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
#23851
Steve Redhead
#23862
Overall Influence
1952 - 2018 (66 years)
Steve Redhead was the Professor of Jurisprudence and Head of Law in the Faculty of Arts at Charles Sturt University. He was also an adjunct professor at York University and was visiting Professor of Accelerated Culture at the University of Bolton.
Go to Profile#23852
Avshalom Elitzur
#23863
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Avshalom Cyrus Elitzur is an Israeli physicist and philosopher. Biography Avshalom Elitzur was born in Kerman, Iran, to a Jewish family. When he was two years old, his family immigrated to Israel and settled in Rehovot. He left school at the age of sixteen and began working as a laboratory technician at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Elitzur received no formal university training before obtaining his PhD.
Go to Profile#23853
Nir Barzilai
#23864
Overall Influence
Nir Barzilai is the founding director of the Institute for Aging Research, the Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging and the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine . He also directs the Longevity Genes Project, a genetics study of over 600 families of centenarians and their children. The participants are all Ashkenazi Jews, a group selected for their genetic homogeneity, which makes it easier to identify significant genetic variations. Barzilai found that many of the centenarians had very high levels of HDL....
Go to Profile#23854
Miran Božovič
#23865
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Miran Božovič is a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, associated with the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis. Božovič was born in Ljubljana. He holds a degree in comparative literature and philosophy from the University of Ljubljana, and a PhD in philosophy. He teaches early modern philosophy at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana.
Go to Profile#23855
Jack Wolf
#23866
Overall Influence
1935 - 2011 (76 years)
Jack Keil Wolf was an American researcher in information theory and coding theory. Biography Wolf was born in 1935 in Newark, New Jersey, and graduated from Weequahic High School in 1952. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1956 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1960 for his thesis "On the Detection and Estimation Problem for Multiple Nonstationary Random Processes". He held faculty appointments at New York University 1963–1965, the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn 1965–1973 and the University of Massachusetts Amherst 1973–1984, and worked at RCA Laboratories and Bell Laboratories.
Go to Profile#23856
Patrick F. McManus
#23867
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Patrick Francis McManus was an American humor writer, who primarily wrote about the outdoors. A humor columnist for Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, and other magazines, his columns and stories have been collected in several books, beginning with A Fine and Pleasant Misery up through The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories .
Go to Profile#23857
Malcolm Beasley
#23868
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Malcolm Roy Beasley is an American physicist. He is Professor Emeritus of Applied Physics at Stanford University. He is known for his research related to superconductivity. Early life and education Beasley was born at Stanford hospital, moving to Hawaii during World War II with his parents, who were social scientists. He was a high school and college basketball player, earning All-Metropolitan honors at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, and playing for the Cornell Big Red in 1958-59.
Go to Profile#23858
Tony Gwynn
#23869
Overall Influence
1960 - 2014 (54 years)
Anthony Keith Gwynn Sr. , nicknamed "Mr. Padre", was an American professional baseball right fielder, who played 20 seasons in Major League Baseball for the San Diego Padres. The left-handed hitting Gwynn won eight batting titles in his career, tied for the most in National League history. He is one of the best and most consistent hitters in baseball history. Gwynn had a .338 career batting average, never hitting below .309 in any full season. He was a 15-time All-Star, recognized for his skills both on offense and defense with seven Silver Slugger Awards and five Gold Glove Awards. Gwynn w...
Go to Profile#23859
Suniya S. Luthar
#23870
Overall Influence
Suniya S. Luthar was Founder and executive director of AC Groups nonprofit, Professor Emerita at Teachers College-Columbia University, and Co-founder Emerita at Authentic Connections Co. She had previously served on the faculty at Yale University's Department of Psychiatry and the Yale Child Study Center and as Foundation Professor of Psychology at the Arizona State University.
Go to Profile#23860
Richard Murnane
#23871
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Richard John Murnane is an economist and the Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has made important contributions to our understanding of education policy and the relationship between the economy and education. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and coauthored a number of books. His research has investigated what skills are required to earn a middle-class living in the U.S., the significance of the GED, and teacher quality. Murnane earned his Ph.D. at Yale University and is a winner of the Morni...
Go to Profile#23861
Sidney Pestka
#23872
Overall Influence
1936 - 2016 (80 years)
Sidney Pestka was an American biochemist and geneticist. A recipient of the National Medal of Technology, he is sometimes referred to as the "father of interferon" for his groundbreaking work developing the interferons as treatments for major diseases such as hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, and cancer. Pestka was part of the team working on research involving the genetic code, protein synthesis and ribosome function that led to the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine received by Marshall Warren Nirenberg.
Go to Profile#23862
Bernard F. Schutz
#23873
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Bernard F. Schutz FInstP FLSW is an American and naturalised British physicist. He is well known for his research in Einstein's theory of general relativity, especially for his contributions to the detection of gravitational waves, and for his textbooks. Schutz is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is a professor of physics and astronomy at Cardiff University, and was a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, where he led the Astrophysical Relativity division from 1995 to 2014. Schutz was...
Go to Profile#23863
Thomas K. McCraw
#23874
Overall Influence
1940 - 2012 (72 years)
Thomas Kincaid McCraw was an American business historian and Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus at Harvard Business School, who won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for History for Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn , which "used biography to explore thorny issues in economics."
Go to Profile#23864
Yang Shangkun
#23875
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
Yang Shangkun was a Chinese Communist military and political leader, president of the People's Republic of China from 1988 to 1993, and one of the Eight Elders that dominated the party after the death of Mao Zedong.
Go to Profile#23865
John Wennberg
#23876
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
John E. "Jack" Wennberg is the pioneer and leading researcher of unwarranted variation in the healthcare industry. In four decades of work, Wennberg has documented the geographic variation in the healthcare that patients receive in the United States. In 1988, he founded the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School to address that unwarranted variation in healthcare.
Go to Profile#23866
Bruno Sammartino
#23877
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
Bruno Leopoldo Francesco Sammartino was an Italian-American professional wrestler. He is best known for his time with the World Wide Wrestling Federation . There, he held the WWWF World Heavyweight Championship for more than 11 years. He is overall a two-time world champion in professional wrestling. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time.
Go to Profile#23867
Anne G. Osborn
#23878
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Anne G. Osborn is an American physician who works at the University of Utah. She holds the William H. and Patricia W. Child Presidential Endowed Chair in Radiology at the University of Utah Medical Center.
Go to Profile#23868
Stone Gossard
#23879
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Stone Carpenter Gossard is an American musician who serves as a guitarist and songwriter for the rock band Pearl Jam. Along with Jeff Ament, Mike McCready, and Eddie Vedder, he is one of the founding members of the band.
Go to Profile#23869
Alexander Klibanov
#23880
Overall Influence
Alexander Klibanov is the Novartis Professor of Biological Engineering and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for research in enzyme and protein technology and contributions to the field of biocatalysis in nonaqueous solvents.
Go to Profile#23870
Alex Macario
#23881
Overall Influence
Alex Macario is an American anesthesiologist, academic and author. He is a vice-chair for education, a professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, and program director for the anesthesiology residency at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#23871
Nancy Ip
#23882
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Nancy Chu Ip Yuk-yu , as known as Nancy Y. Ip in academic publications, is a Hong Kong neuroscientist. She is serving as the 5th President of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology since 19 October 2022. She had served as the Vice-President of Research and Development, the Morningside Professor of Life Science, and Director of the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Neuroscience at the HKUST. Since December 2022, Ms. Ip has also served as the a deputy from the Hong Kong delegation to the National People's Congress and received the largest number of votes from the 1273 member Electo...
Go to Profile#23872
Małgorzata Gersdorf
#23883
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Małgorzata Maria Gersdorf is a Polish lawyer and judge who served as the First President of the Supreme Court of Poland. She was appointed in 2014 and her six-year term ended on 30 April, 2020. Biography She graduated from the University of Warsaw with a law degree in 1975, and obtained a doctorate degree in 1981. She became a professor for the University of Warsaw in 1992, served as Vice-Rector of the University in 2005, and became head of the Law Department in 2008.
Go to Profile#23873
Keith Dowding
#23884
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Keith Martin Dowding is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Political Philosophy, School of Politics and International Relations, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. He was in the Government Department at the London School of Economics, UK in 2006. He has published widely in the fields of public choice, public administration, public policy, British politics, comparative politics, urban political economy, positive political theory and normative political philosophy. His work is informed by social and rational choice theories.
Go to Profile#23874
Karen Nelson Moore
#23885
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Karen Nelson Moore is an American attorney and jurist serving as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Her chambers are in Cleveland, Ohio. Education Moore received her Artium Baccalaureus from Radcliffe College of Harvard University in 1970, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, and her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, also magna cum laude, in 1973.
Go to Profile#23875
Lale Akarun
#23886
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Lale Akarun is a Turkish electrical engineer and computer scientist researching sign language and gesture recognition, human–computer interaction, and biometrics. She is a professor in the computer engineering department and ex-vice rector at Boğaziçi University.
Go to Profile#23876
Jack L. Strominger
#23887
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (101 years)
Jack Leonard Strominger is the Higgins Professor of Biochemistry at Harvard University, specializing in the structure and function of human histocompatibility proteins and their role in disease. He won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1995.
Go to Profile#23877
David W. Miller
#23888
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David W. Miller is on the faculty of Princeton University, Director of the Princeton University Faith & Work Initiative, and scholar of the "faith at work" movement. Previously he taught for five years at the Yale School of Management and the Yale Divinity School and was the founding Executive Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Prior to academia he was a senior executive in international business for 16 years.
Go to Profile#23878
Michael Fitzgerald
#23889
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Michael Fitzgerald is an Irish professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, specialising in autism spectrum disorder . Career His research is in the area of epidemiology of child and adolescent psychiatry. He has been involved in research collaboration in 18 countries and in initiating master's degree programs at Irish universities. He has lectured including in London, at the Royal Society, British Academy, and the British Library and also in New York City, Buenos Aires, Tbilisi, Melbourne and many European countries as well as in China, Malaysia, Korea, and Hawaii. As of June 2005, he said ...
Go to Profile#23879
Ana Maria Rey
#23890
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Ana Maria Rey is a Colombian theoretical physicist, professor at University of Colorado at Boulder, a JILA fellow, a fellow at National Institute of Standards and Technology and a fellow of the American Physical Society. Rey was the first Hispanic woman to win the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in 2019. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She is currently the chair of DAMOP, the American Physical Society's division in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics .
Go to Profile#23880
Åke Edwardson
#23891
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Åke Edwardson is a Swedish author of detective fiction, and was previously a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University, the city where many of his Inspector Winter novels are set. Edwardson has had many jobs, including as a journalist and press officer for the United Nations and his crime novels have made him a three-time winner of the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy Award for best crime novel. His first novel to be translated into English, in 2005, was Sun and Shadow. The second, Never End, followed in 2006. In a Spiegel Online interview on 21 June 2008, Edwardson declared that he would...
Go to Profile#23881
Zdeněk Zeman
#23892
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Zdeněk Zeman is a Czech-Italian football manager currently in charge with Serie C club Pescara. Known for his exciting, offensive footballing tactics and use of the 4–3–3 formation, Zeman has managed numerous teams over the years, mostly in Italian football. He has won the Serie B title twice, with Foggia and with Pescara.
Go to Profile#23882
David C. Stark
#23893
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David Charles Stark is Arthur Lehman Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where he served as chair of the sociology department and currently directs the Center on Organizational Innovation. He was formerly an External Faculty Member of the Santa Fe Institute. He is well-cited in the fields of economic sociology, social networks, science and technology studies, and social change and development.
Go to Profile#23883
David Walliams
#23894
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
David Edward Williams , known professionally as David Walliams , is an English comedian, actor, writer, and television personality. He is best known for his work with Matt Lucas on the BBC sketch comedy series Little Britain and Come Fly With Me . From 2012 to 2022, Walliams was a judge on the television talent show competition Britain's Got Talent on ITV. He is also a writer of children's books, having sold more than 37 million copies worldwide.
Go to Profile#23884
Jim Cornette
#23895
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
James Mark Cornette is an American author and podcaster who has previously worked in the professional wrestling industry as an agent, booker, color commentator, manager, promoter, trainer, and occasional professional wrestler. Cornette, along with co-host 'The Great' Brian Last, currently produces and hosts two podcasts—The Jim Cornette Experience and Jim Cornette's Drive-Thru—both popular among the wrestling community, with the latter being the most-listened wrestling podcast as of October 2023 and both being among the most-listened wrestling podcasts of all time. Cornette is widely consider...
Go to Profile#23885
Damian Conway
#23896
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Damian Conway is a computer scientist, a member of the Perl and Raku communities, a public speaker, and the author of several books. Until 2010, he was also an adjunct associate professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University.
Go to Profile#23886
David Boies
#23897
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
David Boies is an American lawyer and chairman of the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP. Boies rose to national prominence for three major cases: leading the U.S. federal government's successful prosecution of Microsoft in United States v. Microsoft Corp., his unsuccessful representation of Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore in Bush v. Gore, and for successful representation of the plaintiff in Hollingsworth v. Perry, which invalidated California Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage. Boies has also represented various clients in US lawsuits, including Theranos, tobacco companies, ...
Go to Profile#23887
Alaksandar Milinkievič
#23898
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Alaksandar Uładzimieravič Milinkievič is a Belarusian politician. He was nominated by the leading opposition parties in Belarus to run against incumbent Alexander Lukashenko in the 2006 presidential election.
Go to Profile#23888
Matthew Black
#23899
Overall Influence
1908 - 1994 (86 years)
Rev Matthew Black was a Scottish minister and biblical scholar. He was the first editor of the journal, New Testament Studies. Life He was born in Kilmarnock the son of James Black. He attended Kilmarnock Academy.
Go to Profile#23889
Frank Beamer
#23900
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Franklin Mitchell Beamer is a retired American college football coach, most notably for the Virginia Tech Hokies, and former college football player. He is the father of current South Carolina Gamecocks head coach Shane Beamer.
Go to Profile#23890
Andrew Joseph Galambos
#23901
Overall Influence
1924 - 1997 (73 years)
Andrew Joseph Galambos was an astrophysicist and philosopher who presented his revolutionary theories of freedom and Volitional Science in oral lectures through his Free Enterprise Institute from 1961 to 1989 in Los Angeles, California. He developed over 117 courses for FEI's curriculum over a period of twenty-eight years. As Galambos' literary executor, William W. Martin completed the all encompassing "Book One" that the professor intended to have published in written form which Martin published under the title Sic Itur Ad Astra . Within Sic Itur Ad Astra is the "roadmap to freedom" Course V-201: The Nature and Protection of Primary Property.
Go to Profile#23891
Dan Issel
#23902
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Daniel Paul Issel is an American former professional basketball player and coach. An outstanding collegian at the University of Kentucky, Issel was twice named an All-American en route to a school-record 25.7 points per game for his career. The American Basketball Association Rookie of the Year in 1971, he was a six-time ABA All-Star and a one-time NBA All-Star.
Go to Profile#23892
Steve Whittaker
#23903
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Steve Whittaker is a Professor in human-computer interaction at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is best known for his research at the intersection of computer science and social science in particular on computer mediated communication and personal information management. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery , and winner of the CSCW 2018 "Lasting Impact" award. He also received a Lifetime Research Achievement Award from SIGCHI, is a Member of the SIGCHI Academy. He is Editor of the journal Human-Computer Interaction.
Go to Profile#23893
Jonathan A. Jones
#23904
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Jonathan A. Jones is a professor in atomic and laser physics at the University of Oxford, and a fellow and tutor in physics at Brasenose College, Oxford. Education Jones studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1985 to 1989 and St John's College, Oxford, from 1989 to 1992. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1992 for research on Nuclear magnetic resonance data processing methods supervised by Peter Hore.
Go to Profile#23894
Predrag Mijatović
#23905
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Predrag "Peđa" Mijatović is a Montenegrin retired professional footballer who played as a striker. At club level, Mijatović played for six clubs: Budućnost, Partizan, Valencia, Real Madrid, Fiorentina and Levante. Internationally, he played for FR Yugoslavia at the 1998 FIFA World Cup and at the UEFA Euro 2000. During his career at Real Madrid he was widely considered as one of the best strikers in the world.
Go to Profile#23895
Carolyne Van Vliet
#23906
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Carolyne Marina Van Vliet was a Dutch-American physicist notable for the theory of generation-recombination noise and for the theory of quantum transport in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, as well as for her many contributions to the foundations of Linear Response Theory. She was a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers .
Go to Profile#23896
Didier Ratsiraka
#23907
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Didier Ignace Ratsiraka was a Malagasy politician and naval officer who was the third President of Madagascar from 1975 to 1993 and the fifth from 1997 to 2002. At the time of his death, he was the longest-serving President of Madagascar.
Go to Profile#23897
Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska
#23908
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska was a Polish paleobiologist. In the mid-1960s, she led a series of Polish-Mongolian paleontological expeditions to the Gobi Desert. She was the first woman to serve on the executive committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences. The most notable dinosaur species she discovered include: Deinocheirus and Gallimimus while Kielanodon and Zofiabaatar were named in her honour.
Go to Profile#23898
Valerie F. Reyna
#23909
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Valerie F. Reyna is an American psychologist and Professor of Human Development at Cornell University and an expert on false memory and risky decision making. In collaboration with her husband Charles Brainerd, Reyna developed fuzzy-trace theory, a dual-process model of mental representations underlying memory, judgement, and decision making. According to fuzzy-trace theory, there are two independent types of memory traces: a verbatim trace that records the exact details and a gist trace that extracts general features. Brainerd and Reyna used fuzzy-trace theory to provide a comprehensive acco...
Go to Profile#23899
Barbara Ann Crancer
#23910
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Barbara Ann Crancer is an American retired lawyer and judge who was a St. Louis County, Missouri Associate Circuit Court Judge. She is the daughter of former Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa and Josephine Hoffa.
Go to Profile#23900
Darrell Waltrip
#23911
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Darrell Lee Waltrip is an American motorsports analyst, author as well as a former national television broadcaster and stock car driver. He raced from 1972 to 2000 in the NASCAR Cup Series , most notably driving the No. 11 Chevrolet for Junior Johnson. Waltrip is a three-time Cup Series champion .
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