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
#23301
Peng Shige
#23312
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Peng Shige is a Chinese mathematician noted for his contributions in stochastic analysis and mathematical finance. Biography Peng Shige was born in Binzhou and raised in Shandong, while his parents' hometown is Haifeng County in south-eastern Guangdong, he is a grandnephew of the famous revolutionary Peng Pai, and his grandfather is also recognized a "revolutionary martyr" by the nation. He went to a countryside working with farmers as an "Educated youth" from 1968 to 1971, and studied in the Department of Physics, Shandong University from 1971 to 1974 and went to work at the Institute of Mathematics, Shandong University in 1978.
Go to Profile#23302
Yishai Beer
#23313
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Aluf Yishai Beer is a former general in the Israel Defense Forces, head of a reserve call-up, and former president of the Israeli Military Court of Appeals. He was drafted into the IDF in 1974 and joined the Paratroopers Brigade. Two years later he took part as a platoon leader in Operation Entebbe, freeing Israeli hostages flown to Uganda. He also participated in Operation Litani and as a reserve in the 1982 Lebanon War. He rejoined the regular service in May 2002 when he was appointed to his current post, although as a doctor of law, he continues to work as a Law professor. During his career Beer received a B.A.
Go to Profile#23303
Albert Kligman
#23314
Overall Influence
1916 - 2010 (94 years)
Albert Montgomery Kligman was an American dermatologist who co-invented Retin-A, the acne medication, with James Fulton in 1969. Kligman performed human experiments on inmates at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia. Scandal followed years later. The experiments intentionally exposed humans to pathogens and dioxin, and later became a textbook example of unethical experimenting on humans. He and others involved were sued for alleged injuries, but the lawsuit was dismissed due to the statute of limitations expiring.
Go to Profile#23304
Pieter Seuren
#23315
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Pieter Albertus Maria Seuren was a Dutch linguist, emeritus professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, and research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen.
Go to Profile#23305
Apostolos Athanassakis
#23316
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Apostolos N. Athanassakis is a classical scholar, and the former Argyropoulos Chair in Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara . Professor Athanassakis, or "Professor A" as he is often referred to by students, served as the faculty in residence in Manzanita Village. Athanassakis taught at UCSB for nearly 30 years in the Classics Department. From 1984 to 1986 he served as head of the Humanities Division at the University of Crete, in Greece.
Go to Profile#23306
Vladimir Zhirinovsky
#23317
Overall Influence
1946 - 2022 (76 years)
Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky was a Russian right-wing populist politician and the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia from its creation in 1992 until his death. He had been a member of the State Duma since 1993 and leader of the LDPR group in the State Duma from 1993 to 2000, and from 2011 to 2022.
Go to Profile#23307
Denis Parsons Burkitt
#23318
Overall Influence
1911 - 1993 (82 years)
Denis Parsons Burkitt, MD, FRCS, FRS was an Irish surgeon who made significant advances in health, such as the etiology of a pediatric cancer, now called Burkitt's lymphoma, and the finding that rates of colorectal cancer are higher in those who eat limited dietary fibre.
Go to Profile#23308
Richard H. Tilly
#23319
Overall Influence
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
Richard Hugh Tilly was an American economic historian. Born to a family of German descent in Chicago, Richard Tilly studied history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. From 1955 to 1957, he completed his military service largely in Germany, where he learned the language of his grandfather and, in 1960, married his wife Elisabeth, of Würzburg. After working for an insurance company, Tilly continued his studies, earning his Ph.D. in economics in 1964 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, after two years of intensive research in Germany. After holding positions in Ann Arbor and Yale, h...
Go to Profile#23309
Don Was
#23320
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Don Edward Fagenson , known professionally as Don Was , is an American musician, record producer, music director, film composer, documentary filmmaker and radio host. Since 2011, he has also served as president of the American jazz label Blue Note Records.
Go to Profile#23310
Diane Vaughan
#23321
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
#23311
Jim Keller
#23322
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
James B. Keller is an American microprocessor engineer best known for his work at AMD and Apple. He was the lead architect of the AMD K8 microarchitecture and was involved in designing the Athlon and Apple A4/A5 processors. He was also the coauthor of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect. From 2012 to 2015 he returned to AMD to work on the AMD K12 and Zen microarchitectures.
Go to Profile#23312
Jeffrey P. Minear
#23323
Overall Influence
Jeffrey P. Minear was the counselor to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Minear began work at the Supreme Court on September 11, 2006. Previously he had been senior litigation counsel and assistant to the Solicitor General, Department of Justice .
Go to Profile#23313
Andrew Strathern
#23324
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Andrew Jamieson Strathern is a British anthropologist. Strathern earned a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, where he serves as Andrew Mellon Professor of Anthropology. He is married to Pamela J. Stewart, a fellow anthropologist employed at Pitt. A collection of their joint work is held at the University of Pittsburgh, as the Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern Archive, and at the University of California, San Diego, as the Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart Photographs and Audiorecordings. Andrew Strathern is a fellow of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania.
Go to Profile#23314
Albert Benschop
#23325
Overall Influence
1949 - 2018 (69 years)
Albert Benschop was a Dutch sociologist with the University of Amsterdam's faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He ran a sociology-focussed website called SocioSite. Biography Benschop received a master's degree in sociology and psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam early 1970s. In 1972 he made name as leader of the SRVU Students' union of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, which occupied the main building of the Vrije Universiteit during the student protests that year.
Go to Profile#23315
Gregory Grossman
#23326
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Gregory Grossman was late professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, an authority on the economy of the Soviet Union. He is credited with the introduction of the terms "second economy" and "command economy".
Go to Profile#23316
Kurt Angle
#23327
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Kurt Steven Angle is an American retired professional wrestler and former collegiate wrestler who became a gold medalist in freestyle wrestling at the 1996 Olympic Games. He is best known for his tenures in both WWE and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling .
Go to Profile#23317
Anna Kournikova
#23328
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Anna Sergeyevna Kournikova is a Russian former professional tennis player and American television personality. Her appearance and celebrity status made her one of the best known tennis stars worldwide. At the peak of her fame, fans looking for images of Kournikova made her name one of the most common search strings on Google Search.
Go to Profile#23318
Pascal Lissouba
#23329
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Pascal Lissouba was a Congolese politician who was the first democratically elected President of the Republic of the Congo and served from 31 August 1992 until 25 October 1997. He was overthrown by the former and current President Denis Sassou Nguesso in the 1997 civil war.
Go to Profile#23319
Lans Bovenberg
#23330
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Arij Lans Bovenberg is a Dutch economist, and Professor of Economics at the Tilburg University and Erasmus University, known mainly due to his contribution to the Dutch debate on population ageing, pension reforms and public finances. Lans Bovenberg was awarded the Spinoza Prize in 2003.
Go to Profile#23320
Marc Mézard
#23331
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Marc Mézard is a French physicist and academic administrator. He was, from 2012 to 2022, the director of the École normale supérieure . He is the co-author of two books. Early life Marc Mézard was born on 29 August 1957. He graduated from the École normale supérieure in 1976 and earned the agrégation in Physics. He earned a PhD in Physics from University of Paris 6 in 1980.
Go to Profile#23321
Françoise Tisseur
#23332
Overall Influence
Françoise Tisseur is a numerical analyst and Professor of Numerical Analysis at the Department of Mathematics, University of Manchester, UK. She works in numerical linear algebra and in particular on nonlinear eigenvalue problemss and structured matrix problems, including the development of algorithms and software.
Go to Profile#23322
Al Jean
#23333
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Alfred Ernest Jean III is an American screenwriter and producer. Jean is well known for his work on The Simpsons. He was raised near Detroit, Michigan, and graduated from Harvard University in 1981. Jean began his writing career in the 1980s with fellow Harvard alum Mike Reiss. Together, they worked as writers and producers on television shows such as The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, ALF and It's Garry Shandling's Show.
Go to Profile#23323
John W. Shumaker
#23334
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
John William Shumaker is an American educator who served as president of Central Connecticut State University, the University of Louisville, and the University of Tennessee. Early life and education Shumaker is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was born in 1942. He received a bachelor's degree in ancient Greek from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was admitted into Phi Beta Kappa. He undertook graduate study in classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving master's and doctoral degrees in 1966 and 1969, respectively. His doctoral dissertation was entitled "...
Go to Profile#23324
Diana L. Eck
#23335
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Diana L. Eck is a scholar of religious studies who is Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University, as well as a former faculty dean of Lowell House and the Director of The Pluralism Project at Harvard. Among other works, she is the author of Banaras, City of Light, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras, A New Religious America: How a Christian Country Became the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation, and "India: A Sacred Geography." At Harvard, she is in the Department of South Asian Studies, the Committee on the Study of Religion, and is also a member of the Faculty of Divinity.
Go to Profile#23325
Steven Izenour
#23336
Overall Influence
1940 - 2001 (61 years)
Steven Izenour was an American architect, urbanist and theorist. He is best known as co-author, with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, of Learning from Las Vegas, one of the most influential architectural theory books of the twentieth century. He was also a principal in the Philadelphia firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates.
Go to Profile#23326
Vince Young
#23337
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Vincent Paul Young Jr. is an American former football quarterback who played for six seasons in the National Football League . Young was selected by the Tennessee Titans as the third overall pick in the 2006 NFL Draft, and he was also selected to be the Madden NFL 08 cover athlete.
Go to Profile#23327
Susan Meiselas
#23338
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Susan Meiselas is an American documentary photographer. She has been associated with Magnum Photos since 1976 and been a full member since 1980. Currently she is the President of the Magnum Foundation. She is best known for her 1970s photographs of war-torn Nicaragua and American carnival strippers.
Go to Profile#23328
Jerome Ravetz
#23339
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Jerome Ravetz is a philosopher of science. He is best known for his books analysing scientific knowledge from a social and ethical perspective, focussing on issues of quality. He is the co-author of the NUSAP notational system and of Post-normal science. He is currently an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#23329
James C. Miller III
#23340
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
James Clifford Miller III is an American economist and former government official who served as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission between 1981 and 1985 and as Budget Director for President Ronald Reagan between 1985 and 1988. Miller was the first member of the FTC with a background as a career economist, as opposed to a legal background as is common.
Go to Profile#23330
James K. A. Smith
#23341
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
James K. A. Smith is a Canadian-American philosopher who is currently Professor of Philosophy at Calvin University, holding the Gary & Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology & Worldview. He is the current editor-in-chief of the literary journal Image.
Go to Profile#23331
Jerard Hurwitz
#23342
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Jerard Hurwitz was an American biochemist who co-discovered RNA polymerase in 1960 along with Sam Weiss, Audrey Stevens, and James Bonner. He most recently worked at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York studying DNA replication in eukaryotes and its control.
Go to Profile#23332
Richard W. Miller
#23343
Overall Influence
1945 - 2023 (78 years)
Richard W. Miller the Wyn and William Y. Hutchinson Professor in Ethics and Public Life and Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life in the Cornell University Department of Philosophy. He specializes in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of science.
Go to Profile#23333
Naoto Kan
#23344
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
is a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan and President of the Democratic Party of Japan from June 2010 to September 2011. Kan was the first Prime Minister since the resignation of Junichiro Koizumi in 2006 to serve for more than one year, with his predecessors Yukio Hatoyama, Tarō Asō, Yasuo Fukuda, and Shinzo Abe either resigning prematurely or losing an election. On 26 August 2011, Kan announced his resignation. Yoshihiko Noda was elected as his successor. On 1 August 2012, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced Kan would be one of the members of the UN...
Go to Profile#23334
Julian Besag
#23345
Overall Influence
1945 - 2010 (65 years)
Julian Ernst Besag FRS was a British statistician known chiefly for his work in spatial statistics , and Bayesian inference . Early life and education Besag was born in Loughborough and was educated at Loughborough Grammar School. He began studying engineering at the University of Cambridge but moved to the University of Birmingham to study statistics, obtaining his BSc in 1968.
Go to Profile#23335
Martin J. Taylor
#23346
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sir Martin John Taylor, FRS is a British mathematician and academic. He was Professor of Pure Mathematics at the School of Mathematics, University of Manchester and, prior to its formation and merger, UMIST where he was appointed to a chair after moving from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1986. He was elected Warden of Merton College, Oxford on 5 November 2009, took office on 2 October 2010 and retired in September 2018.
Go to Profile#23336
Shang Fa Yang
#23347
Overall Influence
1932 - 2007 (75 years)
Shang Fa Yang was a Taiwanese-American botanist. He was a professor at the University of California, Davis. He was awarded the 1991 Wolf Prize in Agriculture and was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences the year before.
Go to Profile#23337
Camille Laurens
#23348
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Laurence Ruel , known by her pen name Camille Laurens, is a French writer and winner of the 2000 Prix Femina for Dans ces bras-là. Laurens is a member of the Académie Goncourt. Career A graduate of humanities, Camille Laurens taught in Rouen in Normandy. In 1984, she began teaching in Morocco, where she spent twelve years. Since September 2011, she has taught at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris .
Go to Profile#23338
David Scheffer
#23349
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
David John Scheffer is an American lawyer and diplomat who served as the first United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, during President Bill Clinton's second term in office. He is the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law, where he directed the Center for International Human Rights from 2006 to 2019.
Go to Profile#23339
Nguyễn Khánh
#23350
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Nguyễn Khánh was a South Vietnamese military officer and Army of the Republic of Vietnam general who served in various capacities as head of state and prime minister of South Vietnam while at the head of a military junta from January 1964 until February 1965. He was involved in or against many coup attempts, failed and successful, from 1960 until his defeat and exile from South Vietnam in 1965. Khánh lived out his later years with his family in exile in the United States. He died in 2013 in San Jose, California, at age 85.
Go to Profile#23340
Jennifer Granick
#23351
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Jennifer Stisa Granick is an American attorney and educator. Senator Ron Wyden has called Granick an "NBA all-star of surveillance law." She is well known for her work with intellectual property law, free speech, privacy law, and other things relating to computer security, and has represented several high-profile hackers.
Go to Profile#23341
Martin Selmayr
#23352
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Martin Selmayr is a European civil servant from Germany who was Secretary-General of the European Commission from 2018 to 2019 and chief of staff to Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker from 2014 to 2018. During his time in the Juncker Commission, Selmayr was widely described as one of the most influential figures within the European Union. After taking office as secretary-general, he was described in a debate in the European Parliament as "the most powerful bureaucrat in the world." A resident of Brussels since 2000, he is a member of the Christian Democratic and Flemish party of Belgium.
Go to Profile#23342
J. Gwyn Griffiths
#23353
Overall Influence
1911 - 2004 (93 years)
John Gwyn Griffiths was a Welsh poet, Egyptologist and nationalist political activist who spent the largest span of his career lecturing at Swansea University. Early life Born in 1911 in Porth in the Rhondda Valley, Griffiths was educated at Porth Grammar school before reading Latin at University College, Cardiff of the University of Wales , gaining a first class degree in 1932. He then graduated with a first class degree in Greek in 1933, and obtained a first class teacher's diploma in 1934. At Cardiff Griffiths was influenced by Classicist Kathleen Freeman who kindled the interest in Egypto...
Go to Profile#23343
Denys Wilkinson
#23354
Overall Influence
1922 - 2016 (94 years)
Sir Denys Haigh Wilkinson FRS was a British nuclear physicist. Life He was born on 5 September 1922 in Leeds, Yorkshire and educated at Loughborough Grammar School and Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1943.
Go to Profile#23344
Bill Schwarz
#23355
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bill Schwarz is an English historian, who is a Professor in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, his research focusing on postcolonial history. Schwarz is the author of Memories of Empire: The White Man's World, which was Book of the Year at the Longman/History Today Awards in 2013. He is literary executor, with Catherine Hall, of cultural theorist Stuart Hall, whose posthumously published memoir Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands was co-written with Schwarz. He is an editor of History Workshop Journal, and General Editor of the Duke University Pres...
Go to Profile#23345
Che-Ming Ko
#23356
Overall Influence
Che-Ming Ko is a Taiwanese physicist, focusing in nuclear theory, currently University Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1994.
Go to Profile#23346
Darrell Long
#23357
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Darrell Don Earl Long is an American computer scientist and computer engineer who is the inaugural holder of the Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair of Storage Systems Research and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was editor-in-chief of the IEEE Letters of the Computer Society and was editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Storage . In 2002, he was the founder of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies .
Go to Profile#23347
Edward C. Stone
#23358
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Edward Carroll Stone is an American space scientist, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, and former director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory . Biography Stone was born in Knoxville, Iowa. After receiving his undergraduate education at Iowa's Burlington Junior College in Iowa, Stone attended the University of Chicago where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics. Stone's astrophysics career goes back to his first cosmic-ray experiments on Discoverer satellites in 1961. He then joined the staff of Caltech as a research fellow, and became a full facult...
Go to Profile#23348
Edward M. Hundert
#23359
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Edward M. Hundert is the Dean for Medical Education and the Daniel D. Federman, M.D. Professor in Residence of Global Health and Social Medicine and Medical Education at Harvard Medical School, where he is also Associate Director of the Center for Bioethics at HMS . Hundert is a member of the TIAA Board of Trustees of TIAA-CREF.
Go to Profile#23349
Evelyn M. Witkin
#23360
Overall Influence
1921 - 2023 (102 years)
Evelyn M. Witkin was an American bacterial geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory , SUNY Downstate Medical Center , and Rutgers University . Witkin was considered innovative and inspirational as a scientist, teacher and mentor.
Go to Profile#23350
Megan Rapinoe
#23361
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Megan Anna Rapinoe is an American progressive activist and former professional soccer player who played as a winger for OL Reign of the National Women's Soccer League , as well as the United States national team. Winner of the Ballon d'Or Féminin and named The Best FIFA Women's Player in 2019, Rapinoe won gold with the national team at the 2012 London Summer Olympics, 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup, and 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup and she played for the team at the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup where the U.S. finished in second place. Rapinoe co-captained the national team alongside Carli Lloyd and Alex Morgan from 2018 to 2020.
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