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
#22951
James A. Lake
#22962
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
James A. Lake is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology and of Human Genetics at UCLA. Lake is best known for the New Animal Phylogeny and for the first three-dimensional structure of the ribosome. He has also made significant contributions to understanding genome evolution across all kingdoms of life, including discovering informational and operational genes, elucidating the complexity hypothesis for gene transfer, rooting the tree of life, and understanding the early transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life.
Go to Profile#22952
Kalypso Nicolaïdis
#22963
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Kalypso Aude Nicolaïdis is a Franco-Greek academic, currently Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International Studies at Oxford University, England. She teaches in the areas of European integration, international relations, international political economy, negotiation and game theory and research methods as University Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations. In 2020, Nicolaïdis joined the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute as a full time professor.
Go to Profile#22953
P. Kevin Castel
#22964
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Peter Kevin Castel is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Education and career Born on August 5, 1950, in Jamaica, New York, Castel received a Bachelor of Science degree from St. John's University in 1972 and a Juris Doctor from St. John's University School of Law in 1975. He was a law clerk to Kevin Thomas Duffy of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York from 1975 to 1977. He was in private practice of law at Cahill Gordon & Reindel in New York City, New York, from 1977 to 2003.
Go to Profile#22954
Robert Berger
#22965
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Robert Berger is an applied mathematician, known for discovering the first aperiodic tiling using a set of 20,426 distinct tile shapes. Contributions to tiling theory The unexpected existence of aperiodic tilings, although not Berger's explicit construction of them, follows from another result proved by Berger: that the so-called domino problem is undecidable, disproving a conjecture of Hao Wang, Berger's advisor. The result is analogous to a 1962 construction used by Kahr, Moore, and Wang, to show that a more constrained version of the domino problem was undecidable.
Go to Profile#22955
William Chafe
#22966
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
William H. Chafe is an American historian, and currently Alice Mary Baldwin Professor Emeritus of History at Duke University in Durham, NC. Career Professor Chafe received his PhD from Columbia University in 1971, and is the author of numerous notable historical texts on United States history. Chafe's research interests focus on gender and racial equality. His publications include: Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal ; The Rise and Fall of the American Century: The United States from 1890 to 2008 ; The Unfinished Journey: American Since World War II ; Private Lives/Public Consequen...
Go to Profile#22956
Arto Salomaa
#22967
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Arto K. Salomaa is a Finnish mathematician and computer scientist. His research career, which spans over forty years, is focused on formal languages and automata theory. Early life and education Salomaa was born in Turku, Finland on June 6, 1934. He earned a Bachelor's degree from the University of Turku in 1954 and a PhD from the same university in 1960. Salomaa's father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Turku. Salomaa was introduced to the theory of automata and formal languages during seminars at Berkeley given by John Myhill in 1957.
Go to Profile#22957
Shun-ichi Iwasaki
#22968
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Shun-ichi Iwasaki is a Japanese engineer. He was professor at Tohoku University and then became president and of Tohoku Institute of Technology. He was also a professor at Lanzhou University . Iwasaki's pioneering work on perpendicular magnetic recording has been integral to the development of modern hard disk drives.
Go to Profile#22958
Bénédicte Savoy
#22969
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Bénédicte Savoy is a French art historian, specialising in the critical enquiry of the provenance of works of art, including looted art and other forms of illegally acquired cultural objects. Savoy is professor of modern art history at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. From 2016 to 2021, she was professor for cultural history of European Artistic Heritage from the 18th to 20th centuries at the Collège de France in Paris. Commissioned by the French president in 2018, she and economist and writer Felwine Sarr from Senegal are the authors of a report on the restitution of African cult...
Go to Profile#22959
Sam Cassell
#22970
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Samuel James Cassell Sr. is an American professional basketball coach and former point guard who serves as an assistant coach for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association . Drafted 24th overall in the 1993 NBA draft out of Florida State, Cassell played for eight different teams during his 15-year career. He was selected to the NBA All-Star Game and All-NBA Team once, both in the 2003–04 season.
Go to Profile#22960
Philip S. Abrams
#22971
Overall Influence
Philip S. Abrams is a computer science researcher who co-authored the first implementation of the programming language APL. APL In 1962, Kenneth E. Iverson published his book A Programming Language, describing a mathematical notation for describing array operations in mathematics. In 1965, Abrams and Lawrence M. Breed produced a compiler that translated expressions in Iverson's APL notation into IBM 7090 machine code. In the 1970s, he was vice president of development for Scientific Time Sharing Corporation , Inc.
Go to Profile#22961
David Steel
#22972
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
David Martin Scott Steel, Baron Steel of Aikwood, is a retired Scottish politician. Elected as Member of Parliament for Roxburgh, Selkirk, and Peebles, followed by Tweeddale, Ettrick, and Lauderdale, he served as the final leader of the Liberal Party, from 1976 to 1988. His tenure spanned the duration of the alliance with the Social Democratic Party, which began in 1981 and concluded with the formation of the Liberal Democrats in 1988.
Go to Profile#22962
Michael Aaron Rockland
#22973
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Michael Aaron Rockland is a writer and Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University. Despite the variety of his books and articles, the recurring interests in his writing—whether scholarship, memoir, journalism or fiction—are New Jersey culture and America on the international stage.
Go to Profile#22963
Ina Rilke
#22974
Overall Influence
Ina Rilke is a Mozambique-born translator who specializes in translating Dutch literature and French literature into English. Born in Mozambique, she went to school in Porto in Portugal, attending Oporto British School. She studied translation at the University of Amsterdam, where she later taught.
Go to Profile#22964
Jason Alexander
#22975
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jay Scott Greenspan , known professionally as Jason Alexander, is an American actor and comedian. A Tony Award winner, he played George Costanza in the television series Seinfeld from 1989 to 1998, for which he was nominated for seven consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards.
Go to Profile#22965
Bill Chen
#22976
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
William Chen is an American quantitative analyst, poker player, software designer, and badminton player. Biography Chen holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He was an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis triple-majoring in Physics, Math, and Computer Science, and was also a research intern in Washington University's Computer Science SURA Program where he co-wrote a technical report inventing an Argument Game. He heads the Statistical arbitrage department at Susquehanna International Group.
Go to Profile#22966
Reza Mansouri
#22977
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Reza Mansouri is an Iranian physicist and a retired professor of physics at Sharif University of Technology. Biography Reza Mansouri received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Vienna under the supervision of Roman Ulrich Sexl. He also spent five years as an Assistant Professor there. He served as Deputy Science Minister from 2001 to 2005 and is one of Iran's influential scientific policymakers. Without his efforts, Iran would not have been able to participate in international scientific collaborations such as SESAME and the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva. Mansouri has several publications focusing on scientific development in Iran.
Go to Profile#22967
Ronny Abraham
#22978
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ronny Abraham is a French academic and practitioner in the field of public international law who was elected to the International Court of Justice, to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of judge and former President Gilbert Guillaume. He served the remainder of Guillaume's which ended on 5 February 2009, and was reelected for a term extending to 2018.
Go to Profile#22968
Peer Bork
#22979
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Peer Bork is a German bioinformatician. He is Director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory site in Heidelberg, in south-west Germany. Bork received his PhD in biochemistry in 1990 from the Leipzig University and his habilitation in theoretical biophysics in 1995 from the Humboldt University of Berlin. He was appointed a Group Leader at EMBL in 1995. He has worked on the microbiomes of humans and other animals.
Go to Profile#22969
Walter Hollenweger
#22980
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Walter Jacob Hollenweger was a Swiss theologian, recognized as an expert on worldwide Pentecostalism. His two best known books are The Pentecostals and Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide .
Go to Profile#22970
Nagi Naganathan
#22981
Overall Influence
Nagi Ganapathy Naganathan is the current president of the Oregon Institute of Technology and the former dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Toledo. Education Naganathan received his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Regional Engineering College, Tiruchirappalli , master's degree from Clarkson University and his doctorate of philosophy degree from Oklahoma State University.
Go to Profile#22971
J. F. Ade Ajayi
#22982
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Jacob Festus Adeniyi Ajayi, commonly known as J. F. Ade Ajayi, was a Nigerian historian and a member of the Ibadan school, a group of scholars interested in introducing African perspectives to African history and focusing on the internal historical forces that shaped African lives. Ade Ajayi favours the use of historical continuity more often than focusing on events only as powerful agents of change that can move the basic foundations of cultures and mould them into new ones. Instead, he sees many critical events in African life, sometimes as weathering episodes which still leave some parts of the core of Africans intact.
Go to Profile#22972
Otto Forster
#22983
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Otto Forster is a German mathematician. Education and career Forster received his Diplom in 1960 from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. There he received in 1961 his doctorate. His thesis Banachalgebren stetiger Funktionen auf kompakten Rumen was supervised by Karl Stein. In 1965 Forster also completed his habilitation in Munich. After spending the academic year 1966–1967 at the Institute for Advanced Study and the academic year 1967–1968 as a substitute professor at the University of Göttingen, he became a full professor at the University of Regensburg in 1968. In 1968–1969 he was a visiting professor at the University of Geneva.
Go to Profile#22973
Jerome Frank
#22984
Overall Influence
1909 - 2005 (96 years)
Jerome David Frank was an American psychiatrist who held the post of Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. His book Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy was influential in his field. Frank's personal papers are archived in the Personal Papers Collections of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins University. He earned degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School.
Go to Profile#22974
Helen Czerski
#22985
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Helen Czerski is a British physicist and oceanographer and television presenter. She is an associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering at University College London. She was previously at the Institute for Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton.
Go to Profile#22975
Pierre de Vos
#22986
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Pierre Francois de Vos is a South African constitutional law scholar. Early life De Vos was born in Messina, Transvaal, and matriculated from Pietersburg High School in Pietersburg . His sister, Anne-Marie, is a well-known advocate.
Go to Profile#22976
Ernest S. Croot III
#22987
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Ernest S. Croot III is a mathematician and professor at the School of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology. He is known for his solution of the Erdős–Graham conjecture, and for contributing to the solution of the cap set problem.
Go to Profile#22977
David Coleman
#22988
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
David Robert Coleman OBE was a British sports commentator and television presenter who worked for the BBC for 46 years. He covered eleven Summer Olympic Games from 1960 to 2000 and six FIFA World Cups from 1962 to 1982.
Go to Profile#22978
Paul Pogba
#22989
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (33 years)
Paul Labile Pogba is a French professional footballer who plays for club Juventus and the France national team. A versatile player, he operates primarily as a central midfielder, but can be deployed as a left winger, attacking midfielder, defensive midfielder and deep-lying playmaker.
Go to Profile#22979
Bronisław Komorowski
#22990
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Bronisław Maria Komorowski is a Polish politician and historian who served as President of Poland from 2010 to 2015. Komorowski served as Minister of Defence from 2000 to 2001. As Marshal of the Sejm, Komorowski exercised the powers and duties of head of state following the death of President Lech Kaczyński in a plane crash on 10 April 2010. Komorowski was then the governing Civic Platform party's candidate in the resulting presidential election, which he won in the second round of voting on 4 July 2010. He was sworn in as president on 6 August 2010. Komorowski thus became the second person to serve on two occasions as Polish head of state since 1918, after Maciej Rataj.
Go to Profile#22980
Manuel Kauers
#22991
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Manuel Kauers is a German mathematician and computer scientist. He is working on computer algebra and its applications to discrete mathematics. He is currently professor for algebra at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and leader of the Institute for Algebra at JKU. Before that, he was affiliated with that university's Research Institute for Symbolic Computation .
Go to Profile#22981
Kim Sung-Hou
#22992
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Kim Sung-Hou is a Korean-born American structural biologist and biophysicist. Kim reported the first 3D structure of tRNA with A. Rich in 1973. He also published many papers on the structures of protein molecules including human Ras, human cyclin dependent kinase 2 and small heat shock protein. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1994. He is currently a professor in the department of chemistry at the U.C. Berkeley and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory .
Go to Profile#22982
Ruth Haas
#22993
Overall Influence
Ruth Haas is an American mathematician and professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Previously she was the Achilles Professor of Mathematics at Smith College. She received the M. Gweneth Humphreys Award from the Association for Women in Mathematics in 2015 for her mentorship of women in mathematics. Haas was named an inaugural AWM Fellow in 2017. In 2017 she was elected President of the AWM and on February 1, 2019 she assumed that position.
Go to Profile#22983
Robert Hogan
#22994
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Robert Hogan is an American personality psychologist and organizational psychologist known for developing socioanalytic theory, which fuses psychoanalytic theory, role theory, and evolutionary theory. Hogan is the president of Hogan Assessment Systems, which he cofounded with the late Joyce Hogan, PhD, in 1987. He is the author of three widely used personality inventories—the Hogan Personality Inventory; the Hogan Development Survey; and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory—along with more than 300 scholarly articles, chapters, and books.
Go to Profile#22984
Bret Anthony Johnston
#22995
Overall Influence
Bret Anthony Johnston is an American author. He wrote the novel Remember Me Like This and the story collection, Corpus Christi: Stories. He is also the editor of the non-fiction work, Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. He won the 2017 Sunday Times Short Story Award.
Go to Profile#22985
Paul Brand
#22996
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Paul Wilson Brand, was a pioneer in developing tendon transfer techniques for use in the hands of those with leprosy. He was the first physician to appreciate that leprosy is not a disease of the tissue but of the nerves: it is the loss of the sensation of pain which makes sufferers susceptible to injury and leads to tissue rotting away, especially in the extremities. Brand contributed extensively to the fields of hand surgery and hand therapy through his publications and lectures, and wrote popular autobiographical books about his childhood, his parents' missionary work, and his philosophy about the valuable properties of pain.
Go to Profile#22986
Maarten Kossmann
#22997
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Maarten Kossmann is a Dutch linguist who specializes in Berber languages. He is currently professor of Berber studies at Leiden University. Bibliography 1997. Grammaire du parler berbère de Figuig .1999. Essai sur la phonologie historique du berbère.2000. A Study of Eastern Moroccan Fairy Tales.2010. Parallel System Borrowing: Parallel morphological systems due to the borrowing of paradigms.2011. A Grammar of Ayer Tuareg .2013. The Arabic Influence on Northern Berber.2014. On substratum: The history of the focus marker d in Jijel Arabic . In: Carole de Féral, Maarten Kossmann & Mauro Tosco , In and Out of Africa.
Go to Profile#22987
Stuart Pugh
#22998
Overall Influence
1929 - 1993 (64 years)
Stuart Pugh was a British product designer from Halifax, UK. He is known for redefining Total Design , which had previously been coined by Ove Arup regarding integrated architecture and structural engineering, to instead map a structured and integrated process in the field of product design and development that included market and production processes.
Go to Profile#22988
Giovanni Azzone
#22999
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Giovanni Azzone is an Italian engineer and academic, rector of the Polytechnic University of Milan between 2010 and 2016. In 1986 Azzone graduated in industrial engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan.
Go to Profile#22989
Larry Woiwode
#23000
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Larry Alfred Woiwode was an American writer from North Dakota, where he was the state's Poet Laureate from 1995 until his death. His work appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Gentleman's Quarterly, The Partisan Review and The Paris Review. He was the author of five novels; two collections of short stories; a commentary titled "Acts"; a biography of the Gold Seal founder and entrepreneur, Harold Schafer, Aristocrat of the West; a book of poetry, Even Tide; and reviews and essays and essay-reviews that appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post Book World.
Go to Profile#22990
Joseph Bogen
#23001
Overall Influence
1926 - 2005 (79 years)
Joseph E. Bogen, M.D. was a neurophysiologist who specialized in split brain research and focused on theories of consciousness. He was a clinical professor of neurosurgery at the University of Southern California, Adjunct Professor of Psychology at UCLA, and a visiting professor at Caltech.
Go to Profile#22991
David Rindos
#23002
Overall Influence
1947 - 1996 (49 years)
David Rindos was an archaeologist. He graduated with a PhD from Cornell University and subsequently held a number of short-term positions in the US. His book on the origins of agriculture, published in 1984, was hailed as a major innovative contribution to the field. In 1989, he was recruited to the University of Western Australia, where he worked until his dismissal and involvement in the Rindos affair.
Go to Profile#22992
Rivers Cuomo
#23003
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Rivers Cuomo is an American musician. He is best known as the lead vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter of the rock band Weezer. Cuomo was born in New York City and raised in a number of Buddhist communities in the Northeastern U.S. until the age of 10, when his family settled in Connecticut. He played in several bands in Connecticut and California before forming Weezer in 1992.
Go to Profile#22993
Bruce Wallace
#23004
Overall Influence
1920 - 2015 (95 years)
Bruce Wallace was an American scientist. He was University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech. Biography Wallace was born and raised in McKean, Pennsylvania. He received his bachelor's degree in zoology from Columbia University before joining the United States Army. He served as a statistical control officer under Robert McNamara before returning to Columbia to earn his doctoral degree in 1949, studying under Theodosius Dobzhansky. He joined the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1947 and was promoted to its assistant director. In 1958, he joined the facult...
Go to Profile#22994
Kevin Buzzard
#23005
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Kevin Mark Buzzard is a British mathematician and currently a professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London. He specialises in arithmetic geometry and the Langlands program. Biography While attending the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe he competed in the International Mathematical Olympiad, where he won a bronze medal in 1986 and a gold medal with a perfect score in 1987.
Go to Profile#22995
Dolph Schayes
#23006
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Adolph Schayes was an American professional basketball player and coach in the National Basketball Association . A top scorer and rebounder, he was a 12-time NBA All-Star and a 12-time All-NBA selection. Schayes won an NBA championship with the Syracuse Nationals in 1955. He was named one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History, and was also named to the NBA 75th Anniversary Team in 2021. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1973.
Go to Profile#22996
Martin Puchner
#23007
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Martin Puchner is a literary critic and philosopher. He studied at Konstanz University, the University of Bologna, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, before receiving his Ph.D. at Harvard University. Until 2009 he held the H. Gordon Garbedian Chair at Columbia University, where he also served as co-chair of the Theater Ph.D. program. He now holds the Byron and Anita Wien Chair of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the founding director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#22997
Đuro Kurepa
#23008
Overall Influence
1907 - 1993 (86 years)
Đuro Kurepa was a Yugoslav mathematician, university professor and academic. Throughout his life, Kurepa published over 700 articles, books, papers, and reviews and over 1,000 scientific reviews. He lectured at universities across Europe, as well as those in Canada, Cuba, Iraq, Israel, and the United States, and was quoted saying "I lectured at almost each of [the] nineteen universities of [the former] Yugoslavia..."
Go to Profile#22998
Gisbert Hasenjaeger
#23009
Overall Influence
1919 - 2006 (87 years)
Gisbert F. R. Hasenjaeger was a German mathematical logician. Independently and simultaneously with Leon Henkin in 1949, he developed a new proof of the completeness theorem of Kurt Gödel for predicate logic. He worked as an assistant to Heinrich Scholz at Section IVa of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht Chiffrierabteilung, and was responsible for the security of the Enigma machine.
Go to Profile#22999
C. Ronald Kahn
#23010
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Carl Ronald Kahn is an American physician and scientist, best known for his work with insulin receptors and insulin resistance in diabetes and obesity. He is the Chief Academic Officer at Joslin Diabetes Center, the Mary K. Iacocca Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1999.
Go to Profile#23000
Pierbattista Pizzaballa
#23011
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Pierbattista Pizzaballa is an Italian prelate of the Catholic Church who has been the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem since 6 November 2020. A Franciscan friar, he served as Custos of the Holy Land from 2004 to 2016, Apostolic Administrator of the Latin Patriarchate from 2016 to 2020, and was made a cardinal by Pope Francis on 30 September 2023.
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