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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#2251
Theda Skocpol
#2253
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
Go to Profile#2252
Robert M. Gagné
#2254
Overall Influence
1999 - 2022 (23 years)
Robert Mills Gagné was an American educational psychologist best known for his Conditions of Learning. He pioneered the science of instruction during World War II when he worked with the Army Air Corps training pilots. He went on to develop a series of studies and works that simplified and explained what he and others believed to be "good instruction." Gagné was also involved in applying concepts of instructional theory to the design of computer-based training and multimedia-based learning. His work is sometimes summarized as the Gagné assumption: that different types of learning exist, and t...
Go to Profile#2253
Isabelle Stengers
#2255
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Isabelle Stengers is a Belgian philosopher, noted for her work in the philosophy of science. Trained as a chemist, she has collaborated with Russian-Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine and French philosopher/sociologist Bruno Latour among others, and has written widely on the history of science as well as philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, Donna Haraway, and Michel Serres.
Go to Profile#2254
Alan Bean
#2256
Overall Influence
1932 - 2018 (86 years)
Alan LaVern Bean was an American naval officer and aviator, aeronautical engineer, test pilot, NASA astronaut and painter. He was selected to become an astronaut by NASA in 1963 as part of Astronaut Group 3, and was the fourth person to walk on the Moon.
Go to Profile#2255
Rudolf Jaenisch
#2257
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Rudolf Jaenisch is a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his M.D. from the University of Munich, where he specializes in transgenic science, which genetically modifies animals such as mice to study human diseases such as cancer. He completed his postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute, where he studied bacteriophages. His laboratory has made breakthroughs that have improved therapies for sickle-cell anemia and Parkinson’s Disease. Jaenisch has been a vocal advocate for using transgenic methods to alter human cells, but he is opposed to human reproductive cloning.
Go to Profile#2256
Harold W. Kuhn
#2258
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Harold William Kuhn was an American mathematician who studied game theory. He won the 1980 John von Neumann Theory Prize jointly with David Gale and Albert W. Tucker. A former Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University, he is known for the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions, for Kuhn's theorem, and for developing Kuhn poker. He described the Hungarian method for the assignment problem, but a paper by Carl Gustav Jacobi, published posthumously in 1890 in Latin, was later discovered that had described the Hungarian method a century before Kuhn.
Go to Profile#2257
Tomas Tranströmer
#2259
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Tomas Gösta Tranströmer was a Swedish poet, psychologist and translator. His poems captured the long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature. Tranströmer's work is also characterized by a sense of mystery and wonder underlying the routine of everyday life, a quality which often gives his poems a religious dimension. He has been described as a Christian poet.
Go to Profile#2258
Slobodan Milošević
#2260
Overall Influence
1941 - 2006 (65 years)
Slobodan Milošević was a Serbian and Yugoslav politician who was the president of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 until his оverthrow in 2000. Formerly a high-ranking member of the League of Communists of Serbia during the 1980s, he led the Socialist Party of Serbia from its foundation in 1990 until his death in 2006. Milošević played a major role in the Yugoslav Wars. During his reign, numerous anti-government and anti-war protests took place, and hundreds of thousands deserted the Milošević-controlled Yugoslav People's Army, leading to mass emigration from Serbia.
Go to Profile#2259
Yukihiro Matsumoto
#2261
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Yukihiro Matsumoto, also known as Matz, is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its original reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter . His demeanor has brought about a motto in the Ruby community: "Matz is nice and so we are nice," commonly abbreviated as MINASWAN.
Go to Profile#2260
John E. Walker
#2262
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Sir John Ernest Walker is a British chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997. Walker is Emeritus Director and Professor at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit in Cambridge, and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#2261
Fred Fiedler
#2263
Overall Influence
1922 - 2017 (95 years)
Fred Edward Fiedler was one of the leading researchers of industrial and organizational psychology in the 20th century. He helped shape psychology and was a leading psychologist. He was born in Vienna, Austria to Victor and Helga Schallinger Fiedler. His parents owned a textile and tailoring supply store prior to 1938. Fiedler immigrated to the United States shortly after the Anschluss in 1938 and became a US citizen in 1943. He served in the US Army from 1942 to 1945. He studied psychology at the University of Chicago where he obtained his undergraduate degree and later a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1949.
Go to Profile#2262
Pat Gelsinger
#2264
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Patrick Paul Gelsinger is an American business executive and engineer currently serving as CEO of Intel. Based mainly in Silicon Valley since the late 1970s, Gelsinger graduated from Stanford University with a master's degree in engineering and was the chief architect of the i486 microprocessor in the 1980s. Before returning to Intel, he was CEO of VMware and president and chief operating officer at EMC.
Go to Profile#2263
Bruce Hoffman
#2265
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Bruce R. Hoffman is an American political analyst. He specializes in the study of terrorism, counter-terrorism, insurgency, and counter-insurgency. Hoffman serves as the Shelby Cullom and Kathryn W. Davis Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security on the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a professor at the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University, where he directs its Center for Jewish Civilization. In addition, he is the Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor of Terrorism Studies at the University of St Andrews, and is the George H. Gilmore Senior Fellow at the U.S.
Go to Profile#2264
Gabriel Zucman
#2266
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
#2265
Mario Botta
#2267
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Mario Botta is a Swiss architect. Career Botta designed his first building, a two-family house at Morbio Superiore in Ticino, at age 16. He graduated from the Università Iuav di Venezia . While the arrangement of spaces in this structure is inconsistent, its relationship to its site, separation of living from service spaces, and deep window recesses echo of what would become his stark, strong, towering style. His designs tend to include a strong sense of geometry, often being based on very simple shapes, yet creating unique volumes of space. His buildings are often made of brick, yet his use ...
Go to Profile#2266
Eileen Barker
#2268
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Eileen Vartan Barker is a professor in sociology, an emeritus member of the London School of Economics , and a consultant to that institution's Centre for the Study of Human Rights. She is the chairperson and founder of the Information Network Focus on Religious Movements and has written studies about cults and new religious movements.
Go to Profile#2267
Peter Landin
#2269
Overall Influence
1930 - 2009 (79 years)
Peter John Landin was a British computer scientist. He was one of the first to realise that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, an insight that is essential to the development of both functional programming and denotational semantics.
Go to Profile#2268
Dorothy E. Smith
#2270
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Dorothy Edith Smith was a British-born Canadian ethnographer, feminist studies scholar, sociologist, and writer with research interests in a variety of disciplines. These include women's studies, feminist theory, psychology, and educational studies. Smith was also involved in certain subfields of sociology, such as the sociology of knowledge, family studies, and methodology. She founded the sociological sub-disciplines of feminist standpoint theory and institutional ethnography.
Go to Profile#2269
John D. Mayer
#2271
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
John D. Mayer is an American psychologist at the University of New Hampshire, specializing in emotional intelligence and personality psychology. He co-developed a popular model of emotional intelligence with Peter Salovey. He is one of the authors of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test , and has developed a new, integrated framework for personality psychology, known as the Systems Framework for Personality Psychology. He is the author of Personal Intelligence: The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives.
Go to Profile#2270
Jiang Zemin
#2272
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Jiang Zemin was a Chinese politician who served as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1989 to 2002, as chairman of the Central Military Commission from 1989 to 2004, and as president of China from 1993 to 2003. Jiang was the third paramount leader of China from 1989 to 2002. He was the core leader of the third generation of Chinese leadership, one of four core leaders alongside Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Xi Jinping.
Go to Profile#2271
Daniel Pipes
#2273
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Daniel Pipes is an American commentator on foreign policy and the Middle East. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East as well as criticism of Islam.
Go to Profile#2272
C. Loring Brace
#2274
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Charles Loring Brace IV was an American anthropologist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan's Department of Anthropology and Curator Emeritus at the University's Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. He considered the attempt "to introduce a Darwinian outlook into biological anthropology" to be his greatest contribution to the field of anthropology.
Go to Profile#2273
Robert Dahl
#2275
Overall Influence
1915 - 2014 (99 years)
Robert Alan Dahl was an American political theorist and Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He established the pluralist theory of democracy—in which political outcomes are enacted through competitive, if unequal, interest groups—and introduced "polyarchy" as a descriptor of actual democratic governance. An originator of "empirical theory" and known for advancing behavioralist characterizations of political power, Dahl's research focused on the nature of decision making in actual institutions, such as American cities. He is the most important scholar associated with th...
Go to Profile#2274
Reza Aslan
#2276
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American scholar of sociology of religion, writer, and television host. A convert to evangelical Christianity from Shia Islam as a youth, Aslan eventually reverted to Islam but continued to write about Christianity. He has written four books on religion: No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, and God: A Human History.
Go to Profile#2275
Gayle Rubin
#2277
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Gayle S. Rubin is an American cultural anthropologist, theorist and activist, best known for her pioneering work in feminist theory and queer studies. Her essay "The Traffic in Women" had a lasting influence in second-wave feminism and early gender studies, by arguing that gender oppression could not be adequately explained by Marxist conceptions of the patriarchy. Her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex" is widely regarded as a founding text of gay and lesbian studies, sexuality studies, and queer theory. She has written on a range of subjects including the politics of sexuality, gender oppression, sa...
Go to Profile#2276
Frederick Herzberg
#2278
Overall Influence
1923 - 2000 (77 years)
Frederick Irving Herzberg was an American psychologist who became one of the most influential names in business management. He is most famous for introducing job enrichment and the Motivator-Hygiene theory. His 1968 publication "One More Time, How Do You Motivate Employees?" had sold 1.2 million reprints by 1987 and was the most requested article from the Harvard Business Review.
Go to Profile#2277
Ben Bova
#2279
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Benjamin William Bova was an American writer and editor. During a writing career of 60 years, he was the author of more than 120 works of science fact and fiction, an editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, for which he won a Hugo Award six times, and an editorial director of Omni; he was also president of both the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America.
Go to Profile#2278
Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi
#2280
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi is the ruler of the Emirate of Sharjah and a member of the Federal Supreme Council of the United Arab Emirates. He has ruled Sharjah continuously since January 1972, apart from a six-day period in June 1987, during an attempted coup led by his elder brother Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Mohammed Al-Qasimi.
Go to Profile#2279
Michel Weber
#2281
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Michel Weber is a Belgian philosopher. He is best known as an interpreter and advocate of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and has come to prominence as the architect and organizer of an overlapping array of international scholarly societies and publication projects devoted to Whitehead and the global relevance of process philosophy.
Go to Profile#2280
Tom Coyne
#2282
Overall Influence
1954 - 2017 (63 years)
Thomas J. Coyne was an American mastering engineer. Early life and career Coyne was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Union, where he graduated from Roselle Catholic High School in 1972. He attended Kean College where he received a degree in Commercial Design. Following college, Coyne's first job was at Dick Charles Recording where Lee Hulko, former owner of Sterling Sound, got his first job in the states after arriving from Thunder Bay, Ontario. In the six months Coyne worked at Dick Charles, he watched Dick master records on the lathe and soon began cutting his own after hours.
Go to Profile#2281
James Farmer
#2283
Overall Influence
1920 - 1999 (79 years)
James Leonard Farmer Jr. was an American civil rights activist and leader in the Civil Rights Movement "who pushed for nonviolent protest to dismantle segregation, and served alongside Martin Luther King Jr." He was the initiator and organizer of the first Freedom Ride in 1961, which eventually led to the desegregation of interstate transportation in the United States.
Go to Profile#2282
Gordon Murray
#2284
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ian Gordon Murray , is a South African-British designer of Formula One racing cars for Brabham and McLaren and the McLaren F1 high-performance road car. Founder and CEO of Gordon Murray Design and Gordon Murray Automotive he has subsequently designed and built a number of sports cars and a variety of other automotive vehicles.
Go to Profile#2283
Jim Garrison
#2285
Overall Influence
1921 - 1992 (71 years)
James Carothers Garrison was the District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, from 1962 to 1973. A member of the Democratic Party, he is best known for his investigations into the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the prosecution of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw to that effect in 1969, which ended in Shaw's acquittal. He authored three books, one of which became a prime source for Oliver Stone's film JFK in 1991, in which Garrison was portrayed by actor Kevin Costner, while Garrison himself also made a cameo as Earl Warren.
Go to Profile#2284
Ivor Grattan-Guinness
#2286
Overall Influence
1941 - 2014 (73 years)
Ivor Owen Grattan-Guinness was a historian of mathematics and logic. Life Grattan-Guinness was born in Bakewell, England; his father was a mathematics teacher and educational administrator. He gained his bachelor degree as a Mathematics Scholar at Wadham College, Oxford, and an MSc in Mathematical Logic and the Philosophy of Science at the London School of Economics in 1966. He gained both the doctorate in 1969, and higher doctorate in 1978, in the History of Science at the University of London. He was Emeritus Professor of the History of Mathematics and Logic at Middlesex University, and...
Go to Profile#2285
Robert Motherwell
#2287
Overall Influence
1915 - 1991 (76 years)
Robert Motherwell was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, and editor of The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Go to Profile#2286
Geoffrey Sampson
#2288
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex. He produces annotation standards for compiling corpora of ordinary usage of the English language. His work has been applied in automatic language-understanding software, and in writing-skills training. He has also analysed Ronald Coase's "theory of the firm" and the economic and political implications of e-business.
Go to Profile#2287
Peter Kreeft
#2289
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Peter John Kreeft is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and The King's College. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he is the author of over eighty books on Christian philosophy, theology and apologetics. He also formulated, together with Ronald K. Tacelli, Twenty Arguments for the Existence of God in their Handbook of Christian Apologetics.
Go to Profile#2288
Martin Jay
#2290
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Martin Evan Jay is an American intellectual historian whose research interests connected history with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography.
Go to Profile#2289
Gregory Corso
#2291
Overall Influence
1930 - 2001 (71 years)
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was one of the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers . Early life Born Nunzio Corso at New York City's St. Vincent's Hospital, Corso later selected the name "Gregory" as a confirmation name. Within Little Italy and its community he was "Nunzio," while he dealt with others as "Gregory." He often would use "Nunzio" as short for "Annunziato," the announcing angel Gabriel, hence a poet. Corso identified with not only Gabriel but also Hermes, the divine messenger.
Go to Profile#2290
Hernando de Soto
#2292
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Hernando Soto Polar is a Peruvian economist known for his work on the informal economy and on the importance of business and property rights. His work on the developing world has earned him praise worldwide by numerous heads of state, particularly for his publication The Mystery of Capital and The Other Path. He is the current president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy , a think tank devoted to promoting economic development in developing countries located in Lima, Peru.
Go to Profile#2291
Nick Joaquin
#2293
Overall Influence
1917 - 2004 (87 years)
Nicomedes "Nick" Marquez Joaquin was a Filipino writer and journalist best known for his short stories and novels in the English language. He also wrote using the pen name Quijano de Manila. Joaquin was conferred the rank and title of National Artist of the Philippines for Literature. He has been considered one of the most important Filipino writers, along with José Rizal and Claro M. Recto. Unlike Rizal and Recto, whose works were written in Spanish, Joaquin's major works were written in English despite being literate in Spanish.
Go to Profile#2292
Gabriele Veneziano
#2294
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Gabriele Veneziano is an Italian theoretical physicist widely considered the father of string theory. He has conducted most of his scientific activities at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and held the Chair of Elementary Particles, Gravitation and Cosmology at the Collège de France in Paris from 2004 to 2013, until the age of retirement there.
Go to Profile#2293
George Porter
#2295
Overall Influence
1920 - 2002 (82 years)
George Porter, Baron Porter of Luddenham, was a British chemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967. Education and early life Porter was born in Stainforth, near Thorne, in the then West Riding of Yorkshire. He was educated at Thorne Grammar School, then won a scholarship to the University of Leeds and gained his first degree in chemistry. During his degree, Porter was taught by Meredith Gwynne Evans, who he later said was the most brilliant chemist he had ever met. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1949 for research investigating free radicals produced by photochemical means.
Go to Profile#2294
Edvard Moser
#2296
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Edvard Ingjald Moser is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, who is a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. In 2005, he and his then-wife May-Britt Moser discovered grid cells in the brain's medial entorhinal cortex. Grid cells are specialized neurons that provide the brain with a coordinate system and a metric for space. In 2018, he discovered a neural network that expresses a person's sense of time in experiences and memories located in the brain's lateral entorhinal cortex.
Go to Profile#2295
Philippe Kruchten
#2297
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Philippe Kruchten is a Canadian software engineer, and Professor of Software Engineering at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, known as Director of Process Development at Rational Software, and developer of the 4+1 Architectural View Model.
Go to Profile#2296
Stephen Thomas Erlewine
#2298
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Stephen Thomas Erlewine is an American music critic and senior editor for the online music database AllMusic. He is the author of multiple artist biographies and record reviews for AllMusic, as well as a freelance writer, occasionally contributing liner notes.
Go to Profile#2297
Benjamin Barber
#2299
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Benjamin R. Barber was an American political theorist and author, perhaps best known for his 1995 bestseller, Jihad vs. McWorld, and for 2013's If Mayors Ruled the World. His 1984 book of political theory, Strong Democracy, was revised and reissued in 2004. He was an adviser to political leaders including Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, and Muammar Gaddafi. He was a board member of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation.
Go to Profile#2298
Steve Furber
#2300
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Stephen Byram Furber is a British computer scientist, mathematician and hardware engineer, and Emeritus ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, UK. After completing his education at the University of Cambridge , he spent the 1980s at Acorn Computers, where he was a principal designer of the BBC Micro and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor. , over 250 billion arm chips have been manufactured, powering much of the world's mobile computing and embedded systems, everything from sensors to smartphones to servers.
Go to Profile#2299
Manjul Bhargava
#2301
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
#2300
Marian Wright Edelman
#2302
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Marian Wright Edelman is an American activist for civil rights and children's rights. She is the founder and president emerita of the Children's Defense Fund. She influenced leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.
Go to Profile