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
#22001
Leszek Balcerowicz
#22012
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Leszek Henryk Balcerowicz is a Polish economist, statesman, and Professor at Warsaw School of Economics. He served as Chairman of the National Bank of Poland and twice as Deputy Prime Minister of Poland .
Go to Profile#22002
Hillel Weiss
#22013
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Hillel Weiss is a professor emeritus of literature at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Academic career Hillel Weiss is a tenured professor at the Joseph & Norman Berman Department of Literature of the Jewish People, Faculty of Jewish Studies, Bar-llan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. As head of the Department of Hebrew Literature, he changed its name to the Department of Literature of the Jewish People. He is the editor of “Bikoret U’parshanut,” a journal of literary criticism.
Go to Profile#22003
David Allen
#22014
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David Allen is an American productivity consultant best known for the creation of a time management method called "Getting Things Done". Careers Allen grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana where he acted and won a state championship in debate. He went to college at New College, now New College of Florida, in Sarasota, Florida, and completed graduate work in American history at University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#22004
Booker T
#22015
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Booker T. Huffman Jr. , better known by his ring name Booker T, is an American commentator and semi-retired professional wrestler. He is currently signed to WWE where he serves as a color commentator on the NXT brand, and is also the owner and founder of the independent promotion Reality of Wrestling in Texas City, Texas. Booker has been frequently named by peers and industry commentators as one of the top 25 greatest professional wrestlers of all time; he was voted WWE's greatest World Heavyweight Champion in a 2013 viewer poll.
Go to Profile#22005
Zygmunt Haas
#22016
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Zygmunt J. Haas is a professor and distinguished chair in computer science, University of Texas at Dallas also the professor emeritus in electrical and computer engineering, Cornell University. His research interests include ad hoc networks, wireless networks, sensor networks, and zone routing protocols.
Go to Profile#22006
Marvin H. Caruthers
#22017
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Marvin H. Caruthers is an American biochemist who is a distinguished professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Caruthers earned a B.S in chemistry at the Iowa State University in 1962 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry 1968 at Northwestern University with Robert Letsinger. He did his postdoctoral work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Har Gobind Khorana. From 1973 he was assistant professor and in 1980 professor of biochemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Go to Profile#22007
Tim Finin
#22018
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Timothy Wilking Finin is the Willard and Lillian Hackerman Chair in Engineering and is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County . His research has focused on the applications of artificial intelligence to problems in information systems and has included contributions to natural language processing, expert systems, the theory and applications of multiagent systems, the semantic web, and mobile computing.
Go to Profile#22008
Mark J. Gasiorowski
#22019
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mark J. Gasiorowski is a political scientist at Tulane University in New Orleans in the field of Middle East politics, Third World politics, and U.S. foreign policy. He has served frequently as a consultant to the United States Department of State. In 2003, following the September 11 attacks, he testified before the 9/11 Commission. Journalist and academic Stephen Kinzer has called him "the most persistent" of "a small but dedicated group of scholars [who] have devoted considerable effort to uncovering the truth about events surrounding the 1953 coup" in Iran, an event so important it "defin...
Go to Profile#22009
Jean Serra
#22020
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Jean Paul Frédéric Serra is a French mathematician and engineer, and known as one of the co-founders of mathematical morphology. Biography Education Serra received a scientific baccalauréat in 1957, and an engineering degree from the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Nancy in 1962. He also obtained a Bachelor's degree in philosophy/psychology, from the University of Nancy, in 1965. He obtained a PhD in Mathematical Geology from the University of Nancy in 1967, and a doctorat d'etat in Mathematics, from the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, in 1986. He speaks French, Russian, E...
Go to Profile#22010
Thomas Willmore
#22021
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Thomas James Willmore was an English geometer. He is best known for his work on Riemannian 3-space and harmonic spaces. Willmore studied at King's College London. After his graduation in 1939, he was appointed as a lecturer, but the onset of World War II led him to working as a scientific officer at RAF Cardington, working mainly on barrage balloon defences. During the war, he found the time to write his Ph.D. on relativistic cosmology, and gained his Ph.D. on Clock regraduations and general relativity as an external student of the University of London in 1943 . In 1946, he was given a lectureship at the University of Durham.
Go to Profile#22011
Edmund Fantino
#22022
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Edmund Fantino was an American experimental psychologist. He was raised in Queens, New York before continuing on to earn his bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Cornell University in 1961, and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University in 1964. His doctoral adviser was Dick Herrnstein.
Go to Profile#22012
George Landow
#22023
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
George Paul Landow was Professor of English and Art History Emeritus at Brown University. He was a leading authority on Victorian literature, art, and culture, as well as a pioneer in criticism and theory of Electronic literature, hypertext and hypermedia. He also pioneered the use of hypertext and the web in higher education.
Go to Profile#22013
Daniel C. Kurtzer
#22024
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Daniel Charles Kurtzer is an American former diplomat. He served as U.S. ambassador to Egypt during the term of President Bill Clinton, and was the U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005 during the term of President George W Bush.
Go to Profile#22014
Norman Matloff
#22025
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Norman Saul Matloff is an American professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. Early life Norman Saul Matloff was born on December 16, 1948. Matloff received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1975 from the mathematics department at the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Thomas M. Liggett. His dissertation was titled Equilibrium Behavior in an Infinite Voting Model.
Go to Profile#22015
Richard Lippold
#22026
Overall Influence
1915 - 2002 (87 years)
Richard Lippold was an American sculptor, known for his geometric constructions using wire as a medium. Life Lippold was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He studied at the University of Chicago, and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in industrial design in 1937. Lippold worked as an industrial designer from 1937 to 1941. After he became a sculptor, Lippold taught at several universities, including Hunter College at the City University of New York, from 1952 to 1967.
Go to Profile#22016
William Kruskal
#22027
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
William Henry Kruskal was an American mathematician and statistician. He is best known for having formulated the Kruskal–Wallis one-way analysis of variance , a widely used nonparametric statistical method.
Go to Profile#22017
Mamikon Mnatsakanian
#22028
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Mamikon A. Mnatsakanian was an Armenian physicist. In 1959, he discovered a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem. He received a Ph.D. in physics in 1969 from Yerevan State University, where he became professor of astrophysics. As an undergraduate he specialized in the development of geometric methods for solving calculus problems by a visual approach that makes no use of formulas, which he later developed into his system of visual calculus.
Go to Profile#22018
David Kaye
#22029
Overall Influence
1910 - Present (116 years)
David Kaye was the United Nations special rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression between August 2014 and July 2020. He was succeeded by Irene Khan. Kaye is clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine on public international law, international humanitarian law human rights and international criminal justice. He is co-director of the UCI Fair Elections and Free Speech Center working at the intersection of technology, freedom of speech and democratic deliberation. He is also the independent board chair of the Global Netwo...
Go to Profile#22019
Stephen Yablo
#22030
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Stephen Yablo is a Canadian-born American philosopher. He is David W. Skinner Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught previously at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He specializes in the philosophy of logic, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics.
Go to Profile#22020
Jadakiss
#22031
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Jason Terrance Phillips , known professionally as Jadakiss, is an American rapper from Yonkers, New York. He began his career in the 1990s as a member of the rap trio The Lox, managed by Ruff Ryders and signed with Bad Boy. After leaving the label in 1999, they signed a joint venture deal between Interscope Records and Ruff Ryders. He is currently signed to Def Jam, Roc Nation, and D-Block.
Go to Profile#22021
Richard J. Jensen
#22032
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Richard Joseph Jensen is an American historian. He was a professor of history at the University of Illinois, Chicago, from 1973 to 1996. He has worked on American political, social, military, and economic history as well as historiography and quantitative and computer methods. His work focuses on Midwestern electoral history, and he has authored The Winning of the Midwest and Historian's Guide to Statistics.
Go to Profile#22022
Lee Gutkind
#22033
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Lee Gutkind is an American writer, speaker, and founder of the literary journal called Creative Nonfiction. Gutkind has written or edited more than 30 books, covering a wide range of subjects from motorcycle subculture to child and adolescent mental illness and organ transplantation.
Go to Profile#22023
Robert B. Salter
#22034
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Robert Bruce Salter was a Canadian surgeon and a pioneer in the field of pediatric orthopaedic surgery. Born in Stratford, Ontario, he graduated in medicine from the University of Toronto in 1947, worked for two years at the Grenfell Medical Mission in Newfoundland, and spent one year as the McLaughlin Fellow in Oxford, England. Salter then returned to join the medical staff at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto in 1955. He was later appointed surgeon-in-chief.
Go to Profile#22024
Martha McClintock
#22035
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Martha Kent McClintock is an American psychologist best known for her research on human pheromones and her theory of menstrual synchrony. Her research focuses on the relationship that the environment and biology have upon sexual behaviour. She is the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago and is the Founder and past Director of the Institute for Mind and Biology.
Go to Profile#22025
Ravindra Khattree
#22036
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ravindra Khattree is an Indian-American statistician and a distinguished professor of statistics at Oakland University and a co-director of the Center for Data Science and Big Data Analytics at the same university. His contribution to the Fountain–Khattree–Peddada Theorem in Pitman measure of closeness is one of the important results of his work. Khattree is the coauthor of two books and has coedited two volumes. He has served as an associate editor of the Communications in Statistics journal and the editor of the Interstat online journal. He was Chief editor of Journal of Statistics and Applications for more than ten years.
Go to Profile#22026
Daniel Bonevac
#22037
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Daniel Bonevac is an American philosopher born in Pittsburgh. He is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He has degrees in philosophy from Haverford College, and the University of Pittsburgh. His areas of interest are metaphysics, philosophical logic, ethics, and Eastern philosophy. In autumn 2016, Bonevac joined 145 other scholars and writers in declaring support for Donald Trump for president. He has posted hundreds of philosophy videos on his YouTube channel.
Go to Profile#22027
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
#22038
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jomo Kwame Sundaram , fondly known just as Jomo, is a prominent Malaysian economist. He is a senior adviser at the Khazanah Research Institute, visiting fellow at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University, and an adjunct professor at the International Islamic University .
Go to Profile#22028
Iain Thomson
#22039
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Iain D. Thomson is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico . He is a well-known expert on Martin Heidegger. Education and career Thomson studied as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with Hubert Dreyfus, and then earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. As a visiting graduate student at UC Irvine, he also studied with Jacques Derrida. He is known for his expertise on Heidegger's philosophy, European philosophy since Kant, philosophy of education, philosophy of technology, p...
Go to Profile#22029
Hideo Levy
#22040
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ian Hideo Levy is an American-born Japanese language author. Levy was born in California and educated in Taiwan, the US, and Japan. He is one of the first Americans to write modern literature in Japanese, and his work has won the Noma Literary New Face Prize and the Yomiuri Prize, among other literary prizes.
Go to Profile#22030
Talib Kweli
#22041
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Talib Kweli Greene is an American rapper. He earned recognition through his collaboration with fellow Brooklyn rapper Mos Def in 1997, when they formed the group Black Star. Kweli's musical career continued with solo success including collaborations with producers and rappers Kanye West, Just Blaze, and Pharrell Williams. His most recent album, Gotham, was released in 2020. In 2011, Kweli founded his own record label, Javotti Media.
Go to Profile#22031
Norton Zinder
#22042
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Norton David Zinder was an American biologist famous for his discovery of genetic transduction. Zinder was born in New York City, received his A.B. from Columbia University in 1947, Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1952, and became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1969. He led a lab at Rockefeller University until shortly before his death.
Go to Profile#22032
Brigid Heywood
#22043
Overall Influence
Brigid R. Heywood, born 1956 or 1957, is a British/Australian academic and biological scientist. She was Vice-Chancellor of the University of New England in Australia from 2019 until she resigned after criminal charges were laid against her in 2022.
Go to Profile#22033
Robert Griffiths
#22044
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Robert B. Griffiths is an American physicist at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the originator of the consistent histories approach to quantum mechanics, which has since been developed by himself, Roland Omnès, Murray Gell-Mann, and James Hartle.
Go to Profile#22034
Nelson W. Polsby
#22045
Overall Influence
1934 - 2007 (73 years)
Nelson Woolf Polsby was an American political scientist. He specialized in the study of the United States presidency, the United States Congress and how governmental policies and practices evolve. Polsby was the Heller Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the editor of the American Political Science Review from 1971–77 and the founding editor of the Annual Review of Political Science from 1998 until his death in 2007.
Go to Profile#22035
Samuel Pickering
#22046
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Samuel F. "Sam" Pickering Jr. is a writer and professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. His unconventional teaching style was an inspiration for the character of Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams in the film Dead Poets Society. Pickering specializes in the familiar essay, children's literature, nature writers, and 18th and 19th century English literature. Pickering has published many collections of non-fiction personal essays as well as over 200 articles.
Go to Profile#22036
Jessica Levinson
#22047
Overall Influence
Jessica Levinson is an American law professor and political commentator. Levinson teaches at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where she lectures in the areas of constitutional law, election law and privacy torts.
Go to Profile#22037
William Cochran
#22048
Overall Influence
1922 - 2003 (81 years)
William Cochran was a Scottish physicist. Biography Bill Cochran was born in Scotland and educated at Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh. He studied physics at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his PhD under Arnold Beevers in the Chemistry Department in X-ray crystallography of sucrose using isomorphous replacement. He moved to the University of Cambridge to work with Lawrence Bragg, and obtained tenure in 1951. He realised that isomorphous replacement was the key to solving protein structures. With Francis Crick, he invented methods for deducing helical patterns from crystallogr...
Go to Profile#22038
Antony Lerman
#22049
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Antony Lerman is a British writer who specialises in the study of antisemitism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, multiculturalism, and the place of religion in society. From 2006 to early 2009, he was Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, a think tank on issues affecting Jewish communities in Europe. From December 1999 to 2006, he was Chief Executive of the Hanadiv Charitable Foundation, renamed the Rothschild Foundation Europe in 2007. He is a founding member of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights, and a former editor of Patterns of Prejudice, a quarterly academic ...
Go to Profile#22039
Catherine Lutz
#22050
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Catherine A. Lutz is an American anthropologist and Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University. She is also a Research Professor at the Watson Institute where she serves as a director of the Costs of War Project, which attempts to calculate the financial costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Go to Profile#22040
Masatoshi Gündüz Ikeda
#22051
Overall Influence
1926 - 2003 (77 years)
Masatoşi Gündüz İkeda , was a Japanese-born Turkish mathematician known for his contributions to the field of algebraic number theory. Early years Ikeda was born on 25 February 1926 in Tokyo, Japan, to Junzo Ikeda, head of the statistics department of an insurance company, and his wife Yaeko Ikeda. He was the youngest child with a brother and two sisters. He grew up reading mathematics books belonging to his father. During his school years, he bought himself used books about mathematics and the life story of mathematicians. He was very impressed by the French mathematician Évariste Galois .
Go to Profile#22041
Michael J. Saks
#22052
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michael J. Saks is a professor of law at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University; he holds a secondary appointment in the department of psychology. Saks served as president of the American Psychology-Law Society and as editor of the scientific journal, Law and Human Behavior. For his early work on jury research, he earned the Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology in the Public Interest from the American Psychological Association.
Go to Profile#22042
Gerald Koocher
#22053
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Gerald Paul Koocher is an American psychologist and past president of the American Psychological Association . His interests include ethics, clinical child psychology and the study of scientific misconduct. He is Dean Emeritus Simmons University and also holds an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School. Koocher has over 300 publications including 16 books and has edited three scholarly journals including Ethics & Behavior which he founded. Koocher was implicated as an author of the so-called "torture memos" that allowed psychologists to participate in torture during interrogations in t...
Go to Profile#22043
Olufemi Bamiro
#22054
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Olufemi Adebisi Bamiro is a Nigerian professor of mechanical engineering and former vice-chancellor of the University of Ibadan. Early life and education Olufemi was born on 16 September 1947 in Ijebu-Igbo, Ogun State. He attended Molusi College, Ijebu-lgbo and proceeded to Government College, Ibadan, obtaining the best result of the year at the Cambridge Higher School Certificate , 1967. Afterwards he proceeded as Shell Scholar to the University of Nottingham, Nottingham, England, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering with First Class Honours in 1971. He worked brie...
Go to Profile#22044
John Christy
#22055
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
#22045
Ze'ev Segal
#22056
Overall Influence
1947 - 2011 (64 years)
Ze'ev Segal was an Israeli lawyer, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University and a legal analyst for the newspaper Haaretz. Segal was born in Mandate Palestine. He served in the Israel Defense Forces as a military correspondent for the Gadna newspaper Bemachane Gadna in 1965–1968. Segal received an LL.M degree from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1982, he received a doctorate in law from Tel Aviv University. He worked as an assistant to Shimon Peres when he was Minister of Communications and Transport.
Go to Profile#22046
James Park Sloan
#22057
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
James Park Sloan is an American author, critic, and academic. He was a Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was educated at Harvard University, designed a course in 'Western Values' for the Harvard Business School and served in the Vietnam War as a paratrooper.
Go to Profile#22047
Herschel Grossman
#22058
Overall Influence
1939 - 2004 (65 years)
Herschel Ivan Grossman was an American economist best known for his work on general disequilibrium with Robert Barro in the 1970s and later work on property rights and the emergence of the state. Life and career Grossman grew up in Philadelphia, where he attended Central High School. He received a bachelor of arts from the University of Virginia , a B.Phil. from the University of Oxford , where he was a student at Merton College, and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University . Grossman collaborated with Barro to produce the influential article "A General Disequilibrium Model of Income," which,...
Go to Profile#22048
Diana Taylor
#22059
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Diana Taylor is an American academic. She is a professor of performance studies and Spanish at New York University' s Tisch School of the Arts and the founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. She is also the president of the Modern Language Association in 2017–2018. Her work focuses on Latin American and U.S. theatre and performance, performance and politics, feminist theatre and performance in the Americas, Hemispheric studies, and trauma studies. She is married to Eric Manheimer, former New York Bellevue Hospital medical director and current producer of...
Go to Profile#22049
Rosemary Murray
#22060
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Dame Alice Rosemary Murray, was an English chemist and educator. She was instrumental in establishing New Hall, Cambridge, now Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, and was the first woman to hold the office of Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#22050
Benjamin Powell
#22061
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Benjamin W. "Ben" Powell is the director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University and professor of economics at Texas Tech University's Rawls College of Business. He is also a junior fellow at the Independent Institute and the South American editor of the Review of Austrian Economics.
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