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
#22851
Marie Gottschalk
#22862
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Marie Gottschalk is an American political scientist and professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, known for her work on mass incarceration in the United States. Gottschalk is the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America and Caught: the Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics . Her research investigates the origins of the carceral state in the United States, the critiques of the scope and size of the carceral network, and the intersections of the carceral state with race and economic inequality.
Go to Profile#22852
John R. Harris
#22863
Overall Influence
1934 - 2018 (84 years)
John Rees Harris , Professor of Economics at Boston University, was an American economist known for his work in the field of development economics. Harris earned a PhD in economics from Northwestern University in 1967. Harris was an African Development economist. His work on labor markets and wages, embodied in the Harris-Todaro Model is a foundation of contemporary Development Economics, and was constructed based on observations of Nigerian and Kenyan labor markets. Harris directly worked for numerous governmental and non-governmental agencies including USAID, World Bank, International Labor...
Go to Profile#22853
Kristina Mladenovic
#22864
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (33 years)
Kristina "Kiki" Mladenovic is a French professional tennis player and a former world No. 1 in doubles. She is a nine-time Grand Slam champion, having won the 2016 and 2022 French Open women's doubles titles partnering Caroline Garcia, and the 2018 Australian Open, 2019 and 2020 French Opens and 2020 Australian Open with Tímea Babos. In mixed doubles, Mladenovic won the 2013 Wimbledon Championships and 2014 Australian Open alongside Daniel Nestor, and the 2022 Australian Open with Ivan Dodig. She has also reached a further six Grand Slam finals across women's and mixed doubles. Mladenovic became world No.
Go to Profile#22854
Alex Bateman
#22865
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Alexander George Bateman is a computational biologist and Head of Protein Sequence Resources at the European Bioinformatics Institute , part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge, UK. He has led the development of the Pfam biological database and introduced the Rfam database of RNA families. He has also been involved in the use of Wikipedia for community-based annotation of biological databases.
Go to Profile#22855
F. G. Bailey
#22866
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Frederick George Bailey , who published professionally as F. G. Bailey, was a British social anthropologist who spent the second half of his career in the United States at the University of California, San Diego . He received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Manchester University, working under Max Gluckman, and is closely associated with the Manchester School of social anthropology. A prolific writer of some sixteen books in anthropology, he is probably best known for his studies of local and organizational politics. He conducted fieldwork in Bisipāra, Orissa, India, and has also writte...
Go to Profile#22856
Colin Bundy
#22867
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Colin James Bundy is a South African historian, former principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford and former director of SOAS University of London. Bundy was an influential member of a generation of historians who substantially revised understanding of South African history. In particular, he wrote on South Africa's rural past from a predominantly Marxist perspective, but also deploying Africanist and underdevelopment theories. Since the mid-1990s, however, Bundy has held a series of posts in university administration. Bundy is also a trustee of the Canon Collins Educational & Legal Assista...
Go to Profile#22857
Saparmurat Niyazov
#22868
Overall Influence
1940 - 2006 (66 years)
Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov , also known as , was a Turkmen politician who ruled Turkmenistan from 1985 until his death in 2006. He was first secretary of the Turkmen Communist Party from 1985 until 1991 and supported the 1991 Soviet coup attempt. He continued to rule Turkmenistan for 15 years after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Go to Profile#22858
Frederick I. Ordway III
#22869
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Frederick Ira Ordway III was an American space scientist and author of visionary books on spaceflight. Ordway was educated at Harvard University and completed several years of graduate study at the University of Paris and other universities in Europe. He owned a large collection of original paintings depicting astronautical themes. He was a member of many leading professional societies and was the author, co-author, or editor of more than thirty books and over three hundred articles.
Go to Profile#22859
Essam Heggy
#22870
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Essam Heggy is an Egyptian space scientist. Heggy obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy and planetary science in 2002 with distinguished honors from the Paris-Sorbonne University in Paris. His main science interests in space and planetary geophysics covers Mars, the Moon, icy satellites and near-Earth objects. His research involves probing structural, hydrological and volcanic elements in terrestrial and planetary environments using different types of radar imaging and sounding techniques as well as measuring the electromagnetic properties of rocks in the radar frequency range. His research experti...
Go to Profile#22860
Brian Evenson
#22871
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Brian Evenson is an American academic and writer of both literary fiction and popular fiction, some of the latter being published under B. K. Evenson. His fiction is often described as literary minimalism, but also draws inspiration from horror, weird fiction, detective fiction, science fiction and continental philosophy. Evenson makes frequent use of dark humor and often features characters struggling with the limits and consequences of knowledge. He has also written non-fiction, and translated several books by French-language writers into English.
Go to Profile#22861
Steve Deering
#22872
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Stephen Deering is a former Fellow at Cisco Systems, where he worked on the development and standardization of architectural enhancements to the Internet Protocol. Prior to joining Cisco in 1996, he spent six years at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, engaged in research on advanced Internet technologies, including multicast routing, mobile internetworking, scalable addressing, and support for multimedia applications over the Internet. He is a former member of the Internet Architecture Board, a past chair of numerous Working Groupss of the Internet Engineering Task Force , the inventor of IP multicast, and the lead designer of the new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6.
Go to Profile#22862
Carsten Smith
#22873
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Carsten Smith is a Norwegian judge and lawyer. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo and as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Norway . After his retirement from the court, he continued to handle international arbitration cases, and worked with the United Nations.
Go to Profile#22863
Meryn Cadell
#22874
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Meryn Cadell is an American-Canadian writer and performance artist. He is an assistant professor of song lyrics and libretto writing in the Creative Writing Program at University of British Columbia.
Go to Profile#22864
Richard H. Holm
#22875
Overall Influence
1933 - 2021 (88 years)
Richard Hadley Holm was an American inorganic chemist. Biography A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Holm received his B.S. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1955 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 under the direction of F. Albert Cotton. As an independent researcher, he joined the chemistry faculty at Harvard University in 1962. He was later on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University prior to returning to Harvard in 1980. He was the Higgins Professor of Chemistry at Har...
Go to Profile#22865
George P. L. Walker
#22876
Overall Influence
1926 - 2005 (79 years)
George Patrick Leonard Walker was a British geologist who began his career studying mineralogy and later made significant contributions to volcanology. He was widely regarded as one of the pioneers of modern quantitative volcanology.
Go to Profile#22866
Karel van het Reve
#22877
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Karel van het Reve was a Dutch writer, translator and literary historian, teaching and writing on Russian literature. He was born in Amsterdam and was raised as a communist. He lost his 'faith' in his twenties and became an active critic and opponent of the Soviet regime. With his help, work of dissident Andrei Sakharov was smuggled to the west, and his Alexander Herzen Foundation published dissident Soviet literature.
Go to Profile#22867
Lüder Deecke
#22878
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Lüder Deecke in Lohe-Rickelshof, Germany is a German Austrian neurologist, neuroscientist, teacher and physician whose scientific discoveries have influenced brain research and the treatment and rehabilitation of neurological disorders.
Go to Profile#22868
Camilla Stoltenberg
#22879
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Camilla Stoltenberg is a Norwegian physician and researcher. Since 13 August 2012, she has been Director-General of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. She is the sister of former Prime Minister of Norway and General Secretary of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg.
Go to Profile#22869
John S. Lewis
#22880
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
John S. Lewis is a Professor Emeritus of planetary science at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. His interests in the chemistry and formation of the Solar System and the economic development of space have made him a leading proponent of turning potentially hazardous near-Earth objects into attractive space resources.
Go to Profile#22870
Stanisław Tołpa
#22881
Overall Influence
1901 - 1996 (95 years)
Stanislaw Tołpa was a Polish professor of botany. He has developed a method of peat preparation called by his name. Tołpa, born into a poor peasant family in eastern Poland, graduated theologian, then studied mathematics and natural sciences at Lwów University where he completed a doctorate on peatlands in Chornohora. He worked as a biology teacher in a high school in Kalisz until 1939.
Go to Profile#22871
Sharon R. Long
#22882
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Sharon Rugel Long is an American plant biologist. She is the Steere-Pfizer Professor of Biological Science in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, and the Principal Investigator of the Long Laboratory at Stanford.
Go to Profile#22872
Missy Cummings
#22883
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Mary Louise "Missy" Cummings is an American academic who is a professor at Duke University and director of Duke's Humans and Autonomy Laboratory. She was one of the United States Navy's first female fighter pilots. In November 2021, Dr. Cummings joined the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration .
Go to Profile#22873
Laurence Martin
#22884
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Sir Laurence Woodward Martin was a British academic who was the vice-chancellor of Newcastle University from 1978 to 1990. Life and career Martin was born on 30 July 1928 in Cornwall. Educated at St Austell Grammar School, Christ's College, Cambridge and Yale University, Martin joined the Royal Air Force as a Flying Officer in 1948. He married Betty Parnall in 1956 with whom he had two children.
Go to Profile#22874
Richard Kosolapov
#22885
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Richard Ivanovich Kosolapov was a Soviet and Russian scientist, author, social philosopher, doctor of philosophy and journalist. He was a professor at the Moscow State University . Biography Kosolapov was born in Novonikolayevsky, Volgograd Oblast. He graduated from the Moscow State University Faculty of Philosophy in 1955. He later went there to graduate school, receiving his Candidate of Sciences in Philosophical Sciences in 1962, and subsequently returned to earn a Doctor of Sciences in Philosophical Sciences in 1971. He also taught on the Faculty of Philosophy from 1961 to 1964. In 1974, ...
Go to Profile#22875
Paul Ridker
#22886
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Paul M. Ridker is a cardiovascular epidemiologist and biomedical researcher. He is currently the Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine at Harvard University and Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he directs the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention. Ridker also holds an appointment as Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#22876
Maria Kovacs
#22887
Overall Influence
Maria Kovacs is an American psychologist and academic. She is a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She is the developer of the Children's Depression Inventory.
Go to Profile#22877
Ann M. Blair
#22888
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Ann M. Blair is an American historian, and the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University. She specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe , with an emphasis on France. Her interests include the history of the book and of reading, the history of the disciplines and of scholarship, and the history of interactions between science and religion. She is most widely known for being the author of the bestselling book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age . Blair was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2...
Go to Profile#22878
Robert G. Roeder
#22889
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Robert G. Roeder is an American biochemist. He is known as a pioneer scientist in eukaryotic transcription. He discovered three distinct nuclear RNA polymerases in 1969 and characterized many proteins involved in the regulation of transcription, including basic transcription factors and the first mammalian gene-specific activator over five decades of research. He is the recipient of the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 2000, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2003, and the Kyoto Prize in 2021. He currently serves as Arnold and Mabel Beckman Professor and Head of ...
Go to Profile#22879
Carles Puyol
#22890
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Carles Puyol Saforcada is a Spanish former professional footballer who played his entire career for Barcelona. He mainly played as a centre-back, but he could also play in either full-back position, mostly as a right-back. Regarded by many pundits, for his tenacious play, tackling and leadership, Puyol has been regarded among the greatest defenders of all time.
Go to Profile#22880
Mary Blue
#22891
Overall Influence
Mary Elizabeth Blue is an American neurobiologist and computational neurologist. She is an associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a research scientist in the neuroscience laboratory at Kennedy Krieger Institute.
Go to Profile#22881
Jan Hoeijmakers
#22892
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jan Hendrik Jozef Hoeijmakers is a Dutch molecular biologist, biochemist, and molecular geneticist. Education and career Hoeijmakers studied biology from 1969 at the Radboud University Nijmegen with receiving his MSc degree in molecular biology in 1975 . At the University of Amsterdam he performed his doctoral research from 1975 to 1979 and then was a lecturer at the department of microbiology from 1979 to 1981. He obtained a PhD in molecular medicine in 1981 from the University of Amsterdam under Piet Borst with dissertation Trypanosomes: Kinetoplast DNA and Antigenic Variation. At Erasmus ...
Go to Profile#22882
Michael Scaife
#22893
Overall Influence
1948 - 2001 (53 years)
Michael Scaife was a British biologist, psychologist, and reader at the University of Sussex, known for his early work in developmental psychology and his later interdisciplinary study in cognitive and computing sciences.
Go to Profile#22883
Joel Kotkin
#22894
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Joel Kotkin is a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University in Orange, California. He writes about demographic, social, and economic trendss in the U.S. and internationally. He is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast and the conservative magazine The Spectator.
Go to Profile#22884
Lee Si-chen
#22895
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Lee Si-chen , is a Taiwanese engineer specializing in semiconductors, a researcher in amorphous silicon in the early development in Taiwan, and an IEEE Fellow. He has been a professor of electrical engineering since 1982 and the president of National Taiwan University from 2005 to 2013.
Go to Profile#22885
Muhiuddin Khan Alamgir
#22896
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Muhiuddin Khan Alamgir is a Bangladeshi politician. He is a Jatiya Sangsad member representing the Chandpur-1 constituency since 2008, and was Minister of Home Affairs from 2011 to 2013. He is also an economist, civil servant, and writer in Bangladesh.
Go to Profile#22886
Gerardo Martino
#22897
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Gerardo Daniel "Tata" Martino is an Argentine professional football coach and former player who currently serves as the head coach for Inter Miami of Major League Soccer. Martino played mostly for Newell's Old Boys in his native Rosario. He holds the record of appearances with the team playing a total of 505 matches in all official competitions. He was also selected in a fan's poll as Newell's best player throughout the club's history.
Go to Profile#22887
Sali Berisha
#22898
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Sali Ram Berisha is an Albanian conservative politician who served as the president of Albania from 1992 to 1997 and 32nd prime minister from 2005 to 2013. He has been banned from entering the United States and the United Kingdom after being accused of "involvement in significant corruption" and links to organised crime groups and criminals that pose a "risk to public safety in Albania".
Go to Profile#22888
Julia Görges
#22899
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Julia Görges is a German former professional tennis player. A former top-ten singles player, she was ranked as high as No. 9 in the world on 20 August 2018, and was ranked inside the top 15 in doubles, peaking at world No. 12 on 22 August 2016. She won seven singles and five doubles titles on the WTA Tour , as well as six singles and six doubles titles on the ITF Circuit.
Go to Profile#22889
June Pilcher
#22900
Overall Influence
June J. Pilcher is Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Clemson University. Her specialization is the study of sleep habits and the effects of sleep deprivation in human beings. She was named a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2010, and from 2016 through 2018 she was a Distinguished Lecturer of Sigma Xi. In 2018, the National Academy of Sciences honored her with the Jefferson Science Fellowship which allowed her to work at the United States Agency for International Development. In 2019, she hosted a seminar at the University of Nebraska at Kearney Science Café ...
Go to Profile#22890
David Magleby
#22901
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David Blyth Magleby is an American political scientist and distinguished professor of political science at Brigham Young University and formerly the dean of the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences at that institution. He is an expert on direct democracy and campaign finance.
Go to Profile#22891
Dries van Agt
#22902
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Andreas Antonius Maria "Dries" van Agt is a Dutch politician and diplomat of the Catholic People's Party and later its successor the Christian Democratic Appeal party and jurist who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 19 December 1977 until 4 November 1982.
Go to Profile#22892
Alice Beck Kehoe
#22903
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Alice Beck Kehoe is a feminist anthropologist and archaeologist. She has done considerable field research among Native American peoples in the upper plains of the US and Canada, and has authored research volumes on Native American archaeology and Native American history. She is also the author of several general anthropology and archaeology textbooks.
Go to Profile#22893
David Lyon
#22904
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David Lyon is a retired Scottish sociologist who directed the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He previously held a Queen’s Research Chair position and appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Faculty of Law at Queen's University.
Go to Profile#22894
Carl Weber
#22905
Overall Influence
1925 - 2016 (91 years)
Carl Weber was a theatre director and a professor of drama at Stanford University. He was Bertolt Brecht's directing assistant and a dramaturg and actor at the Berliner Ensemble theatre company in 1952. After Brecht's death in 1956, Weber remained as a director of the company. He directed in major theatres in Germany, America, Canada and elsewhere since 1957. He produced English translations of German dramatist Heiner Müller.
Go to Profile#22895
Elijah Millgram
#22906
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Elijah "Lije" Millgram is an American philosopher. He is E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His research specialties include practical reason and moral philosophy. Elijah Millgram received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991. He taught at Princeton University and Vanderbilt University before moving to Utah. He is a former fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow.
Go to Profile#22896
Peter Swerling
#22907
Overall Influence
1929 - 2000 (71 years)
Peter Swerling was one of the most influential radar theoreticians in the second half of the 20th century. He is best known for the class of statistically "fluctuating target" scattering models he developed at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s to characterize the performance of pulsed radar systems, referred to as Swerling Targets I, II, III, and IV in the literature of radar. Swerling also contributed to the optimal estimation of orbits of satellites and trajectories of missiles, anticipating the development of the Kalman filter. He also founded two companies, one of which continues hi...
Go to Profile#22897
Aminatta Forna
#22908
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Aminatta Forna, OBE, is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest, and four novels: Ancestor Stones , The Memory of Love , The Hired Man and Happiness . Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Director and Lann...
Go to Profile#22898
Caroline van Eck
#22909
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Caroline Alexandra van Eck is a Dutch art historian and academic, specialising in the art and architecture of the early modern period. Since 2016, she has been Professor of Art History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. She was Professor of Art and Architecture before 1800 at Leiden University from 2006 to 2016, and previously taught at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of Groningen. She was the 2017 Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#22899
Helmut Wielandt
#22910
Overall Influence
1910 - 2001 (91 years)
Helmut Wielandt was a German mathematician who worked on permutation groups. He was born in Niedereggenen, Lörrach, Germany. He gave a plenary lecture Entwicklungslinien in der Strukturtheorie der endlichen Gruppen at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1958 at Edinburgh and was an Invited Speaker with talk Bedingungen für die Konjugiertheit von Untergruppen endlicher Gruppen at the ICM in 1962 in Stockholm.
Go to Profile#22900
Margaret Murnane
#22911
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Margaret Mary Murnane NAS AAA&S is an Irish physicist, who served as a distinguished professor of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, having moved there in 1999, with past positions at the University of Michigan and Washington State University. She is currently Director of the STROBE NSF Science and Technology Center, and is among the foremost active researchers in laser science and technology. Her interests and research contributions span topics including atomic, molecular, and optical physics, nanoscience, laser technology, materials and chemical dynamics, plasma physics, and imaging science.
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