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
#24001
Ernesto Cardenal
#24012
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Ernesto Cardenal Martínez was a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet, and politician. He was a liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived for more than ten years . A former member of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, he was Nicaragua's minister of culture from 1979 to 1987. He was prohibited from administering the sacraments in 1984 by Pope John Paul II, but rehabilitated by Pope Francis in 2019.
Go to Profile#24002
Michael J. Graham
#24013
Overall Influence
Michael J. Graham is an American Jesuit priest and educator who was the president of Xavier University between 2001 and 2021. Early life and education Michael Graham was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Graham graduated from Cornell College with a Bachelor of Science. Additionally, Graham earned a Master of Arts degrees in American Studies and psychology, and a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Michigan. Graham was ordained a priest in 1988.
Go to Profile#24003
Cary Wolfe
#24014
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Cary Wolfe is an American academic. He teaches English at Rice University. He has written on topics from American poetry to bioethics. He has been a voice in debates on animal studies and advocates a version of the posthumanist position. He is series editor for Minnesota Press's Posthumanities Series. He was born and grew up in North Carolina.
Go to Profile#24004
Jamaal Wilkes
#24015
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jamaal Abdul-Lateef , better known as Jamaal Wilkes, is an American former basketball player who was a small forward in the National Basketball Association . A three-time NBA All-Star, he won four NBA championships with the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers. Nicknamed "Silk", he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#24005
Joseph Kony
#24016
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Joseph Rao Kony is a Ugandan militant who founded the Lord's Resistance Army , designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Peacekeepers, the European Union, and various other governments. An Acholi, Kony was born into a middle-class family. His father, Luizi Obol, and his mother, Nora Oting, were both farmers. Kony dropped out of school at a young age. In 1987, he formed the Lord's Resistance Army. Kony declared a military offensive in Uganda, aiming to overthrow Yoweri Museveni's Ugandan government and establish a theocratic state based on the dominion theology. After Kony's terror activities, he was banished from Uganda and shifted to South Sudan.
Go to Profile#24006
Ole Henrik Magga
#24017
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ole Henrik Magga is a Sámi linguist, professor and politician from Kautokeino, Norway. As a linguist As a linguist, Magga is best known for his work on syntax. His master's thesis at the University of Oslo, "Lokative læt-setninger i samisk" , discussed the structure of existential and habitive sentences, whose structures in many of the Uralic languages are similar to each other. His doctoral dissertation in 1986 discussed the structure of Sámi verbal phrases, in particular, the interaction between modal verbs and infinitives.
Go to Profile#24007
Hank Marvin
#24018
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Hank Brian Marvin is an English multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and songwriter. He is widely known as the lead guitarist for the Shadows, a group which primarily performed instrumentals and was the backing band for Cliff Richard, and subsequently for Marvin, Welch & Farrar.
Go to Profile#24008
Ron Sider
#24019
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Ronald James Sider , was a Canadian-born American theologian and social activist. He was the founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, a think-tank which seeks to develop biblical solutions to social and economic problems through incubating programs that operate at the intersection of faith and social justice.
Go to Profile#24009
Stephen Street
#24020
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Stephen Brian Street is an English music producer best known for his work with the Smiths, the Cranberries and Blur. Street collaborated with Morrissey on his debut album Viva Hate following the split of the Smiths.
Go to Profile#24010
Srinivas Aravamudan
#24021
Overall Influence
1962 - 2016 (54 years)
Srinivas Aravamudan was an Indian-born American academic. He was a professor of English, Literature, and Romance Studies at Duke University, where he also served as dean of the humanities. He was widely recognized for his work on eighteenth-century British and French literature and postcolonial literature and theory. His publications included books and articles on novels, slavery, abolition, secularism, cosmopolitanism, globalization, climate change, and the anthropocene.
Go to Profile#24011
Aihwa Ong
#24022
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Science Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship. She is well known for her interdisciplinary approach in investigations of globalization, modernity, and citizenship from Southeast Asia and China to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Her notions of 'flexible citizenship', 'graduated sovereignty,' and 'global assemblages' have widely impacted conceptions of the global in modernity across the social sciences and humanities.
Go to Profile#24012
Ladislav Holý
#24023
Overall Influence
1933 - 1997 (64 years)
Ladislav Holý was a Czech anthropologist and Africanist of the British school of social anthropology. He combined interpretative approach with methodological individualism, most notably in the Actions, Norms and Representations, co-written with Milan Stuchlik.
Go to Profile#24013
Helmut Willke
#24024
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Helmut Willke is a German sociologist who studies the effect of globalization on modern society. He coined the term Atopia to denote a society that exists without borders, with no national identity. He is currently professor at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Helmut Willke has been teaching planning and decision theory since 1983 in the University of Bielefeld’s department of sociology, and state theory and global governance since 2002. He also holds visiting professorships in Washington, D.C., Geneva and Vienna. His main areas of interest and praxis are in systems theory, st...
Go to Profile#24014
Konrad Paul Liessmann
#24025
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Konrad Paul Liessmann is an Austrian philosopher, essayist and cultural publicist. He is a university professor for "Methods of Teaching Philosophy and Ethics" at the University of Vienna. He officially retired in 2018, but continued his professorial activities at the University of Vienna on a special contract basis until the end of 2020.
Go to Profile#24015
Fidel Nemenzo
#24026
Overall Influence
Fidel Ronquillo Nemenzo is a Filipino mathematician and professor who served as chancellor of the University of the Philippines Diliman from 2020 to 2023. His areas of expertise include number theory, elliptic curves, and coding theory. He earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from UP Diliman while his master's and Doctor of Science degrees are from Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan.
Go to Profile#24016
Caron Butler
#24027
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
James Caron Butler is an American professional basketball coach and former player who is an assistant coach for the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association . During a 14-year career he played for the Miami Heat, Los Angeles Lakers, Washington Wizards, Dallas Mavericks, Los Angeles Clippers, Milwaukee Bucks, Oklahoma City Thunder, Detroit Pistons, and Sacramento Kings of the National Basketball Association . Butler is a two-time NBA All-Star and was the 2002 Big East Conference Men's Basketball Player of the Year, while playing for the Connecticut Huskies.
Go to Profile#24017
Andrey Tikhonov
#24028
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Andrey Nikolayevich Tikhonov was a leading Soviet Russian mathematician and geophysicist known for important contributions to topology, functional analysis, mathematical physics, and ill-posed problems. He was also one of the inventors of the magnetotellurics method in geophysics. Other transliterations of his surname include "Tychonoff", "Tychonov", "Tihonov", "Tichonov".
Go to Profile#24018
Hugh Ross
#24029
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Hugh Norman Ross is a Christian apologist, and old-Earth creationist. Ross obtained his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Toronto and his B.Sc. degree in physics from the University of British Columbia. He established his own ministry in 1986, called Reasons to Believe.
Go to Profile#24019
Jerry Kaplan
#24030
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Samuel Jerrold "Jerry" Kaplan is an American computer scientist, author, futurist, and entrepreneur. He is best known as a pioneer in the field of pen computing and tablet computers. He is the founder of numerous companies, including GO Corporation, whose technology was used to develop the first smartphone and tablet PC. Kaplan is the co-founder of OnSale, the first B2C online auction site launched in 1994, five months prior to eBay. He is a recipient of the 1998 Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award and author of the best-selling book Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure. He h...
Go to Profile#24020
Jeffrey Brock
#24031
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Jeffrey Farlowe Brock is an American mathematician, working in low-dimensional geometry and topology. He is known for his contributions to the understanding of hyperbolic 3-manifolds and the geometry of Teichmüller spaces.
Go to Profile#24021
Ursula Franklin
#24032
Overall Influence
1921 - 2016 (95 years)
Ursula Martius Franklin was a Canadian metallurgist, research physicist, author, and educator who taught at the University of Toronto for more than 40 years. Franklin is best known for her writings on the political and social effects of technology. She was the author of The Real World of Technology, which is based on her 1989 Massey Lectures; The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map, a collection of her papers, interviews, and talks; and Ursula Franklin Speaks: Thoughts and Afterthoughts, containing 22 of her speeches and five interviews between 1986 and 2012. Franklin was a practising Quaker and actively worked on behalf of pacifist and feminist causes.
Go to Profile#24022
Robert Wagner
#24033
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Robert John Wagner Jr. is an American actor of stage, screen, and television. He is known for starring in the television shows It Takes a Thief , Switch , and Hart to Hart . He later had a recurring role as Teddy Leopold in the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men and made twelve guest appearances as Anthony DiNozzo Sr. in the police procedural NCIS.
Go to Profile#24023
Hachiro Sugimoto
#24034
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Hachiro Sugimoto is a Japanese chemist and pharmacologist, known for his discovery of Donepezil. Research Sugimoto's research on E2020 , an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, first began at Eisai's Tsukuba Research Laboratories in 1983, because his mother suffered from dementia. At that time, there was a hypothesis suggested that acetylcholines were closely linked to abnormal decreases in memory function in patients with Alzheimer's disease. His research group was finally able to successfully create Donepezil with a promising enough profile for the compound to become a drug candidate.
Go to Profile#24024
Daniel Lanois
#24035
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Daniel Roland Lanois is a Canadian record producer and musician. He has produced albums by artists including Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, Robbie Robertson, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Spoons, and Brandon Flowers. He collaborated with Brian Eno to produce several albums for U2, including The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby . Three albums produced or co-produced by Lanois have won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Four other albums received Grammy nominations.
Go to Profile#24025
Vico Magistretti
#24036
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Vico Magistretti was an Italian architect who was also active as an industrial designer, furniture designer, and academic. As a collaborator of humanist architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers, one of Magistretti's first projects was the "poetic" round church in the experimental Milan neighbourhood of QT8. He later designed mass-produced appliances, lighting, and furniture for companies such as Cassina S.p.A., Artemide, and Oluce. These designs won several awards, including the Compasso d'Oro and the Gold Medal of the Chartered Society of Industrial Artists & Designers in 1986.
Go to Profile#24026
Dennis Gaitsgory
#24037
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Dennis Gaitsgory is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University known for his research on the geometric Langlands program. Born in Chișinău, now in Moldova, he grew up in Tajikistan, before studying at Tel Aviv University under Joseph Bernstein . He received his doctorate in 1997 for a thesis entitled "Automorphic Sheaves and Eisenstein Series". He has been awarded a Harvard Junior Fellowship, a Clay Research Fellowship, and the prize of the European Mathematical Society for his work.
Go to Profile#24027
Alain Caillé
#24038
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Allain Caillé is a French sociologist and economist. He is Professor of sociology at the University of Paris X Nanterre. He is a founding member of the Anti-Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences and editor of the movement's monthly journal "Revue du Mauss".
Go to Profile#24028
Ann Heberlein
#24039
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Ann Helen Heberlein is a Swedish academic and author, who writes extensively on theology and ethics. She is best known for her autobiographical account of life with bipolar disorder, Jag vill inte dö, jag vill bara inte leva .
Go to Profile#24029
Joseph O'Rourke
#24040
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Joseph O'Rourke is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor of Computer Science at Smith College and the founding chair of the Smith computer science department. His main research interest is computational geometry.
Go to Profile#24030
Michael A. Cohen
#24041
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Michael A. Cohen is an American academic who is the director of the International Affairs Program at The New School. He also works as Advisor to the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning of the University of Buenos Aires.
Go to Profile#24031
Robert E. Horn
#24042
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Robert E. Horn is an American political scientist who taught at Harvard, Columbia, and Sheffield universities, and has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information. He is known for the development of information mapping.
Go to Profile#24032
Hubert Österle
#24043
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Hubert Österle is an Austrian academic, and Professor Emeritus of Business and Information Systems, and former director of the Institute of Information Management at the University of St. Gallen. Career Hubert Österle studied business administration at the University of Innsbruck and the Johannes Kepler Universität Linz. He obtained his PhD at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 1973 with his dissertation “Computerunterstütztes Entscheidungstraining” . After working as a consultant at IBM Germany, Österle completed his postdoctoral work on the "Design of information systems" at the Techn...
Go to Profile#24033
James H. Charlesworth
#24044
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
James Hamilton Charlesworth is an American academic who served as the George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature until January 17, 2019, and Director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at the Princeton Theological Seminary. His research interests include the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, the Historical Jesus, the Gospel of John, and the Book of Revelation.
Go to Profile#24034
Brian Street
#24045
Overall Influence
1943 - 2017 (74 years)
Brian Vincent Street was a professor of language education at King's College London and visiting professor at the Graduate School of Education in University of Pennsylvania. During his career, he mainly worked on literacy in both theoretical and applied perspectives, and is perhaps best known for his book Literacy in Theory and Practice .
Go to Profile#24035
Jordan Grafman
#24046
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jordan Henry Grafman is an American neuropsychologist who serves as Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. He is also the Director of Brain Injury Research at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Before joining Northwestern and the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, Grafman served as the director of Traumatic Brain Injury Research at the Kessler Foundation. He also served as Chief of the Cognitive Neuroscience Section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. His research primarily focuses on investigating the funct...
Go to Profile#24036
Trina Gulliver
#24047
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Catrina Elizabeth Gulliver is an English professional darts player. She is the 10-time Women's World Professional Darts Champion of the British Darts Organisation . Her nickname is Golden Girl and in 2003, she was named as the BBC Midlands Sports Personality of the Year.
Go to Profile#24037
Jean-Claude Colliard
#24048
Overall Influence
1946 - 2014 (68 years)
Jean-Claude Colliard was a French academic and senior public servant. Colliard was born in Paris. He graduated from the Paris Institute of Political Studies , and obtained a Ph.D. in law from the University of Paris. He also held an agrégation in Public Law and Political Science.
Go to Profile#24038
Seth Lerer
#24049
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Seth Lerer is an American scholar and Professor of English. He specializes in historical analyses of the English language, and in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. He previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University. Lerer won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in ...
Go to Profile#24039
Chris Allen
#24050
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Chris Allen is a British sociologist and associate professor at the Centre for Hate Studies based in the Department of Criminology at the University of Leicester. He was named by the Deutsche Welle as an expert on the topic of contemporary Islamophobia.
Go to Profile#24040
Margaret Levi
#24051
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Margaret Levi is an American political scientist and author, noted for her work in comparative political economy, labor politics, and democratic theory, notably on the origins and effects of trustworthy government.
Go to Profile#24041
Ben Folds
#24052
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Benjamin Scott Folds is an American singer-songwriter from Greensboro, North Carolina. After playing in several small independent bands throughout the late 80s and into the early 90s, Folds came to prominence as the eponymous frontman and pianist of the alternative rock trio Ben Folds Five from 1993 to 2000, and again during their reunion from 2011 to 2013. He has recorded a number of solo albums – the most recent of which, What Matters Most, was released in June 2023. He has also collaborated with musicians such as Regina Spektor, "Weird Al" Yankovic, and yMusic, and undertaken experimental songwriting projects with actor William Shatner and authors such as Nick Hornby and Neil Gaiman.
Go to Profile#24042
Mogobe Ramose
#24053
Overall Influence
Mogobe Bernard Ramose is a South African philosopher, one of the key thinkers to have popularised African philosophy, and specifically Ubuntu philosophy, internationally. Ramose is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Africa in Pretoria.
Go to Profile#24043
Joe Simon
#24054
Overall Influence
1913 - 2011 (98 years)
Joseph Henry Simon was an American comic book writer, artist, editor, and publisher. Simon created or co-created many important characters in the 1930s–1940s Golden Age of Comic Books and served as the first editor of Timely Comics, the company that would evolve into Marvel Comics.
Go to Profile#24044
Leo Paquette
#24055
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Leo Armand Paquette was an American organic chemist. Biography Paquette was born on July 15, 1934. He received his B.S. degree in 1956 from the College of the Holy Cross and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 with professor Norman Allan Nelson. After serving as a research associate at the Upjohn Company from 1959 to 1963, he joined the faculty of Ohio State University .
Go to Profile#24045
Richard M. Durbin
#24056
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Richard Michael Durbin is a British computational biologist and Al-Kindi Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. He also serves as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where he was previously a senior group leader.
Go to Profile#24046
Leonard Maltin
#24057
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Leonard Michael Maltin is an American film critic and film historian, as well as an author of several mainstream books on cinema, focusing on nostalgic, celebratory narratives. He is perhaps best known for his book of film capsule reviews, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, published annually from 1969 to 2014. Maltin was the film critic on Entertainment Tonight from 1982 to 2010. He currently teaches at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and has appeared regularly on Turner Classic Movies, and hosts the weekly podcast Maltin on Movies. He has written articles for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Variety, Playboy and TV Guide.
Go to Profile#24047
Kev Walker
#24058
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Kevin Walker is a British comics artist and illustrator, based in Leeds, who worked mainly on 2000 AD and Warhammer comics and the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering. He is now working for Marvel Comics.
Go to Profile#24048
Beverley Skeggs
#24059
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Beverley Skeggs is a British sociologist, noted as one of the foremost feminist sociologists in the world. Currently, she works as a "Distinguished Professor" in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, developing a Center for Social Inequalities in the North West of England. She continues to run the "Economics of Care" theme at the International Inequalities centre at the London School of Economics and is a visiting professor at Goldsmiths University. She has been the head of two of the UK's leading Sociology Departments, at the University of Manchester and Goldsmiths, as well as co-director of Lancaster's Women's Studies.
Go to Profile#24049
Hanns-Peter Boehm
#24060
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Hanns-Peter Boehm was a German chemist and professor emeritus at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. Boehm is considered a pioneer of graphene research. Biography Hanns-Peter Boehm studied chemistry in Regensburg from 1947 to 1951. He received his doctorate in 1953 at Technische Universität Darmstadt, where he also received his habilitation in 1959 with the treatise Oberflächenchemie und Adsorption an Kohlenstoff und SiO2. In 1961, Boehm, together with Ralph Setton and Eberhard Stumpp, isolated and identified single graphene sheets by transmission electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction.
Go to Profile#24050
Robert Cummings Neville
#24061
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Robert Cummings Neville is an American systematic philosopher and theologian, author of numerous books and papers, and ex-Dean of the Boston University School of Theology. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Religion, and Theology at Boston University.
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