Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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List of the most influential people

#23151

J. Jayalalithaa

#23162

Overall Influence

1948 - 2016 (68 years)

Jayaram Jayalalithaa was an Indian politician and actress who served as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for more than fourteen years over six terms between 1991 and 2016. From 9 February 1989 to 5 December 2016, she was the 5th and longest-serving general secretary of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam , a Dravidian party whose cadre revered her as their "" and "" .

#23152

Akira Toriyama

#23163

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

is a Japanese manga artist and character designer. He first achieved mainstream recognition for his highly successful manga series Dr. Slump, before going on to create Dragon Ball and acting as a character designer for several popular video games such as the Dragon Quest series, Chrono Trigger, and Blue Dragon. Toriyama is regarded as one of the authors who changed the history of manga, as his works are highly influential and popular, particularly Dragon Ball, which many manga artists cite as a source of inspiration.

#23153

F. John Lewis

#23164

Overall Influence

1916 - 1993 (77 years)

Floyd John Lewis was an American surgeon who performed the first successful open heart operation, closing an atrial septal defect in a 5-year-old girl, on 2 September 1952. For the next 3 years, Lewis and colleagues operated on 60 patients with atrial septal defects using hypothermia and inflow occlusion. He was best friends with C. Walton Lillehei and they worked together at the University of Minnesota.

#23154

Lygia Pape

#23165

Overall Influence

1927 - 2004 (77 years)

Lygia Pape was a Brazilian visual artist, sculptor, engraver, and filmmaker, who was a key figure in the Concrete movement and a later co-founder of the Neo-Concrete Movement in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s. Along with Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, she was an important artist in the expansion of contemporary art in Brazil and pushed geometric art to include aspects of interaction and to engage with ethical and political themes.

#23155

Renée Zellweger

Renée Zellweger

#23166

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

Renée Kathleen Zellweger is an American actress. The recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards, she was one of the world's highest-paid actresses by 2007.

#23156

Mikhail Shvydkoy

#23167

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Mikhail Yefimovich Shvydkoy is a Soviet and Russian theater critic, drama, social and political activist. Laureate of the State Prize of Russia. The artistic director of the Moscow theater musical, supervisor of the Faculty of the Graduate School of cultural policy and management in the humanitarian sphere, Moscow State University.

#23157

Len Sassaman

#23168

Overall Influence

1980 - 2011 (31 years)

Leonard Harris Sassaman was an American technologist, information privacy advocate, and the maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and operator of the randseed remailer. Much of his career gravitated towards cryptography and protocol development.

#23158

Elizabeth Warrington

#23169

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Elizabeth Kerr Warrington FRS is a British neuropsychologist specialised in the study of dementia. She holds a PhD in Psychology visual processing and is now an emeritus professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University College London. She formerly worked as the Head of the Department of Neuropsychology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery where she is also a member of the Dementia Research Centre. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986.

#23159

Michael N. Schmitt

#23170

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Michael N. Schmitt is an American international law scholar specializing in international humanitarian law, use of force issues, and the international law applicable to cyberspace. He is Professor of Public International Law at the University of Reading, the G. Norman Lieber Distinguished Scholar at the Lieber Institute of the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the Charles H. Stockton Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the US Naval War College.

#23160

Charles L. Glaser

#23171

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Charles Louis Glaser is a scholar of international relations theory, known for his work on defensive realism, as well as nuclear strategy. He is the founding director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, as well as a professor of political science and international affairs. His best-known book, Rational Theory of International Politics: The Logic of Competition and Cooperation received an Honorable Mention for 2011 Best Book from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies...

#23161

Seweryn Bialer

#23172

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Seweryn Bialer was a German-born American academic. He was emeritus professor of political science at Columbia University and an expert on the Communist parties of the Soviet Union and Poland. He was the Director of Columbia's Research Institute on International Change.

#23162

Lenore Terr

#23173

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Lenore C. Terr is a psychiatrist and author known for her research into childhood trauma. Terr graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School with an MD. She is the winner of the Blanche Ittleson Award for her research on childhood trauma. Terr is noted for her work studying the after-effects of the 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping on the 26 children who were buried alive for 16 hours after being kidnapped from a bus.

#23163

Vinciane Despret

#23174

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher of science, associate professor, at the University of Liège, Belgium. Biography Vinciane Despret first graduated in philosophy. She then studied psychology and graduated in 1991. She is most known for having provided a reflexive account on ethologists, observing babblers in the Negev desert and the way they would interpret those birds' complex dance moves.

#23164

Ian Hutchinson

#23175

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Ian Horner Hutchinson is a nuclear engineer and physicist who is currently Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has made a number of important contributions to the fields of nuclear engineering and nuclear physics and has also written about the philosophy of science and the relationship between religion and science.

#23165

Aamer Hussein

#23176

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Aamer Hussein is a Pakistani critic and short story writer Early life and education Hussein grew up in Karachi, where he attended Lady Jennings School and the Convent of Jesus and Mary. He spent most summers with his mother's family in India. He studied in Ooty, South India, for two years before moving to London in 1970. Hussein is fluent in seven languages: English, Urdu, Hindi, French, Italian, Spanish and Persian.

#23166

Edgar S. Cahn

#23177

Overall Influence

1935 - 2022 (87 years)

Edgar Stuart Cahn was an American law professor, a counsel and speech writer to Robert F. Kennedy, and the creator of TimeBanking. He co-founded the Antioch School of Law with his late wife, Jean Camper Cahn. Cahn has also held positions at the University of Miami School of Law, Florida International University, the London School of Economics, and a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. In later life, Cahn devoted most of his professional effort to TimeBanks USA, now TimeBanks.Org, a 5013 nonprofit organization he established in 1995.

#23167

Clive Coleman

#23178

Overall Influence

Clive Coleman is an English barrister turned journalist, who, from 2010 to 2020, has been the BBC News Legal Correspondent. He is also a playwright, film and sitcom writer. Early Years Coleman grew up in North London attending Dame Alice Owen's School and then University College School. He studied English Literature at York University from 1981–84, before taking a Law conversion course and then the Bar Finals in 1985 to qualify as a barrister.

#23168

Priyamvada Natarajan

Priyamvada Natarajan

#23179

Overall Influence

1985 - Present (41 years)

Priyamvada Natarajan is a professor in the departments of astronomy and physics at Yale University. She is noted for her work in mapping dark matter and dark energy, particularly with her work in gravitational lensing, and in models describing the assembly and accretion histories of supermassive black holes. She authored the book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos.

#23169

Harold Kerzner

#23180

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Harold Kerzner is an American engineer, management consultant, Emeritus Professor of Systems Management at Baldwin Wallace University, and Sr. Executive Director for Project Management at the International Institute for Learning, known for his work in the field of project management.

#23170

David Blunkett

#23181

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

David Blunkett, Baron Blunkett, is a British Labour Party politician who has been a Member of the House of Lords since 2015, and previously served as the Member of Parliament for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough from 1987 to 2015, when he stood down. Blind since birth, and coming from a poor family in one of Sheffield's most deprived districts, he rose to become Education and Employment Secretary, Home Secretary and Work and Pensions Secretary in Tony Blair's Cabinet following Labour's victory in the 1997 general election.

#23171

Maxine D. Brown

Maxine D. Brown

#23182

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Maxine D. Brown is an American computer scientist and retired director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago . Along with Tom DeFanti and Bruce McCormick, she co-edited the 1987 NSF report, Visualization in Scientific Computing, which defined the field of scientific visualization.

#23172

Leland Ryken

#23183

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Leland Ryken is professor emeritus of English at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He has contributed a number of works to the study of classic literature from the Christian perspective, including editing the comprehensive volume on Christian writing on literature The Christian Imagination. He was the literary stylist for the English Standard Version of the Bible, published by Crossway Bibles in 2001. He is the author of How to Read the Bible as Literature and Words of Delight: A Literary Introduction to the Bible, as well as co-editor of Ryken's Bible Handbook and the ESV Literary Study Bible .

#23173

Junji Kinoshita

#23184

Overall Influence

1914 - 2006 (92 years)

Junji Kinoshita was the foremost playwright of modern drama in postwar Japan. He was also a translator and scholar of Shakespeare's plays. Kinoshita’s achievements were not limited to Japan. He helped to promote theatrical exchanges between Japan and the People’s Republic of China, and he traveled broadly in Europe and Asia. In addition to his international work, Kinoshita joined various societies that focused on the study of folktales and the Japanese language.

#23174

John Endler

#23185

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

John Arthur Endler is a Canadian ethologist and evolutionary biologist noted for his work on the adaptation of vertebrates to their unique perceptual environments, and the ways in which animal sensory capacities and colour patterns co-evolve.

#23175

Mark Norell

#23186

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Mark Allen Norell is an American paleontologist, acknowledged as one of the most important living vertebrate paleontologists. He is currently the chairman of paleontology and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. He is best known as the discoverer of the first theropod embryo and for the description of feathered dinosaurs. Norell is credited with the naming of the genera Apsaravis, Byronosaurus, Citipati, Tsaagan, and Achillobator. His work regularly appears in major scientific journals and was listed by Time magazine as one of the ten most significant science stori...

#23176

S. Mark Young

#23187

Overall Influence

S. Mark Young is a professor and writer focused on management accounting and control, particularly in relation to the entertainment industry. He was born in Sydney, Australia and attended Homebush Primary and High Schools. After he and his family moved to the United States, he graduated from Thomas Worthington High School. He holds an A.B. degree in Economics from Oberlin College, a Master's of Accounting degree from The Ohio State University, and holds a Ph.D. in Accounting from the University of Pittsburgh.

#23177

Jin Au Kong

#23188

Overall Influence

1942 - 2008 (66 years)

Jin Au Kong was an American expert in applied electromagnetics. He was a 74th-generation lineal descendant of the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius . Biography Kong was born in Gaochun, Jiangsu Province. He received his BS from the National Taiwan University in 1962, his MS from the National Chiao Tung University in 1965, and his PhD from Syracuse University in 1968. His PhD thesis supervisor was David K. Cheng. Kong did his postdoctoral research at Syracuse University as well from 1968 to 1969. From 1969 to 1971, he was the Vinton Hayes Postdoctoral Fellow of Engineering.

#23178

John E. Savage

#23189

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

John Edmund Savage is an American computer scientist and An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Brown University. At his retirement in 2019, Savage was one of the longest-serving faculty members in Brown's history.

#23179

John Watson

#23190

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

John Marshall Watson, is a British former racing driver and current commentator from Northern Ireland. He competed in Formula One, winning five Grands Prix and was third in the 1982 championship. He also competed in the World Sportscar Championship finishing second in the 1987 championship. After his retirement from motorsport, he became a commentator for Eurosport's coverage of Formula One from 1989 to 1996. He currently commentates on the GT World Challenge Europe and commentated on the 2022 Miami F1 Grand Prix for F1TV.

#23180

Martin Peters

#23191

Overall Influence

1943 - 2019 (76 years)

Martin Stanford Peters was an English footballer and manager. As a member of the England team which won the 1966 FIFA World Cup, he scored the second of England's four goals in the final against West Germany. He also played in the 1970 World Cup. Born in Plaistow, Essex, he played club football for West Ham United, Tottenham Hotspur, Norwich City and Sheffield United. He briefly managed Sheffield United before retiring from professional football in 1981.

#23181

Michelle Yeoh

#23192

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Michelle Yeoh Choo Kheng is a Malaysian actress. Credited as Michelle Khan in her early films in Hong Kong, she rose to fame in the 1990s after starring in Hong Kong action films where she performed her own stunts. These roles include Yes, Madam ; Magnificent Warriors ; Police Story 3: Supercop ; The Heroic Trio ; and Holy Weapon .

#23182

Chandler Davis

#23193

Overall Influence

1926 - 2022 (96 years)

Horace Chandler Davis was an American-Canadian mathematician, writer, educator, and left-wing political activist. The socialist magazine Jacobin described Davis as "an internationally esteemed mathematician, a minor science fiction writer of note, and among the most celebrated political prisoners in the United States during the years of the high Cold War."

#23183

José Carreras

#23194

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Josep Maria Carreras Coll , better known as José Carreras , is a Spanish-Argentine operatic tenor who is particularly known for his performances in the operas of Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini. Born in Barcelona, he made his debut on the operatic stage at 11 as Trujamán in Manuel de Falla's El retablo de Maese Pedro, and went on to a career that encompassed over 60 roles, performing in the world's leading opera houses and on numerous recordings. He gained fame with a wider audience as one of the Three Tenors, with Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, in a series of large concerts from 1990 to 2003.

#23184

Alastair G. W. Cameron

#23195

Overall Influence

1925 - 2005 (80 years)

Alastair G. W. Cameron was an American–Canadian astrophysicist and space scientist who was an eminent staff member of the Astronomy department of Harvard University. He was one of the founders of the field of nuclear astrophysics, advanced the theory that the Moon was created by the giant impact of a Mars-sized object with the early Earth, and was an early adopter of computer technology in astrophysics.

#23185

Sandro Magister

#23196

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Sandro Magister is an Italian journalist who writes for the magazine L'espresso. Magister specializes in religious news, in particular on the Catholic Church and the Vatican. He has written two books on the political history of the Italian episcopate: "Italian Church: Vatican Politics and Italy 1943-1978" and "Extraparliamentary Church: The Triumph of the Pulpit". He also manages the website Chiesa on the topic of modern ecclesiastical affairs.

#23186

David E. Muller

#23197

Overall Influence

1924 - 2008 (84 years)

David Eugene Muller was an American mathematician and computer scientist. He was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of Illinois , after which he became an emeritus professor, and was an adjunct professor of mathematics at the New Mexico State University . Muller received his BS in 1947 and his PhD in 1951 in physics from Caltech; an honorary PhD was conferred by the University of Paris in 1989. He was the inventor of the Muller C-element , a device used to implement asynchronous circuitry in electronic computers. He also co-invented the Reed–Muller codes. He discovered the codes, and Irving S.

#23187

Koldo Zuazo

#23198

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Koldo Zuazo is a Basque linguist, professor at the University of the Basque Country and specialist in Basque language dialectology and sociolinguistics. The dialects of the Basque language Since 1998, Zuazo's work on the Basque dialects has drawn a new classification and a new map of these dialects—this has been a revolution in a field where few changes were made since Louis Lucien Bonaparte's works .

#23188

Abel Idowu Olayinka

Abel Idowu Olayinka

#23199

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Abel Idowu Olayinka is a Nigerian professor of applied geophysics. He is a former deputy vice chancellor and former vice chancellor of the University of Ibadan. He is also the president of the West African Research and Innovation Management Association.

#23189

Vlatko Vedral

#23200

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Vlatko Vedral is a Serbian-born physicist and Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Until the summer of 2022 he also held a joint appointment at the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. He is known for his research on the theory of quantum entanglement and quantum information theory. He has published numerous research papers, which are regularly cited, in quantum mechanics and quantum information, and was awarded the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2007. He has held a le...

#23190

John Warner

#23201

Overall Influence

1927 - 2021 (94 years)

John William Warner III was an American lawyer and politician who served as the United States Secretary of the Navy from 1972 to 1974 and as a five-term Republican U.S. Senator from Virginia from 1979 to 2009. Warner served as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1999 to 2001, and again from 2003 to 2007. He also served as the Chairman of the Senate Rules Committee from 1995 to 1999.

#23191

Tatyana Chernigovskaya

Tatyana Chernigovskaya

#23202

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Tatyana Vladimirovna Chernigovskaya is a Soviet and Russian scientist in the field of neuroscience, psycholinguistics and theory of mind, a Honored Worker of Science . On her initiative in 2000 was first open training specialization "Psycholinguistics" , Member of the Council on Science and Education under President of the Russian Federation.

#23192

Tan Qixiang

#23203

Overall Influence

1911 - 1992 (81 years)

Tan Qixiang was a Chinese geographer and historian who is considered a founder of the field of historical geography in Modern China. His magnum opus, the eight-volume The Historical Atlas of China, was published between 1982 and 1988. He was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1981.

#23193

Gerald Freedman

#23204

Overall Influence

1927 - 2020 (93 years)

Gerald Alan Freedman was an American theatre director, librettist, and lyricist, and a college dean. Life and career Freedman was born in Lorain, Ohio, the son of Fannie , a history teacher, and Barnie B. Freedman, a dentist. His parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. He was educated at Northwestern University under Alvina Krause and others. He earned both BA and MA degrees there. He began his career as assistant director of such projects as Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, and Gypsy. His first credit as a Broadway director was the 1961 musical The Gay Life. Additional Broadway credits in...

#23194

Linda Lawton

#23205

Overall Influence

Linda Lawton, Ph.D., FRSE is a Scottish researcher in microcystins and toxins produced by cyanobacteria and has researched into the impact of the so-called 'blue-green algae" from drinking water supply. Her detection method is now used worldwide and was used by the World Health Organization to develop drinking water safety standards, scientists are trained in it from Sri Lanka to fish farms in Scotland, and Lawton is investigating potential cancer treatments and positive uses such as digesting waste plastics in microbiology. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2021. La...

#23195

Jack Sepkoski

#23206

Overall Influence

1948 - 1999 (51 years)

Joseph John Sepkoski Jr. was a University of Chicago paleontologist. Sepkoski studied the fossil record and the diversity of life on Earth. Sepkoski and David Raup produced a new understanding of extinction events, by developing a statistical approach to the study of taxonomic diversification. They suggested that the extinction of dinosaurs 66 mya was part of a cycle of mass extinctions that may have occurred every 26 million years. But their most important contribution was the identification of the "Big 5" mass extinctions, events that have shaped the evolution of life on earth.

#23196

David Milstein

#23207

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

David Milstein is an Israeli chemist studying homogeneous catalysis. Education and early life Milstein was born in 1947 in Ulm, Germany where his family took refuge after being displaced during the Holocaust. With his family, he immigrated to the newly founded state of Israel at the age of two. Milstein was first fascinated by chemistry when attending high school in the town of Rehovot where “an enthusiastic, old-fashioned chemistry teacher who didn’t care much about orbitals” inspired him “with vivid, thought-provoking experiments”. Pursuing his interest, Milstein received B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D.

#23197

Dennis J. Selkoe

#23208

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Dennis J. Selkoe is an American physician known for his research into the molecular basis of Alzheimer's disease. In 1985 he became Co-Director of the Center for Neurological Diseases and from 1990, Vincent and Stella Coates Professor of Neurological Diseases at Harvard Medical School. He is also a Fellow of the AAAS and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

#23198

Joanna Lumley

#23209

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Dame Joanna Lamond Lumley is a British actress, presenter, former model, author, television producer, and activist. She has won two BAFTA TV Awards for her role as Patsy Stone in the BBC sitcom Absolutely Fabulous , and was nominated for the 2011 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for the Broadway revival of La Bête. In 2013, she received the Special Recognition Award at the National Television Awards, and in 2017 she was honoured with the BAFTA Fellowship award.

#23199

Kurt Benirschke

#23210

Overall Influence

1924 - 2018 (94 years)

Kurt Benirschke was a German-American pathologist, geneticist and expert on the placenta and reproduction in humans and myriad mammalian species. At the San Diego Zoo, he created the world's first frozen zoo for the cryopreservation of genetic material from endangered species.

#23200

David Tall

#23211

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

David Orme Tall is Emeritus Professor in Mathematical Thinking at the University of Warwick. One of his early influential works is the joint paper with Vinner "Concept image and concept definition in mathematics with particular reference to limits and continuity". The "concept image" is a notion in cognitive theory. It consists of all the cognitive structure in the individual's mind that is associated with a given concept. Tall and Vinner point out that the concept image may not be globally coherent, and may have aspects which are quite different from the formal concept definition. They study...

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