Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

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List of the most influential people

#22301

Humayun Chaudhry

Humayun Chaudhry

#22312

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Humayun Javaid Chaudhry, D.O., MACP, FRCP , FRCP is an American physician and medical educator who is president and chief executive officer of the Federation of State Medical Boards of the United States, a national non-profit organization founded in 1912 that represents the 70 state medical boards of the United States and its territories and which co-sponsors the United States Medical Licensing Examination . From 2007 to 2009, he served as Commissioner of Health Services for Suffolk County, New York, the state's most populous county outside New York City. In 2016, he was listed by Modern He...

#22302

José María Mainetti

#22313

Overall Influence

1909 - 2006 (97 years)

José María Mainetti was an Argentine physician, surgeon and oncologist. Mainetti was born in Hinojo, Buenos Aires. He spent most of his childhood and youth in La Plata, were his family moved in 1911. He finished his medicine studies in 1932. Since 1940 he started working also as a professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata.

#22303

Mario Aurelio Poli

Mario Aurelio Poli

#22314

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Mario Aurelio Poli is an Argentine prelate of the Catholic Church who was the Archbishop of Buenos Aires from 2013 to 2023. He was the Bishop of Santa Rosa from 2008 to 2013 and before that an auxiliary bishop in Buenos Aires from 2002 to 2008. Pope Francis, his predecessor in Buenos Aires, made him a cardinal in 2014.

#22304

Michael R. Strain

#22315

Overall Influence

Michael R. Strain is an American economist. He is currently the Director of Economic Policy Studies and the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also Professor of Practice in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, and a columnist for Project Syndicate. Strain's research focuses on labor economics, macroeconomics, public finance, and social policy.

#22305

Janet Abu-Lughod

#22316

Overall Influence

1928 - 2013 (85 years)

Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod was an American sociologist who made major contributions to world-systems theory and urban sociology. Early life Raised in Newark, New Jersey, United States, she attended Weequahic High School, where she was influenced by the works of Lewis Mumford about urbanization.

#22306

Ernst Pöppel

#22317

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Ernst Pöppel is a German psychologist and neuroscientist. He is the father of Dr. David Poeppel. Education and research Pöppel was born in Schwessin, Farther Pomerania. He studied psychology and biology in Freiburg and Munich, before finishing his academic education with PhD in 1968 in Innsbruck, Austria. He did research on temporal perception and circadian rhythms between 1964 and 1968, in the Max-Planck-Institute of Behavioral Physiology, and on neurophysiology of vision in 1969 and 1970 in Max-Planck-Institute of Psychiatry, Munich. From 1971 to 1973, he did research on neuropsychology of vision at the Department of Psychology and Brain Science at MIT, Cambridge, USA.

#22307

Janko Tipsarević

Janko Tipsarević

#22318

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Janko Tipsarević is a Serbian former professional tennis player. His career-high singles ranking is world No. 8, achieved on 2 April 2012. In his career, he won 4 ATP World Tour titles, one ATP doubles title, three Futures, and 15 Challenger titles. Tipsarević also won the 2001 Australian Open junior title. He holds notable victories over former world No. 1 players Carlos Moyá, Marat Safin, Lleyton Hewitt, Juan Carlos Ferrero, Andy Roddick, his compatriot Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray. His best results at a Grand Slam tournament have been reaching the quarterfinals at the US Open in 2011 a...

#22308

Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler

#22319

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Karen Joy Fowler is an American author of science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. Her work often centers on the nineteenth century, the lives of women, and alienation. She is best known as the author of the best-selling novel The Jane Austen Book Club that was made into a movie of the same name.

#22309

Arthur Winfree

#22320

Overall Influence

1942 - 2002 (60 years)

Arthur Taylor Winfree was a theoretical biologist at the University of Arizona. He was born in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. Winfree was noted for his work on the mathematical modeling of biological phenomena : from cardiac arrhythmia and circadian rhythms to the self-organization of slime mold colonies and the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction. Winfree was a MacArthur Fellow from 1984 to 1989, he won the Einthoven Prize for his work on ventricular fibrillation, and shared the 2000 Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics with Alexandre Chorin.

#22310

Lee O-young

#22321

Overall Influence

1934 - 2022 (88 years)

Lee O-young was a South Korean critic and novelist. Although the romanized spelling of the hangul name "이어령" might be Yi O-ryŏng or Lee Eo-ryeong, Lee O-young is the author's preferred romanization according to the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

#22311

John Hewson

#22322

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

John Robert Hewson AM is an Australian former politician who served as leader of the Liberal Party from 1990 to 1994. He led the Liberal-National Coalition to defeat at the 1993 Australian federal election.

#22312

Michael Rosenzweig

#22323

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Michael L. Rosenzweig is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona who has developed and popularized the concept of Reconciliation ecology. He received his Ph.D in zoology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and has gone on to hold a number of positions around the United States.

#22313

Patricia Craddock

#22324

Overall Influence

Patricia B. Craddock is an American author and professor of English, writer of works on the historian Edward Gibbon, the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, including a two-volume biography, Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters and Edward Gibbon: "Luminous" Historian .

#22314

Stijn Claessens

Stijn Claessens

#22325

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Stijn Claessens is a Dutch economist who currently serves as the Head of Financial Stability Policy department of the Bank for International Settlements. He worked for fourteen years at World Bank beginning in 1987 until 2001 where he assumed various positions including that of Lead Economist. Following his tenure at the World Bank he became Professor of International Finance Policy at the University of Amsterdam where he remained for three years and still is on the faculty. Stijn has many distinguished academic publications and his work has been cited in many outlets including The Wall Str...

#22315

Paris Pişmiş

#22326

Overall Influence

1911 - 1999 (88 years)

Marie Paris Pişmiş de Recillas was an Armenian-Mexican astronomer. Pişmiş was born Mari Sukiasian in 1911, in Ortaköy, Istanbul. She completed her high school studies at Üsküdar American Academy. In 1937, she became the first woman to get a Ph.D. from the Science Faculty of Istanbul University. Her advisor was Erwin Finlay Freundlich. Later, she went to Harvard University where she met her future husband Félix Recillas, a Mexican mathematician. They settled in Mexico, and she became the first professional astronomer in Mexico. According to Dorrit Hoffleit, "she is the one person most influen...

#22316

Stephen S. Morse

#22327

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Stephen S. Morse is an American epidemiologist, influenza researcher and specialist on emerging infectious diseases, who has served as an adviser on the epidemiology of infectious diseases and on improving disease early warning systems to numerous government and international organizations. As of 2016, he is Professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University. His seminal book Emerging Viruses was selected by American Scientist for its list of "100 Top Science Books of the 20th Century".

#22317

Maxim D. Shrayer

Maxim D. Shrayer

#22328

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Maxim D. Shrayer is a bilingual Russian-American author, translator, and literary scholar, and a professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College. Biography Shrayer was born and grew up in Moscow, USSR, in the family of the writer David Shrayer-Petrov, and the translator Emilia Shrayer. Among his ancestors on the Shrayer side is the Russian-Israeli writer Batya Kahana . Together with his parents he spent almost nine years as a refusenik before immigrating to the US in the summer of 1987. Shrayer attended Moscow University, Brown University , Rutgers University , and Yale University .

#22318

Peter Sneath

#22329

Overall Influence

1923 - 2011 (88 years)

Peter Henry Andrews Sneath FRS, MD was a microbiologist who co-founded the field of numerical taxonomy, together with Robert R. Sokal. Sneath and Sokal wrote Principles of Numerical Taxonomy, revised in 1973 as Numerical Taxonomy. Sneath reviewed the state of numerical taxonomy in 1995 and wrote some autobiographical notes in 2010.

#22319

Stanislav Mikheyev

#22330

Overall Influence

1940 - 2011 (71 years)

Stanislav Pavlovich Mikheyev was a Russian physicist known for the discovery of the MSW effect. Education and research Stanislav Mikheyev graduated from Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University in 1965. Then he became a researcher at Lebedev Physical Institute. Since 1970 he was a researcher at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the USSR Academy of Sciences , where he earned his Ph.D. in physics in 1983.

#22320

Rod Steiger

#22331

Overall Influence

1925 - 2002 (77 years)

Rodney Stephen Steiger was an American actor, noted for his portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters. Ranked as "one of Hollywood's most charismatic and dynamic stars", he is closely associated with the art of method acting, embodying the characters he played, which at times led to clashes with directors and co-stars. He starred as Marlon Brando's mobster brother Charley in On the Waterfront , the title character Sol Nazerman in The Pawnbroker which won him the Silver Bear for Best Actor, and as police chief Bill Gillespie opposite Sidney Poitier in the film In the Heat of ...

#22321

Tomasz Łuczak

#22332

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Tomasz Łuczak is a Polish mathematician and professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and Emory University. His main field of research is combinatorics, specifically discrete structures, such as random graphs, and their chromatic number.

#22322

Baudouin of Belgium

Baudouin of Belgium

#22333

Overall Influence

1930 - 1993 (63 years)

Baudouin was King of the Belgians from 17 July 1951 until his death in 1993. He was the last Belgian king to be sovereign of the Congo, before it became independent in 1960 and became the Democratic Republic of the Congo .

#22323

Stephen Haber

#22334

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Stephen H. Haber is an American political scientist and historian known for his research on political institutions and economic policies that promote innovation and improvements in living standards. Haber is the A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

#22324

Leonard Fein

#22335

Overall Influence

1934 - 2014 (80 years)

Leonard J. Fein , also known as Leibel Fein, was an American activist, writer, and teacher specializing in Jewish social themes. Academic career After studying at the University of Chicago, Fein later received his PhD from Michigan State University.

#22325

David C. Funder

#22336

Overall Influence

David C. Funder is a personality psychologist and a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside. He has written a number of important textbooks and research articles pertaining to the field of personality psychology. He used to be a past editor of the Journal of Research in Personality, as well as being a former secondary editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Funder has been praised for his studies on personality judgment. He had also published research over the attribution theory and the "delay of gratification".

#22326

Cris Kobryn

#22337

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Cris Kobryn is an American systems engineer and software engineer best known for leading international teams of vendors and users in defining the Unified Modeling Language v1 and v2 standards for software engineering, as well as the Systems Modeling Language v1 standard for systems engineering.

#22327

Heiner Wilmer

#22338

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Heiner Wilmer, SCJ is a German Catholic prelate who has served as the Bishop of Hildesheim since 2018. He was formerly the superior general of the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart . Biography Wilmer grew up on a farm in Emsland. In 1980 he graduated at the Leoninum, a high school operated by the Dehonians in Handrup close to his hometown. In the same year, he entered the novitiate of the congregation in Freiburg. From 1981 to 1986 he studied theology in Freiburg and romance philology in Paris. After that he was ordained as priest by Archbishop Oskar Saier, the archbishop of Freiburg.

#22328

Ewan Stafford Page

#22339

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (98 years)

Ewan Stafford Page is a British academic and computer scientist, and former vice-chancellor of the University of Reading. Ewan Page was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys in Leicester and at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated MA and PhD and won the Rayleigh Prize. After a period of National Service, he was a research student in the field of statistics at the University of Cambridge between 1951 and 1954, at a time when the EDSAC computer was new. In 1957, he was appointed as director of the Durham University's Computing Laboratory, located at King's College, Newcastle....

#22329

Rob Paulsen

#22340

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Robert Frederick Paulsen III is an American voice actor and voice director, known for his roles in numerous animated television series and films. He received a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program and three Annie Awards for his role as both Yakko and Pinky in the Animaniacs franchise. His other voice roles include Hadji in The New Adventures of Jonny Quest and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest ; Raphael in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ; P.J. Pete in Goof Troop , A Goofy Movie , and An Extremely Goofy Movie ; Jaq in Cinderella II: Dreams Come True and Cinderel...

#22330

Benjamin Karney

#22341

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Benjamin Karney is an American professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles and an adjunct behavioral scientist at the Rand Corporation. His research is on interpersonal relationships and marriage, examining the effects of stress on marital processes, divorce rates in military marriages, intimate relationships among youth and young adults, and marriage in low-income populations.

#22331

Peter Savaryn

#22342

Overall Influence

1926 - 2017 (91 years)

Peter Savaryn was a Ukrainian-born Canadian lawyer. During World War II, he belonged to the Waffen-SS Galician Division. He was among the approximately 2,000 Waffen-SS Galicia fighters allowed to immigrate to Canada.

#22332

Chris Tomson

#22343

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Christopher William Tomson is an American singer, songwriter and musician, best known as the drummer for New York–based indie rock band Vampire Weekend. He is also the lead vocalist and guitarist for a side project called Dams of the West, for which he writes and records the entirety of its music.

#22333

Heinz Staab

#22344

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Heinz A. Staab was a German chemist. From 1990 to 1996 he was Präsident der Max Planck Society. Biography Staab was born in 1926 in Darmstadt. He studied chemistry at the Marburg, the Tübingen and medicine in Heidelberg. Hans Meerwein, Rolf Huisgen, Adolf Butenandt and Georg Wittig were among his academic teachers. In 1962 he was appointed professor for organic chemistry at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Staab worked in the field of heterocyclic chemistry. Staab was the president of the German Chemical Society from 1984 till 1985. He was director of the Max Planck Society from 1984 until 1990.

#22334

Kenneth D. Mackenzie

#22345

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Kenneth D. Mackenzie is an American organizational theorist, former professor at the University of Kansas and management consultant. He is known for his early work on the "Theory of Group Structures" and his later work on organizational design

#22335

Mark L. Strauss

#22346

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Mark Lehman Strauss is an American biblical scholar and professor of the New Testament at Bethel Seminary San Diego, which is part of Bethel University, Minnesota. His areas of expertise include New Testament Gospels and Bible translation.

#22336

Roberto DaMatta

#22347

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Roberto DaMatta is a Brazilian anthropologist. He is an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. DaMatta graduated in history at the Fluminense Federal University and received his PhD from Harvard University.

#22337

Orel Hershiser

#22348

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Orel Leonard Hershiser IV is an American former baseball pitcher who played 18 seasons in Major League Baseball from 1983 to 2000. He later became a pitching coach for the Texas Rangers from 2002 to 2005 and a broadcast color analyst for the Dodgers. He is also a professional poker player.

#22338

Joel-Peter Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin

#22349

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Joel-Peter Witkin is an American photographer who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work often deals with themes such as death, corpses , often featuring ornately decorated photographic models, including people with dwarfism, transgender and intersex persons, as well as people living with a range of physical features. Witkin is often praised for presenting these figures in poses which celebrate and honor their physiques in an elevated, artistic manner. Witkin's complex tableaux vivants often recall religious episodes or classical paintings.

#22339

Hannes Leitgeb

#22350

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Hannes Leitgeb is an Austrian philosopher and mathematician. He is Professor of Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and has received a Humboldt Professorship in 2010. His areas of research include logic , epistemology , philosophy of mathematics , philosophy of language , cognitive science , philosophy of science , and history of philosophy .

#22340

Eberhard Kolb

#22351

Overall Influence

1933 - Present (93 years)

Professor Eberhard Kolb is a German historian, best known for his research of the German history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Biography Eberhard Kolb studied at the universities of Tübingen and Bonn, and attained a doctorate 1960 at the University of Göttingen on the topic of the influence of workers' councils on German domestic politics.

#22341

Kenneth N. Stevens

Kenneth N. Stevens

#22352

Overall Influence

1924 - 2013 (89 years)

Kenneth Noble Stevens was the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and professor of health sciences and technology at the research laboratory of electronics at MIT. Stevens was head of the speech communication group in MIT's research laboratory of electronics , and was one of the world's leading scientists in acoustic phonetics.

#22342

Derek Roberts

#22353

Overall Influence

1932 - 2021 (89 years)

Sir Derek Harry Roberts, was an English engineer who twice served as provost of University College London , from 1989 to 1999 and again from 2002 to 2003. Engineering Roberts spent much of his professional life in industrial scientific research at Plessey's Caswell research centre, and later at the GEC Hirst Research Centre and as a director of GEC. For his contribution to early semiconductor research, Roberts was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980 and delivered the Clifford Paterson Lecture the same year. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, also in 1980. ...

#22343

Christopher Hacon

Christopher Hacon

#22354

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Christopher Derek Hacon is a mathematician with British, Italian and US nationalities. He is currently distinguished professor of mathematics at the University of Utah where he holds a Presidential Endowed Chair. His research interests include algebraic geometry.

#22344

Gail Hershatter

#22355

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Gail Hershatter is an American historian of Modern China who holds the Distinguished Professor of History chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She previously taught in the history department at Williams College.

#22345

Paul Pintrich

#22356

Overall Influence

1953 - 2003 (50 years)

Paul R. Pintrich was an educational psychologist who made significant contributions to the fields of motivation, epistemological beliefs, and self-regulated learning. He was a professor of education and psychology at the University of Michigan where he also completed his PhD and MA. Pintrich published over 140 articles, book chapters, and books on topics related to educational psychology.

#22346

Jan Carew

#22357

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

Jan Rynveld Carew was a Guyana-born novelist, playwright, poet and educator, who lived at various times in The Netherlands, Mexico, England, France, Spain, Ghana, Jamaica, Canada and the United States.

#22347

Jeff Malpas

#22358

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Jeff Malpas is an Australian philosopher and emeritus distinguished professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. Known internationally for his work across the analytic and continental traditions, Malpas is also at the forefront of contemporary philosophical research on the concept of "place" , as first and most comprehensively presented in his Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography—now in its second edition—and further developed in numerous subsequent works.

#22348

W. Nelson Francis

W. Nelson Francis

#22359

Overall Influence

1910 - 2002 (92 years)

W. Nelson Francis was an American author, linguist, and university professor. He served as a member of the faculties of Franklin & Marshall College and Brown University, where he specialized in English and corpus linguistics. He is known for his work compiling a text collection entitled the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, which he completed with Henry Kučera.

#22349

Philip R. Lane

#22360

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Philip Richard Lane is an Irish economist who has been serving as a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank since 2019 and concurrently as ECB chief economist. He previously served as Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland from 2015 to 2019. As ECB Chief Economist, Lane is seen by many as providing an academic counterweight to the traditional political abilities of ECB President, Christine Lagarde.

#22350

Aidan Dodson

#22361

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Aidan Mark Dodson is an English Egyptologist and historian. He has been honorary professor of Egyptology at the University of Bristol since 1 August 2018. Academic career Dodson, born in London on 11 September 1962, studied at Langley Grammar School , before moving to Collingwood College, Durham . He completed a BA at the University of Liverpool , and an MPhil and PhD at Christ's College, Cambridge. He began teaching at the University of Bristol in October 1996, also holding the post of Simpson Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo from January to July 2013. His primar...

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