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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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Ranking

List of the most influential people

#22701

Taran Adarsh

#22712

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Taran Adarsh is an Indian film critic and trade analyst. He is best known for giving trade figures and box office updates on social media, as well as his reviews for Bollywood Hungama. Career Taran Adarsh started his journalism career at the age of 15 with Trade Guide, a weekly box office magazine. In 1994, Adarsh produced and wrote the Bollywood film-based TV serial Hello Bollywood, starring Shehzad Khan and Kashmera Shah. He continued his work on Trade Guide alongside. He is currently an active film critic, journalist and trade analyst on Bollywood Hungama, a Bollywood entertainment website...

#22702

Stuart Parkin

#22713

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Stuart Stephen Papworth Parkin is an experimental physicist, director at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle and an Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the Institute of Physics of the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg.

#22703

Wayne R. Dynes

#22714

Overall Influence

1934 - 2021 (87 years)

Wayne R. Dynes was an American art historian, encyclopedist, and bibliographer. He was professor emeritus in the Art Department at Hunter College, where he taught from 1972 to 2005. Dynes spent his early years in southern California, where he attended UCLA and received his B.A. in 1969. After extended sojourns in Italy and England, he settled permanently in Manhattan, where he obtained his Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. The subject of his dissertation was the eleventh-century illuminated Stavelot Bible from Belgium. His training as a medievalist provided the...

#22704

John Cusack

#22715

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

John Paul Cusack is an American actor, producer, and screenwriter. He is a son of filmmaker Dick Cusack and the younger brother of actresses Joan and Ann Cusack. Cusack began acting in films during the 1980s, starring in coming-of-age dramedies such as Sixteen Candles , The Sure Thing , Better Off Dead , and Say Anything... . He then started appearing in independent films such as Eight Men Out , The Grifters , True Colors , and Bullets Over Broadway . Cusack began appearing as a leading man in such film as the comedic films Grosse Pointe Blank , the action thriller Con Air , the animated mus...

#22705

Ivo Goldstein

#22716

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Ivo Goldstein is a historian, author and ambassador from Croatia. Goldstein is a recipient of the Order of Danica Hrvatska and the City of Zagreb Award . Biography Education Ivo Goldstein graduated from the Classical Gymnasium in Zagreb and in 1976 he enrolled into undergraduate History studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb where he graduated in 1979.

#22706

William Ruddiman

#22717

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

William F. Ruddiman is a palaeoclimatologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. Ruddiman earned an undergraduate degree in geology in 1964 at Williams College, and a Ph.D. in marine geology from Columbia University in 1969. Ruddiman worked at the US Naval Oceanographic Office from 1969 to 1976, and at Columbia's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory from 1976 to 1991. He moved to Virginia in 1991, serving as a professor in Environmental Sciences. Ruddiman's research interests center on climate change over several time scales. He is a Fellow of both the Geological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union.

#22707

Abdoldjavad Falaturi

#22718

Overall Influence

1926 - 1996 (70 years)

Abdoldjavad Falaturi was a German scholar of Iranian origin. Education He attended a German-Persian high school in his hometown of Isfahan and took private lessons in Arabic literature and Islamic studies. He carried on his education at Mahad and Tehran. Later, he attended the University of Tehran's Faculty of Theology, where he graduated with a bachelor of arts in philosophy in 1333/1954. While in Germany, Falaturi studied a variety of courses, including philosophy, psychology, comparative religion, Greek, and Latin; he earned his PhD from the University of Bonn in 1962.

#22708

Amy Adams

#22719

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Amy Lou Adams is an American actress. Known for both her comedic and dramatic roles, she has been featured three times in annual rankings of the world's highest-paid actresses. She has received various accolades, including two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for six Academy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards.

#22709

Philip Thody

#22720

Overall Influence

1928 - 1999 (71 years)

Philip Malcolm Waller Thody was an English scholar of French literature who was Professor of French Literature at the University of Leeds from 1965 until 1993. Early life and education Thody was born in Lincoln in 1928 and educated locally. After national service in the RAF, he read French at King's College London and subsequently lived in Paris for three years, writing a thesis on 'The Vogue of the American Novel in France since 1944', including a year as a lecteur at the Sorbonne.

#22710

Fiona Hill

#22721

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Fiona Hill is a British-American foreign affairs specialist and author. She is a former official at the U.S. National Security Council, specializing in Russian and European affairs. She was a witness in the November 2019 House hearings regarding the impeachment inquiry during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. She earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1998. She currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. She took up office as Chancellor of Durham University in England in June 2023.

#22711

Jürgen Flimm

#22722

Overall Influence

1941 - 2023 (82 years)

Jürgen Flimm was a German theatre and opera director, theatre manager, and academic teacher. Flimm was first active in drama, and made the Thalia Theater in Hamburg one of the most successful German theatres when he managed it from 1985 to 2000. He was general manager of the Salzburg Festival and RuhrTriennale festivals, and intendant of the Berlin State Opera from 2010 to 2018. He directed internationally, including Beethoven's Fidelio at the Metropolitan Opera, the 2000 Ring cycle production at the Bayreuth Festival, and the 2002 world premiere of Friedrich Cerha's Der Riese vom Steinfeld a...

#22712

Ayesha Siddiqa

#22723

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Ayesha Siddiqa , is a Pakistani political scientist, and an author who serves as a research associate at the SOAS South Asia Institute. She previously served as the inaugural Pakistan Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center between 2004 and 2005.

#22713

Anthony Albanese

#22724

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Anthony Norman Albanese is an Australian politician serving as the 31st and current prime minister of Australia since 2022. He has been leader of the Australian Labor Party since 2019 and the member of parliament for the division of Grayndler since 1996. Albanese previously served as the 15th deputy prime minister under the second Rudd government in 2013. He held various ministerial positions from 2007 to 2013 in the governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.

#22714

Tibor Gánti

#22725

Overall Influence

1933 - 2009 (76 years)

Tibor Gánti was a Hungarian theoretical biologist and biochemist, who is best known for his theory of the chemoton, a model for defining the minimal nature of life. He taught industrial biochemistry at Faculty of Science of the Eötvös University, and theoretical biology at University of Gödöllő, József Attila University, and Eötvös University.

#22715

Christoph Koutschan

#22726

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Christoph Koutschan is a German mathematician and computer scientist. He is currently with the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Education Christoph Koutschan is a German mathematician and computer scientist. He studied computer science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany from 1999 to 2005 and then moved to the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation in Linz, Austria, where he completed his PhD in symbolic computation in 2009 under the supervision of Peter Paule.

#22716

Alfred Molina

#22727

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Alfred Molina is a British actor known for his work on the stage and screen. He first rose to prominence in the West End, earning a nomination for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Newcomer in a Play for his performance in the production of Oklahoma! in 1980. He made his film debut as Satipo in Raiders of the Lost Ark and his Broadway debut as Yvan in a production of Art from 1998 to 1999. His other Broadway roles include Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof from 2004 to 2005 and Mark Rothko in the play Red from 2009 to 2010.

#22717

Zlil Sela

#22728

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Zlil Sela is an Israeli mathematician working in the area of geometric group theory. He is a Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Sela is known for the solution of the isomorphism problem for torsion-free word-hyperbolic groups and for the solution of the Tarski conjecture about equivalence of first-order theories of finitely generated non-abelian free groups.

#22718

Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

#22729

Overall Influence

Emmanuel Charles McCarthy is an American priest of the Melkite Catholic Church, as well as a peace activist and author. He has been a Melkite Catholic priest since August 9, 1981, when he was ordained in Damascus, Syria. He received his Bachelor of Arts Degree with majors in philosophy and English from the University of Notre Dame in 1962. He received Masters Degrees in English and in Theology from the same university. He earned his Doctorate in Jurisprudence from Boston College Law School in 1967 and was soon after admitted to the Massachusetts Bar for the practice of law.

#22719

Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare

#22730

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Yinka Shonibare , is a British-Nigerian artist living in the United Kingdom. His work explores cultural identity, colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. A hallmark of his art is the brightly coloured Ankara fabric he uses. Because he has a physical disability that paralyses one side of his body, Shonibare uses assistants to make works under his direction.

#22720

Herbert Freeman

#22731

Overall Influence

1925 - 2020 (95 years)

Dr. Herbert Freeman was an American computer scientist who made important contributions to the field of automatic label placement, computer graphics, including spatial anti-aliasing, and machine vision.

#22721

James R. Dixon

#22732

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

James Ray Dixon was professor emeritus and curator emeritus of amphibians and reptiles at the Texas Cooperative Wildlife Collection at Texas A&M University. He lived in El Campo, Texas, throughout most of his childhood. He published prolifically on the subject of herpetology in his distinguished career, authoring and co-authoring several books, book chapters, and numerous peer reviewed notes and articles, describing two new genera, and many new species, earning him a reputation as one of the most prominent herpetologistss of his generation. His main research focus was morphology based systema...

#22722

W. Bruce Croft

#22733

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

W. Bruce Croft is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose work focuses on information retrieval. He is the founder of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval and served as the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems from 1995 to 2002. He was also a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board from 2000 to 2003. Since 2015, he is the Dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was Chair of the UMass Amherst Compu...

#22723

Helen Khal

#22734

Overall Influence

1923 - 2009 (86 years)

Helen Khal was an American artist and critic of Lebanese descent. Early life Helen Khal was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania to a Lebanese American family from Tripoli, Lebanon. She started her painting career at the age of 21; when illness forced house rest, she began to draw. On a visit to Lebanon in 1946 she met and married a young Lebanese poet, Yusuf al-Khal , and remained in the country to study art at ALBA from 1946 to 1948. She returned to the United States briefly but in 1973, after moving back to Lebanon, she established Lebanon's first permanent art gallery, Gallery One.

#22724

Jill Zimmerman

#22735

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Jill Loraine Zimmerman is an American computer scientist and the James M. Beall Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Goucher College. Since 2006, she has been the head of the Goucher Robotics Lab.

#22725

Paul W. Schroeder

#22736

Overall Influence

1927 - 2020 (93 years)

Paul W. Schroeder was an American historian who was professor emeritus at the University of Illinois. He specialized in European international politics from the late 16th to the 20th centuries, Central Europe, and the theory of history. He is known for his contributions to diplomatic history and international relations.

#22726

Thomas G. Weiss

Thomas G. Weiss

#22737

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Thomas G. Weiss is a distinguished international diplomat and scholar of international relations and global governance with special expertise in the politics of the United Nations, where he himself served in various high-ranking roles. He was named a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow for a project exploring the concept of a world without the United Nations. Since 1998, he has been Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and is Director Emeritus of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. At present, he also is co-chair, Cultural Heritage at Risk Project, J.

#22727

Nilima Ibrahim

#22738

Overall Influence

1921 - 2002 (81 years)

Neelima Ibrahim was a Bangladeshi educationist, littérateur and social worker. She is well known for her scholarship on Bengali literature but even more so for her depiction of raped and tortured women in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War in her book Ami Birangana Bolchi. She was awarded Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1969, Begum Rokeya Padak in 1996 and Ekushey Padak in 2000 by the Government of Bangladesh for her contributions to Bangla literature.

#22728

May Ayim

#22739

Overall Influence

1960 - 1996 (36 years)

May Ayim is the pen name of May Opitz ; she was an Afro-German poet, educator, and activist. The child of a German dancer and Ghanaian medical student, she lived with a white German foster family when young. After reconnecting with her father and his family in Ghana, in 1992 she took his surname for a pen name.

#22729

Robert Jensen

#22740

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Robert William Jensen is a former professor of journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. From 1992 to 2018 he taught graduate and undergraduate courses in media law, ethics, and politics. He has focused much of his work on the critique of pornography and of masculinity, developed in his 2017 book, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men. He also has written about white privilege and institutional racism. He also sits on the editorial board of the academic journal Sexualization, Media, and Society.

#22730

Michel Legrand

#22741

Overall Influence

1932 - 2019 (87 years)

Michel Jean Legrand was a French musical composer, arranger, conductor, and jazz pianist. Legrand was a prolific composer, having written over 200 film and television scores, in addition to many songs. His scores for two of the films of French New Wave director Jacques Demy, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort , earned Legrand his first Academy Award nominations. Legrand won his first Oscar for the song "The Windmills of Your Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair , and additional Oscars for Summer of '42 and Barbra Streisand's Yentl .

#22731

Richard Thompson

#22742

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Richard Thompson is an English singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Thompson first gained prominence in the late 1960s as the lead guitarist and songwriter for the folk rock group Fairport Convention, which he had co-founded in 1967. After departing the group in 1971, Thompson released his debut solo album Henry the Human Fly in 1972. The next year, he formed a duo with his wife Linda Thompson, which produced six albums, including the critically acclaimed I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight and Shoot Out the Lights . After the dissolution of the duo, Thompson revived his solo career with the release of Hand of Kindness in 1983.

#22732

Michael Genesereth

#22743

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Michael Genesereth is an American logician and computer scientist, who is most known for his work on computational logic and applications of that work in enterprise management, computational law, and general game playing. Genesereth is professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and a professor by courtesy in the Stanford Law School. His 1987 textbook on Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence remains one of the key references on symbolic artificial intelligence. He is the author of the influential Game Description Language and Knowledge Interchange Format , th...

#22733

Gail Caldwell

#22744

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Gail Caldwell is an American critic and author. She was the chief book critic for The Boston Globe, where she was on staff from 1985 to 2009. Caldwell was the winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. The award was for eight Sunday reviews and two other columns written in 2000. According to the Pulitzer Prize board, those columns were noted for “her insightful observations on contemporary life and literature.”

#22734

Martin Moors

#22745

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Martin Moors is a professor of Philosophy and is the Chair of Contemporary Metaphysics at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven , Belgium, where he lectures. He has published work on Kant, German idealism and Schelling.

#22735

Yuri Nagibin

#22746

Overall Influence

1920 - 1994 (74 years)

Yuri Markovich Nagibin was a Soviet and Russian writer, screenwriter and novelist. Biography Yuri Nagibin was born in Moscow. Nagibin's mother Ksenia Nagibina was pregnant with him when his father — Kirill Nagibin, a Russian nobleman — was executed as a counter-revolutionary before he was born. He was raised by his Jewish stepfather Mark Leventhal who was also later arrested and sent into internal exile to the Russian North in Komi Republic in 1927. Nagibin was unaware of his real father, so he assumed he was partly Jewish . He found out late in life that both of his parents were in fact Russ...

#22736

Douglas Kmiec

#22747

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Douglas William Kmiec is an American legal scholar, author, and former U.S. ambassador. He is the Caruso Family Chair and Professor of Constitutional Law at Pepperdine University School of Law. Kmiec came to prominence during the 2008 United States presidential election when, although a Republican, he endorsed Democrat Barack Obama. In July 2009, he was nominated by President Obama to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Malta. He was confirmed by the Senate and served for close to two years as ambassador to Malta. He resigned his post effective May 31, 2011.

#22737

Dick Teresi

#22748

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Dick Teresi is an American writer. He is a co-author of The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? He is also a former editor of Omni. Career With his wife Judith Hooper, Teresi has coauthored The Three Pound Universe and Would the Buddha Wear a Walkman? A Catalogue of Revolutionary Tools for Higher Consciousness. Teresi also coauthored Laser: Light of a Million Uses with Jeff Hecht.

#22738

Alain Lascoux

#22749

Overall Influence

1944 - 2013 (69 years)

Alain Lascoux was a French mathematician at Université de Paris VII, University of Marne la Vallée and Nankai University. His research was primarily in algebraic combinatorics, particularly Hecke algebrass and Young tableaux.

#22739

Dorothy Wedderburn

#22750

Overall Influence

1925 - 2012 (87 years)

Dorothy Enid Wedderburn was Principal of Bedford College, part of the University of London, and after the merger with Royal Holloway College, another college of the university, was the first principal of the combined institution.

#22740

Jane Bennett

#22751

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Jane Bennett is an American political theorist and philosopher. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at the Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences. She was also the editor of the academic journal Political Theory between 2012 and 2017.

#22741

Mathai Joseph

#22752

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Mathai Joseph is an Indian computer scientist and author. Early life and education Joseph studied for a BSc in physics at Wilson College and an MSc in the same subject at the University of Mumbai in 1964. He later studied for a Postgraduate Diploma in electronics at the Welsh College of Advanced Technology and then undertook a PhD in computing at Churchill College, Cambridge under the supervision of David Wheeler .

#22742

Paul Tough

#22753

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

#22743

Zorba Paster

#22754

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Robert Zorba Paster is a physician and radio show host. Paster was born on August 19, 1947, and raised in Chicago. He hosts a weekly radio call-in show on personal health issues called Zorba Paster on Your Health. The show is produced by Wisconsin Public Radio, syndicated by the Public Radio Exchange, and is broadcast on public radio stations around the United States. The show's trademark is a lighthearted, humorous approach, made possible by Zorba's banter with his co-host, Tom Clark. The show's style is somewhat similar to National Public Radio's program, Car Talk, providing callers both ...

#22744

Philip Holmes

#22755

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Philip John Holmes is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. As a member of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, he formerly served as the interim chair until May 2007.

#22745

Brian Hare

#22756

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Brian Hare is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. He researches the evolution of cognition by studying both humans, our close relatives the primates , and species whose cognition converged with our own . He founded and co-directs the Duke Canine Cognition Center.

#22746

John B. Biggs

#22757

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

John Burville Biggs is an Australian educational psychologist and novelist who developed the SOLO taxonomy for assessing the quality of learning outcomes, and the model of constructive alignment for designing teaching and assessment.

#22747

Lilly Pulitzer

#22758

Overall Influence

1931 - 2013 (82 years)

Lillian Pulitzer Rousseau was an American entrepreneur, fashion designer, and socialite. She founded Lilly Pulitzer, Inc., which produces floral print clothing and other wares. Career Lilly and husband Herbert Pulitzer settled in Palm Beach, Florida, shortly after their marriage. They owned several Florida orange groves and, with produce from these, she opened a fruit juice stand on Via Mizner in Palm Beach. While working at the stand, Pulitzer found that squeezing juice made a mess of her clothes. Seeking to camouflage the juice stains, Lilly asked her dressmaker to design a dress that would camouflage the stains.

#22748

Sacha Pfeiffer

#22759

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Sacha Pfeiffer is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and radio host. In November 2018, she joined NPR as an investigations correspondent. Pfeiffer is known for her work with the Spotlight team run by The Boston Globe. She was a member of the group of reporters whose work in exposing the Roman Catholic church's cover-up of clergy sex abuse earned the newspaper the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

#22749

Sten Grillner

#22760

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Sten Grillner is a Swedish neurophysiologist and distinguished professor at the Karolinska Institute's Nobel Institute for Neurophysiology in Stockholm where he is the director of that institute. He is considered one of the world's foremost experts in the cellular bases of motor behaviour. His research is focused on understanding the cellular bases of motor behaviour; in particular, he has shown how neuronal circuits in the spine help control rhythmic movements, such as those needed for locomotion. He is the current secretary general of the International Brain Research Organization and president of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies .

#22750

James F. Masterson

#22761

Overall Influence

1926 - 2010 (84 years)

James F. Masterson was a prominent American psychiatrist. He was an internationally recognized psychiatrist who helped inaugurate the study and treatment of personality disorder including borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. He died April 12, 2010, of pneumonia at the age of eighty-four.

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