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 …
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List of the most influential people
#22801
Richard R. Wilk
#22812
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Richard R. Wilk is an American anthropologist best known for his work in economic anthropology focusing most recently on food, though he has published widely on diverse topics including human ecology, consumer behavior, beauty pageants, Maya culture, bad poetry, and visual anthropology. Wilk has published 89 works, and his research has been translated into five languages. He is currently Director of the Open Anthropology Institute and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Indiana University.
Go to Profile#22802
Donald Fowler
#22813
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Donald L. Fowler was an American political scientist, professor, and political operative who served as National Chair of the Democratic National Committee from 1995 to 1997, alongside Chris Dodd as General Chairman during this same period.
Go to Profile#22803
Wolf Blitzer
#22814
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Wolf Isaac Blitzer is an American journalist, television news anchor, and author who has been a CNN reporter since 1990, and who currently serves as one of the principal anchors at the network. He is the host of The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer since 2005; previously he served as the network's lead political anchor until 2021.
Go to Profile#22804
George Galloway
#22815
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
George Galloway is a British politician, broadcaster, and writer who is currently leader of the Workers Party of Britain, serving since 2019. Between 1987 and 2010, and then between 2012 and 2015, Galloway was a Member of Parliament for four constituencies, first for the Labour Party and later for the Respect Party, the latter of which he joined in 2004 and led from 2013 until its dissolution in 2016.
Go to Profile#22805
Lann Hornscheidt
#22816
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Lann Hornscheidt is a German academic active in the fields of gender studies and linguistics. Hornscheidt is non-binary. Academic career Lann Hornscheidt obtained a PhD degree at the University of Kiel. From 2007 to 2016, Hornscheidt was professor for Gender Studies and Language Analysis at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Hornscheidt has had visiting professorships and periods of research at the universities of Örebro, Lund, Turku, Uppsala, Graz, Innsbruck and Södertörn . Hornscheidt received the habilitation in Scandinavian Linguistics at...
Go to Profile#22806
Óscar Arias
#22817
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Óscar Arias Sánchez is a Costa Rican activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He was President of Costa Rica from 1986 to 1990 and from 2006 to 2010. Arias was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his proposal of a negotiated solution to the Central American crisis. He sought the support of the Contadora group for his plan, which involved the removal of all foreign powers from the region, an end to aid for antigovernment guerrillas in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and the implementation of democratic principles and a compromise peace for social reconstruction. Although his plan was not off...
Go to Profile#22807
Tommie Shelby
#22818
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Tommie Shelby is an American philosopher. Since 2013, he has served as the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University, where he is the current chair of the Department of African and African American Studies. He is particularly known for his work in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, social theory , and the philosophy of social science.
Go to Profile#22808
Jesse Schell
#22819
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Jesse N. Schell is an American video game designer and author, as well as the CEO of Schell Games, and a distinguished professor of the practice of entertainment technology at CMU's Entertainment Technology Center , a joint master's program between the College of Fine Arts and School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#22809
David Arnold
#22820
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
David Arnold is a historian and has held the position of Professor of Asian and Global History at Warwick University since 2006. Previously he held the position of professor of South Asian History at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. He was one of the founding members of the subaltern studies group in the 1970s, remembered by Ranajit Guha in 1993 as "an assortment of marginalised academics". Arnold contributed seven articles in total to the publication and co-edited the eighth volume with David Hardiman in 1994. He later described this period as consisting of ...
Go to Profile#22810
Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo
#22821
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Luiz Gonzaga de Mello Belluzzo , better known as Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo or just Belluzzo, is a Brazilian economist and professor, and former president of Sociedade Esportiva Palmeiras. Biography As a young man, Belluzzo was a seminarian of the Society of Jesus and a student at St. Louis College.
Go to Profile#22811
Robert Alan Good
#22822
Overall Influence
#22812
Christopher D. Manning
#22823
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Christopher David Manning is an Australian computer scientist, best known for co-developing GloVe word vectors and the bilinear or multiplicative form of attention in artificial neural networks and for his books Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing and Introduction to Information Retrieval . He is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Machine Learning and a professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford University. He was previously President of the Association for Computational Linguistics and he has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam .
Go to Profile#22813
Janet Abbate
#22824
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Janet Abbate is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on the history of computer science and the Internet, particularly on the participation of women in the field.
Go to Profile#22814
L. W. Sumner
#22825
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Leonard Wayne Sumner is a Canadian philosopher notable for his work on normative and applied ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law. Sumner is University Professor Emeritus of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#22815
Jeffrey H. Smith
#22826
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Jeffrey Henderson Smith is a former professor of mathematics at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, under the supervision of Daniel Kan, and was promoted to full professor at Purdue in 1999. His primary research interest is algebraic topology; his best-cited work consists of two papers in the Annals of Mathematics on "nilpotence and stable homotopy".
Go to Profile#22816
Staffan Normark
#22827
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jan Staffan Normark is a Swedish physician, microbiologist and infectious disease researcher. He grew up in Umeå and was awarded his Ph.D. at Umeå University in 1971. At the end of the 1970s, he was one of the first Swedish scientists to use the new genetic engineering tools in infection-related research. In 1980, he was made a professor at Umeå University, then the university's youngest. 1989 he was recruited as professor of molecular microbiology to Washington University in St. Louis. 1993 he returned to Sweden as professor of infectious disease control, in particular clinical bacteriology, at Karolinska Institutet.
Go to Profile#22817
Bahram Mashhoon
#22828
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Bahram Mashhoon is an Iranian-American physicist known for his research in General Relativity. Mashhoon is a professor at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, where he deals with some foundational aspects of gravitational physics. Within his field of research, Mashhoon has given important contributions to general relativity, with particular emphasis on the gravitomagnetic clock effect, but also as far as cosmology is concerned. He is also active in the field of non-local gravity.
Go to Profile#22818
Diego Schwartzman
#22829
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Diego Sebastián Schwartzman is an Argentine professional tennis player. He has won four ATP singles titles and reached his career-high singles ranking of world 8 in October 2020. As a clay court specialist, his best results have been on this surface. He is noted for his high-quality return game.
Go to Profile#22819
Bruce Grobbelaar
#22830
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Bruce David Grobbelaar is a Zimbabwean former professional footballer who played as a goalkeeper, most prominently for English team Liverpool between 1981 and 1994, and for the Zimbabwean national team. He is remembered for his gymnastic-like athletic ability, unflappable confidence and eccentric and flamboyant style of play, as well as his rushing ability, which has led pundits to compare him retrospectively to the sweeper-keepers of the modern era.
Go to Profile#22820
Craig Tracy
#22831
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Craig Arnold Tracy is an American mathematician, known for his contributions to mathematical physics and probability theory. Born in United Kingdom, he moved as infant to Missouri where he grew up and obtained a B.Sc. in physics from University of Missouri . He studied as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Stony Brook University where he obtained a Ph.D. on the thesis entitled Spin-Spin Scale-Functions in the Ising and XY-Models advised by Barry M. McCoy, in which he studied Painlevé functions in exactly solvable statistical mechanical models.
Go to Profile#22821
Robert L. Moore
#22832
Overall Influence
1942 - 2016 (74 years)
Robert Louis Moore was an American Jungian analyst and consultant in private practice in Chicago, Illinois. He was the Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Spirituality at the Chicago Theological Seminary; a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago; and director of research for the Institute for the Science of Psychoanalysis. Author and editor of numerous books in psychology and spirituality, he lectured internationally on his formulation of a Neo-Jungian paradigm for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. He was working on Structural Psychoanalysis and I...
Go to Profile#22822
Peter Kenneth Newman
#22833
Overall Influence
1928 - 2001 (73 years)
Peter Kenneth Newman was an English economist and historian of economic thought. He helped to edit The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, to which he contributed several articles. Bibliography
Go to Profile#22823
Paul Cilliers
#22834
Overall Influence
1956 - 2011 (55 years)
Friedrich Paul Cilliers was a South-African philosopher, complexity researcher, and Professor in Complexity and Philosophy at Stellenbosch University. He was known for his contributions in the field of complex systems.
Go to Profile#22824
Uzi Vishkin
#22835
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Uzi Vishkin is a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies . Uzi Vishkin is known for his work in the field of parallel computing. In 1996, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, with the following citation: "One of the pioneers of parallel algorithms research, Dr. Vishkin's seminal contributions played a leading role in forming and shaping what thinking in parallel has come to mean in the fundamental theory ...
Go to Profile#22825
Michael Andretti
#22836
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Michael Mario Andretti is an American former racing driver, and current team owner. Statistically one of the most successful drivers in the history of American open-wheel car racing, Andretti won the 1991 CART championship, and amassed 42 race victories, the most in the CART era and fourth-most all time.
Go to Profile#22826
Marshall Van Alstyne
#22837
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Marshall W. Van Alstyne is the Questrom Professor in Management at Boston University and a research associate at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. He co-developed the theory of two-sided markets with Geoffrey G Parker. His work focuses on the economics of information. This includes a sustained interest in information markets and in how information and technology affect productivity with a new emphasis on “platforms” as an extension of the work on two-sided markets.
Go to Profile#22827
Madhav V. Rajan
#22838
Overall Influence
Madhav V. Rajan is an Indian-American professor and academic administrator. He is the dean of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. Early life Madhav V. Rajan graduated from the University of Madras in India in 1984. Rajan earned a master of science in Accounting in 1987, followed by a master of science in Industrial Administration in 1989, and a PhD in Accounting in 1990, all from Carnegie Mellon University. In 1990, his dissertation won the Alexander Henderson Award for Excellence in Economic Theory.
Go to Profile#22828
Alok R. Chaturvedi
#22839
Overall Influence
Alok R. Chaturvedi is a professor of information systems and the founder and the director of SEAS Laboratory at the Krannert School of Management, Purdue University. His research is focused on using artificial intelligence, computational ecology, and enterprise integration for wargaming enterprise situations. He received a Ph.D. and M.S in Management Information Systems from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from B.I.T Ranchi .
Go to Profile#22829
Mark Gasson
#22840
Overall Influence
Mark N. Gasson is a British scientist and visiting research fellow at the Cybernetics Research Group, University of Reading, UK. He pioneered developments in direct neural interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, has developed brain–computer interfaces and is active in the research fields of human microchip implants, medical devices and digital identity. He is known for his experiments transmitting a computer virus into a human implant, and is credited with being the first human infected with a computer virus.
Go to Profile#22830
Arif Mardin
#22841
Overall Influence
1932 - 2006 (74 years)
Arif Mardin was a Turkish-American music producer, who worked with hundreds of artists across many different styles of music, including jazz, rock, soul, disco and country. He worked at Atlantic Records for over 30 years, as producer, arranger, studio manager, and vice president, before moving to EMI and serving as vice president and general manager of Manhattan Records.
Go to Profile#22831
J. Mark Ramseyer
#22842
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
John Mark Ramseyer is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is the author of over 10 books and 50 articles in scholarly journals. He is co-author of one of the leading corporations casebooks, Klein, Ramseyer & Bainbridge, Business Associations, Cases and Materials on Agency, Partnerships, LLCs, and Corporations, now in its 10th edition. In 2018 he was awarded Japan's Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon in recognition of "his extensive contributions to the development of Japanese studies in the U.S. and the promotion of understanding tow...
Go to Profile#22832
Harmon Craig
#22843
Overall Influence
1926 - 2003 (77 years)
Harmon Craig was an American geochemist who worked briefly for the University of Chicago before spending the majority of his career at Scripps Institution of Oceanography . Craig was involved in numerous research expeditions, which visited the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, the crater of Loihi , the Afar Depression of Ethiopia, Greenland's ice cores, and Yellowstone's geysers, among many others. This led to him being described as "the Indiana Jones of the Earth sciences", someone "whose overriding impulse was to get out and see the world they were studying".
Go to Profile#22833
Hasok Chang
#22844
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Hasok Chang is a Korean-born American historian and philosopher of science currently serving as the Hans Rausing Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a board member of the Philosophy of Science Association. He previously served as president of the British Society for the History of Science from 2012 to 2014.
Go to Profile#22834
C. Christine Fair
#22845
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Carol Christine Fair is an American political scientist. She is an associate professor in the Security Studies Program within the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her work is primarily focused on counter-terrorism and South Asian topics.
Go to Profile#22835
Murray R. Spiegel
#22846
Overall Influence
1923 - 1991 (68 years)
Murray Ralph Spiegel was an author of textbooks on mathematics, including titles in a collection of Schaum's Outlines. Spiegel was a native of Brooklyn and a graduate of New Utrecht High School. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Brooklyn College in 1943. He earned a master's degree in 1947 and doctorate in 1949, both in mathematics and both at Cornell University. He was a teaching fellow at Harvard University in 1943–1945, a consultant with Monsanto Chemical Company in the summer of 1946, and a teaching fellow at Cornell University from 1946 to 1949. He was a c...
Go to Profile#22836
Sanjay Leela Bhansali
#22847
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Sanjay Leela Bhansali is an Indian filmmaker and music composer, who is known for his work in Hindi films. He is the recipient of several awards, including seven National Film Awards and 12 Filmfare Awards , in addition to a nomination for a BAFTA Award. In 2015, the Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award.
Go to Profile#22837
Gerd Jürgens
#22848
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Gerd Jürgens is a plant developmental biologist and emeritus Director of the Cell Biology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology and Head of the Center for Plant Molecular Biology at the Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen. He has published extensively in leading journals, including eight papers in the journal Nature as well as various articles in the journals Cell, Science, Journal of Cell Biology and The Plant Journal.
Go to Profile#22838
Hank Stram
#22849
Overall Influence
1923 - 2005 (82 years)
Henry Louis Stram was an American football coach. He is best known for his 15-year tenure with the Dallas Texans / Kansas City Chiefs of the American Football League and National Football League .
Go to Profile#22839
Thomas Hertog
#22850
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Thomas Hertog is a Belgian cosmologist at KU Leuven university and was a key collaborator of Professor Stephen Hawking. Early life Thomas Hertog was born on 27 May 1975. He graduated Summa cum laude from KU Leuven in 1997 with an MSc degree in physics. He obtained his Master's degree at the University of Cambridge in Part III of the Mathematical Tripos and obtained a Ph.D. degree at Cambridge with a thesis on the origins of cosmic expansion under the supervision of Stephen Hawking.
Go to Profile#22840
John Zorn
#22851
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John Zorn is an American composer, conductor, saxophonist, arranger and producer who "deliberately resists category". His avant-garde and experimental approaches to composition and improvisation are inclusive of jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, contemporary, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and world music. In 2013, Down Beat described Zorn as "one of our most important composers" and in 2020 Rolling Stone noted that "[alt]hough Zorn has operated almost entirely outside the mainstream, he's gradually asserted himself as one of the most influential musicians of our time".
Go to Profile#22841
Pete Worden
#22852
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Simon Peter Worden was Director of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, until his retirement on March 31, 2015. Prior to joining NASA, he held several positions in the United States Air Force and was research professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He is a recognized expert on space issues – both civil and military. Worden has authored or co-authored more than 150 scientific papers in astrophysics, space sciences, and strategic studies. He served as a scientific co-investigator for two NASA space science missions, and received the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal for the 1994 Clementine mission.
Go to Profile#22842
Fiona Godlee
#22853
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Fiona Godlee was editor in chief of The British Medical Journal from March 2005 until 31 December 2021; she was the first female editor appointed in the journal's history. She was also editorial director of the other journals in BMJ's portfolio.
Go to Profile#22843
Anthony Hill
#22854
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Anthony Hill was an English artist, painter and relief-maker, originally a member of the post-World War II British art movement termed the Constructionist Group whose work was essentially in the international constructivist tradition.
Go to Profile#22844
Bruce Arians
#22855
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Bruce Charles Arians is an American football executive and former coach in the National Football League . Since 2022, he has been a senior football consultant for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Arians was previously the head coach of the Arizona Cardinals from 2013 to 2017 and the Buccaneers from 2019 to 2021. He was also the interim head coach of the Indianapolis Colts during the 2012 season. Arians is known for his slogan "No risk-it, no biscuit," which encourages aggressive playcalling.
Go to Profile#22845
Robert J. Wicks
#22856
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Robert J. Wicks is a clinical psychologist and writer about the intersection of spirituality and psychology. Wicks is a well known speaker, therapist, and spiritual guide who has taught at universities and professional schools of psychology, medicine, nursing, theology, and social work for more than thirty years. He is a Professor Emeritus at Loyola University Maryland.
Go to Profile#22846
Ramakrishnan Srikant
#22857
Overall Influence
Ramakrishnan Srikant is a Google Fellow at Google. His primary field of research is Data Mining. His 1994 paper, Fast algorithms for mining association rules, co-authored with Rakesh Agrawal has acquired over 27000 citations as per Google Scholar as of July 2014, and is thus one of the most cited papers in the area of Data Mining. It won the VLDB 10-year award in 2004. His 1995 paper, Mining Sequential Patterns, also co-authored with Rakesh Agrawal, was awarded the ICDE Influential Paper Award in 2008, and his 2004 paper, Order-Preserving Encryption for Numeric Data, co-authored with Rakesh Ag...
Go to Profile#22847
Don Newcombe
#22858
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Donald Newcombe , nicknamed "Newk", was an American professional baseball pitcher in Negro leagues and Major League Baseball who played for the Newark Eagles , Brooklyn / Los Angeles Dodgers , Cincinnati Reds , and Cleveland Indians .
Go to Profile#22848
Jack Ramsay
#22859
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
John Travilla Ramsay was an American basketball coach, commonly known as "Dr. Jack" . He was best known for leading the Portland Trail Blazers to the 1977 NBA championship, and for his broadcasting work with the Indiana Pacers, the Miami Heat, and for ESPN TV and ESPN Radio. Ramsay was among the most respected coaches in NBA history and a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. He was the winner of the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award for the 2009–10 NBA season.
Go to Profile#22849
Anton Shekhovtsov
#22860
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Anton Volodymyrovich Shekhovtsov is a Ukrainian political scientist, academic and writer. He is known for his writings on the European radical right and in particular its connections to Russia. He is the editor of the Explorations of the Far Right book series at ibidem-Verlag and sits on the board of the open access journal Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies.
Go to Profile#22850
Haki R. Madhubuti
#22861
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Haki R. Madhubuti is an African-American author, educator, and poet, as well as a publisher and operator of black-themed bookstore. He is particularly recognized in connection with the founding in 1967 of Third World Press, considered the oldest independent black publishing house in the United States.
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