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
#24251
Kevin Pietersen
#24262
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Kevin Peter Pietersen is an English cricket commentator, conservationist, and former England international captain. He is a right-handed batsman and occasional off spin bowler who played in all three formats for England between 2005 and 2014, which included a brief tenure as captain. He won the Player of the Series award for his heroics in 2010 ICC World Twenty20 and for helping the England Cricket Team win their maiden ICC trophy.
Go to Profile#24252
Jean-Marc Ferry
#24263
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jean-Marc Ferry is a French philosopher who is best known for his book Les puissances de l'expérience , described by Paul Ricoeur as "one of the most important works recently published in the field of social and political philosophy". He has also translated the work of Jürgen Habermas, by whom he was influenced, into French.
Go to Profile#24253
Edmund Stoiber
#24264
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Edmund Rüdiger Stoiber is a German politician who served as the 16th Minister President of the state of Bavaria between 1993 and 2007 and chairman of the Christian Social Union between 1999 and 2007. In 2002, he ran for the office of Chancellor of Germany in the federal election, but in one of the narrowest elections in German history lost against Gerhard Schröder. On 18 January 2007, he announced his decision to step down from the posts of minister-president and party chairman by 30 September, after having been under fire in his own party for weeks.
Go to Profile#24254
Sigrid Nunez
#24265
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Sigrid Nunez is an American writer, best known for her novels. Her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. Biography Sigrid Nunez was born and raised in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. She received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Columbia University , after which she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books. Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, and What Are You Going Through. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag.
Go to Profile#24255
Kirsten Dunst
#24266
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Kirsten Caroline Dunst is an American actress. She made her acting debut in the anthology film New York Stories . She gained recognition for her role as child vampire Claudia in the horror film Interview with the Vampire , which earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She also had roles in her youth in Little Women and Jumanji .
Go to Profile#24256
Louis Monier
#24267
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Louis Monier was a cofounder of the Internet search engine AltaVista together with Paul Flaherty and Michael Burrows. After he left AltaVista, he worked at eBay and then at Google. He left Google in August 2007 to join Cuil, a search engine startup. He was Vice President of Products at Cuil. One month after the launch, he left Cuil, citing differences with the CEO. He also was the co-founder and CTO of Qwiki with Doug Imbruce. Qwiki won the TechCrunch Disrupt Award in 2010 and was sold to Yahoo in 2013. In 2014, Yahoo shuttered Qwiki.
Go to Profile#24257
Jean Meeus
#24268
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Jean Meeus is a Belgian meteorologist and amateur astronomer specializing in celestial mechanics, spherical astronomy, and mathematical astronomy. Meeus studied mathematics at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where he received the Degree of Licentiate in 1953. From then until his retirement in 1993, he was a meteorologist at Brussels Airport.
Go to Profile#24258
James E. Cofer
#24269
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
James Erwin Cofer, Sr. , is a former president of both Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, and the University of Louisiana at Monroe, Louisiana. He served as the tenth president of Missouri State University and eight years previously at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. His tenure at Missouri State came during a difficult economic period. According to Missouri State's official account of his presidency, Cofer "opened up the budget process, balanced the budget without cutting the academic departments even in light of the state appropriation reductions, gave equity raises to 40 percent of the faculty and started the process of raising the pay grades and salaries for staff.
Go to Profile#24259
Yann Algan
#24270
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Yann Algan is a French economist, Associate Dean of Pre-experience Programs and Professor of Economics at HEC Paris. He was previously and until 2021 a Professor of Economics of Sciences Po, where he was dean of the School of Public Affairs. His research interests include the digital economy, social capital and well-being. In 2009, Yann Algan was awarded the Prize of the Best Young Economist of France for his contributions to economics in France.
Go to Profile#24260
Tommy Dreamer
#24271
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Thomas James Laughlin is an American professional wrestler and promoter better known by the ring name Tommy Dreamer. He is signed to Impact Wrestling, where he is the current Impact Digital Media Champion in his first reign, and is the owner and promoter of the House of Hardcore promotion.
Go to Profile#24261
Harry George Drickamer
#24272
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Harry George Drickamer , born Harold George Weidenthal, was a pioneer experimentalist in high-pressure studies of condensed matter. His work generally concerned understanding the electronic properties of matter.
Go to Profile#24262
Sergei Kurdyumov
#24273
Overall Influence
1928 - 2004 (76 years)
Sergey Pavlovich Kurdyumov was a specialist in mathematical physics, mathematical modeling, plasma physics, complexity studies and synergetics from Moscow, Russia. Kurdyumov graduated from the Moscow State University in 1957. Since 1953 he worked in the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics. He was also the Head of the Applied Mathematics Department in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Since 1984 he was a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#24263
Blake Griffin
#24274
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Blake Austin Griffin is an American professional basketball player who last played for the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association . He played college basketball for the Oklahoma Sooners, when he was named the consensus national college player of the year as a sophomore. Griffin was selected first overall by the Los Angeles Clippers in the 2009 NBA draft, and has since been a six-time NBA All-Star and a five-time All-NBA selection. In January 2018, Griffin was traded to the Detroit Pistons and played for them until 2021. In March 2021, Griffin signed with the Brooklyn Nets. In September 2022, Griffin signed with the Boston Celtics.
Go to Profile#24264
Finn Kjærsdam
#24275
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Finn Kjærsdam is a Danish Land Surveyor and former rector and professor of Urban Planning at Aalborg University . Finn Kjærsdam is born in Roskilde in 1943, but grew up most of his childhood in Køge. He graduated from Roskilde Cathedral School as a mathematical and natural science high school student in 1963. He subsequently studied at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University and became a Land Surveyor in 1969.
Go to Profile#24265
James O'Connor
#24276
Overall Influence
1930 - 2017 (87 years)
James Richard O'Connor was an American political economist and professor of sociology. He was born April 20, 1930, in Boston, Massachusetts, and died November 12, 2017, in Santa Cruz, California. Together with Barbara Laurence he founded the journal Capitalism Nature Socialism in 1988.
Go to Profile#24266
Ferdinand Fellmann
#24277
Overall Influence
1939 - 2019 (80 years)
Ferdinand Fellmann was a German philosopher. After the expulsion of his family in 1946 out of Hirschberg Fellmann grew up in Hameln/Weser . Biography Fellmann studied at the University of Münster and the University of Pavia, promoted by the “Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes” . He graduated from his studies in English and Romance Languages and Literature in 1959. From 1962 to 1965 Fellmann continued his studies in Giessen . He studied there under his most influential professors: Professor of Romance Languages and Literature Hans Robert Jauss, and Professor of Philosophy Hans Blumenberg. ...
Go to Profile#24267
Nick Herbert
#24278
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Nick Herbert is an American physicist and author, best known for his book Quantum Reality. Biography Herbert studied engineering physics at The Ohio State University, graduating in 1959. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 1967 for work on nuclear scattering experiments. After a one-year teaching job at Monmouth College in Illinois, Herbert held a number of posts in industry. The most illustrious of these was senior physicist at Memorex Corporation in Santa Clara, California, where he developed new magnetic materials, as well as magnetic, electrostatic and optical measuring devices, and carried out theoretical work on Lorentz microscopy.
Go to Profile#24268
Ferdinand Kirchhof
#24279
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ferdinand Kirchhof is a German judge, jurisprudent and tax law expert. Early career Kirchhof was born in Osnabrück. He served as expert member of the Commission on the Reform of the Federal System of Government , established by the Bundestag and the Bundesrat between 2003 and 2004. From 2003 until 2007, he was a member of the Constitutional Court of Baden-Württemberg.
Go to Profile#24269
Riddick Bowe
#24280
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Riddick Lamont Bowe is an American former professional boxer who competed between 1989 and 2008. He held the undisputed world heavyweight championship in 1992, and won the super heavyweight silver medal at the 1988 Summer Olympics.
Go to Profile#24270
Peter McMullen
#24281
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Peter McMullen is a British mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at University College London. Education and career McMullen earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Trinity College, Cambridge, and studied at the University of Birmingham, where he received his doctorate in 1968. and taught at Western Washington University from 1968 to 1969. In 1978 he earned his Doctor of Science at University College London where he still works as a professor emeritus. In 2006 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#24271
Barbara Engelking
#24282
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
#24272
Marina Borovskaya
#24283
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Marina Aleksandrovna Borovskaya is a Russian economist and professor. She serves as Rector of Southern Federal University since 2012. She is President of the Council of Rectors of Southern Federal District, Vice-President of Russian Union of Rectors.
Go to Profile#24273
Jacek Czaputowicz
#24284
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Jacek Krzysztof Czaputowicz is a Polish politician and academic who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland from 9 January 2018 to 20 August 2020. Education In the years 1980-1983 Czaputowicz studied geography at the University of Warsaw, in 1986 he graduated from the Faculty of Economics of the Warsaw Central School of Planning and Statistics|Warsaw Central of Planning and Statistics]]. In the years 1992-1993 he was a member of the Foreign Service Programme at the University of Oxford. In 1997, he received a doctorate in political science at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#24274
Michael Sheen
#24285
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Michael Christopher Sheen is a Welsh actor. After training at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art , he worked mainly in theatre throughout the 1990s with stage roles in Romeo and Juliet , Don't Fool with Love , Peer Gynt , The Seagull , The Homecoming , and Henry V . His performances in Amadeus at the Old Vic and Look Back in Anger at the National Theatre were nominated for Olivier Awards in 1998 and 1999, respectively. In 2003, he was nominated for a third Olivier Award for his performance in Caligula at the Donmar Warehouse.
Go to Profile#24275
Moussa Traoré
#24286
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Moussa Traoré was a Malian soldier, politician, and dictator who was President of Mali from 1968 to 1991. As a lieutenant, he led the military ousting of President Modibo Keïta in 1968. Thereafter he served as head of state until March 1991, when he was overthrown by popular protests and a military coup.
Go to Profile#24276
Joshua Clover
#24287
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Joshua Clover is a writer and a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Davis. He is a published scholar, poet, critic, and journalist whose work has been translated into more than a dozen languages; his scholarship on the political economy of riots has been widely influential in political theory. He has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry and two times in Best Music Writing, and has received an individual grant from the NEA as well as fellowships from the Cornell Society for the Humanities, The University of California Humanities Research Institute, and Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick.
Go to Profile#24277
Pinchas Lapide
#24288
Overall Influence
1922 - 1997 (75 years)
Pinchas Lapide was a Jewish theologian and Israeli historian. He was an Israeli diplomat from 1951 to 1969, among other position acting as Israeli Consul to Milan, and was instrumental in gaining recognition for the young state of Israel. He wrote more than 35 books during his lifetime. Lapide was married to Ruth Lapide with whom he shared his interests and endeavors.
Go to Profile#24278
Henning Sirringhaus
#24289
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Henning Sirringhaus is Hitachi Professor of Electron Device Physics, Head of the Microelectronics Group and a member of the Optoelectronics Group at the Cavendish Laboratory. He is also a Fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#24279
Françoise Combes
#24290
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Françoise Combes is a French astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory and a professor at the Collège de France where she has been the chair of Galaxies and cosmology since 2014. On 15 September 2017 the 'City of Success' school at Montpellier was renamed as 'High school Françoise Combes'.
Go to Profile#24280
Leopoldina Fortunati
#24291
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Leopoldina Fortunati is an Italian feminist, theorist, and author. Her influences include Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Antonio Negri, and Karl Marx. Work She is the author of The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital , a feminist critique of Marx.
Go to Profile#24281
Richard Bornat
#24292
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Richard Bornat , is a British author and researcher in the field of computer science. He is also professor of Computer programming at Middlesex University. Previously he was at Queen Mary, University of London.
Go to Profile#24282
Russell Greiner
#24293
Overall Influence
Russell Greiner is a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and a specialist in machine learning and bioinformatics. Greiner is one of the principal investigators at the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning and has published over 200 refereed papers and patents.
Go to Profile#24283
Barbara Block
#24294
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Barbara Block is an American marine biologist and Charles & Elizabeth Prothro Professor of Biology in Marine Sciences at the Stanford University Hopkins Marine Station and a co-director of Stanford University's Tuna Research and Conservation Center, with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. She has published numerous bodies of work throughout her career in marine biology and chemistry, mainly focusing on the biology and chemistry of metabolism in different tuna and shark species. Additionally, she has helped develop two new types of electronic tags for large pelagic predators in order to track the migra...
Go to Profile#24284
Michael J. Glennon
#24295
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Michael J. Glennon is professor of international law at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is the author of National Security and Double Government . Glennon studied political science at the College of St. Thomas . As an undergraduate, he worked for three summers as a staff assistant for congressman Donald M. Fraser . Glennon then attended the University of Minnesota Law School . After graduating law school, Glennon worked as assistant counsel for the Office of the Legislative Counsel at the United States Senate.
Go to Profile#24285
Terry Wogan
#24296
Overall Influence
1938 - 2016 (78 years)
Sir Michael Terence Wogan was an Irish-British radio and television broadcaster who worked for the BBC in the UK for most of his career. Between 1993 and his semi-retirement in December 2009, his BBC Radio 2 weekday breakfast programme Wake Up to Wogan regularly drew an estimated eight million listeners. He was believed to be the most listened-to radio broadcaster in Europe.
Go to Profile#24286
Gene Roddenberry
#24297
Overall Influence
1921 - 1991 (70 years)
Eugene Wesley Roddenberry Sr. was an American television screenwriter, producer, and creator of Star Trek: The Original Series, its sequel spin-off series Star Trek: The Animated Series, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Born in El Paso, Texas, Roddenberry grew up in Los Angeles, where his father was a police officer. Roddenberry flew 89 combat missions in the Army Air Forces during World War II and worked as a commercial pilot after the war. Later, he followed in his father's footsteps and joined the Los Angeles Police Department, where he also began to write scripts for television.
Go to Profile#24287
Stefanie Dimmeler
#24298
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Stefanie Dimmeler is a German biologist specializing in the pathophysiological processes underlying cardiovascular diseases. Her awards and honours include the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation for her work on the programmed cell death of endothelial cells. Since 2008 she has led the Institute for Cardiovascular Regeneration at the University of Frankfurt. Her current work is focusing to develop cellular and pharmacological strategies to improve cardiovascular repair and regeneration. Her work aims to establish non-coding RNAs as novel therapeutic targets.
Go to Profile#24288
Steven Blair
#24299
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Steven Noel Blair was an American exercise scientist. He has been a tenured professor in the Department of Exercise Science and Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the University of South Carolina's Arnold School of Public Health since 2006. He previously worked at the Dallas, Texas-based Cooper Institute, of which he was president and CEO from 2002 to 2006. He is known for his research on the health benefits of physical exercise. A 2005 New York Times article described Blair as "one of the nation's leading experts on the health benefits of exercise".
Go to Profile#24289
Tison Pugh
#24300
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Tison Pugh is a literary scholar. He has been a professor of English at the University of Central Florida since 2006. Before coming to UCF, Pugh was a lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, in the 2000–2001 academic year.
Go to Profile#24290
George R. Knight
#24301
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
George Raymond Knight is a leading Seventh-day Adventist historian, author, and educator. He is emeritus professor of church history at Andrews University. As of 2014 he is considered to be the best-selling and influential voice for the past three decades within the denomination.
Go to Profile#24291
Enrico Schleiff
#24302
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Enrico Schleiff is a German biologist and physicist, and the president of the Goethe University Frankfurt, serving since 1 January 2021. Career Early career Schleiff studied physics at the Charles University in Prague from 1990 to 1992 and at the University of Mainz from 1992 to 1995. He completed his master's thesis at the University of Basel in 1995 and then received a Ph.D. from the Department of Biochemistry at McGill University in Montreal. He then worked as a research assistant at the University of Kiel and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he completed his habilitat...
Go to Profile#24292
Sarah H. Kagan
#24303
Overall Influence
Sarah Hope Kagan, PhD, RN, FAAN, is an American gerontological nurse, and Lucy Walker Honorary Term Professor of Gerontological Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. Life Professor Kagan teaches students across the baccalaureate, masters and doctoral programs in the School of Nursing as well as offering lectures and clinical preceptorships in the School of Medicine. She is the Director of the Nursing Undergraduate Honors Program and the Penn-UK and Penn Australia Study Abroad Programs in the School of Nursing. Dr. Kagan regularly teaches two undergraduate honors courses "Sweet Little Old Ladies and Sandwiched Daughters" and "Ageing, Beauty, and Sexuality".
Go to Profile#24293
Bob Perelman
#24304
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Bob Perelman is an American poet, critic, editor, and teacher. He was an early exponent of the Language poets, an avant-garde movement, originating in the 1970s. He has helped shape a "formally adventurous, politically explicit poetic practice in the United States", according to one of his chroniclers. Perelman is professor of English emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#24294
Vinod Johri
#24305
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Vinod Johri was an Indian astrophysicist. He was an eminent cosmologist, a retired professor of astrophysics at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and an emeritus professor at Lucknow University since 1995. Johri had over 75 research publications and articles published in pioneering journals. His major contributions in cosmological research included 'power law inflation, genesis of quintessence fields of dark energy and phantom cosmologies'. He was the co-author of the first model of power law inflation in Brans–Dicke theory along with C. Mathiazhagan. He was honored by Uttar Pradesh Gove...
Go to Profile#24295
Al Michaels
#24306
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Alan Richard Michaels is an American television play-by-play sportscaster for Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime Video and in an emeritus role for NBC Sports. He has worked on network sports television since 1971, with his most recent work being with NBC Sports after nearly three decades with ABC Sports. Michaels is known for his many years calling play-by-play of National Football League games, including ABC Monday Night Football from 1986 to 2005 and NBC Sunday Night Football from 2006 to 2021. He is also known for famous calls in other sports, including the Miracle on Ice at the 198...
Go to Profile#24296
Marius Vassiliou
#24307
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Marius Vassiliou is an American computational scientist, geophysicist, and aerospace executive. He is also an authority on the history of petroleum. Vassiliou is of Greek Cypriot descent and was educated at Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology .
Go to Profile#24297
Wolfgang Butzkamm
#24308
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Wolfgang Butzkamm is Professor Emeritus of English as a foreign language at Aachen University, Germany. He is credited with the development of a principled and systematic approach to the role of the mother tongue in foreign language teaching which radically differs from a target-language-only philosophy prevailing in many countries. For him, traditional monolingualism is an instance of a more general naturalistic fallacy which is committed when foreign language teaching is modelled after the natural acquisition of a first language , as in the direct method which was also called the natural m...
Go to Profile#24298
Warren Buffett
#24309
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Warren Edward Buffett is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. As a result of his immense investment success, Buffett is one of the best-known investors in the world. As of November 2023, he had a net worth of $118 billion, making him the seventh-richest person in the world.
Go to Profile#24299
Jason Mraz
#24310
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Jason Thomas Mraz is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist. He rose to prominence with the release of his debut studio album, Waiting for My Rocket to Come , which spawned the single "The Remedy ", that peaked at number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. His second studio album Mr. A-Z peaked at number five on the Billboard 200.
Go to Profile#24300
Paul van Geert
#24311
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Paul van Geert is a Dutch linguist. He is currently a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He is renowned for his work on developmental psychology and the application of dynamical systems theory in social science.
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