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
#2201
François Hollande
#2203
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
François Gérard Georges Nicolas Hollande is a French politician who served as President of France from 2012 to 2017. Prior to his presidency, he was First Secretary of the Socialist Party from 1997 to 2008, Mayor of Tulle from 2001 to 2008, as well as President of the General Council of Corrèze from 2008 to 2012. Hollande also held the 1st constituency of Corrèze seat in the National Assembly twice, from 1988 to 1993 and again from 1997 until 2012.
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J. Hillis Miller
#2204
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Joseph Hillis Miller Jr. was an American literary critic and scholar who advanced theories of literary deconstruction. He was part of the Yale School along with scholars including Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Hartman, who advocated deconstruction as an analytical means by which the relationship between literary text and the associated meaning could be analyzed. Through his career, Miller was associated with the Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and University of California, Irvine, and wrote over 50 books studying a wide range of American and British literature using pr...
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Bernard Widrow
#2205
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Bernard Widrow is a U.S. professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He is the co-inventor of the Widrow–Hoff least mean squares filter adaptive algorithm with his then doctoral student Ted Hoff. The LMS algorithm led to the ADALINE and MADALINE artificial neural networks and to the backpropagation technique. He made other fundamental contributions to the development of signal processing in the fields of geophysics, adaptive antennas, and adaptive filtering. A summary of his work is.
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Richard P. Gabriel
#2206
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Richard P. Gabriel is an American computer scientist known for his work in computing related to the programming language Lisp, and especially Common Lisp. His best known work was a 1990 essay "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big", which introduced the phrase Worse is Better, and his set of benchmarks for Lisp, termed Gabriel Benchmarks, published in 1985 as Performance and evaluation of Lisp systems. These became a standard way to benchmark Lisp implementations.
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Pierre Vidal-Naquet
#2207
Overall Influence
1930 - 2006 (76 years)
Pierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet was a French historian who began teaching at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1969. Vidal-Naquet was a specialist in the study of Ancient Greece, but was also interested in contemporary history, particularly the Algerian War , during which he opposed the use of torture by the French Army, as well as Jewish history. He participated with Michel Foucault and Jean-Marie Domenach in the founding of the Groupe d'information sur les prisons , which was one of the first French new social movements. He was part of debates over historiography in which he criticized negationism, and he was a supporter of Middle East peace efforts.
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Harry Hay
#2208
Overall Influence
1912 - 2002 (90 years)
Henry "Harry" Hay Jr. was an American gay rights activist, communist, and labor advocate. He was a co-founder of the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights group in the United States, as well as the Radical Faeries, a loosely affiliated gay spiritual movement.
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Julien Temple
#2209
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Julien Temple is a British film, documentary and music video director. He began his career with short films featuring the Sex Pistols, and has continued with various off-beat projects, including The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, Absolute Beginners and a documentary film about Glastonbury.
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Bob Saget
#2210
Overall Influence
1956 - 2022 (66 years)
Robert Lane Saget was an American stand-up comedian, actor, and television host. He portrayed Danny Tanner on the sitcom Full House and its sequel Fuller House . Saget was the original host of America's Funniest Home Videos , and the voice of narrator Ted Mosby on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother . He was also known for his adult-oriented stand-up comedy, and his 2014 album That's What I'm Talkin' About was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.
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Judith Rodin
#2211
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Judith Rodin is a philanthropist with a long history in U.S. higher education. She was the president of the Rockefeller Foundation from 2005 until 2017. From 1994 to 2004, Rodin served as the 7th permanent president of the University of Pennsylvania, and the first permanent female president of an Ivy League university.
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Oliver H. Lowry
#2212
Overall Influence
1910 - 1996 (86 years)
Oliver Howe Lowry was an American biochemist. He devised the Lowry protein assay, the subject of the most-cited scientific paper in history. Biography Lowry was the youngest of a family of five children. His father was a teacher and later an administrator in the Chicago public school system. His three brothers and sister all earned graduate degrees in various fields, and Lowry was inspired to emulate his siblings. He attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, for his undergraduate studies, having intended to major in chemical engineering. However, upon the advice of a fellow student, he ended up shifting his focus towards biochemistry.
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Peter Turchin
#2213
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Peter Valentinovich Turchin is a Russian-American complexity scientist, specializing in an area of study he and his colleagues developed called cliodynamics—mathematical modeling and statistical analysis of the dynamics of historical societies. He is currently Editor-in-Chief at Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution. , he is a director of the Evolution Institute.
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André Gorz
#2214
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
André Gorz , more commonly known by his pen names Gérard Horst and Michel Bosquet , was an Austrian and French social philosopher and journalist and critic of work. He co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur weekly in 1964. A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist version of Marxism after the Second World War, he became in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots more concerned with political ecology.
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William Taubman
#2215
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
William Chase Taubman is an American political scientist. His biography of Nikita Khrushchev won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2004 and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography in 2003.
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Serge Haroche
#2216
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Serge Haroche is a French physicist who was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with David J. Wineland for "ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems", a study of the particle of light, the photon. This and his other works developed laser spectroscopy. Since 2001, Haroche is a professor at the Collège de France and holds the chair of quantum physics.
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James Cronin
#2217
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
James Watson Cronin was an American particle physicist. Cronin and co-researcher Val Logsdon Fitch were awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1964 experiment that proved that certain subatomic reactions do not adhere to fundamental symmetry principles. Specifically, they proved, by examining the decay of kaons, that a reaction run in reverse does not merely retrace the path of the original reaction, which showed that the interactions of subatomic particles are not invariant under time reversal. Thus the phenomenon of CP violation was discovered.
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Amir Pnueli
#2218
Overall Influence
1941 - 2009 (68 years)
Amir Pnueli was an Israeli computer scientist and the 1996 Turing Award recipient. Biography Pnueli was born in Nahalal, in the British Mandate of Palestine and received a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Technion in Haifa, and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science . His thesis was on the topic of "Calculation of Tides in the Ocean". He switched to computer science during a stint as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. His works in computer science focused on temporal logic and model checking, particularly regarding fairness properties of con...
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George Davis Snell
#2219
Overall Influence
1903 - 1996 (93 years)
George Davis Snell NAS was an American mouse geneticist and basic transplant immunologist. Work George Snell shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Baruj Benacerraf and Jean Dausset for their discoveries concerning "genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions". Snell specifically "discovered the genetic factors that determine the possibilities of transplanting tissue from one individual to another. It was Snell who introduced the concept of H antigens." Snell's work in mice led to the discovery of HLA, the major histocompatibility complex, in humans that is analogous to the H-2 complex in mice.
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Endel Tulving
#2220
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (97 years)
Endel Tulving was an Estonian-born Canadian experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. In his research on human memory he proposed the distinction between semantic and episodic memory. Tulving was a professor at the University of Toronto. He joined the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences in 1992 as the first Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and remained there until his retirement in 2010. In 2006, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada , Canada's highest civilian honour.
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Phillip Allen Sharp
#2221
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Phillip Allen Sharp is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered RNA splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence". He has been selected to receive the 2015 Othmer Gold Medal.
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Kenneth R. Miller
#2222
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Kenneth Raymond Miller is an American cell biologist, molecular biologist, and Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brown University. Miller's primary research focus is the structure and function of cell membranes, especially chloroplast thylakoid membranes. Miller is a co-author of a major introductory college and high school biology textbook published by Prentice Hall since 1990.
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Chalmers Johnson
#2223
Overall Influence
1931 - 2010 (79 years)
Chalmers Ashby Johnson was an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He served in the Korean War, was a consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973 and chaired the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1972. He was also president and co-founder with Steven Clemons of the Japan Policy Research Institute , an organization that promotes public education about Japan and Asia.
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Kellyanne Conway
#2224
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Kellyanne Elizabeth Conway is an American political consultant and pollster, who served as Senior Counselor to the President in the administration of Donald Trump from 2017 to 2020. She was previously Trump's campaign manager, having been appointed in August 2016; Conway is the first woman to have run a successful U.S. presidential campaign. She has previously held roles as campaign manager and strategist in the Republican Party, and was formerly president and CEO of the Polling Company/WomanTrend.
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Neal E. Miller
#2225
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
Neal Elgar Miller was an American experimental psychologist. Described as an energetic man with a variety of interests, including physics, biology and writing, Miller entered the field of psychology to pursue these. With a background training in the sciences, he was inspired by professors and leading psychologists at the time to work on various areas in behavioral psychology and physiological psychology, specifically, relating visceral responses to behavior.
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Robert Zajonc
#2226
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Robert Bolesław Zajonc was a Polish-born American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. One of his most important contributions to social psychology is the mere-exposure effect. Zajonc also conducted research in the areas of social facilitation, and theories of emotion, such as the affective neuroscience hypothesis. He also made contributions to comparative psychology. He argued that studying the social behavior of humans alongside the behavior of other species, is essential to our understanding of the general laws of social behavior.
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Richard Doll
#2227
Overall Influence
1912 - 2005 (93 years)
Sir William Richard Shaboe Doll was a British physician who became an epidemiologist in the mid-20th century and made important contributions to that discipline. He was a pioneer in research linking smoking to health problems. With Ernst Wynder, Bradford Hill and Evarts Graham, he was credited with being the first to prove that smoking increased the risk of :lung cancer and :heart disease.
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Connie Chung
#2228
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Constance Yu-Hwa Chung is an American journalist who has been a news anchor and reporter for the U.S. television news networks ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC. Some of her more famous interview subjects include Claus von Bülow and U.S. representative Gary Condit, whom Chung interviewed first after the Chandra Levy disappearance, and basketball legend Magic Johnson after he went public about being HIV-positive. In 1993, she became the second woman to co-anchor a network newscast as part of CBS Evening News.
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Zenon Pylyshyn
#2229
Overall Influence
1937 - 2022 (85 years)
Zenon Walter Pylyshyn was a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher. He was a Canada Council Senior Fellow from 1963 to 1964. Pylyshyn's research generally involved the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive systems behind perception, imagination, and reasoning. He developed visual indexing theory which hypothesizes a pre-conceptual mechanism responsible for individuating, tracking, and directly referring to the visual properties encoded by cognitive processes. His very influential multiple object tracking experiment methodology emerged from this work.
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Nick Hornby
#2230
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Nicholas Peter John Hornby is an English writer and lyricist. He is best known for his memoir Fever Pitch and novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, all of which were adapted into feature films. Hornby's work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists. His books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide as of 2018. In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Hornby was named the 29th most influential person in British culture. He has received two Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay nominations for An Education , and Brooklyn .
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Celine Dion
#2231
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Céline Marie Claudette Dion is a Canadian singer. Referred to as the "Queen of Power Ballads", she is noted for her powerful and technically skilled vocals. Her music has incorporated genres such as pop, rock, R&B, gospel, and classical music. Her recordings have been mainly in English and French, although she has also sung in Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, Japanese, and Chinese.
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Robert Samuel Langer, Jr.
#2232
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Robert Samuel Langer Jr. FREng is an American biotechnologist, businessman, chemical engineer, chemist, and inventor. He is one of the twelve Institute Professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Robert Lefkowitz
#2233
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Joseph Lefkowitz is an American physician and biochemist. He is best known for his groundbreaking discoveries that reveal the inner workings of an important family G protein-coupled receptors, for which he was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Brian Kobilka. He is currently an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as well as a James B. Duke Professor of Medicine and Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at Duke University.
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Kenzō Tange
#2234
Overall Influence
1913 - 2005 (92 years)
Kenzō Tange was a Japanese architect, and winner of the 1987 Pritzker Prize for Architecture. He was one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, combining traditional Japanese styles with modernism, and designed major buildings on five continents. His career spanned the entire second half of the twentieth century, producing numerous distinctive buildings in Tokyo, other Japanese cities and cities around the world, as well as ambitious physical plans for Tokyo and its environments.
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Antony Gormley
#2235
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sir Antony Mark David Gormley is a British sculptor. His works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in Gateshead in the north of England, commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998; Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool; and Event Horizon, a multipart site installation which premiered in London in 2007, then subsequently in Madison Square in New York City , São Paulo, Brazil , and Hong Kong .
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Walter Rudin
#2236
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Walter Rudin was an Austrian-American mathematician and professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In addition to his contributions to complex and harmonic analysis, Rudin was known for his mathematical analysis textbooks: Principles of Mathematical Analysis, Real and Complex Analysis, and Functional Analysis. Rudin wrote Principles of Mathematical Analysis only two years after obtaining his Ph.D. from Duke University, while he was a C. L. E. Moore Instructor at MIT. Principles, acclaimed for its elegance and clarity, has since become a standard textbook for introductor...
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Judy Woodruff
#2237
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Judy Carline Woodruff is an American broadcast journalist who has worked in local, network, cable, and public television news since 1970. She was the anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour through the end of 2022. Woodruff has covered every presidential election and convention since 1976. She has interviewed several heads of state and moderated U.S. presidential debates.
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Paul D. Boyer
#2238
Overall Influence
1918 - 2018 (100 years)
Paul Delos Boyer was an American biochemist, analytical chemist, and a professor of chemistry at University of California Los Angeles . He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research on the "enzymatic mechanism underlying the biosynthesis of adenosine triphosphate " with John E. Walker, making Boyer the first Utah-born Nobel laureate; the remainder of the Prize in that year was awarded to Danish chemist Jens Christian Skou for his discovery of the Na+/K+-ATPase.
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Peter Bergen
#2239
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Peter Lampert Bergen is a British and American-based United States journalist, author, and producer who is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast In the Room with Peter Bergen.
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Atle Selberg
#2240
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Atle Selberg was a Norwegian mathematician known for his work in analytic number theory and the theory of automorphic forms, and in particular for bringing them into relation with spectral theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950 and an honorary Abel Prize in 2002.
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Robin Warren
#2241
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
John Robin Warren is an Australian pathologist, Nobel Laureate and researcher who is credited with the 1979 re-discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, together with Barry Marshall. The duo proved to the medical community that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers.
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Yevgeny Yevtushenko
#2242
Overall Influence
1932 - 2017 (85 years)
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko was a Soviet and Russian poet. He was also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, publisher, actor, editor, university professor, and director of several films.
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Jonathan Barnes
#2243
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jonathan Barnes, FBA is an English scholar of Aristotelian and ancient philosophy. Education and career He was educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford University. He taught for 25 years at Oxford University before moving to the University of Geneva. He was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, 1968–78; a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, 1978–94, and has been Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College since 1994.
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John Cornforth
#2244
Overall Influence
1917 - 2013 (96 years)
Sir John Warcup Cornforth Jr., was an AustralianBritish chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1975 for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalysed reactions, becoming the only Nobel laureate born in New South Wales.
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Vartan Gregorian
#2245
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Vartan Gregorian was an Armenian-American academic, educator, and historian. He served as president of the Carnegie Corporation from 1997 to 2021. An Armenian born in Iran, Gregorian moved to the United States at 22. He graduated with a PhD from Stanford University. He subsequently taught at several universities and his work as a historian focused mainly on the Muslim world. He went on to join the University of Pennsylvania faculty, then as its provost. From 1981 to 1989 he served as president of the New York Public Library during which he succeeded in financially stabilizing the institution and revitalizing its cultural importance.
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Thomas Gold
#2246
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Thomas Gold was an Austrian-born American astrophysicist, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society . Gold was one of three young Cambridge scientists who in 1948 proposed the now mostly abandoned "steady state" hypothesis of the universe. Gold's work crossed boundaries of academic and scientific disciplines, into biophysics, astronomy, aerospace engineering, and geophysics.
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James Fallows
#2247
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
James Mackenzie Fallows is an American writer and journalist. He is a former national correspondent for The Atlantic. His work has also appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The American Prospect, among others. He is a former editor of U.S. News & World Report, and as President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter for two years was the youngest person ever to hold that job.
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Christina Romer
#2248
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Christina Duckworth Romer is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration. She resigned from her role on the Council of Economic Advisers on September 3, 2010.
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Subcomandante Marcos
#2249
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente is a Mexican insurgent, the former military leader and spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the ongoing Chiapas conflict, and a prominent anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal. Widely known by his initial nom de guerre Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos , he has subsequently employed several other pseudonyms: he called himself Delegate Zero during the Other Campaign , and since May 2014 has gone by the name Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano , which he adopted in honor of his fallen comrade Jose Luis Solis Lopez, his nom de guerre being Galeano, aka "Teacher Galeano".
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Nathan Seiberg
#2250
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Nathan "Nati" Seiberg is an Israeli American theoretical physicist who works on quantum field theory and string theory. He is currently a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.
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Bradley Efron
#2251
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Bradley Efron is an American statistician. Efron has been president of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics . He is a past editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and he is the founding editor of the Annals of Applied Statistics. Efron is also the recipient of many awards .
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Sid Watkins
#2252
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Eric Sidney Watkins , commonly known within the Formula One fraternity as Professor Sid or simply Prof, was an English neurosurgeon. Born in Liverpool, Watkins enrolled at the University of Liverpool where he graduated in 1952. He later served four years in the Royal Army Medical Corps before specialising in neurosurgery in Oxford and later, in London. Watkins also acted as a race track doctor at weekends which he continued at Watkins Glen International when he was appointed a Professor of Neurosurgery at State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse.
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