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

#22551

Vikram Patel

#22562

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Vikram Harshad Patel FMedSci is an Indian psychiatrist and researcher best known for his work on child development and mental disability in low-resource settings. He is the Co-Founder and former Director of the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine , Co-Director of the Centre for Control of Chronic Conditions at the Public Health Foundation of India, and the Co-Founder of Sangath, an Indian NGO dedicated to research in the areas of child development, adolescent health and mental health. Since 2016 he has been Pershing Professor of Global Health...

#22552

Fred Zinnemann

#22563

Overall Influence

1907 - 1997 (90 years)

Alfred Zinnemann was an American film director born in Austria-Hungary. He won four Academy Awards for directing and producing films in various genres, including thrillers, westerns, film noir and play adaptations. He began his career in Europe before emigrating to the US, where he specialized in shorts before making 25 feature films during his 50-year career.

#22553

Anjali Goswami

#22564

Overall Influence

Anjali Goswami is a Resesarch Leader and Dean of the Graduate Centre at the Natural History Museum. She is an Honorary Professor of Paleobiology at University College London in the Department of Genetics, Evolution, and Environment. She was elected President of the Linnean Society of London, in 2022 and is the first person of colour elected to this role since its founding in 1788. Goswami's expertise is in vertebrate evolution and development, particularly using high-resolution 3D images of specimens to quantify and reconstruct the evolution of biodiversity and understand how development, eco...

#22554

Na'im Akbar

#22565

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Na'im Akbar is a clinical psychologist well known for his Afrocentric approach to psychology. He is a distinguished scholar, public speaker, and author. Akbar entered the world of Black psychology in the 1960s, as the Black Power Movement was gaining momentum. In the 1970s, Akbar published his first critiques of the Eurocentric psychological tradition, asserting that this model maintained the intellectual oppression of African Americans. Akbar criticized the pathology perspectives that had taken over as the dominant literature on African Americans. Many of his major works involved mental healt...

#22555

Claude Dubar

#22566

Overall Influence

1945 - 2015 (70 years)

Claude Dubar was a French sociologist. Biography After his teaching experience at Beirut, Lebanon in 1974, he joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research and became Docent at the Lille University of Science and Technology in 1977. His thesis, under the direction of Raymond Boudon, focuses on vocational training in France

#22556

Hasan Özbekhan

#22567

Overall Influence

1921 - 2007 (86 years)

Dr. Hasan Özbekhan was a Turkish American systems scientist, cyberneticist, philosopher and planner who was Professor Emeritus of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He applied the field-of-systems theory to global problems, helped inspire the group of planners, diplomats, scientists and academics who came together as the Club of Rome.

#22557

Susumu Okubo

#22568

Overall Influence

1930 - 2015 (85 years)

Susumu Okubo was a Japanese theoretical physicist at the University of Rochester. Ōkubo worked primarily on elementary particle physics. He is famous for the Gell-Mann–Okubo mass formula for mesons and baryons in the quark model; this formula correctly predicts the relations of masses of the members of SU multiplets in terms of hypercharge and isotopic spin. Ōkubo died in July 2015.

#22558

Lyn Evans

#22569

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Lyn Evans CBE FINSTP FLSW FRS , is a Welsh scientist who served as the project leader of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Based at CERN, in 2012 he became the director of the Linear Collider Collaboration, an international organisation managing development of next generation particle colliders, including the International Linear Collider and the Compact Linear Collider.

#22559

Jonathan Cohn

#22570

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Jonathan Scott Cohn is an American author and journalist who writes mainly on United States public policy and political issues. Formerly the executive editor of The American Prospect and a senior editor at The New Republic, Cohn is now a senior national correspondent at The Huffington Post.

#22560

Yair Censor

#22571

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Yair Censor is an Israeli mathematician and a professor at the University of Haifa, specializing in computational mathematics and optimization, as well as applications of these fields, in particular to medical imaging and radiation therapy treatment planning.

#22561

Glenn Roeder

#22572

Overall Influence

1955 - 2021 (66 years)

Glenn Victor Roeder was an English professional football player and manager. As a player, Roeder played as a defender for Arsenal, Leyton Orient, Queens Park Rangers, Notts County, Newcastle United, Watford and Gillingham. He also represented the England national B team.

#22562

James C. Coyne

#22573

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

James C. Coyne is an American psychologist. Education and career Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Coyne attended New London High School in New London, Connecticut. He received his B.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University and his Ph.D. in psychology from Indiana University Bloomington . After being a Clinical Psychology Intern at the University of Florida in 1972–3, he was an instructor at Miami University from 1973 to 1975, where he became an assistant professor in 1975. He became professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999, and became an emeritus prof...

#22563

David Tacey

#22574

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

David Tacey is an Australian public intellectual, writer and interdisciplinary scholar. He is Emeritus Professor of Literature at La Trobe University in Melbourne and Research Professor at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture in Canberra.

#22564

Fiona Gilbert

#22575

Overall Influence

Fiona Jane Gilbert is a Scottish radiologist and academic. Background Gilbert graduated in medicine from Glasgow University in 1978. She trained in Radiology in Aberdeen, and became a consultant radiologist in 1989, then appointed Roland Sutton Professor of Radiology at the University of Aberdeen in 1996. She was assigned the role of professor of radiology and head of the Department of Radiology at University of Cambridge in 2011, where she now leads a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine in various fields of radiology. Prior to this she was head of t...

#22565

Jay Rosenberg

#22576

Overall Influence

1942 - 2008 (66 years)

Jay Frank Rosenberg was an American philosopher and historian of philosophy. He spent his teaching career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he joined the Department of Philosophy in 1966 and was appointed Taylor Grandy Professor of Philosophy in 1987. Rosenberg was a student of Wilfrid Sellars and established his reputation with ten books and over 80 articles in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy . His most commercially successful work, The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners, is a standard text in introduc...

#22566

Emmanuel Ullmo

#22577

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Emmanuel Ullmo is a French mathematician, specialised in arithmetic geometry. Since 2013 he has served as director of the Institut des Hautes Études scientifiques. Biography He wrote his thesis under Lucien Szpiro at the University of Paris-Sud in 1993, where he was appointed professor in 2001. He also held temporary positions at IMPA for 18 months, then two years at Princeton University, and six months at Tsinghua University.

#22567

Maya Forstater

#22578

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Maya Forstater is a British business studies and international development researcher who is the claimant in Forstater v Centre for Global Development Europe. The case established that gender critical views are protected as a belief under the Equality Act 2010, while stating that the judgment does not permit misgendering transgender people with impunity. At a subsequent full merits hearing, the Employment Tribunal upheld Forstater's case, concluding that she had suffered direct discrimination on the basis of her gender critical beliefs. The judgement for remedies was handed down in June 2023,...

#22568

Carol Channing

#22579

Overall Influence

1921 - 2019 (98 years)

Carol Elaine Channing was an American actress, comedian, singer and dancer who starred in Broadway and film musicals. Her characters usually had a fervent expressiveness and an easily identifiable voice, whether singing or for comedic effect.

#22569

Rachel McCleary

#22580

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Rachel M. McCleary is a lecturer in the Economics Department at Harvard University and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Biography McCleary has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago, a Master of Theological Studies from Emory University and a B.A. from Indiana University. Her work is interdisciplinary with theoretical grounding in the fields of political science, sociology and economics. Within these disciplines, she conducts research on the political economy of religion. Her research focuses on how religion interacts with economic performance and the political and social behavior of individuals and institutions across societies.

#22570

Carlos Sainz Sr.

Carlos Sainz Sr.

#22581

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Carlos Sainz Cenamor is a Spanish rally driver. He won the World Rally Championship drivers' title with Toyota in and , and finished runner-up four times. Constructors' world champions to have benefited from Sainz are Subaru , Toyota and Citroën . In the 2018 season he was one of the official drivers of the Team Peugeot Total. He received the Princess of Asturias Sports Award in 2020. Sainz founded the Acciona | Sainz XE Team to join Extreme E and has competed in the first two seasons alongside Laia Sanz.

#22571

Lucian Boia

#22582

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Lucian Boia is a Romanian historian. He is mostly known for his debunking of historical myths about Romania, for purging mainstream Romanian history from the deformations due to ideological propaganda. I.e. as a fighter against pseudohistory.

#22572

Guillermo Simari

#22583

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Guillermo Ricardo Simari is an Argentine computer scientist born in the city of Buenos Aires. He has headed the Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Lab at National University of the South since 1990.

#22573

Salah Fadl

#22584

Overall Influence

1938 - 2022 (84 years)

Mohamed Salahuddin Abdel-Sameeh Fadl was an Egyptian academic, writer, and translator from Kafr el Sheikh. He has held many educational and non-educational positions in Egypt and abroad. He worked as a medic at the Cairo University, the Al-Azhar University, the Ain Shams University in Egypt, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and the College of Mexico in Spain, as well as the University of Sana'a in Yemen and Bahrain. Other non-educational positions held by Dr. Fadl include editing the Journal of the Egyptian Institute of Islamic Studies in Madrid, heading the Department of Arabic...

#22574

Shouyong Shi

#22585

Overall Influence

Shouyong Shi is a Canadian economist and member of the Pennsylvania State University faculty. He is a tier 1 Canada Research Chair as well as a Research Fellow at the Bank of Canada. Shi's research focuses on topics in macroeconomics and labour economics. He is co-editor of the economics journal Annals of Economics and Finance.

#22575

Ronald Solomon

#22586

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Ronald "Ron" Mark Solomon is an American mathematician specializing in the theory of finite groups. Solomon studied as an undergraduate at Queens College and received a PhD in 1971 at Yale University under Walter Feit with a thesis entitled Finite Groups with Sylow 2-Subgroups of the Type of the Alternating Group on Twelve Letters. In 1972, he began his participation in the classification program for finite simple groups, after hearing a lecture by Daniel Gorenstein. He was for two years an instructor at the University of Chicago and the academic year 1974–1975 at Rutgers University, before he became a professor at Ohio State University, where he has remained.

#22576

Richard Cytowic

Richard Cytowic

#22587

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Richard E. Cytowic is an American neurologist and author who rekindled interest in synesthesia in the 1980s and returned it to mainstream science. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times Magazine cover story about James Brady, the Presidential Press Secretary shot in the brain during the assassination attempt on President Reagan. Cytowic’s writing ranges from textbooks and music reviews, to his Metro Weekly "Love Doctor" essays and brief medical biographies of Anton Chekhov, Maurice Ravel and Virginia Woolf. His work is the subject of two BBC Horizon documentaries, “Ora...

#22577

Noah Rosenberg

#22588

Overall Influence

Noah Aubrey Rosenberg is a geneticist working in evolutionary biology, mathematical phylogenetics, and population genetics, and is the Stanford Professor of Population Genetics and Society. His research focuses on mathematical modeling and statistical methods for genetics and evolution and he is the editor-in-chief of Theoretical Population Biology.

#22578

Charles C. Holt

#22589

Overall Influence

1921 - 2010 (89 years)

Charles C. Holt was Professor at the Department of Management at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He is well known for his contributions to exponential smoothing. Holt held BS and MS degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He later earned a MA and a PhD from the University of Chicago.

#22579

Miklós Simonovits

#22590

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Miklós Simonovits is a Hungarian mathematician who currently works at the Rényi Institute of Mathematics in Budapest and is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is on the advisory board of the journal Combinatorica. He is best known for his work in extremal graph theory and was awarded Széchenyi Prize in 2014. Among other things, he discovered the method of progressive induction which he used to describe graphs which do not contain a predetermined graph and the number of edges is close to maximal. With Lovász, he gave a randomized algorithm using O separation calls to approximate...

#22580

Gershon Galil

#22591

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Gershon Galil is Professor of Biblical Studies and Ancient History and former chair of the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel. Gershon Galil earned his doctorate from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His work, The Chronology of the Kings of Israel and Judah, suggests a new chronology for the kings of ancient Israel and ancient Judah. His thesis was published by Brill Academic Publishers in 1996 and his chronology contrasts with those presented by the more traditional William F. Albright or Edwin R. Thiele.

#22581

Ivar Karl Ugi

#22592

Overall Influence

1930 - 2005 (75 years)

Ivar Karl Ugi was an Estonian-born German chemist who made major contributions to organic chemistry. He is known for the research on multicomponent reactions, yielding the Ugi reaction. Biography After he went to Germany from Estonia in 1941 he began his studies of chemistry in 1949 at the University of Tübingen until 1951. He became Dr. rer. nat. in 1954 at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He did his habilitation 1960 at the same university. After a short but very successful career in industry at Bayer from 1962 until 1968 when he joined the University of Southern California at Lo...

#22582

Michael Sabom

#22593

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Michael B. Sabom is an American cardiologist, confessing Christian and near-death experience researcher. Education Michael B. Sabom attended Colorado College, graduating in 1966. He completed his medical education at the University of Texas Medical Branch in 1970. He completed his cardiology training at the University of Florida in 1978.

#22583

Theo Seiler

#22594

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Theo Seiler is a German ophthalmologist and physicist. He is considered one of the pioneers of refractive surgery. Biography Seiler graduated from gymnasium in 1968 and enrolled the same year at the University of Heidelberg where he studied mathematics and physics. He received his prediploma in physics in 1970 and eventually continued his studies at the Freie Universität of Berlin where he graduated in 1972 with a degree in physics. He also began with his medical studies in the same year.

#22584

George Edward Hughes

George Edward Hughes

#22595

Overall Influence

1918 - 1994 (76 years)

George Edward Hughes was an Irish-born New Zealand philosopher and logician whose principal scholarly works were concerned with modal logic and medieval philosophy. Biography Hughes was born on 8 June 1918 in Waterford city, Ireland. His English parents George James Hughes and Gertrude Sparks moved to Scotland in the early 1920s, as a result of the Irish War of Independence. George graduated MA with First Class Honours in Philosophy and English, and then in pure Philosophy, from the University of Glasgow. He then studied for a year at the University of Cambridge, before being called back to Glasgow as an assistant lecturer.

#22585

Charles Joseph Adams

#22596

Overall Influence

1924 - 2011 (87 years)

Charles Joseph Adams was an American academic and professor of religion. He was Emeritus Professor of Islamic Studies at McGill University and for nearly 20 years the Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies there.

#22586

Al D'Amato

#22597

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Alfonse Marcello D'Amato is an American attorney and Republican former politician from the state of New York. In 1980, after 25 years of involvement in the politics and government of Long Island, D'Amato defeated four-term Republican Sen. Jacob Javits in a Republican U.S. Senate primary. D'Amato went on to prevail in the 1980 general election for that office. D'Amato represented the state of New York in the Senate from 1981 to 1999. He was re-elected in 1986 and 1992, but was defeated in 1998 by Democratic Rep. Chuck Schumer.

#22587

Karl Rubin

#22598

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Karl Cooper Rubin is an American mathematician at University of California, Irvine as Thorp Professor of Mathematics. Between 1997 and 2006, he was a professor at Stanford, and before that worked at Ohio State University between 1987 and 1999. His research interest is in elliptic curves. He was the first mathematician to show that some elliptic curves over the rationals have finite Tate–Shafarevich groups. It is widely believed that these groups are always finite.

#22588

Kenneth Keith

#22599

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Sir Kenneth James Keith is a New Zealand judge. He was elected to the International Court of Justice in November 2005, serving a nine-year term during the years 2006 through 2015. Keith was educated at the Auckland Grammar School and studied law at the University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington, and Harvard Law School. He was a faculty member of Victoria University from 1962 to 1964 and from 1966 to 1991. He served in the New Zealand Department of External Affairs during the early 1960s, and as a member of the United Nations Secretariat from 1968 to 1970. After this, he was Di...

#22589

Xia Peisu

#22600

Overall Influence

1923 - 2014 (91 years)

Xia Peisu or Pei-su Hsia was a Chinese computer scientist and educator known for her pioneering research in computer science and technology. The leading developer of Model 107, the nation's first domestically designed general-purpose electronic computer, she has been called the "Mother of Computer Science in China". She and her husband Yang Liming were both elected academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991. In 2010, she was honoured with the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from the China Computer Federation.

#22590

James Alison

#22601

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

James Alison is an English Catholic priest and theologian. Alison is noted for his application of René Girard's anthropological theory to Christian systematic theology and for his work on LGBT issues.

#22591

Ross Levine

#22602

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Ross Levine is an American economist who currently holds the Willis H. Booth Chair in Banking and Finance at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an advisor to the World Economic Forum. As of 2018, he is the 12th most cited economist in the world.

#22592

John Dixon Hunt

John Dixon Hunt

#22603

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

John Dixon Hunt is an English landscape historian whose academic career began with teaching English literature. He became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and served as the department chair of landscape architecture and regional planning until June 2000, now being emeritus. One aspect of his work focuses on the time between the turn of the seventeenth through the end of the 18th centuries in France and England. He is the author of many articles, not only in landscape journals but also Apollo, Lincoln Center Theater Review, and Comparative Criticism, and chapters on topics including T.

#22593

Ben Elton

#22604

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Benjamin Charles Elton is a British-Australian comedian, actor, author, playwright, lyricist and director. He was a part of London's alternative comedy movement of the 1980s and became a writer on the sitcoms The Young Ones and Blackadder, as well as continuing as a stand-up comedian on stage and television. His style in the 1980s was left-wing political satire. Since then he has published 17 novels and written the musicals The Beautiful Game , We Will Rock You , Tonight's the Night , and Love Never Dies , the sequel to The Phantom of the Opera. His novels cover the dystopian, comedy, and cr...

#22594

Kristin Neff

#22605

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Kristin Neff is an associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin's department of educational psychology. Dr. Neff received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, studying moral development. She did two years of postdoctoral study at the University of Denver studying self-concept development. She created the Self-compassion Scales. The long scale consists of 26 items and the short scale consists of 12 items. She has been credited with conducting the first academic studies into self-compassion.

#22595

Carlos Osoro Sierra

#22606

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Carlos Osoro Sierra is a Spanish prelate of the Catholic Church who was Archbishop of Madrid from 2014 to 2023. He has been a bishop since 1997 and a cardinal since 2016. Life Osoro was born in Castañeda in northern Spain on 16 May 1945. He studied at the Escuela Normal and taught for a year in Santander. He then entered the seminary for adult vocations in Salamanca, earning licentiates in theology and philosophy at the Pontifical University of Salamanca. He later obtained a licentiate in Exact Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid and another in pedagogy from the University of Salamanca.

#22596

Bruce Rioch

#22607

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Bruce David Rioch is a football manager and former player for the Scotland national team. His last managerial post was at AaB in the Danish Superliga in 2008. As a player, he made more than 550 appearances in the Football League and, by virtue of his parents' birthplaces, represented Scotland in 24 matches; he became the first player born in England to captain Scotland. As a manager, he has taken charge of clubs in England, including Arsenal where he signed the famous Dennis Bergkamp, the United States, and Denmark. His brother Neil, son Gregor and nephew Matty Holmes were also professional f...

#22597

Alejandro González Iñárritu

Alejandro González Iñárritu

#22608

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Alejandro González Iñárritu is a Mexican filmmaker. He is primarily known for making modern psychological drama films about the human condition. His projects have garnered critical acclaim and numerous accolades including four Academy Awards with a Special Achievement Award, three Golden Globe Awards, three BAFTA Awards, two Directors Guild of America Awards. His most notable films include Amores perros , 21 Grams , Babel , Biutiful , Birdman , The Revenant , and Bardo .

#22598

Tim Cresswell

#22609

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Tim Cresswell is a British human geographer and poet. Cresswell is the Ogilvie Professor of Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh having formally served as the Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.

#22599

Martha Olney

#22610

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Martha Louise Olney is a teaching professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a winner of local and national teaching awards, and has authored several leading undergraduate economics textbooks.

#22600

Michael Hutchings

Michael Hutchings

#22611

Overall Influence

Michael Lounsbery Hutchings is an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for proving the double bubble conjecture on the shape of two-chambered soap bubbles, and for his work on circle-valued Morse theory and on embedded contact homology, which he defined.

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