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
#2401
Richard Howard
#2403
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Richard Joseph Howard was an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and was a graduate of Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren, and where he was an emeritus professor. He lived in New York City.
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Heisuke Hironaka
#2404
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Heisuke Hironaka is a Japanese mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970 for his contributions to algebraic geometry. Career Hironaka entered Kyoto University in 1949. After completing his undergraduate studies at Kyoto University, he received his Ph.D. in 1960 from Harvard University while under the direction of Oscar Zariski.
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Abraham Pais
#2405
Overall Influence
1918 - 2000 (82 years)
Abraham Pais was a Dutch-American physicist and science historian. Pais earned his Ph.D. from University of Utrecht just prior to a Nazi ban on Jewish participation in Dutch universities during World War II. When the Nazis began the forced relocation of Dutch Jews, he went into hiding, but was later arrested and saved only by the end of the war. He then served as an assistant to Niels Bohr in Denmark and was later a colleague of Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Pais wrote books documenting the lives of these two great physicists and the contributions they and others made to modern physics.
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Jean Dausset
#2406
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Jean-Baptiste-Gabriel-Joachim Dausset was a French immunologist born in Toulouse, France. Dausset received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1980 along with Baruj Benacerraf and George Davis Snell for their discovery and characterisation of the genes making the major histocompatibility complex. Using the money from his Nobel Prize and a grant from the French Television, Dausset founded the Human Polymorphism Study Center in 1984, which was later renamed the Foundation Jean Dausset-CEPH in his honour. He married Rose Mayoral in 1963, with whom he had two children, Henri and Irène. ...
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Robert W. McChesney
#2407
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Robert Waterman McChesney is an American professor notable in the history and political economy of communications, and the role media play in democratic and capitalist societies. He is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He co-founded the Free Press, a national media reform organization. In 2002–12, he hosted Media Matters, a weekly radio program every Sunday afternoon on WILL , Illinois Public Media radio.
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Robert Hinde
#2408
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Robert Aubrey Hinde was a British zoologist, ethologist and psychologist. He served as the Emeritus Royal Society Research Professor of Zoology at the University of Cambridge. Hinde is best known for his ethological contributions to the fields of animal behaviour and developmental psychology.
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Susan Hockfield
#2409
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Susan Hockfield is an American neuroscientist who served as the sixteenth president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from December 2004 through June 2012. Hockfield succeeded Charles M. Vest and was succeeded by L. Rafael Reif, who had served in her administration as Provost. Hockfield was the first biologist and the first woman to serve as the Institute's president. Hockfield currently serves as a Professor of Neuroscience in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a Joint Professor of Work and Organization Studies in MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
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Kevin J. Anderson
#2410
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Kevin James Anderson is an American science fiction author. He has written spin-off novels for Star Wars, StarCraft, Titan A.E. and The X-Files, and with Brian Herbert is the co-author of the Dune prequel series. His original works include the Saga of Seven Suns series and the Nebula Award–nominated Assemblers of Infinity. He has also written several comic books, including the Dark Horse Star Wars series Tales of the Jedi written in collaboration with Tom Veitch, Dark Horse Predator titles, and The X-Files titles for Topps. Some of Anderson's superhero novels include Enemies & Allies, about t...
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Daniel Okrent
#2411
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Daniel Okrent is an American writer and editor. He is best known for having served as the first public editor of The New York Times newspaper, inventing Rotisserie League Baseball, and for writing several books . In November 2011, Last Call won the Albert J. Beveridge prize, awarded by the American Historical Association to the year's best book of American history. His most recent book, published May 2019, is The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.
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Kim Newman
#2412
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Kim James Newman is an English journalist, film critic and fiction writer. He is interested in film history and horror fiction—both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's Dracula at the age of eleven—and alternative history. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award and the BSFA award.
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James Hartle
#2413
Overall Influence
1939 - 2023 (84 years)
James Burkett Hartle was an American theoretical physicist. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966, and was a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. Hartle is known for his work in general relativity, astrophysics, and interpretation of quantum mechanics.
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Elias James Corey
#2414
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
#2413
Riazuddin
#2415
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Riazuddin, also spelled as Riaz-Ud-Din , was a Pakistani theoretical physicist, specialising in high-energy physics and nuclear physics. Starting his scientific research in physics in 1958, Riazuddin was considered one of the early pioneers of Pakistan's nuclear weapons development and atomic deterrence development. He was the director of the Theoretical Physics Group of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission from 1974 until 1984. Riazuddin was a pupil of the winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, Abdus Salam.
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Ray Jackendoff
#2416
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ray Jackendoff is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed to both the existence of an innate universal grammar and to giving an account of language that is consistent with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition .
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Edward Jay Epstein
#2417
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist and a former political science professor at Harvard University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Gavyn Wright
#2418
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gavyn Wright is a British violinist and orchestra leader with the London Session Orchestra and Penguin Cafe Orchestra. He is best known for his orchestral arrangements on pop productions as well as numerous TV and movie soundtracks .
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George Saunders
#2419
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
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Johann Deisenhofer
#2420
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Johann Deisenhofer is a German biochemist who, along with Hartmut Michel and Robert Huber, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 for their determination of the first crystal structure of an integral membrane protein, a membrane-bound complex of proteins and co-factors that is essential to photosynthesis.
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Morris Kline
#2421
Overall Influence
1908 - 1992 (84 years)
Morris Kline was a professor of mathematics, a writer on the history, philosophy, and teaching of mathematics, and also a popularizer of mathematical subjects. Education and career Kline was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn and resided in Jamaica, Queens. After graduating from Boys High School in Brooklyn, he studied mathematics at New York University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1930, a master's degree in 1932, and a doctorate in 1936. He continued at NYU as an instructor until 1942.
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Marv Albert
#2422
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Marv Albert is an American former sportscaster. Honored for his work by the Basketball Hall of Fame, he was commonly referred to as "the voice of basketball". From 1967 to 2004, he was also known as "the voice of the New York Knicks". Albert worked for Turner Sports as the lead announcer for NBA games on TNT.
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Nathaniel Rochester
#2423
Overall Influence
1919 - 2001 (82 years)
Nathaniel Rochester was the chief architect of the IBM 701, the first mass produced scientific computer, and of the prototype of its first commercial version, the IBM 702. He wrote the first assembler and participated in the founding of the field of artificial intelligence.
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Brian Mulroney
#2424
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Martin Brian Mulroney is a Canadian lawyer, businessman, and politician who served as the 18th prime minister of Canada from 1984 to 1993. Born in the eastern Quebec city of Baie-Comeau, Mulroney studied political science and law. He then moved to Montreal and gained prominence as a labour lawyer. After placing third in the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership election, he was appointed president of the Iron Ore Company of Canada in 1977. He held that post until 1983, when he successfully became leader of the Progressive Conservatives. He then led the party to a landslide victory in the ...
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Barry Simon
#2425
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Barry Martin Simon is an American mathematical physicist and was the IBM professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Caltech, known for his prolific contributions in spectral theory, functional analysis, and nonrelativistic quantum mechanics , including the connections to atomic and molecular physics. He has authored more than 400 publications on mathematics and physics.
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Chandra Wickramasinghe
#2426
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe is a Sri Lankan-born British mathematician, astronomer and astrobiologist of Sinhalese ethnicity. His research interests include the interstellar medium, infrared astronomy, light scattering theory, applications of solid-state physics to astronomy, the early Solar System, comets, astrochemistry, the origin of life and astrobiology. A student and collaborator of Fred Hoyle, the pair worked jointly for over 40 years as influential proponents of panspermia. In 1974 they proposed the hypothesis that some dust in interstellar space was largely organic, later proven t...
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Robert Morgenthau
#2427
Overall Influence
1919 - 2019 (100 years)
Robert Morris Morgenthau was an American lawyer. From 1975 until his retirement in 2009, he was the District Attorney for New York County , having previously served as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York throughout much of the 1960s on the appointment of John F. Kennedy. At retirement, Morgenthau was the longest-serving district attorney in the history of the State of New York.
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Ed Broadbent
#2428
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
John Edward "Ed" Broadbent is a Canadian social-democratic politician, political scientist, and chair of the Broadbent Institute, a policy think tank. He was leader of the New Democratic Party from 1975 to 1989. In the 2004 federal election, he returned to Parliament for an additional term as the Member of Parliament for Ottawa Centre.
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David Wheeler
#2429
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
David John Wheeler FRS was a computer scientist and professor of computer science at the University of Cambridge. Education Wheeler was born in Birmingham, England, the second of the three children of Marjorie, née Gudgeon, and Arthur Wheeler, a press tool maker, engineer, and proprietor of a small shopfitting firm. He was educated at a local primary school in Birmingham and then went on to King Edward VI Camp Hill School after winning a scholarship in 1938. His education was disrupted by World War II, and he completed his sixth form studies at Hanley High School. In 1945 he gained a scholarship to study the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1948.
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Maurice Hilleman
#2430
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Maurice Ralph Hilleman was a leading American microbiologist who specialized in vaccinology and developed over 40 vaccines, an unparalleled record of productivity. According to one estimate, his vaccines save nearly eight million lives each year. He has been described as one of the most influential vaccinologists ever.
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Reinhard Bendix
#2431
Overall Influence
1916 - 1991 (75 years)
Reinhard Bendix was a German-American sociologist. Life and career Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1916, he briefly belonged to Neu Beginnen and Hashomer Hatzair, groups that resisted the Nazis. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States. He received his B.A. , M.A. , and PhD from the University of Chicago, and subsequently taught there from 1943 to 1946. He then taught for a year in the Sociology Department of the University of Colorado before moving to the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1947 where he remained for the rest of his career.
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Niels Kaj Jerne
#2432
Overall Influence
1911 - 1994 (83 years)
Niels Kaj Jerne, FRS was a Danish immunologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 with Georges J. F. Köhler and César Milstein "for theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system and the discovery of the principle for production of monoclonal antibodies".
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Stephen R. Bourne
#2433
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Stephen Richard "Steve" Bourne is an English computer scientist based in the United States for most of his career. He is well known as the author of the Bourne shell , which is the foundation for the standard command-line interfaces to Unix.
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Ugo Fano
#2434
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
Ugo Fano was an Italian American physicist, notable for contributions to theoretical physics. Biography Ugo Fano was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Turin, Italy. His father was Gino Fano, a professor of mathematics.
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Garry Shandling
#2435
Overall Influence
1949 - 2016 (67 years)
Garry Emmanuel Shandling was an American actor, comedian, writer, director, and producer. Shandling began his career writing for sitcoms, such as Sanford and Son and Welcome Back, Kotter. He made a successful stand-up performance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson where he became a frequent guest host. Shandling was, for a time, considered the leading contender to replace Johnny Carson. In 1986, he created It's Garry Shandling's Show, which aired on Showtime. It was nominated for four Emmy Awards and lasted until 1990.
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Klaus Hasselmann
#2436
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Klaus Ferdinand Hasselmann is a German oceanographer and climate modeller. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Hamburg and former Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. He was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Syukuro Manabe and Giorgio Parisi.
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Helmut Schmidt
#2437
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt was a German politician and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany , who served as the chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982. Before becoming chancellor, he served as the minister of defence and the minister of finance in the government of Willy Brandt. In the latter role he gained credit for his financial policies. He had also briefly been minister of economics and acting foreign minister.
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Doug Morris
#2438
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Doug Morris is an American record executive. He is the current chairman of 12Tone Music Group. He previously served as chairman and CEO of the Universal Music Group from 1995 to 2011 and Sony Music Entertainment from 2011 to 2017.
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Roger Wolcott Sperry
#2439
Overall Influence
1913 - 1994 (81 years)
Roger Wolcott Sperry was an American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist, cognitive neuroscientist, and Nobel laureate who, together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work with split-brain research. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sperry as the 44th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Randy Shilts
#2440
Overall Influence
1951 - 1994 (43 years)
Randy Shilts was an American journalist and author. After studying journalism at the University of Oregon, Shilts began working as a reporter for both The Advocate and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as for San Francisco Bay Area television stations. In the 1980s, he was noted for being the first openly gay reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.
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Dominic Lieven
#2441
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Dominic Lieven is an English research professor at Cambridge University and a Fellow of the British Academy and of Trinity College, Cambridge. Education Lieven was educated at Downside School, a Benedictine Roman Catholic boarding independent school in Stratton-on-the-Fosse, near Shepton Mallet in Somerset, followed by Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated top of the class of 1973 , and was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University in 1973/4.
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Maria Zakharova
#2442
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Maria Vladimirovna Zakharova is the Director of the Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation since 2015. She has a degree of Candidate in Historical Sciences, the Russian equivalent of a PhD.
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Hirofumi Uzawa
#2443
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Hirofumi Uzawa was a Japanese economist. Biography Uzawa was born on July 21, 1928, in Yonago, Tottori to a farming family. He attended the Tokyo First Middle School and the First Higher School, Japan .
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Greg Egan
#2444
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Greg Egan is an Australian science fiction writer and mathematician, best known for his works of hard science fiction. Egan has won multiple awards including the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Hugo Award, and the Locus Award.
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Sidney Powell
#2445
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Sidney Katherine Powell is an American attorney, former federal prosecutor, and conspiracy theorist who attempted to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. In August 2023, she was indicted along with Donald Trump and eighteen others in the prosecution related to the 2020 election in Georgia, arising from the attempt by the former president and his allies to subvert the election outcome in Georgia and other key states lost by Trump. In October 2023, as part of an agreement with Georgia prosecutors, she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiring to intentionally interfere with the performance of election duties.
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Alan Rusbridger
#2446
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Alan Charles Rusbridger is a British journalist, who was formerly editor-in-chief of The Guardian and then principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Rusbridger became editor-in-chief of The Guardian in 1995, having been a reporter and columnist earlier in his career. Rusbridger stood down from the post at the end of May 2015 and was succeeded by Katharine Viner.
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Rod Smallwood
#2447
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Roderick Charles Smallwood is an English music manager, best known as the co-manager of the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden. With his business partner, Andy Taylor, whom he met while studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, he founded the Sanctuary Records Group in 1979, which became the largest independent record label in the UK and the largest independent music management company in the world until its closure in 2007. Prior to managing Iron Maiden, Smallwood managed Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel.
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Helmut Newton
#2448
Overall Influence
1920 - 2004 (84 years)
Helmut Newton was a German-Australian photographer. The New York Times described him as a "prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications."
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Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
#2449
Overall Influence
1921 - 2011 (90 years)
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was an American medical physicist, and a co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for development of the radioimmunoassay technique. She was the second woman , and the first American-born woman, to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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Todd May
#2450
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Todd Gifford May is a political philosopher who writes on topics of anarchism, poststructuralism, and post-structuralist anarchism. More recently he has published books on existentialism and moral philosophy. He is currently a professor of philosophy at Warren Wilson College.
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R. Adam Engle
#2451
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
R. Adam Engle is an American social entrepreneur who initiated and developed the Mind and Life Dialogues between the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet and panels of prominent scientists in the 1980s. Over the 22 years of his subsequent tenure as chief executive of the Mind and Life Institute, which he co-founded in 1990, his work contributed significantly to the establishment of contemplative science as a new field of research.
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Gérard Genette
#2452
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Gérard Genette was a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.
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