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
#21851
Derek Lowe
#21862
Overall Influence
Derek Lowe is a medicinal chemist working on preclinical drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry. Lowe has published a blog about this field, "In the Pipeline", since 2002 and is a columnist for the Royal Society of Chemistry's Chemistry World.
Go to Profile#21852
Erdal Arıkan
#21863
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Erdal Arıkan is a Turkish professor in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. He is known for his implementation of polar coding. Career Academic background Arıkan briefly served as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He joined Bilkent University as a faculty member in 1987.
Go to Profile#21853
Carl Bildt
#21864
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Nils Daniel Carl Bildt is a Swedish politician and diplomat who served as Prime Minister of Sweden from 1991 to 1994. He led the Moderate Party from 1986 to 1999, appearing at its lead candidate in four general elections, before his appointment as Minister for Foreign Affairs under Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt from 2006 to 2014. Bildt first entered the Riksdag in 1979, holding a seat until 2001. A member of the Bildt family, he is a great-great grandson of Baron Gillis Bildt, who was Prime Minister of Sweden from 1888 to 1889.
Go to Profile#21854
Oliver Stuenkel
#21865
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Oliver Stuenkel is a German-Brazilian political scientist, writer and Associate Professor at FGV's School of International Relations in São Paulo, Brazil. In addition to several books written on emerging powers and global politics — such as BRICS and the Future of Global Order and Post-Western World , he is a columnist for EL PAÍS and Americas Quarterly and a frequent commentator in the national and international media on topics related to Brazilian politics and foreign policy, US-China relations and political risk. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Global Times, among others.
Go to Profile#21855
Frank Michelman
#21866
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Frank Isaac Michelman is an American legal scholar and the Robert Walmsley University Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School. Early life In 1960, Michelman was graduated from Harvard Law School. He clerked for Justice William Brennan of the U.S. Supreme Court during the 1961 Term. In 1962, he joined the Harvard Law School faculty.
Go to Profile#21856
Michael Haneke
#21867
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Michael Haneke is an Austrian film director and screenwriter. His work often examines social issues and depicts the feelings of estrangement experienced by individuals in modern society. Haneke has made films in French, German, and English and has worked in television and theatre, as well as cinema. He also teaches film direction at the Film Academy Vienna.
Go to Profile#21857
Gerald L. Alexanderson
#21868
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Gerald Lee Alexanderson was an American mathematician. He was the Michael & Elizabeth Valeriote Professor of Science at Santa Clara University, and in 1997–1998 was president of the Mathematical Association of America. He was also president of The Fibonacci Association from 1980 to 1984.
Go to Profile#21858
M. Lee Pelton
#21869
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
M. Lee Pelton is the President and CEO of the Boston Foundation, the community foundation serving the Greater Boston area since 1915. A native of Wichita, Kansas, Pelton studied English literature at Wichita State University and Harvard University. He then held various deanship positions at Colgate University and Dartmouth College before becoming president of Willamette University and Emerson College . On June 1, 2021, Pelton took the helm at the Boston Foundation.
Go to Profile#21859
Quassim Cassam
#21870
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Quassim Cassam, is professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He writes on self-knowledge, perception, epistemic vices and topics in Kantian epistemology. As blurbed for his book, Vices of the Mind , Cassam defines epistemic vice as "character traits, attitudes or thinking styles that prevent us from gaining, keeping or sharing knowledge".
Go to Profile#21860
Nancy Knowlton
#21871
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Nancy Knowlton is a coral reef biologist and a former Sant Chair for Marine Science at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Life She graduated from Harvard University, and from the University of California, Berkeley, with a PhD. She was a professor at Yale University, then joined the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
Go to Profile#21861
Kenneth Heilman
#21872
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Kenneth M. Heilman is an American behavioral neurologist He is considered one of the fathers of modern-day behavioral neurology. Early life and career Heilman was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended college at the University of Virginia was accepted into medical school after three years of college and graduated from the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1963.
Go to Profile#21862
Sheridan Titman
#21873
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Sheridan Dean Titman is a professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the McAllister Centennial Chair in Financial Services at the McCombs School of Business. He received a B.S. degree from the University of Colorado and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Go to Profile#21863
Leonid Kravchuk
#21874
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Leonid Makarovych Kravchuk was a Ukrainian politician and the first president of Ukraine, serving from 5 December 1991 until 19 July 1994. In 1992, he signed the Lisbon Protocol, undertaking to give up Ukraine's nuclear arsenal. He was also the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and a People's Deputy of Ukraine serving in the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine faction.
Go to Profile#21864
Eliza Manningham-Buller
#21875
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Elizabeth Lydia Manningham-Buller, Baroness Manningham-Buller, is a retired British intelligence officer. She worked as a teacher for three years before joining MI5, the British internal Security Service. She led the newly created Irish counter-terrorism section from 1992 and then became director in charge of surveillance and technical operations. She became Director General of MI5 in October 2002 and, in that capacity, led the Security Service's response to the 7 July 2005 London bombings. Following her retirement in April 2007, she became a crossbench life peer in 2008.
Go to Profile#21865
Anthony G. Amsterdam
#21876
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Anthony Guy Amsterdam is an American lawyer and University Professor Emeritus at New York University School of Law. In 1981, Alan Dershowitz called Amsterdam “the most distinguished law professor in the United States.”
Go to Profile#21866
Cameron Munter
#21877
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Cameron Munter is a retired diplomat, academic, and executive who now works as a global consultant. He was President and CEO of the EastWest Institute in New York from 2015 to 2019, directing conflict resolution projects in Russia, China, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Balkans. He is currently a senior fellow of the CEVRO Institute in Prague and the Atlantic Council in Washington, and serves on a number of corporate and nonprofit boards.
Go to Profile#21867
Anna Nagurney
#21878
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Anna Nagurney is an American mathematician, economist, educator and writer in the field of Operations Management. Nagurney is the Eugene M. Isenberg Chair in Integrative Studies in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts. Previously, she held the John F. Smith Memorial Professorship of Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management from 1998 to 2021.
Go to Profile#21868
Brebis Bleaney
#21879
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Brebis Bleaney was a British physicist. His main area of research was the use of microwave techniques to study the magnetic properties of solids. He was head of the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford from 1957 to 1977. In 1992, Bleaney received the International Zavoisky Award "for his contribution to the theory and practice of electron paramagnetic resonance of transition ions in crystals."
Go to Profile#21869
Lea Verou
#21880
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Lea Verou is a computer scientist, front end web developer, speaker and author, originally from Lesbos, Greece. Verou is currently a research assistant at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory , an elected participant in the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Architecture Group , and an Invited Expert in the W3C CSS Working Group. She is the author of CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems .
Go to Profile#21870
David Macarthur
#21881
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
David Macarthur is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney who works primarily on skepticism, metaphysical quietism, pragmatism, liberal naturalism and philosophy of art . He has taken up these and other themes in articles on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Go to Profile#21871
Denis Weaire
#21882
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Denis Lawrence Weaire FRS is an Irish physicist and an emeritus professor of Trinity College Dublin . Educated at the Belfast Royal Academy and Clare College, Cambridge he held positions at University of California, University of Chicago, Harvard and Yale, ultimately holding professorships at Heriot-Watt, and University College Dublin before becoming, in 1984, Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at TCD.
Go to Profile#21872
Freek Vonk
#21883
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Freek Jacobus Vonk is a Dutch biologist who specializes in herpetology with a special interest in snake venom. He travels the world in search of the most spectacular and bizarre creatures. He has been bitten by a number of venomous snakes, almost lost his arm due to a Caribbean reef shark bite and has housed several parasites in his own body.
Go to Profile#21873
John Hume
#21884
Overall Influence
1937 - 2020 (83 years)
John Hume was an Irish nationalist politician from Northern Ireland, widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the recent political history of Ireland, as one of the architects of the Northern Ireland peace process.
Go to Profile#21874
Bruce L. Gordon
#21885
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Bruce L. Gordon is a Canadian philosopher of science , metaphysician and philosopher of religion. He is a proponent of intelligent design and has been affiliated with the Discovery Institute since 1997.
Go to Profile#21875
Steven Cowley
#21886
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Sir Steven Charles Cowley is a British theoretical physicist and international authority on nuclear fusion and astrophysical plasmas. He has served as director of the United States Department of Energy Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory since 1 July 2018. Previously he served as president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, since October 2016. and head of the EURATOM / CCFE Fusion Association and chief executive officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority .
Go to Profile#21876
Dorret Boomsma
#21887
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Dorret I. Boomsma is a Dutch biological psychologist specializing in genetics and twin studies. Education Secondary education: Willem de Zwijgerlyceum, BussumBachelor's: Vrije Universiteit in Psychology, cum laude, 1979Master's: Vrije Universiteit in Psychophysiology, cum laude, 1983Master's: University of Colorado at Boulder in Biological Psychology/Behavior Genetics, 1983Ph.D.: Vrije Universiteit , cum laude, 1992
Go to Profile#21877
David W. Bebbington
#21888
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David William Bebbington is a British historian who is a professor of history at the University of Stirling in Scotland and a distinguished visiting professor of history at Baylor University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Historical Society.
Go to Profile#21878
John Gibson
#21889
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John David Gibson is an American radio talk show host. As of September 2008, he hosts the syndicated radio program The John Gibson Show. He formerly co-hosted the weekday edition of The Big Story on Fox News.
Go to Profile#21879
Anne Roe
#21890
Overall Influence
1904 - 1991 (87 years)
Anne Roe was an American clinical psychologist and researcher who studied creativity and occupational psychology. Her publications included The Making of a Scientist and the Psychology of Occupations .
Go to Profile#21880
Celia Britton
#21891
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Celia Margaret Britton, FBA is a British scholar of French Caribbean literature and thought. She was Carnegie Professor of French at the University of Aberdeen from 1991 to 2002 and Professor of French at University College London from 2003 to 2011. She had previously lectured at King's College London and the University of Reading.
Go to Profile#21881
Charles F. Manski
#21892
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Charles Frederick Manski is an American economist and university professor at the Northwestern University. Manski is a noted econometrician, known for his work in rational choice theory and an innovator in the area of parameter identification. His research spans econometrics, judgment and decision, and the analysis of social policy . A specialist in prediction and decision, he is known within the economics field for landmark work on partial identification, identification of discrete choice models, and identification of social interactions. He has also performed substantial empirical research ...
Go to Profile#21882
William Eskridge
#21893
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
William Nichol Eskridge Jr. is American academic and the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School. He is one of the most cited law professors in America, ranking fourth overall for the period 2016–2020. He writes primarily on constitutional law, legislation and statutory interpretation, religion, marriage equality, and LGBT rights.
Go to Profile#21883
Christopher Edley Jr.
#21894
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Christopher Fairfield Edley Jr. was the Dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law from 2004 to 2013. He serves as President of the Opportunity Institute, an organization he co-founded with Hillary Clinton advisor Ann O'Leary.
Go to Profile#21884
John D. Lafferty
#21895
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
John D. Lafferty is an American scientist, Professor at Yale University and leading researcher in machine learning. He is best known for proposing the Conditional Random Fields with Andrew McCallum and Fernando C.N. Pereira.
Go to Profile#21885
Meghan O'Sullivan
#21896
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Meghan L. O'Sullivan is a former deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan. She is Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a board member of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Kennedy School. She is a member of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Raytheon, and the North American chair of the Trilateral Commission.
Go to Profile#21886
Sebastian Möller
#21897
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Sebastian Möller is an expert for quality of experience and speech technology. Biography Sebastian Möller studied electrical engineering at the universities in Bochum , Orléans and Bologna . From 1994 to 2005, he was a scientific researcher and later lecturer at the Institute of Communication Acoustics at Ruhr Universität Bochum specializing in speech transmission, speech technology and communication acoustics, as well as the quality of speech-based systems. Möller earned his habilitation at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Ruhr Universität Bochum in 2004 with a book discussing the quality of telephone-based speech dialog systems.
Go to Profile#21887
Kengo Hirachi
#21898
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Kengo Hirachi is a Japanese mathematician, specializing in CR geometry and mathematical analysis. Hirachi received from Osaka University his B.S. in 1987, his M.S. in 1989, and his Dr.Sci., advised by Gen Komatsu, in 1994 with dissertation The second variation of the Bergman kernel for ellipsoids. He was a research assistant from 1989 to 1996 and a lecturer from 1996 to 2000 at Osaka University. He was an associate professor from 2000 to 2010 and a full professor from 2010 to the present at the University of Tokyo. He was a visiting professor at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute fr...
Go to Profile#21888
Curtis Mayfield
#21899
Overall Influence
1942 - 1999 (57 years)
Curtis Lee Mayfield was an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer, and one of the most influential musicians behind soul and politically conscious African-American music. Dubbed the "Gentle Genius", he first achieved success and recognition with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inducted group the Impressions during the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and the 1960s, and later worked as a solo artist.
Go to Profile#21889
Carolyn Rosé
#21900
Overall Influence
Carolyn Penstein Rosé is an American computer scientist who is a Professor of Language Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research looks to understand human conversation, and use this understanding to build computer systems that support effective communication in an effort to improve human learning. She has previously served as President of the International Society for the Learning Sciences and a Leshner Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#21890
Samuel Dagogo-Jack
#21901
Overall Influence
Samuel E. Dagogo-Jack is a Nigerian-American physician. He is the A.C. Mullins Endowed Professor in Translational Research, Professor of Medicine, and Chief of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. He is also an Editor of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
Go to Profile#21891
Alessandro Magnoli Bocchi
#21902
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Alessandro Magnoli Bocchi , is an Italian economist, investment professional and manager. Biography Born in 1968 in Cremona, Italy, he graduated from Liceo Classico "Daniele Manin". In 1986 he moved to Milan, Italy to attend Bocconi University. From 1992 to 1995 he lived in Barcelona, Spain where he studied and taught at ESADE and worked at Pirelli. In 1995 he moved to Washington, DC, USA to work at the Inter-American Development Bank. In 1999 he joined Harvard University as a Research Associate and earned a Ph.D. from ESADE. In 2001 he returned to Washington, DC, recruited by the World Bank Y...
Go to Profile#21892
Bernie Kosar
#21903
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Bernard Joseph Kosar Jr. is an American former professional football player who was a quarterback in the National Football League . He played college football at the University of Miami, where he led the team to a national championship in 1983. He subsequently played in the NFL for the Cleveland Browns from 1985 to 1993 and the Dallas Cowboys and Miami Dolphins . He was the backup quarterback on the 1993 Cowboys team that won Super Bowl XXVIII.
Go to Profile#21893
Mary Ann Caws
#21904
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Mary Ann Caws is an American author, translator, art historian and literary critic. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita in Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, and on the film faculty. She is an expert on Surrealism and modern English and French literature, having written biographies of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. She works on the interrelations of visual art and literary texts, has written biographies of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, and edited the diaries, letters, and source material of Joseph Cornell.
Go to Profile#21894
Mirra Komarovsky
#21905
Overall Influence
1905 - 1999 (94 years)
Mirra Komarovsky , was an American pioneer in the sociology of gender. Early years Born to Mendel and Anna Komarovsky in a privileged Jewish family in the Russian Empire, her family fled the country after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Komarovsky's parents were Zionists and landowning Jews in Akkerman, Russia, until tsarist police drove them from their home. They moved initially to Baku and then to Wichita, Kansas after the Bolshevik Revolution, when Mirra was 16. In Baku, Komarovsky lived a solidly middle-class lifestyle; she was homeschooled by private tutors and learned Russian, English, H...
Go to Profile#21895
Dominique Perrin
#21906
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Dominique Pierre Perrin is a French mathematician and theoretical computer scientist known for his contributions to coding theory and to combinatorics on words. He is a professor of the University of Marne-la-Vallée and currently serves as the President of ESIEE Paris.
Go to Profile#21896
John Loder
#21907
Overall Influence
1946 - 2005 (59 years)
John F. Loder was an English sound engineer, record producer and founder of Southern Studios, as well as a former member of EXIT and co-founder of the Southern Records distribution company with his wife Sue. He was also the studio engineer of choice for Crass and Crass Records, and was often considered to be the band's "ninth member".
Go to Profile#21897
Larry Wos
#21908
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Lawrence T. Wos was an American mathematician, a researcher in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory. Biography Wos studied at the University of Chicago, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1950 and a master's in mathematics in 1954, and went on for doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he received PhD in 1957 supervised by Reinhold Baer. He joined the Argonne in 1957, and began using computers to prove mathematical theorems in 1963.
Go to Profile#21898
Jean-Michel Macron
#21909
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron is a French doctor and professor of neurology at the University of Picardy. He is the father of French president Emmanuel Macron. Early life Jean-Michel Macron was born in 1950. His father was André Macron , a railway executive, and his mother was Jacqueline Macron , née Robertson, of half English origin. He wrote a thesis on feline neurology in 1981.
Go to Profile#21899
Gerhart Lüders
#21910
Overall Influence
1920 - 1995 (75 years)
Gerhart Lüders was a German theoretical physicist who worked mainly in quantum field theory and was well known for the discovery and a general proof of the CPT theorem. This theorem is also called the Pauli-Lüders theorem and is one of the most fundamental rules of particle physics.
Go to Profile#21900
Daniel Nestor
#21911
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Daniel Mark Nestor is a Canadian former professional tennis player. Nestor won 91 men's doubles titles , including an Olympic gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, four Tour Finals titles, and twelve major doubles titles attained with seven different partners . Nestor was the first man in history to win every major and Masters event, the Tour Finals, and an Olympic gold medal, an achievement since matched by the Bryan brothers. He was part of the ATP Doubles Team of the Year in 2002 and 2004 , and 2008 . Nestor became the world No. 1 doubles player for the first time in August 2002.
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