimmett Professor in Mathematics at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#21836
Austin Tate
#21847
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Austin Tate is Emeritus Professor of Knowledge-based systems in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. From 1985 to 2019 he was Director of AIAI in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#21837
Jeremy K. Nicholson
#21848
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jeremy K. Nicholson is a professor and pro vice chancellor of Health Sciences at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, where he leads the Australian National Phenome Centre. He is also an emeritus professor of Biological Chemistry at Imperial College London and was the director and principal investigator of the MRC-NIHR National Phenome Centre until 2018.
Go to Profile#21838
Dmitry Peskov
#21849
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Dmitry Sergeyevich Peskov is a Russian diplomat and the press secretary for Russian president Vladimir Putin. Early life and education Peskov was born in Moscow. His father, Sergey, headed the Soviet diplomatic mission in Pakistan. In 1989, Peskov graduated from the Institute of Asian and African Countries at the Moscow State University, specializing in History and Eastern studies. In the same year, Peskov joined the Soviet Foreign Ministry.
Go to Profile#21839
Matest M. Agrest
#21850
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Mates Mendelevich Agrest was a Russian Empire-born mathematician and a proponent of the ancient astronaut theory. Biography Agrest was born in Knyazhitsy in the Mogilev Governorate of the Russian Empire on 20 July 1915. He graduated from Leningrad State University in 1938 and received his PhD in Science, Physics and Mathematics in 1946. He became the Chief of the University's Laboratory in 1970. He retired in 1992 and emigrated with his wife Riva to Charleston, South Carolina, in the United States.
Go to Profile#21840
Martin Bauer
#21851
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Martin W. Bauer is a Professor of social psychology. He directs the MSc in Social and Public Communication at the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science at LSE. Martin Bauer was a Research Fellow in 'Public Understanding of Science' at the Science Museum in London, an academic visitor to the Maison des Sciences de l'homme in Paris, and he teaches regularly in Brazil at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul.
Go to Profile#21841
Dzhokhar Dudayev
#21852
Overall Influence
1944 - 1996 (52 years)
Dzhokhar Musayevich Dudayev was a Chechen politician, statesman and military leader of the 1990s Chechen Independence movement from Russia. He served as the first president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, from 1991 until his assassination in 1996. Previously he had been a Major General of Aviation in the Soviet Armed Forces.
Go to Profile#21842
Wolfram von Soden
#21853
Overall Influence
1908 - 1996 (88 years)
Wolfram Theodor Hermann Freiherr von Soden was a German Assyriologist of the post–World War II era. Life and Work Born in Berlin, Wolfram von Soden was a student of the ancient Semitic languages. He studied under the Jewish Assyriologist, Benno Landsberger at Leipzig. He received his doctorate in 1931 at the age of 23. The title of his dissertation is Der hymnisch-epische Dialekt des Akkadischen . In 1936, he was appointed as Professor of Assyriology and Arabic studies, a new position at the University of Göttingen. After his mentor Landsberger was forced to leave Germany due to the racial policy of Nazi Germany, von Soden joined the Sturmabteilung in 1934.
Go to Profile#21843
Alfred Rappaport
#21854
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Alfred Rappaport is an American economist, educator and author. He is the Leonard Spacek Professor Emeritus at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and is best known for further developing the idea of shareholder value, popularized by his 1986 book, Creating Shareholder Value. He was chairman of Chicago consulting firm The Alcar Group and resided in La Jolla, California,
Go to Profile#21844
Hans-Johann Glock
#21855
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Hans-Johann Glock is a German philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Zurich. Biography Glock studied philosophy, German studies, and mathematics at University of Tübingen, University of Oxford, and the Free University of Berlin, and in 1990 received his DPhil at Oxford. After lectureships at Oxford and the University of Reading, he was appointed a position in 2006 at the University of Zurich, where he holds a chair in Theoretical Philosophy. He is also visiting professor at the University of Reading.
Go to Profile#21845
K. Aslihan Yener
#21856
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
K. Aslıhan Yener, often anglicised as K. Aslihan Yener, is a Turkish American archaeologist whose work on Bronze Age tin miness in Anatolia revealed a new possible source of the important metal. Education and career Yener was born in Istanbul to Turkish parents, and moved to the United States, in New Rochelle, New York at the age of six months. In 1964, she entered Adelphi University in Garden City, New York planning to study chemistry. Soon she visited her native Turkey and subsequently transferred to Robert College in Istanbul in 1966, where she studied the humanities. While studying a cou...
Go to Profile#21846
Richard Slotkin
#21857
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Richard Sidney Slotkin is a cultural critic and historian. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies, Emeritus at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and, since 2010, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Slotkin writes novels alongside his historical research, and uses the process of writing the novels to clarify and refine his historical work.
Go to Profile#21847
Brad Leithauser
#21858
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Brad E. Leithauser is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher. After serving as the Emily Dickinson Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College and visiting professor at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he is now on faculty at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
Go to Profile#21848
Percival Everett
#21859
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Percival Everett is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Personal life Everett was born in Georgia. He then moved to South Carolina and then Wyoming. Everett now lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, the novelist Danzy Senna.
Go to Profile#21849
Candida Höfer
#21860
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Candida Höfer is a German photographer. She is a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like other Becher students, Höfer's work is known for technical perfection and a strictly conceptual approach. From 1997 to 2000, she taught as professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. Höfer is the recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Contribution to Photography award, as part of the Sony World Photography awards. She is based in Cologne.
Go to Profile#21850
Bertie Ahern
#21861
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bartholomew Patrick "Bertie" Ahern is an Irish former Fianna Fáil politician who served as Taoiseach from 1997 to 2008, Leader of Fianna Fáil from 1994 to 2008, Leader of the Opposition from 1994 to 1997, Tánaiste and Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht from November 1994 to December 1994, Deputy Leader of Fianna Fáil from 1992 to 1994, Minister for Industry and Commerce in January 1993, Minister for Finance from 1991 to 1994, Minister for Labour from 1987 to 1991, Government Chief Whip and Minister of State at the Department of Defence from March 1982 to December 1982 and Lord Mayor of Dublin from 1986 to 1987.
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