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
#22051
José Ramón Cossío
#22062
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
José Ramón Cossío Díaz is a Mexican jurist and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. Born in Mexico City, Cossío Díaz studied law at the University of Colima and a master's and doctorate at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. He has taught constitutional law at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, where he was also director of the law faculty.
Go to Profile#22052
John Skoyles
#22063
Overall Influence
John Skoyles is a neuroscientist and evolutionary psychologist. He studied philosophy of science at the London School of Economics and then did MRC funded research upon neuroscience and dyslexia at University College London.
Go to Profile#22053
Jill Tiefenthaler
#22064
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Jill Tiefenthaler is an American academic and economist who is the first female CEO of the National Geographic Society. Previously, Tiefenthaler was the 13th president of Colorado College from July 2011 to 2020 and the provost of Wake Forest University.
Go to Profile#22054
Charles Higham
#22065
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Charles Higham was an English author, editor and poet. After moving to Australia in 1954, Higham began a career in journalism, before moving to the United States in 1969. In the United States, he became known as a celebrity biographer, mainly of film stars, such as Katharine Hepburn and Errol Flynn. The latter book, among several during Higham's career, was criticized for fabrications. Close friends of another of his subjects, Orson Welles, in particular Peter Bogdanovich, were critical of Higham's interpretation of his career.
Go to Profile#22055
Marcel Erdal
#22066
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Marcel Erdal is a linguist and Turkologist, professor and head of the Turcology department at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. He graduated from Robert College in 1963. Publications The Turkic Nagy-Szent-Miklos Inscription in Greek Letters, 1988Old Turkic Word Formation: A Functional Approach to the Lexicon, 1991Die Sprache der wolgabolgarischen Inschriften, 1993A Grammar of Old Turkic, 2004
Go to Profile#22056
S. Neil Fujita
#22067
Overall Influence
1921 - 2010 (89 years)
Sadamitsu "S. Neil" Fujita was an American graphic designer known for his innovative book cover and record album designs. Early life Born in Waimea, Hawaii, to Japanese immigrants, Fujita attended a boarding school in Honolulu, where he adopted the name Neil. He enrolled in Chouinard Art Institute, but his studies were interrupted by World War II and his forced relocation in 1942 , first to the Pomona Assembly Center outside Los Angeles and later to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. During his confinement, he worked as the art director of the camp newspaper, the Heart Mountain Sentinel.
Go to Profile#22057
Jason Greenblatt
#22068
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Jason Dov Greenblatt is an American lawyer. He was the executive vice president and chief legal officer to Donald Trump and The Trump Organization, and his advisor on Israel. In January 2017, he was appointed as an Assistant to the President and Special Representative for International Negotiations by President Donald Trump.
Go to Profile#22058
Mark Bevir
#22069
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Mark Bevir is a British philosopher of history. He is a professor of political science and the Director of the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently teaches courses on political theory and philosophy, public policy and organisation, and methodology. He is also a Professor in the Graduate School of Governance, United Nations University and a Distinguished Research Professor in the College of Arts and Humanities, Swansea University.
Go to Profile#22059
Ulrich Herbert
#22070
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ulrich Herbert is a German historian and a specialist in the Nazi era and German history during World War II. He was a professor at the University of Freiburg . In 1999 Herbert received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in modern and contemporary history. He edited European history in the 20th Century, a series of ten surveys by German scholars.
Go to Profile#22060
Abraham David Sofaer
#22071
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Abraham David Sofaer is an American attorney and jurist who served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and legal adviser to the United States State Department. After resigning from the State Department, he became the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy and National Security Affairs at the Hoover Institution.
Go to Profile#22061
Hualing Nieh Engle
#22072
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (101 years)
Hualing Nieh Engle , née Nieh Hua-ling , is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She is a professor emerita at the University of Iowa. Early life and education Nieh Hua-ling was born on 11 January 1925 in Wuhan, Hubei, China. In 1936, Nieh's father, an official of the Kuomintang administration, was executed by the Communist Red Army during the Chinese Civil War.
Go to Profile#22062
E. M. S. Namboodiripad
#22073
Overall Influence
1909 - 1998 (89 years)
Elamkulam Manakkal Sankaran Namboodiripad , popularly known by his initials 'E. M. S.' was an Indian communist politician and theorist, who served as the first Chief Minister of Kerala in 1957–1959 and then again in 1967–1969. As a member of the Communist Party of India , he became the first non-Congress Chief Minister in the Indian republic. In 1964, he led a faction of the CPI that broke away to form the Communist Party of India .
Go to Profile#22063
Régine Robin
#22074
Overall Influence
1939 - 2021 (82 years)
Régine Robin was a historian, novelist, translator and professor of sociology. Her prolific fiction and non-fiction, primarily on the themes of identity and culture and on the sociological practice of literature, earned a number of awards, including the Governor-General's Award in 1986. She was described by Robert Saletti as "Montreal's grande dame of postmodernism".
Go to Profile#22064
Paolo Di Canio
#22075
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Paolo Di Canio is an Italian former professional footballer and manager. During his playing career he made over 500 league appearances and scored over one hundred goals as a forward. He primarily played as a deep-lying forward, but he could also play as an attacking midfielder, or as a winger. Di Canio was regarded as a technically skilled but temperamental player.
Go to Profile#22065
Glen Sather
#22076
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Glen Cameron “Slats” Sather is a Canadian ice hockey player, coach and executive. He is the current senior advisor and alternate governor of the New York Rangers of the National Hockey League . He was the Rangers' general manager until stepping down on July 1, 2015, and then served as their president until April 4, 2019.
Go to Profile#22066
Graham Coxon
#22077
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Graham Leslie Coxon is an English musician, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and painter who came to prominence as a founding member of the rock band Blur. As the group's lead guitarist and secondary vocalist, Coxon is featured on all of Blur's studio discography . He has also led a solo career since 1998, producing and playing all instrumentation on his solo albums. As well as being a musician, Coxon is a visual artist: he designed the cover art for all his solo albums as well as Blur's 13 .
Go to Profile#22067
Sunkara Balaparameswara Rao
#22078
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Sunkara Balaparameswara Rao was an Indian neurosurgeon. He is regarded as the 'father of neurosurgery in united Andhra Pradesh'. He started the first Department of Neurosurgery in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh in April 1956. He received the Dr. B. C. Roy award in 1989.
Go to Profile#22068
Timothy Brook
#22079
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Timothy James Brook is a Canadian historian, sinologist, and writer specializing in the study of China . He holds the Republic of China Chair, Department of History, University of British Columbia. His research interests include the social and cultural history of the Ming Dynasty in China; law and punishment in Imperial China; collaboration during Japan's wartime occupation of China, 1937–45 and war crimes trials in Asia; global history; and historiography.
Go to Profile#22069
Vladimir Korepin
#22080
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
#22070
Glendon Swarthout
#22081
Overall Influence
1918 - 1992 (74 years)
Glendon Fred Swarthout was an American writer and novelist. Several of his novels were made into films. Where the Boys Are, and The Shootist, which was John Wayne's last work, are probably the best known.
Go to Profile#22071
Peter Jenni
#22082
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Peter Jenni, is an experimental particle physicist working at CERN. He is best known as one of the "founding fathers" of the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider together with a few other colleagues. He acted as spokesperson of the ATLAS Collaboration until 2009. ATLAS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1992 involving roughly 3,000 physicists at 183 institutions in 38 countries. Jenni was directly involved in the experimental work leading to the discoveries of the W and Z bosons in the 1980s and the Higgs boson in 2012. He is author of about 1000 publications in sc...
Go to Profile#22072
Jonathan Green
#22083
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jonathan Green is a freelance writer. He has written for various science fiction and fantasy franchises, including Doctor Who, Fighting Fantasy, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Games Workshop's Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 game universes.
Go to Profile#22073
Zviad Gamsakhurdia
#22084
Overall Influence
1939 - 1993 (54 years)
Zviad Konstantines dze Gamsakhurdia was a Georgian politician, dissident, professor of English language studies and American literature at Tbilisi State University, and writer who became the first democratically elected President of Georgia in May 1991.
Go to Profile#22074
Alan Page
#22085
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Alan Cedric Page is an American retired Minnesota state Supreme Court judge and former professional football He gained national recognition as a defensive tackle in the National Football League during 15 seasons with the Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears, and then embarked on a legal career. Page earned a B.A. in political science from the University of Notre Dame in 1967 and a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1978. Page served as an associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court from 1993 until he reached the court's mandatory retirement age of 70 in 2015.
Go to Profile#22075
Luciano Canfora
#22086
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Luciano Canfora is an Italian classicist and historian. Born in Bari, Canfora obtained his first degree in Roman History in 1964 at Pisa University. He has since been Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Bari. His specialty is ancient libraries and his book The Vanished Library, which is about the Library of Alexandria, has been translated into some 15 languages.
Go to Profile#22076
Suzanne Côté
#22087
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Suzanne Côté is a puisne justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. She was nominated by Prime Minister Stephen Harper to replace retiring justice Louis LeBel. Before her appointment to the Supreme Court, she was a partner at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP and previously Stikeman Elliott LLP in Montréal. She is the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court directly from private practice.
Go to Profile#22077
Jan Velterop
#22088
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Johannes Josephus Marinus Velterop is a science publisher. Education Born in The Hague, Netherlands, he was originally a marine geophysicist and became a science publisher in the mid-1970s. Career Velterop started his publishing career at Elsevier in Amsterdam. After a few years out of the scientific field as the director of the Dutch regional newspaper De Twentsche Courant, he returned to international science publishing at Academic Press in London. He next joined Nature as director for a short while, but moved quickly on to help get BioMed Central, the first commercial open access science ...
Go to Profile#22078
Jaume Casals
#22089
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Jaume Casals Pons is the professor of philosophy at Pompeu Fabra University since 2003. He received his Doctorate in Philosophy summa cum laude from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1984; prior to teaching at UPF, he taught at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Paris Diderot University.
Go to Profile#22079
Itzhak Bars
#22090
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Itzhak Bars is a theoretical physicist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Education After receiving his B.S. from Robert College in physics in 1967, Bars obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision of Feza Gürsey at Yale University in 1971.
Go to Profile#22080
Donald Ault
#22091
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Donald D. Ault was a professor at the University of Florida and is primarily known for his work on British Romantic poet William Blake, British physicist Sir Isaac Newton and American comics artist Carl Barks. He is also known as a foundational figure in the development of American comics studies, and was the General Editor of the academic journal devoted to comics called ImageTexT.
Go to Profile#22081
Irina Grekova
#22092
Overall Influence
1907 - 2002 (95 years)
Elena Sergeevna Ventsel , known by the pen name Irina Grekova , was a Soviet writer and mathematician. She held a Ph.D. in mathematics, and wrote several influential textbooks on probability theory, game theory, and operations research.
Go to Profile#22082
Joshua Greene
#22093
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Joshua David Greene is an American experimental psychologist, neuroscientist, and philosopher. He is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. Most of his research and writing has been concerned with moral judgment and decision-making. His recent research focuses on fundamental issues in cognitive science.
Go to Profile#22083
Lawrence LeShan
#22094
Overall Influence
1920 - 2020 (100 years)
Lawrence LeShan was an American psychologist, educator, and the author of the best-selling How to Meditate a practical guide to meditation. He authored or co-authored approximately 75 articles in the professional literature and more than fifteen books on a diverse range of topics including psychotherapy, war, cancer treatment, and mysticism. He also wrote science fiction under the pseudonym Edward Grendon.
Go to Profile#22084
Bruno Lemaitre
#22095
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Bruno Lemaitre is a French immunologist and a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne . His research focuses on the mechanisms of innate immunity and endosymbiosis in Drosophila. Lemaitre has also authored several books on the topic of narcissism in science. and a book on the philosophy of Michael Polanyi.
Go to Profile#22085
Judith Grabiner
#22096
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Judith Victor Grabiner is an American mathematician and historian of mathematics, who is Flora Sanborn Pitzer Professor Emerita of Mathematics at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges. Her main interest is in mathematics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Go to Profile#22086
Edson Fachin
#22097
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Luiz Edson Fachin is a Brazilian jurist and lawyer. On June 16, 2015, he became a justice of the Supreme Federal Court. Before that, he was a professor of civil law of the Federal University of Paraná .
Go to Profile#22087
Jan Błoński
#22098
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
Jan Błoński was a Polish historian, literary critic, publicist and translator. He was a leading representative of the Kraków school of literary criticism, which wielded significant influence in postwar Poland.
Go to Profile#22088
Heiko Oberman
#22099
Overall Influence
1930 - 2001 (71 years)
Heiko Augustinus Oberman was a Dutch historian and theologian who specialized in the study of the Reformation. Life Oberman was born in Utrecht on 15 October 1930. He earned his doctorate in theology from the University of Utrecht in 1957 and joined the faculty of the Harvard Divinity School in 1958. There he rose rapidly from instructor to associate professor and, in 1963, to professor of church history. He was appointed Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School in 1964 and continued teaching there until 1966. He then accepted a chair in the theology faculty at the ...
Go to Profile#22089
Benjamin Simons
#22100
Overall Influence
Benjamin David Simons is a British theoretical physicist, working in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics and in biophysics. Simons holds the Herchel Smith Chair in Physics at the University of Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory, and he is also a Group Leader in the Gurdon Institute. In 2013 he became head of the Theory of Condensed Matter group in the Cavendish.
Go to Profile#22090
Ken Robinson
#22101
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Kenneth Arthur Robinson was an Australian computer scientist. He has been called "The Father of Formal Methods in Australia". Early life and education Ken Robinson was born in 1938. He received his BE degree in electrical engineering in 1959 and a BSc degree in physics and mathematics in 1961, both from the University of Sydney.
Go to Profile#22091
Alfonso Cuarón
#22102
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Alfonso Cuarón Orozco is a Mexican filmmaker. He is known for directing films in a variety of genres, including the family drama A Little Princess , the romantic drama Great Expectations , the coming of age road film Y tu mamá también , the fantasy film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , science fiction films such as Children of Men and Gravity and the semi-autobiographical drama Roma .
Go to Profile#22092
Hamid Naficy
#22103
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Hamid Naficy is an Iranian-born American filmmaker, writer, scholar, and educator. He is the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University in the department of Radio/Film/Television, an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Art History, and a core member of the Middle East and North African Studies Program.
Go to Profile#22093
Ava DuVernay
#22104
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Ava Marie DuVernay is an American filmmaker. She is a recipient of a Primetime Emmy Award, a NAACP Image Award, a BAFTA Film Award and a BAFTA TV Award, as well as a nominee of an Academy Award and Golden Globe.
Go to Profile#22094
Rafe de Crespigny
#22105
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Richard Rafe Champion de Crespigny , also known by his Chinese name Zhang Leifu , is an Australian sinologist and historian. He was an adjunct professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. He specialised in the history, geography, and literature of the Han dynasty, particularly the translation and historiography of material concerning the Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period.
Go to Profile#22095
John H. Langbein
#22106
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
John Harriss Langbein is an American legal scholar who serves as the Sterling Professor emeritus of Law and Legal History at Yale University. He is an expert in the fields of trusts and estates, comparative law, and Anglo-American legal history.
Go to Profile#22096
David P. Robbins
#22107
Overall Influence
1942 - 2003 (61 years)
David Peter Robbins was an American mathematician. He is most famous for introducing alternating sign matrices. He is also known for his work on generalizations of Heron's formula on the area of polygons, due to which Robbins pentagons were named after him.
Go to Profile#22097
Karl J. Niklas
#22108
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Karl Joseph Niklas is the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor emeritus in the Section of Plant Biology, School of Integrative Plant Science, at Cornell University. He is best known for his work on plant biomechanics, allometry, and functional morphology, and for his long-standing contributions to understanding plant evolutionary biology, particularly early land plant evolutionary diversification patterns and morphospaces.
Go to Profile#22098
David Lange
#22109
Overall Influence
1942 - 2005 (63 years)
David Russell Lange was a New Zealand politician who served as the 32nd prime minister of New Zealand from 1984 to 1989. Lange was born and brought up in Ōtāhuhu, the son of a physician. He became a lawyer, and represented poor and struggling people in civil rights causes in the rapidly changing Auckland of the 1970s. After serving as legal advisor to the Polynesian Panthers, Lange was first elected to the New Zealand Parliament in the Mangere by-election of 1977. He became a prominent debater within parliament, and soon gained a reputation for cutting wit and eloquence. Lange became the le...
Go to Profile#22099
Hans Dieter Betz
#22110
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Hans Dieter Betz is an American scholar of the New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Chicago. He has made influential contributions to research on Paul's Letter to the Galatians, the Sermon on the Mount and the Greco-Roman context of Early Christianity.
Go to Profile#22100
Luc E. Weber
#22111
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Luc E. Weber is the Rector Emeritus of the University of Geneva and the President of the Glion Colloquium. Biography Luc E. Weber received a PhD in Economics and Business from the University of Lausanne. From 1975 to 2008, he was Professor of Public Economics at the University of Geneva. He has also taught at his alma mater, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Fribourg. From 1977 to 1980, he was a member of the Swiss Council of Economic Advisers. He has also served as Vice-Rector, then Rector of the university, and Chairman and Consul for international affairs of ...
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