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

#22401

Graham Virgo

#22412

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Graham John Virgo is an English legal academic, barrister and university administrator, who is Professor of English Private Law at the University of Cambridge and Master of Downing College, Cambridge. He is frequently cited in the English courts and those of other common law jurisdictions, and known for his contributions to the law of restitution and the teaching of law. He was previously Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Cambridge and assumed the role of Master of Downing College, Cambridge, on 1 October 2023.

#22402

Götz Aly

#22413

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Götz Haydar Aly is a German journalist, historian and political scientist. Life and career Aly was born in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg. He is a patrilineal descendant of a Turkish convert to Christianity named who was a chamberlain at the Prussian court in the late 1600s. By family tradition, the oldest son gets the middle name 'Haydar'.

#22403

Jean-Claude van Itallie

#22414

Overall Influence

1936 - 2021 (85 years)

Jean-Claude van Itallie was a Belgian-born American playwright, performer, and theatre workshop teacher. He is best known for his 1966 anti-Vietnam War play America Hurrah; The Serpent, an ensemble play he wrote with Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre; his theatrical adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead; and his translations of Anton Chekhov's plays.

#22404

Adam Swift

#22415

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Adam Swift is a British political philosopher and sociologist who specialises in debates surrounding liberal egalitarianism. He has published books on communitarianism, on the philosophical aspects of school choice, on social justice, on the ethics of the family, and on how to make education policy, as well as an introduction to contemporary political philosophy.

#22405

Carly Rae Jepsen

#22416

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (41 years)

Carly Rae Jepsen is a Canadian singer, songwriter, and musician. After studying musical theatre for most of her school life and while in university, Jepsen garnered mainstream attention after placing third on the fifth season of Canadian Idol in 2007. In 2008, Jepsen released her folk-influenced debut studio album Tug of War in Canada before it was internationally released in 2011.

#22406

Kenneth Steiglitz

#22417

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Kenneth Steiglitz is a Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He was born in Weehawken, New Jersey on January 30, 1939. He received his Doctor of Engineering Science from New York University in 1963. In 1997 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

#22407

Michael Asher

#22418

Overall Influence

1943 - 2012 (69 years)

Michael Max Asher was a conceptual artist, described by The New York Times as "among the patron saints of the Conceptual Art phylum known as Institutional Critique, an often esoteric dissection of the assumptions that govern how we perceive art." Rather than designing new art objects, Asher typically altered the existing environment, by repositioning or removing artworks, walls, facades, etc.

#22408

Kenny Smith

#22419

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Kenneth Smith , nicknamed "the Jet", is an American sports commentator and former professional basketball player in the National Basketball Association . He played in the NBA from 1987 to 1997 as a member of the Sacramento Kings, Atlanta Hawks, Houston Rockets, Detroit Pistons, Orlando Magic, and Denver Nuggets. He won back-to-back NBA championships with Houston.

#22409

Goran Milić

#22420

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Goran Milić is a Croatian and Bosnian journalist and television personality. With a high-profile career spanning forty years, he's one of the most recognizable media personalities in the countries of former Yugoslavia.

#22410

Rosamunde Pilcher

#22421

Overall Influence

1924 - 2019 (95 years)

Rosamunde Pilcher, OBE was a British novelist, best known for her sweeping novels set in Cornwall. Her books have sold over 60 million copies worldwide. Early in her career she was published under the pen name Jane Fraser. In 2001, she received the Corine Literature Prize's Weltbild Readers' Prize for Winter Solstice.

#22411

Sally Walker

#22422

Overall Influence

Sally Ann Walker is an Australian university administrator and lawyer. She served as the fifth Vice-Chancellor and President of Deakin University and was the first woman to be appointed to the position.

#22412

John N. Mather

#22423

Overall Influence

1942 - 2017 (75 years)

John Norman Mather was a mathematician at Princeton University known for his work on singularity theory and Hamiltonian dynamics. He was descended from Atherton Mather , a cousin of Cotton Mather. His early work dealt with the stability of smooth mappings between smooth manifolds of dimensions n and p . He determined the precise dimensions for which smooth mappings are stable with respect to smooth equivalence by diffeomorphisms of the source and target .

#22413

Eric J. Sharpe

#22424

Overall Influence

1933 - 2000 (67 years)

Eric John Sharpe was the founding Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He was a major scholar in the phenomenology of religion, the history of modern Christian mission, and inter-religious dialogue.

#22414

Bernard Silverman

Bernard Silverman

#22425

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Sir Bernard Walter Silverman, is a British statistician and former Anglican clergyman. He was Master of St Peter's College, Oxford, from 1 October 2003 to 31 December 2009. He is a member of the Statistics Department at Oxford University, and has also been attached to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance. He has been a member of the Council of Oxford University and of the Council of the Royal Society. He was briefly president of the Royal Statistical Society in January 2010, a po...

#22415

Mark Burgess

#22426

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Mark Burgess is an independent researcher and writer, formerly professor at Oslo University College in Norway and creator of the CFEngine software and company, who is known for work in computer science in the field of policy-based configuration management.

#22416

Sarita Adve

#22427

Overall Influence

Sarita Vikram Adve is the Richard T. Cheng Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are in computer architecture and systems, parallel computing, and power and reliability-aware systems.

#22417

Geoffrey Hendricks

#22428

Overall Influence

1931 - 2018 (87 years)

Geoffrey Hendricks was an American artist associated with Fluxus since the mid 1960s. He was professor of art at Douglass College, Rutgers University, where he taught from 1956 to 2003 and was associated with Fluxus at Rutgers University, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, and Lucas Samaras during the 1960s.

#22418

Geoffrey Thomas

#22429

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Geoffrey Price Thomas FLSW was President of Kellogg College, Oxford, and Director of Oxford University Department for Continuing Education until 2008. He was educated at Maesteg Grammar School, University of Wales and Churchill College, Cambridge . He is also a Master of Arts of the University of Oxford.

#22419

Craig Gotsman

#22430

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Craig Gotsman is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology . He was the Dean of the Ying Wu College of Computing at NJIT between 2017-2023. He was the Founding Director of the joint Jacobs Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute at Cornell Tech prior to joining NJIT.

#22420

Questlove

#22431

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Ahmir K. Thompson , known professionally as Questlove , is an American musician, record producer, disc jockey, filmmaker, music journalist, and actor. He is the drummer and joint frontman for the hip hop band the Roots. The Roots have been serving as the in-house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon since 2014, after having fulfilled the same role on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Questlove is also one of the producers of the cast album of the Broadway musical Hamilton. He is the co-founder of the websites Okayplayer and OkayAfrica. He is also known for the podcast Questlove Supreme.

#22421

Amy Zegart

#22432

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Amy Zegart is an American political scientist currently serving as the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies , and professor of political science at Stanford University. She is also a contributing writer to The Atlantic. From 2013 to 2018, she served as co-director of FSI's Center for International Security and Cooperation and founder and co-director of the Stanford Cyber Policy Program.

#22422

Michael Zimmer

#22433

Overall Influence

Michael Zimmer is a privacy and data ethics scholar. He currently is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University and Director of the Center for Data, Ethics, and Society. Previously, he was on the faculty at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and director of the Center for Information Policy Research. Zimmer is on the advisory board of the Future of Privacy Forum, and was on the executive committee of the Association of Internet Researchers from 2009-2016. He was the Microsoft Resident Fellow at the Information Society Pro...

#22423

Dankwart Rustow

Dankwart Rustow

#22434

Overall Influence

1924 - 1996 (72 years)

Dankwart Alexander Rustow was a professor of political science and sociology specializing in comparative politics. He is prominent for his research on democratization. In his seminal 1970 article 'Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,' Rustow broke from the prevailing schools of thought on how countries became democratic. Disagreeing with the heavy focus on necessary social and economic pre-conditions for democracy, he argued that national unity was the necessary precondition for democracy.

#22424

Wlad Godzich

#22435

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Wlad Godzich is a literary critic, literary theorist, translator, and scholar. He is attributed with influencing the conceptualization of modern literary critical theory. He currently serves as Professor of general and comparative literature, and critical studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

#22425

William H. Tucker

#22436

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

William H. Tucker , also known as Bill Tucker, was an American psychologist. He was an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University and the author of several books critical of race science. He retired from Rutgers in 2009. Tucker died in 2022.

#22426

Alexander Dobrokhotov

#22437

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Alexander Lvovich Dobrokhotov is a Russian philosopher, historian of philosophy, historian of culture, and university professor. He specialises in the history of Russian culture, history of philosophy, metaphysics, Russian philosophy, ancient and medieval philosophy, Kant and German Idealism, and philosophy of culture.

#22427

James P. Sterba

#22438

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

James P. Sterba is an American philosopher who specializes in ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of religion. Biography Sterba is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association and the North American Society for Social Philosophy. He has authored 35 books.

#22428

Robert Istepanian

#22439

Overall Influence

Robert S. H. Istepanian is a visiting professor at the Faculty of Medicine, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College, London. Istepanian is widely recognized as the first scientist to coin the phrase m-Health. In 2012, Istepanian coined the new term 4G Health which is defined as "The evolution of m-health towards targeted personalized medical systems with adaptable functionalities and compatibility with the future 4G networks."

#22429

Harold Brookfield

#22440

Overall Influence

1926 - 2022 (96 years)

Harold Chillingworth Brookfield was a British and Australian geographer specialising in the analysis of rural development, small-scale societies, family farming, and the relationship between land use and society in developing countries. He retired from the Australian National University in 1991.

#22430

Veerabhadran Ramanathan

Veerabhadran Ramanathan

#22441

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Veerabhadran "Ram" Ramanathan is Edward A. Frieman Endowed Presidential Chair in Climate Sustainability Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He has contributed to many areas of the atmospheric and climate sciences including developments to general circulation models, atmospheric chemistry, and radiative transfer. He has been a part of major projects such as the Indian Ocean Experiment and the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment , and is known for his contributions to the areas of climate physics, Climate Change and atmospheric aerosols research. He is now...

#22431

Robert O. Becker

#22442

Overall Influence

1923 - 2008 (85 years)

Robert Otto Becker was a U.S. orthopedic surgeon and researcher in electrophysiology/electromedicine. He worked mainly as professor at Upstate Medical Center in State University of New York, Syracuse, and as Director of Orthopedic Surgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital, Syracuse, New York.

#22432

Hamid bin Abdallah al-Ali

#22443

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Hamid bin Abdallah al-Ali has been described as "an influential Salafi cleric" based in Kuwait, whom the U.S. Treasury Department has described as "an Al Qaeda facilitator and fundraiser." However, following the release of Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif's anti-terrorist manifesto Rationalizing Jihad in Egypt and the World, he is reported to have "declared on a Web site that he welcomed the rejection of violence as a means of fostering change in the Arab world".

#22433

Thomas Binford

#22444

Overall Influence

Thomas Oriel Binford has been a researcher in image analysis and computer vision since 1967. He developed a model-based approach to computer vision in which complex objects are represented as collections of generalized cylinders. His results are reflected in work in other areas of research, including the interpretation of complex scenes using invariants and quasi-invariants, inference rules and evidential reasoning in extended Bayes networks of symbolic geometric constraints, the SUCCESSOR system, a portable, intelligent vision system, stereo and visual robot navigation, segmentation and featu...

#22434

Bob McAdoo

#22445

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Robert Allen McAdoo Jr. is an American former professional basketball player and coach. He played 14 seasons in the National Basketball Association , where he was a five-time NBA All-Star and named the NBA Most Valuable Player in 1975. He won two NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers during their Showtime era in the 1980s. In 2000, McAdoo was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. He was named to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team in 2021.

#22435

Jessica Litman

#22446

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Jessica Litman is a leading intellectual property scholar. She has been ranked as one of the most-cited U.S. law professors in the field of intellectual property/cyberlaw. Litman graduated from Reed College, received an MFA from Southern Methodist University, and received a JD from Columbia Law School. After law school, she served as a law clerk to Judge Betty Fletcher on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

#22436

John Ballato

#22447

Overall Influence

John Ballato is an American materials scientist, entrepreneur, and academic. He holds the J. E. Sirrine Endowed Chair of Optical Fiber and is a professor of materials science and engineering, electrical and computer engineering, as well as physics and astronomy at Clemson University. He has received many international recognitions for his research on optical and optoelectronic materials, particularly as relates to optical fiber.

#22437

Kimi Räikkönen

#22448

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Kimi-Matias Räikkönen , nicknamed "The Iceman", is a Finnish racing driver who competed in Formula One between 2001 and 2021 for Sauber, McLaren, Ferrari, Lotus, and Alfa Romeo. Räikkönen won the 2007 Formula One World Championship while driving for Ferrari; he also managed to finish second overall twice and third three times. Räikkönen is the most successful Finnish Formula One driver by several metrics, and has the sixth-most podium finishes , third-most fastest laps , and second-most race starts in Formula One history. He is known for his reserved personality and reluctance to participate...

#22438

Alison Galloway

#22449

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Alison Galloway is a forensic anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is best known for her work in identifying the physical remains of Laci Peterson in the Scott Peterson Trial. She co-edited a book called The Evolving Female: A Life History Perspective with Mary Morbeck and Adrienne Zihlmann. She is also editor of "Broken Bones: Anthropological Analysis of Blunt Force Trauma" and co-editor of the second edition of that volume. She is also co-author of "Practicing Forensic Anthropology: an eResource" with Susan Kuzminsky.

#22439

Askar Akayev

#22450

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Askar Akayevich Akayev is a Kyrgyz politician who served as President of Kyrgyzstan from 1990 until being overthrown in the March 2005 Tulip Revolution. Education and early career Akayev was born in Kyzyl-Bayrak, Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic. He was the eldest of five sons born into a family of collective farm workers. He became a metalworker at a local factory in 1961. He subsequently moved to Leningrad, where he trained as a physicist and graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Precision Mechanics and Optics in 1967 with an honors degree in mathematics, engineering and computer science.

#22440

Yutaka Tsujinaka

#22451

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Yutaka Tsujinaka is a professor of political science and the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tsukuba. He is now teaching at the College of Social Sciences and the doctoral program in International and Advanced Japanese Studies. He is also the president of Japan Political Science Association, a member of the International Association of Universities , the director of Internationalization Subcommittee of IAU , the executive assistant to the President at University of Tsukuba and the director of Institute for Comparative Research in Human and Social Sciences .

#22441

Li Dequn

#22452

Overall Influence

1945 - 2022 (77 years)

Li Dequn was a Chinese material scientist who was a professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Biography Li was born in Tai County , Jiangsu, on 7 August 1945. Both his cousins and are also academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

#22442

Melody Chan

#22453

Overall Influence

Melody Tung Chan is an American mathematician and violinist who works as Associate Professor of Mathematics at Brown University. She is a winner of the Alice T. Schafer Prize and of the AWM–Microsoft Research Prize in Algebra and Number Theory. Her research involves combinatorial commutative algebra, graph theory, and tropical geometry.

#22443

Michael Finley

#22454

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Michael Howard Finley is an American former professional basketball player who is the Vice President of Basketball Operations for the Dallas Mavericks of the National Basketball Association . He played 15 seasons in the NBA, predominantly with the Mavericks, but also for the Phoenix Suns , the San Antonio Spurs, and the Boston Celtics. He was a two-time NBA All-Star and won an NBA championship with the Spurs in 2007.

#22444

Eli Upfal

#22455

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Eli Upfal is a computer science researcher, currently the Rush C. Hawkins Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He completed his undergraduate studies in mathematics and statistics at the Hebrew University, Israel in 1978, received an M.Sc. in computer science from the Feinberg Graduate School of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel in 1980, and completed his PhD in computer science at the Hebrew University in 1983 under Eli Shamir. He has made contributions in a variety of areas. Most of his work involves randomized and/or online algorithms, stochastic processes, or the probabilistic analysis of deterministic algorithms.

#22445

Dennis Wise

#22456

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Dennis Frank Wise is an English former professional football player and manager who played as a central midfielder. He is the president of Serie B side Como 1907. He is best known for having spent the majority of his career at Chelsea, from 1990 to 2001.

#22446

Charles H. Zeanah

#22457

Overall Influence

Charles H. Zeanah Jr. is a child and adolescent psychiatrist who is a member of the council of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry . Professional Zeanah is a professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and vice-chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at the Tulane University School of Medicine. He is also an executive director of the Institute of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health.

#22447

Kiiti Morita

#22458

Overall Influence

1915 - 1995 (80 years)

Kiiti Morita was a Japanese mathematician working in algebra and topology. Morita was born in 1915 in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture and graduated from the Tokyo Higher Normal School in 1936. Three years later he was appointed assistant at the Tokyo University of Science. He received his Ph.D. from Osaka University in 1950, with a thesis in topology. After teaching at the Tokyo Higher Normal School, he became professor at the University of Tsukuba in 1951. He held this position until 1978, after which he taught at Sophia University. Morita died of heart failure in 1995 at the Sakakibara Heart ...

#22448

Donald Jeffries

#22459

Overall Influence

1941 - 2011 (70 years)

Professor Donald Jeffries was a British virologist and academic. He was a leading expert on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus that causes AIDS. Education Jeffries was educated at the William Ellis Grammar School in Highgate, North London, and then did medical training at the Royal Free Hospital School, from where he qualified in 1966.

#22449

Dennis Richmond

#22460

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Dennis Richmond is an American retired news anchor who spent 40 years with Oakland, California-based KTVU. Biography Early life Richmond grew up in Rossford, Ohio and graduated from Rossford High School in 1961. He served in the United States Army from 1961 to 1964 with the 82nd Airborne Division. He attended Wayne State University in Detroit from 1965 to 1967. He then attended Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1969 on a scholarship which he was offered while working at KTVU.

#22450

Shirley Pearce

#22461

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Dame Shirley Anne Pearce is a British academic and psychologist. She is Chair of Court and Council at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a member of the Higher Education Quality Assurance Panel for the Ministry of Education .

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