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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#23351
Dennis Altman
#23362
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Dennis Patkin Altman is an Australian academic and gay rights activist. Early childhood Altman was born in Sydney, New South Wales to Jewish immigrant parents, and spent most of his childhood in Hobart, Tasmania.
Go to Profile#23352
Mark McClellan
#23363
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Mark Barr McClellan is the director of the Robert J Margolis Center for Health Policy and the Margolis Professor of Business, Medicine and Health Policy at Duke University. Formerly, he was a senior fellow and director of the Health Care Innovation and Value Initiative at the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at The Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. McClellan served as commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration under President George W. Bush from 2002 through 2004, and subsequently as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from 2004 ...
Go to Profile#23353
William Kirwan
#23364
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
William English "Brit" Kirwan is an American university administrator and mathematician who is chancellor emeritus of the University System of Maryland and professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Most recently, Kirwan served as chancellor of USM from 2002 to 2015. Previously, Kirwan worked at the University of Maryland, College Park from the 1960s to 1990s as a professor, administrator, and eventually president and was president of the Ohio State University from 1998 to 2002.
Go to Profile#23354
James Tartaglia
#23365
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
James Phillip Frank Tartaglia is a British philosopher who defends metaphysical idealism and existential nihilism, as well as a jazz saxophonist whose "jazz-philosophy fusion" combines jazz music with philosophical ideas.
Go to Profile#23355
Krzysztof Wodiczko
#23366
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Krzysztof Wodiczko is a Polish artist known for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realized more than 80 such public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.
Go to Profile#23356
Colum McCann
#23367
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland, and now lives in New York. He is the co-founder and President of Narrative 4, an international empathy education nonprofit. He is also a Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at Hunter College, New York. He is known as an international writer who believes in the "democracy of storytelling." Among his numerous honors are the U.S National Book Award, the Dublin Literary Prize, several major European awards, and an Oscar nomination.
Go to Profile#23357
Akiko Kiso
#23368
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Akiko Kiso is a Japanese classical scholar who specialises in Greek literature. She is a professor emeritus at Osaka University. She is the first Japanese scholar to publish on Sophocles. Her work included reconstructions of the lost plays of Epigoni and Tereus. She also worked on comparative approaches to Greek tragedy with emphasis on Japanese classical drama.
Go to Profile#23358
Ahmad Tafazzoli
#23369
Overall Influence
1937 - 1997 (60 years)
Ahmad Tafazzoli was an Iranian Iranist and professor of ancient Iranian languages and culture at Tehran University. One of his most important books is Pre-Islamic Persian Literature. Jaleh Amouzegar contributed in editing it.
Go to Profile#23359
Bob Fabry
#23370
Overall Influence
Robert Samuel Fabry, as a student at the University of Chicago worked on COMIT II and MADBUG, an interactive debugger for MAD both on CTSS. Later while a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, conceived of the idea of obtaining DARPA funding for a radically improved version of AT&T Unix and started the Computer Systems Research Group.
Go to Profile#23360
Vron Ware
#23371
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Vron Ware is a British academic and visiting professor at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science. She was previously a Professor at Kingston University, editor of Searchlight magazine from 1981 to 1983, and worked as a freelance journalist until 1987, when she co-founded the Women's Design Service. She taught cultural geography at the University of Greenwich from 1992 to 1999, sociology and gender studies at Yale University from 1999 to 2005, and was senior research fellow at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the Open University from 2008...
Go to Profile#23361
Peter Hofstee
#23372
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Harm Peter Hofstee is a Dutch physicist and computer scientist who currently is a distinguished research staff member at IBM Austin, USA, and a part-time professor in Big Data Systems at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.
Go to Profile#23362
Stephen Gaukroger
#23373
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Stephen Gaukroger was a British historian of philosophy and science who spent the majority of his academic career in Australia. Gaukroger was Emeritus Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney.
Go to Profile#23363
Ira Byock
#23374
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ira Robert Byock is an American physician, author, and advocate for palliative care. He is founder and chief medical officer of the Providence St. Joseph Health Institute for Human Caring in Torrance, California, and holds appointments as active emeritus professor of medicine and professor of community health and family medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. He was director of palliative medicine at Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center, from 2003–14, and associate director for patient and family-centered care at the affiliated Norris-Cotton Cancer Center.
Go to Profile#23364
Florian Coulmas
#23375
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Florian Coulmas is a German linguist and author. He is Senior Professor for Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the University of Duisburg-Essen. From 1968 to 1975, Florian Coulmas studied Sociology, Philosophy, and German Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and at Paris Sorbonne . He completed his PhD at Bielefeld University in 1977. In 1980, he finished his habilitation at Düsseldorf University where he worked as a privatdozent thereafter. In 1987, he became Professor of Sociolinguistics at Chūō University.
Go to Profile#23365
Abdus Suttar Khan
#23376
Overall Influence
1941 - 2008 (67 years)
Abdus Suttar Khan was a Bangladeshi scientist. He researched on aerospace for four decades with NASA, United Technology, and Alstom, a French power generation company. Khan invented more than forty different alloys for commercial application in space shuttles, jet engines, train engines and industrial gas turbines.
Go to Profile#23366
H. Richard Winn
#23377
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Dr. H. Richard Winn is an American neurosurgeon, and professor of neurosurgery and neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Winn was chairman of neurological surgery at the University of Washington School of Medicine from 1983 to 2002. Winn has made numerous contributions to the field of neurosurgery, specifically to the physiology of cerebral blood flow regulation and clinical studies of the natural history of cerebral aneurysms. A leading international Neurosurgical Prize is named after Dr. Winn.
Go to Profile#23367
Pierre Schlag
#23378
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Pierre Schlag is a legal theorist and the Byron R. White Professor at the University of Colorado Law School. Generally associated with the critical legal studies movement and school of legal thought, his contributions to the modern legal canon have primarily focused on the subjects of aesthetics and the law, Constitutional interpretation, deconstruction, subjectivity, and broader 'meta' critiques of legal institutions, publications, and thought. He is also the author of a work of fiction, American Absurd.
Go to Profile#23368
Hsinchun Chen
#23379
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Hsinchun Chen is the Regents' Professor and Thomas R. Brown Chair of Management and Technology at the University of Arizona and the Director and founder of the Artificial Intelligence Lab . He also served as lead program director of the Smart and Connected Health program at the National Science Foundation from 2014 to 2015. He received a B.S. degree from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, an MBA from SUNY Buffalo and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Information Systems from New York University.
Go to Profile#23369
Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen
#23380
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen is an Emeritus Reader in the Department of Geography at the University of Hull in Kingston upon Hull England, where she taught environmental policy, management and politics. She was editor of the journal Energy & Environment from 1998 to 2017.
Go to Profile#23370
Gina Rippon
#23381
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Gina Rippon is a British neurobiologist and feminist. She is a professor emeritus of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, Birmingham. Rippon has also sat on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychophysiology. In 2019, Rippon published her book, Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain, which investigates the role of life experiences and biology in brain development.
Go to Profile#23371
Dejan Milošević
#23382
Overall Influence
Dejan Milošević is a Bosnian theoretical physicist and a professor of theoretical physics since 1999 at the University of Sarajevo. His main areas of research are atomic processes in strong laser fields and attophysics.
Go to Profile#23372
William Breitbart
#23383
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
William S. Breitbart, FAPM , is an American psychiatrist in Psychosomatic Medicine, Psycho-oncology, and Palliative Care. He is the Jimmie C Holland Chair in Psychiatric Oncology, and the Chief of the Psychiatry Service, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center , He is a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. He was president of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine, and the Editor-in-Chief of Palliative and Supportive Care.
Go to Profile#23373
Mike Babcock
#23384
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Mike Babcock is a Canadian ice hockey coach and former player. He spent parts of eighteen seasons as a professional and head coach in the National Hockey League . He began as head coach of the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, whom he led to the 2003 Stanley Cup Finals. In 2005, Babcock signed with the Detroit Red Wings, winning the Stanley Cup with them in 2008, and helping them to the Stanley Cup playoffs every year during his tenure, becoming the winningest coach in Red Wings history. In 2015, he left Detroit to coach the Toronto Maple Leafs, a position he held until he was fired in 2019. In 2023,...
Go to Profile#23374
Brian Harvey
#23385
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Brian Keith Harvey is a former Lecturer SOE of computer science at University of California, Berkeley. He and his students developed an educational programming language named UCBLogo which is free and open-source software, a dialect of the language Logo, as an interpreter, for learners.
Go to Profile#23375
Denise Schmandt-Besserat
#23386
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Denise Schmandt-Besserat is a French-American archaeologist and retired professor of art and archaeology of the ancient Near East. She spent much of her professional career as a professor at the University of Texas. She is best known for her work on the history and invention of writing. While her research is highly cited, it has been controversial among scholars. The controversies, as detailed below, concern the interpretation of early tokens, particularly the complex ones; however, the idea that writing emerged out of the counting, cataloging, management, and transactions of agricultural pro...
Go to Profile#23376
John Burland
#23387
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
John Boscawen Burland is an Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Investigator at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Imperial College London. In 2016, Burland was elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to geotechnical engineering and the design, construction, and preservation of civil infrastructure and heritage buildings.
Go to Profile#23377
Robert Stanfield
#23388
Overall Influence
1914 - 2003 (89 years)
Robert Lorne Stanfield was a Canadian politician who served as the 17th premier of Nova Scotia from 1956 to 1967 and the leader of the Official Opposition and leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party of Canada from 1967 to 1976.
Go to Profile#23378
Ron Christie
#23389
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Ronald Irvin Christie is an American government relations expert and Republican political strategist, who has also worked as a member of former Vice President Dick Cheney's staff. He is the author of two books, and an occasional guest on various cable news programs. He serves as an adjunct professor at Cornell University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and Haverford College. He is currently the CEO of Christie Strategies, a communications and issue management firm that he founded in Alexandria, Virginia.
Go to Profile#23379
Ramin Mehmanparast
#23390
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Ramin Mehmanparast is an Iranian diplomat, the former spokesman of the Iranian foreign ministry and the former ambassador to Poland and Lithuania. He was the deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, the head of the "Center for Public Diplomacy & Media" and the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 31 October 2009 until his resignation on 11 May 2013. He was also the ambassador of Iran to Thailand from 1996 to 2000 and Kazakhstan from 2004 to 2009.
Go to Profile#23380
Ari L. Goldman
#23391
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Ari L. Goldman is an American professor and journalist. He is professor of journalism at Columbia University and a former reporter for The New York Times. Early life and education Goldman attended the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was educated at Yeshiva University, Columbia and Harvard.
Go to Profile#23381
Ernest Lepore
#23392
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ernest or Ernie Lepore is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist and a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. Education and career Lepore earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1978, and began teaching at the University of Notre Dame before joining the philosophy department at Rutgers University in 1981, where he has taught ever since.
Go to Profile#23382
Erlinda K. Alburo
#23393
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Erlinda Kintanar Alburo is a prolific contemporary Cebuano language scholar and promoter of the language. She is the former Director of the Cebuano Studies Center of the University of San Carlos, Philippines. She is an active member of Women in Literary Arts , and writes poetry both in English and cebuano. She teaches on the anthropology of linguistics. She has written 54 works in 4 languages.
Go to Profile#23383
Kate Adamala
#23394
Overall Influence
Katarzyna P Adamala is an American synthetic biologist and a professor of genetics at the University of Minnesota. Research Adamala's work includes contributions to the field of astrobiology, synthetic cell engineering and biocomputing.
Go to Profile#23384
Paul K. MacDonald
#23395
Overall Influence
Paul K. MacDonald is an American political scientist and a professor of political science at Wellesley College. He is known for his research on global power politics, U.S. foreign policy, and the political and military dimensions of overseas expansion.
Go to Profile#23385
Kurt Bollacker
#23396
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Kurt Bollacker is an American computer scientist with a research background in the areas of machine learning, digital libraries, semantic networks, and electro-cardiographic modeling. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. Bollacker spent time as a biomedical research engineer at the Duke University Medical Center where worked on electro-cardiography. He is co-creator of the CiteSeer research tool which was produced while he was a visiting researcher at the NEC Research Institute.
Go to Profile#23386
21 Savage
#23397
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph , known professionally as 21 Savage, is an English-born rapper. A British citizen, he has resided in the United States since childhood. 21 Savage was born in London, and moved to Atlanta, Georgia with his mother at age seven. His breakout project, a collaborative EP with record producer Metro Boomin titled Savage Mode , peaked at number 23 on the Billboard 200 and was preceded by three self-released mixtapes. Its lead singles, "X" and "No Heart" peaked within the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. Later that year, he would reach further recognition for his guest appearance on Drake's single "Sneakin'".
Go to Profile#23387
Alena Buyx
#23398
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Alena Michaela Buyx is a German medical ethicist. She has been Chair of the German Ethics Council since 2020. Early life and education Buyx studied medicine, philosophy and sociology at the University of Münster, the University of York and the University College London from 1997, and earned a PhD.
Go to Profile#23388
Mark Lanegan
#23399
Overall Influence
1964 - 2022 (58 years)
Mark William Lanegan was an American singer, songwriter, and poet. First becoming prominent as the lead singer for the early grunge band Screaming Trees, he was also known as a member of Queens of the Stone Age and The Gutter Twins. He released 12 solo studio albums, as well as three collaboration albums with Isobel Campbell and two with Duke Garwood. He was known for his baritone voice, which was described as being "as scratchy as a three-day beard yet as supple and pliable as moccasin leather" and has been compared to Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Cave.
Go to Profile#23389
Rick Astley
#23400
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Richard Paul Astley is an English singer who has been active in music for several decades. He gained worldwide fame in the 1980s, having multiple hits, including his signature songs "Never Gonna Give You Up", "Together Forever" and "Whenever You Need Somebody". He returned to music full-time in the 2000s after a 6-year hiatus. Outside his music career, Astley has occasionally worked as a radio DJ and a podcaster.
Go to Profile#23390
Michèle Vergne
#23401
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Michèle Vergne is a French mathematician, specializing in analysis and representation theory. Life and work Michèle Vergne studied from 1962 to 1966 at the École Normal Supérieure de jeunes filles, which today is part of the ENS. She wrote her diploma thesis in 1966 with Claude Chevalley, entitled "Variété des algèbres de Lie nilpotentes" and her doctoral thesis in 1971 under the supervision of Jacques Dixmier at the University of Paris. She is currently Directeur de Recherche at CNRS.
Go to Profile#23391
Dan Segal
#23402
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Daniel Segal is a British mathematician and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He specialises in algebra and group theory. He studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge, before taking a PhD at Queen Mary College, University of London, in 1972, supervised by Bertram Wehrfritz, with a dissertation on group theory entitled Groups of Automorphisms of Infinite Soluble Groups. He is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford, where he was sub-warden from 2006 to 2008.
Go to Profile#23392
Timothy Insoll
#23403
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Timothy Insoll is a British archaeologist and Africanist and Islamic Studies scholar. Since 2016 he has been Al-Qasimi Professor of African and Islamic Archaeology at the University of Exeter. He is also founder and director of the Centre for Islamic Archaeology. Previously he was at the Department of Archaeology at the University of Manchester .
Go to Profile#23393
Seth Meyers
#23404
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Seth Adam Meyers is an American comedian, television host, actor, writer, producer, podcaster, and political commentator. He currently hosts Late Night with Seth Meyers, a late-night talk show on NBC. Prior to Late Night, Meyers was a cast member on NBC's sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 2001 to 2014, and served as the show's head writer and anchor of their news parody segment, Weekend Update, from 2006 until his departure.
Go to Profile#23394
Diana Natalicio
#23405
Overall Influence
1939 - 2021 (82 years)
Diana Natalicio was an American academic administrator who served as 10th president of the University of Texas at El Paso from 1988 to 2019. After growing up in St. Louis, Natalicio studied Spanish as an undergraduate, completed a master's degree in Portuguese and earned a doctorate in linguistics. She became an assistant professor at UTEP in 1971, and was named the first female president of the university on February 11, 1988.
Go to Profile#23395
Martti Olavi Siirala
#23406
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Martti Olavi Siirala was a Finnish psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and philosopher. He was inspired by psychoanalysis, the anthropological medicine of Viktor von Weizsäcker and the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The outcome was a unique synthesis theory that Siirala called social pathology.
Go to Profile#23396
James R. Griesemer
#23407
Overall Influence
James R. Griesemer is an American professor of philosophy at the University of California, Davis in Davis, California specializing in philosophy of biology. Education and career Griesemer received his PhD in 1983 in the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago under the supervision of William C. Wimsatt. He joined the faculty at University of California, Davis in 1984, and has taught there ever since. He is currently a "Distinguished Professor."
Go to Profile#23397
Arnold Bakker
#23408
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Arnoldus Bastiaan Bakker is a Dutch industrial and organizational psychologist and Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Bakker is also a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the secretary general of the Alliance for Organizational Psychology, and the former president of the European Association of Work and Organizational Psychology.
Go to Profile#23398
Steven M. Goodman
#23409
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Steven Michael Goodman is an American conservation biologist, and field biologist on staff in the Department of Zoology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Life He graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy High School in 1975. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in 1984, from the University of Hamburg with a Ph.D. in 2000, and from the Université Paris-Sud XI, with an H.D.R. in 2005. In the early 1990s, with the World Wildlife Fund, he created the Ecological Training Program .
Go to Profile#23399
Eckart Viehweg
#23410
Overall Influence
1948 - 2010 (62 years)
Eckart Viehweg was a German mathematician. He was a professor of algebraic geometry at the University of Duisburg-Essen. In 2003 he won the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize with his wife, Hélène Esnault.
Go to Profile#23400
John F. Duffy
#23411
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
John Fitzgerald Duffy is Professor of Law at University of Virginia School of Law in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a Legal Commentator and Author who has written numerous articles and co-authored a scholarly book on Patent Law . He previously served as law clerk to Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and Stephen F. Williams, Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Between these two assignments, he served as an attorney at the Office of Legal Counsel in the United States Department of Justice. In additi...
Go to Profile