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
#23201
Maria Kirilenko
#23212
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Maria Yuryevna Kirilenko is a Russian former professional tennis player. A junior Grand Slam champion at the 2002 US Open at the age of 15, she went on to become a top-ten player in both singles and doubles. Kirilenko won six WTA Tour singles titles and 12 doubles titles. She was a three-time major singles quarterfinalist , a semifinalist at the 2012 London Olympics , and reached a career-high ranking of world No. 10, on 10 June 2013. In women's doubles, she became ranked as high as No. 5 in the world on 24 October 2011, and reached two major finals, at the 2011 Australian Open with Azarenka and the 2012 French Open with compatriot Nadia Petrova.
Go to Profile#23202
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
#23213
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman is an English political theorist, academic, social commentator, and Labour life peer in the House of Lords. He is a senior lecturer in Political Theory at London Metropolitan University, Director of its Faith and Citizenship Programme and a columnist for the New Statesman, UnHerd, Tablet and Spiked. He is best known as a founder of Blue Labour, a term he coined in 2009.
Go to Profile#23203
Mary L. Dudziak
#23214
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mary Louise Dudziak , is an American legal theorist, civil rights historian, educator, and a leading foreign policy and international relations expert. She is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University.
Go to Profile#23204
Junichi Watanabe
#23215
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
Jun'ichi Watanabe was a Japanese writer. Biography Jun'ichi Watanabe was born in Kamisunagawa, Hokkaido, Japan. His starting point as a literate was the death of a classmate who was his first love in high school. He published his first works while still studying at Sapporo Medical University, where he graduated in 1958. He specialised in orthopedic surgery, while at the same time writing medical, historical, and biographical novels. Following the scandal about the first heart transplant operation performed in Japan in 1968, which became known as the "Wada incident", Watanabe left his medical p...
Go to Profile#23205
Toby Litt
#23216
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Toby Litt is an English writer and academic based at the University of Southampton. Life Litt was born in Ampthill, England, in 1968. He was educated at Bedford Modern School, read English at Worcester College, Oxford and studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where he was taught by Malcolm Bradbury.
Go to Profile#23206
Sheizaf Rafaeli
#23217
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Sheizaf Rafaeli is an Israeli researcher, scholar of computer-mediated communication and newspaper columnist. He is professor and dean at the School of Management Haifa GSB, University of Haifa Israel and additionally director of the Center for Internet Research Center for Internet Research and the Games for Managers Project. In the 1980s and 1990s he served as head of the Information Systems area at the Graduate School of business in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a senior research fellow at the Samuel Neaman Institute for National Policy, Technion.
Go to Profile#23207
Geremie Barmé
#23218
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Geremie R. Barmé is an Australian sinologist and film-maker on modern and traditional China. He was formerly Director, Australian Centre on China in the World and Chair Professor of Chinese History at Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific in Canberra.
Go to Profile#23208
Chadli Bendjedid
#23219
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Chadli Bendjedid was the third President of Algeria and an Algerian Nationalist. His presidential term of office ran from 9 February 1979 to 11 January 1992. A combatant during the Algerian War, he was a member of the Revolutionary Council from 1965 to 1976 and was appointed Colonel in 1969.
Go to Profile#23209
Arun Kumar Sharma
#23220
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Arun Kumar Sharma , popularly known as AKS, was an Indian cytogeneticist, cell biologist, cytochemist and a former Sir Rashbehary Ghose Professor and Head of the Department of Botany at the University of Kolkata, College of Science and Technology. Considered by many as the father of Indian cytology, he headed the Centre for Advanced Study on Cell and Chromosome at the university and is known for his contributions to the studies on the physical and chemical nature of chromosomes. A Jawaharlal Nehru fellow, he is a recipient of several honors including the Om Prakash Bhasin Award and the VASVIK Industrial Research Award.
Go to Profile#23210
Larisa Maksimova
#23221
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Larisa Lvovna Maksimova is a Russian mathematical logician known for her research in non-classical logic. Education and career Maksimova was born on November 5, 1943, in Kochenyovo, the daughter of two biologists who had temporarily moved there from Tomsk State University to escape the war. She grew up in Novosibirsk, where her parents became geographers at the Novosibirsk Pedagogical Institute. She studied mechanics and mathematics at Novosibirsk State University, publishing her first paper on Wilhelm Ackermann's axioms for strict implication in relevance logic in 1964 and graduating in 1965...
Go to Profile#23211
Bogdan Bogdanov
#23222
Overall Influence
1940 - 2016 (76 years)
Bogdan Bogdanov , 1940-2016, is a Bulgarian classical philologist, culturologist and translator. Bogdanov is the president of New Bulgarian University and chairman of the Board of Trustees of NBU. He is professor of ancient Greek literature and culture at the University of Sofia.
Go to Profile#23212
Elliott Gould
#23223
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Elliott Gould is an American actor. In a career spanning over seven decades, he began acting in Hollywood films during the 1960s. Gould's breakthrough role was in the film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice , for which he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The following year, he starred as Capt. Trapper John McIntyre in the Robert Altman film M*A*S*H , for which he received BAFTA Award and Golden Globe Award nominations. Gould continued working with Altman in The Long Goodbye and California Split . Other notable film roles include Alan Arkin's Little Murders , Ingm...
Go to Profile#23213
Tim Howes
#23224
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Tim Howes is a software engineer, entrepreneur and author. He is the co-creator of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol , the Internet standard for accessing directory servers. He co-founded enterprise software company Opsware, internet browser company Rockmelt, and children's education company, Know Yourself. He has co-authored two books, several Internet RFCs, and holds several patents.
Go to Profile#23214
Chris Barker
#23225
Overall Influence
Chris Barker is the American chair professor of linguistics at New York University, famous for his discovery of the universal iota combinator and his continuation-based approach to scope. Barker received a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale College in 1983, and both a bachelor’s degree in computer and information sciences in 1986, and a doctorate in linguistics in 1991 from the University of California, Santa Cruz
Go to Profile#23215
Eddie Kramer
#23226
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Edwin H. Kramer is a South African-born recording producer and engineer. He has collaborated with several artists now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, including Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, the Kinks, Kiss, John Mellencamp, and Carlos Santana, as well as records for other well-known artists in various genres.
Go to Profile#23216
Ariel Merari
#23227
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Ariel Merari is a retired Israeli professor and terrorism expert. Biography He received a B.A. degree in psychology and in economics from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. in psychology from University of California, Berkeley. He taught at Tel Aviv University from 1975 to 2006.
Go to Profile#23217
Mark Hersam
#23228
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Mark Christopher Hersam is a professor of Chemistry and Materials Science Engineering at Northwestern University who, according to the National Science Foundation, has made "major breakthrough[s]" in the field of nanotechnology. He is a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Award and a 1996 Marshall Scholar. He is also an Executive Editor of ACS Nano. As of October 2023, he has been cited over 68,000 times according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#23218
Carl E. Thoresen
#23229
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Carl E. Thoresen was a psychologist on the faculty of Stanford University. From 2005, he was also a senior fellow at Santa Clara University. Education and academic career Many events and achievements in Thoresen's career as a psychologist were described in a profile published in 2009 in The Counseling Psychologist , as part of its "Legacies and Traditions" series. Thoresen graduated with a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in history , later received his MA and PhD from Stanford University. After a brief period as an assistant professor of counseling at Michigan State , he returned to Stanford as assistant professor of education .
Go to Profile#23219
Julio César Chávez
#23230
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Julio César Chávez González , also known as Julio César Chávez Sr., is a Mexican former professional boxer who competed from 1980 to 2005. A multiple-time world champion in three weight divisions, Chávez was listed by The Ring magazine as the world's best boxer, pound for pound, from 1990 to 1993. During his career he held the WBC super featherweight title from 1984 to 1987, the WBA and WBC lightweight titles between 1987 and 1989, the WBC light welterweight title twice between 1989 and 1996, and the IBF light welterweight title from 1990 to 1991. He also held the Ring magazine and lineal ligh...
Go to Profile#23220
Nancy Willard
#23231
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Nancy Willard was an American writer: novelist, poet, author and occasional illustrator of children's books. She won the 1982 Newbery Medal for A Visit to William Blake's Inn. Biography Willard was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she later received the B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and won five Hopwood Awards for creative writing. She also studied at Stanford University, where she received her M.A.
Go to Profile#23221
Christopher Llewellyn Smith
#23232
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Sir Christopher Hubert Llewellyn Smith is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. Education Llewellyn Smith was educated at the University of Oxford and completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in theoretical physics at New College, Oxford in 1967.
Go to Profile#23222
Buck Owens
#23233
Overall Influence
1929 - 2006 (77 years)
Alvis Edgar "Buck" Owens Jr. was an American musician, singer, songwriter, and band leader. He was the lead singer for Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, which had 21 No. 1 hits on the Billboard country music chart. He pioneered what came to be called the Bakersfield sound, named in honor of Bakersfield, California, Owens's adopted home and the city from which he drew inspiration for what he preferred to call "American music".
Go to Profile#23223
John Thomas Dunlop
#23234
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
John Thomas Dunlop was an American administrator, labor economist, and educator. Dunlop was the United States Secretary of Labor between 1975 and 1976 under President Gerald Ford. He was Director of the United States Cost of Living Council from 1973 to 1974, Chairman of the United States Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations from 1993 to 1995, which produced the Dunlop Report in 1994. He was also arbitrator and impartial chairman of various United States labor-management committees, and a member of numerous government boards on industrial relations disputes and economic stab...
Go to Profile#23224
Angus Calder
#23235
Overall Influence
1942 - 2008 (66 years)
Angus Lindsay Ritchie Calder was a Scottish writer, historian, and poet. Initially studying English literature, he became increasingly interested in political history and wrote a landmark study on Britain during the Second World War in 1969 entitled The People's War. He subsequently wrote several other historical works but became increasingly interested in literature and poetry and worked primarily as a writer, though often holding a number of university teaching positions. A socialist, he was a prominent Scottish public intellectual during the 1970s and 1980s.
Go to Profile#23225
Larry L. Peterson
#23236
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Larry L. Peterson is an American computer scientist, known primarily as the Director of the PlanetLab Consortium, co-author of the networking textbook "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach," and for his research on the TCP Vegas congestion control algorithm and the x-kernel operating system.
Go to Profile#23226
Sakyo Komatsu
#23237
Overall Influence
1931 - 2011 (80 years)
Sakyo Komatsu was a Japanese science fiction writer and screenwriter. He was one of the most well known and highly regarded science fiction writers in Japan. Early life Born Minoru "Sakyo" Komatsu in Osaka, he was a graduate of Kyoto University where he studied Italian literature. After graduating, he worked at various jobs, including as a magazine reporter and a writer for stand-up comedy acts.
Go to Profile#23227
Larry Siedentop
#23238
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Sir Larry Alan Siedentop is an American-born British political philosopher with a special interest in 19th-century French liberalism. He is the author of Democracy in Europe and an occasional contributor to several major British daily newspapers, including the Financial Times and The Times.
Go to Profile#23228
William Bialek
#23239
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
William Samuel Bialek is a theoretical biophysicist and a professor at Princeton University and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Much of his work, which has ranged over a wide variety of theoretical problems at the interface of physics and biology, centers around whether various functions of living beings are optimal, and whether a precise quantification of their performance approaches limits set by basic physical principles. Best known among these is an influential series of studies applying the principles of information theory to the analysis of the neural encoding of information in the nervous ...
Go to Profile#23229
Burton Dreben
#23240
Overall Influence
1927 - 1999 (72 years)
Burton Spencer Dreben was an American philosopher specializing in mathematical logic. A Harvard graduate who taught at his alma mater for most of his career , he published little but was a teacher and a critic of the work of his colleagues .
Go to Profile#23230
Mordechai Kedar
#23241
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Mordechai Kedar is an Israeli scholar of Arab culture and a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, and the vice president of NEWSRAEL. Biography Mordechai Kedar was born in Tel Aviv. His Polish-Jewish parents moved to Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s. Kedar's first language was Yiddish.
Go to Profile#23231
Sara Sefchovich
#23242
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sara Sefchovich is a Mexican writer. Biography She studied sociology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico , earning a master's degree in 1987 and a doctorate degree in 2005 in History of Mexico. Later, she also did research at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales of the institution. She has written articles for the magazines Fem, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, Cuadernos de Comunicación, Los Universitarios, Revista de la Universidad de México, Casa del Tiempo, La Semana de Bellas Artes, La Cultura en México, Sábado and the newspapers La Jornada and El Universal.
Go to Profile#23232
Alun Howkins
#23243
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
Alun Howkins was an English social historian, specialising in the history of English rural society. Regarded as a leading historian of the English countryside and its working class, Howkins was a professor of history at the University of Sussex and co-founder of the journal Rural History.
Go to Profile#23233
Irwin Unger
#23244
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
Irwin Unger was an American historian and academic specializing in economic history, the history of the 1960s, and the history of the Gilded Age. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1958 and is currently Professor Emeritus of History at New York University.
Go to Profile#23234
John M. Merriman
#23245
Overall Influence
1946 - 2022 (76 years)
John Mustard Merriman was an American historian specializing in modern French history. He was a Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University. Early life and education Merriman was born on June 15, 1946, in Battle Creek, Michigan. His mother, Sally Mustard, was a portrait and landscape painter. He did not know his father, Robert Merriman, who was divorced from his mother when John was 2. He grew up in Portland, Oregon, where he attended a Jesuit all-boys secondary school, although he did not consider himself religious. He attended the University of Michigan, where he obtained his B.A.
Go to Profile#23235
Ernst Sejersted Selmer
#23246
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Ernst Sejersted Selmer was a Norwegian mathematician, who worked in number theory, as well as a cryptologist. The Selmer group of an Abelian variety is named after him. His primary contributions to mathematics reside within the field of diophantine equations. He started working as a cryptologist during the Second World War; due to his work, Norway became a NATO superpower in the field of encryption.
Go to Profile#23236
Takeyoshi Kawashima
#23247
Overall Influence
1909 - 1992 (83 years)
Takeyoshi Kawashima was a Japanese jurist. He was a prominent representative of post-war liberalism in Japan and the country's leading legal sociologist. Serving as Sakae Wagatsuma's assistant after 1932, Kawashima was appointed professor of civil law at the University of Tokyo in 1934. In his writings, he sought to develop a system of modern, Western, capitalist society based on the principle of the exchange of goods, which he contrasted to Japanese society with its remaining pre-modern and feudalist elements.
Go to Profile#23237
Hans Zingg
#23248
Overall Influence
Hans H. Zingg is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics and Wyeth-Ayerst Chair in Women's Health at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Biography He earned his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Basel in Switzerland, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Medicine from McGill University. He then completed post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School.
Go to Profile#23238
Brian A. Barsky
#23249
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Brian A. Barsky is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, working in computer graphics and geometric modeling as well as in optometry and vision science. He is a Professor of Computer Science and Vision Science and an Affiliate Professor of Optometry. He is also a member of the Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering, an inter-campus program, between UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco.
Go to Profile#23239
Agnieszka Graff
#23250
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Agnieszka Graff-Osser is a Polish writer, translator, commentator, feminist and women's and human rights activist. She studied at Oxford University, Amherst College and graduated from School of Social Sciences at Polish Academy of Sciences. She completed her PhD in English literature in 1999. In 2001, she published World without women, which was nominated to Nike Award in 2002. She works at the Warsaw University's Institute of the Americas and Europe and gives lectures on gender studies.
Go to Profile#23240
Giovanna Borradori
#23251
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Giovanna Borradori is Professor of Philosophy and Media Studies at Vassar College. Borradori is a specialist in Social and political theory, Aesthetics, and the philosophy of terrorism. A crucial focus of her work is fostering new avenues of communication between rival philosophical lineages, including the analytical and Continental traditions, liberalism and communitarianism, as well as deconstruction and Critical Theory.
Go to Profile#23241
Philippe G. Ciarlet
#23252
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Philippe G. Ciarlet is a French mathematician, known particularly for his work on mathematical analysis of the finite element method. He has contributed also to elasticity, to the theory of plates and shells and differential geometry.
Go to Profile#23242
Frank Smith
#23253
Overall Influence
Frank Smith was a Canadian psycholinguist recognized for his contributions in linguistics and cognitive psychology. He was an essential contributor to research on the nature of the reading process together with researchers such as George Armitage Miller, Kenneth S. Goodman, Paul A. Kolers, Jane W. Torrey, Jane Mackworth, Richard Venezky, Robert Calfee, and Julian Hochberg. Smith and Goodman are founders of whole language approach for reading instruction. He was the author of numerous books.
Go to Profile#23243
Daniel P. Schrag
#23254
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Daniel Paul Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology, Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. He also co-directs the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard University Harvard Kennedy School. He is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
Go to Profile#23244
Ivica Osim
#23255
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Ivan Osim , best known as Ivica Osim, was a Bosnian professional footballer and football manager. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Bosnian football managers of all time and as one of the most influential football managers in the former Yugoslavia.
Go to Profile#23245
Miguel Cotto
#23256
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Miguel Ángel Cotto Vázquez is a Puerto Rican former professional boxer who competed from 2001 to 2017. He is a multiple-time world champion, and the first Puerto Rican boxer to win world titles in four weight classes, from light welterweight to middleweight. In 2007 and 2009, he reached a peak active pound for pound ranking of seventh by The Ring magazine. Cotto started out his career as a hard-hitting pressure fighter, but evolved over the years into a more refined boxer-puncher as he moved up in weight.
Go to Profile#23246
Frances Kirwan
#23257
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Dame Frances Clare Kirwan, is a British mathematician, currently Savilian Professor of Geometry at the University of Oxford. Her fields of specialisation are algebraic and symplectic geometry. Education Kirwan was educated at Oxford High School, and studied maths as an undergraduate at Clare College in the University of Cambridge. She took a D.Phil at Oxford in 1984, with the dissertation title The Cohomology of Quotients in Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry, which was supervised by Michael Atiyah.
Go to Profile#23247
Carlos Alberto Parreira
#23258
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Carlos Alberto Gomes Parreira is a Brazilian former football manager who holds the record for attending the most FIFA World Cup final tournaments as manager with six appearances. He also managed five different national teams in five editions of the FIFA World Cup. He managed Brazil to victory at the 1994 World Cup, the 2004 Copa América, and the 2005 Confederations Cup. He is also the only manager to have led two different Asian teams to conquer the AFC Asian Cup.
Go to Profile#23248
Brian Launder
#23259
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Brian Edward Launder, FRS, FREng is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. He is known for his work in the field of turbulent flows in general and turbulence modelling in particular. In 1994, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Go to Profile#23249
Tamar Gendler
#23260
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Tamar Szabó Gendler is an American philosopher. She is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Yale as well as the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy and a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences at Yale University. Her academic research focuses on issues in philosophical psychology, epistemology, metaphysics, and areas related to philosophical methodology.
Go to Profile#23250
Jean-Michel Savéant
#23261
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Jean-Michel Savéant was a French chemist who specialized in electrochemistry. He was elected member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2000 and foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001. He published in excess of 400 peer-reviewed articles in chemistry literature.
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