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
#24401
Julie Battilana
#24412
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Julie Battilana is a scholar, educator, and advisor in the areas of social innovation and social change at Harvard University. She is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the Alan L. Gleitsman Professor of Social Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Go to Profile#24402
Jacques Servin
#24413
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jacques Servin is an American media artist and activist. He is one of the leading members of The Yes Men, a culture jamming activist group. Their exploits in "identity correction" are documented in the films The Yes Men , The Yes Men Fix the World , and The Yes Men Are Revolting . As Ray Thomas, he is a co-founder of RTMark.
Go to Profile#24403
Manuel Alvar
#24414
Overall Influence
1923 - 2001 (78 years)
Manuel Alvar was a Spanish linguist, historian, and university professor who specialized in the study of dialectology and philology of the Spanish language. Throughout his career, Alvar oversaw and influenced the creation of many Spanish linguistic atlases; maps which recorded speech variations in a given geographical area. He served as Director of the Real Academia Española for four years and was a member of language academies throughout Europe and Latin America.
Go to Profile#24404
Ernst van de Wetering
#24415
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Ernst van de Wetering was a Dutch art historian and an expert on Rembrandt and his work. Background Ernst van de Wetering was born in Hengelo. He was first trained as an artist at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. He received his doctorate in art history from the University of Amsterdam in 1986. Between 1964 and 1968, he worked as a scientific illustrator of microscopic preparations at the Zoological Museum in Amsterdam. From 1968, he was a member and later became chairman of the Rembrandt Research Project. He was art historian on the staff of Amsterdam's Central Research Laborator...
Go to Profile#24405
Chris Knight
#24416
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Chris Knight is a British anthropologist. Life Professional Following an MPhil in Russian Literature from the University of Sussex in 1975, Knight gained his PhD in 1987 at the University of London for a thesis on Claude Lévi-Strauss's four-volume Mythologiques. He became a lecturer in anthropology at the University of East London in 1989 and a professor at the same institution in 2000. A founding member of the "Radical Anthropology Group" , Knight is currently a senior research fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University College London.
Go to Profile#24406
Tõnu Puu
#24417
Overall Influence
1936 - 2020 (84 years)
Tõnu Puu was an Estonian-born Swedish economist. He has been Professor of Economics at Umeå University. Personal Tõnu Puu took refuge from Estonia to Sweden upon the Soviet invasion in 1944, with his parents and one sister.
Go to Profile#24407
Klaus Holzkamp
#24418
Overall Influence
1927 - 1995 (68 years)
Klaus Holzkamp was a German psychologist. Research Klaus Holzkamp worked as a professor at the Free University of Berlin. He took a central role in defining critical psychology based on the works of Karl Marx and Aleksei N. Leontiev. Holzkamp's main message is that mainstream psychology serves the interest of the power elite by disregarding the ability of humans to change their life circumstances. In a standard scientific study in the field of psychology the test setting is taken as a given, unchangeable fact, while in real life people may organize themselves and transform society.
Go to Profile#24408
John M. Sullivan
#24419
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
John Matthew Sullivan is an American mathematician who works in Germany as a professor at the Technical University of Berlin. His research includes work on knot theory, constant-mean-curvature surfaces, mathematical foams, scientific visualization, and mesh generation.
Go to Profile#24409
Jean Craighead George
#24420
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Jean Carolyn Craighead George was an American writer of more than one hundred books for children and young adults, including the Newbery Medal-winning Julie of the Wolves and Newbery runner-up My Side of the Mountain. Common themes in George's works are the environment and the natural world. Beside children's fiction, she wrote at least two guides to cooking with wild foods and one autobiography published 30 years before her death, Journey Inward.
Go to Profile#24410
Engelbert Mveng
#24421
Overall Influence
1930 - 1995 (65 years)
Engelbert Mveng, SJ , was a Cameroonian Jesuit priest, artist, historian, theologian, and anthropologist. Early life and religious education Born in a Presbyterian family but baptized in a Catholic church, Mveng received a Christian education from his parents. His intelligence was noticed by a priest, Father Herbard, who sent him to school in Efok, Cameroon from 1943 to 1944. As a teenager, his talent for draftsmanship led him to tutor younger students at a nearby mission school in Minlaba. The next stage of his studies followed in the minor seminary of Akono from 1944 to 1949.
Go to Profile#24411
Hershel Schachter
#24422
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Hershel Schachter is an American Orthodox rabbi, posek and rosh yeshiva at Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary , part of Yeshiva University in New York City. Schachter is an halakhic advisor for the Orthodox Union, and has rendered notable decisions in a number of contemporary topic areas.
Go to Profile#24412
Andrew von Hirsch
#24423
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Andreas von Hirsch, before 2008 published under his anglicised name Andrew von Hirsch, is a legal philosopher and penal theorist and the founding Director of the centre for Penal Theory and Penal Ethics at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge. He also has been Honorary Professor of Penal Theory and Penal Law at Cambridge University, and an Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College.
Go to Profile#24413
Will Barnet
#24424
Overall Influence
1911 - 2012 (101 years)
Will Barnet was an American artist known for his paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints depicting the human figure and animals, both in casual scenes of daily life and in transcendent dreamlike worlds.
Go to Profile#24414
Michael Pepper
#24425
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Sir Michael Pepper is a British physicist notable for his work in semiconductor nanostructures. Early life Pepper was born on 10 August 1942 to Morris and Ruby Pepper. He was educated at St Marylebone Grammar School, a grammar school in the City of Westminster, London that has since closed. He then went on to study physics at the University of Reading and graduated Bachelor of Science in 1963. He remained at Reading to undertake postgraduate studies and completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1967.
Go to Profile#24415
Michael W. Deem
#24426
Overall Influence
Michael W. Deem is an American engineer, scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. Deem received his B.S. in chemical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1991 and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994. His thesis research was in statistical mechanics and disordered materials with David Chandler. He did postdoctoral research at Harvard University in physics with David R. Nelson. Deem joined the faculty at University of California, Los Angeles, in 1996 and rose to the rank of associate professor of chemical engineering. From 2002 to 2020 Deem was the John W.
Go to Profile#24416
Amitava Bose
#24427
Overall Influence
1947 - 2017 (70 years)
Amitava Bose was a professor of economics at Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He was also a former director of IIM-C. Education Bose received his B.A. degree in Economics from Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, in 1967, and MA degree in economics with First Rank from the Delhi School of Economics in 1969. Bose completed his Ph.D. programme from University of Rochester in 1974.
Go to Profile#24417
Tristan Bekinschtein
#24428
Overall Influence
Tristan Bekinschtein is biologist, Master in Neurophysiology and PhD in neuroscience, Buenos Aires University. He is a university lecturer and Turing Fellow at Cambridge University. Dr. Bekinschtein is primarily known for his work on variable states of consciousness and auditory feedback. He presently runs the Consciousness and Cognition Laboratory at Cambridge University.
Go to Profile#24418
Kanti Bajpai
#24429
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kanti Prasad Bajpai is an Indian political scientist, international affairs expert, academic and the former headmaster of The Doon School, Dehradun, India. He is known to be an expert on Indo-China relations. He is currently Vice Dean and Wilmar Professor of Asian Studies at Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy of the National University of Singapore. Bajpai also writes a monthly column for The Times of India.
Go to Profile#24419
William Galston
#24430
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
William Arthur Galston is an American author, academic, and political advisor, who holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Formerly the Saul Stern Professor and Dean at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a professor of political science at the University of Texas, Austin, Galston specializes in issues of U.S. public philosophy and political institutions, having joined the Brookings Institution on January 1, 2006.
Go to Profile#24420
Athanasios Orphanides
#24431
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Athanasios Orphanides is a Cypriot economist who served as Governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus between 3 May 2007 to 2 May 2012 and as a member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank between 1 January 2008 and 2 May 2012.
Go to Profile#24421
Hanfried Lenz
#24432
Overall Influence
1916 - 2013 (97 years)
Hanfried Lenz was a German mathematician, who is mainly known for his work in geometry and combinatorics. Hanfried Lenz was the eldest son of Fritz Lenz an influential German geneticist, who is associated with Eugenics and hence also with the Nazi racial policies during the Third Reich. He was also the older brother of Widukind Lenz, a geneticist. He started to study mathematics and physics at the University of Tübingen, but interrupted his studies from 1935 to 1937 to do a military service. After that he continued to study in Munich, Berlin and Leipzig. In 1939 when World War II broke out i...
Go to Profile#24422
Kathryn Edin
#24433
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Kathryn J. Edin, is an American sociologist and a professor of sociology and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. She specializes in the study of people living on welfare. Two of her books are Making ends meet: how single mothers survive welfare and low-wage work, and Promises I can keep: why poor women put motherhood before marriage.
Go to Profile#24423
Yukihiro Ozaki
#24434
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
is a Japanese scientist. Kwansei Gakuin University, Department of Chemistry, School of Science and Technology, professor emeritus, Fellow. He was born in Sakai, Osaka, Japan. In 1973, he had B.Sc. in Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Osaka University. In 1978, he had PhD in Physical and Inorganic Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Osaka University. He worked as a research associate in Division of Biological Sciences, National Research Council of Canada. In 1981, he became an instructor in Division of Biochemistry, Institute of Medical Science, The Jikei University School of Medicine, Tokyo, Japan and became an assistant professor there.
Go to Profile#24424
B. Roy Frieden
#24435
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Bernard Roy Frieden is an American mathematical physicist. Frieden obtained a Ph.D. in optics from The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester. His doctoral thesis advisor was Robert E. Hopkins. Frieden is now an emeritus professor of optical sciences at the University of Arizona.
Go to Profile#24425
Mary Kalantzis
#24436
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Professor Mary Kalantzis is an Australian author and academic, and is a former dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in the United States. Her work examines Australian multiculturalism.
Go to Profile#24426
Viktor Rozov
#24437
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Viktor Sergeyevich Rozov was a Soviet and Russian dramatist and screenwriter. He wrote more than 20 dramatic pieces and 6 film scripts, including Вечно живые/Life Eternal, the basis for his film script The Cranes Are Flying. He was a member of the Russian Academy of Letters, and was the president of the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts and a member of the Union of Soviet Writers.
Go to Profile#24427
Francis Graham-Smith
#24438
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (103 years)
Sir Francis Graham-Smith is a British astronomer. He was the thirteenth Astronomer Royal from 1982 to 1990 and was knighted in 1986. Biography Education He was educated at Rossall School, Lancashire, England, and attended Downing College, Cambridge from 1941.
Go to Profile#24428
Marc Galanter
#24439
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Marc Galanter is a Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Previously he was the John and Rylla Bosshard Professor of Law and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and LSE Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He teaches South Asian Law, Law and Social Science, Legal Profession, Religion and the Law, Contracts, Dispute Processing and Negotiations. He has authored numerous books and articles related to law, the legal profession and the provision of legal services in India.
Go to Profile#24429
Ian Wilson
#24440
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Ian Wilson is a British prolific author of historical and religious books. He has investigated such topics as the Shroud of Turin and life after death. Life He was born in Clapham, south London, during World War II. Neither of his parents was religious. His school was nominally Church of England, but during scripture classes he was always, as he put it, "the number one sceptic". He graduated in Modern History from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1963.
Go to Profile#24430
Benedict Nightingale
#24441
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
William Benedict Herbert Nightingale is a British journalist, formerly a regular theatre critic for The Times newspaper. He was educated at Charterhouse and Magdalene College, Cambridge. His first published theatre review was for the Tunbridge Wells Advertiser in 1957, a production of Look Back in Anger by a local amateur group.
Go to Profile#24431
Donald Cameron Watt
#24442
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Donald Cameron Watt was a British historian. Early life Donald Cameron Watt was a chorister in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and then was educated at Rugby School. He read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oriel College, Oxford, graduating from Oxford University with a bachelor's degree in 1951.
Go to Profile#24432
Christopher T. Hill
#24443
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Christopher T. Hill is an American theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who did undergraduate work in physics at M.I.T. , and graduate work at Caltech . Hill's Ph.D. thesis, "Higgs Scalars and the Nonleptonic Weak Interactions" contains one of the first detailed discussions of the two-Higgs-doublet model and its impact upon weak interactions.
Go to Profile#24433
Ferenc Fejtő
#24444
Overall Influence
1909 - 2008 (99 years)
Ferenc Fejtő , also known as François Fejtő, was a Hungarian-born French journalist and political scientist specializing in Eastern Europe. Biography He was born in Nagykanizsa to a well-off Jewish Hungarian family of booksellers and publishers. He was raised as a Roman Catholic. Following the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, several members of his family became Yugoslavian, Italian, Czechoslovak and Romanian citizens.
Go to Profile#24434
Leslie Nielsen
#24445
Overall Influence
1926 - 2010 (84 years)
Leslie William Nielsen was a Canadian-American actor and comedian. With a career spanning 60 years, he appeared in more than 100 films and 150 television programs, portraying more than 220 characters.
Go to Profile#24435
Clem Seecharan
#24446
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Clem Seecharan is a Guyanese writer and historian of the Indo-Caribbean experience, and of West Indies cricket. He was born in Guyana and has been based in England since 1986. Life and career Seecharan grew up in East Berbice-Corentyne, and attended the Sheet Anchor Anglican School, the Berbice Educational Institute, and Queen's College in Guyana. He studied at McMaster University in Canada, and taught Caribbean Studies at the University of Guyana for some years, before completing his doctorate in history at the University of Warwick in 1990. He joined the staff of the University of North Lon...
Go to Profile#24436
Laurie Zoloth
#24447
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Laurie Zoloth is an American ethicist, currently Margaret E. Burton Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She was dean of the Divinity School from 2017 to 2018, whereupon she stepped into an advisory administrative position.
Go to Profile#24437
Don Howe
#24448
Overall Influence
1935 - 2015 (80 years)
Donald Howe was an English football player, coach, manager and pundit. As a right back Howe featured for clubs West Bromwich Albion and Arsenal together with the England national football team in his playing career. He also went on to manage sides West Brom, Arsenal, Galatasaray, Queens Park Rangers and Coventry City. Howe was also a successful coach and has been described as one of the most influential figures of the English footballing game.
Go to Profile#24438
John Dunn
#24449
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
John Montfort Dunn, FBA is emeritus Professor of Political Theory in the Human, Social, and Political Sciences department at King's College, Cambridge, and Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Chiba University.
Go to Profile#24439
Ray Turner
#24450
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Professor Raymond Turner is an English logician, philosopher, and theoretical computer scientist based at the University of Essex. He is best known for his work on logic in computer science and for his pioneering work in the philosophy of computer science. He is on the editorial boards for the Journal of Logic and Computation and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for Logic, Computation, and Agency.
Go to Profile#24440
Charles Csuri
#24451
Overall Influence
1922 - 2022 (100 years)
Charles Csuri , better known as Chuck Csuri, was an American artist and computer art creator, described by the Smithsonian magazine as the "father of digital art and computer animation." Biography Digital art Csuri created his first digital art pieces in 1964, and was quickly recognized by the Museum of Modern Art and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group Graphics . In particular, his 1967 short film Hummingbird, a collaboration with James Shaffer, is in MoMa's permanent collection as one of the earliest surviving examples of computer animation. Csuri taught for over...
Go to Profile#24441
James Jones
#24452
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
James Stuart Jones is a retired Church of England bishop. He was the Bishop of Liverpool between 1998 and 2013. Early life Jones is the son of Major Stuart Jones and Helen Jones. He was educated at the Duke of York's Royal Military School, Dover and Exeter University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in theology in 1970. He was further educated at Alsager College, Keele and Wycliffe Hall, Oxford .
Go to Profile#24442
Ewan McKendrick
#24453
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ewan Gordon McKendrick is Professor of English Private Law at the University of Oxford. He is known for his academic work on the law of contract, as well as publications in the law of unjust enrichment and commercial law.
Go to Profile#24443
Jim Stasheff
#24454
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
James Dillon Stasheff is an American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works in algebraic topology and algebra as well as their applications to physics.
Go to Profile#24444
Robert Walser
#24455
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Robert Walser is an American musicologist associated with the "new musicology". He is author of the book Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, concerning heavy metal music. Walser currently is a member of the faculty at Case Western Reserve University.
Go to Profile#24445
Richard Rodriguez
#24456
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Richard Rodriguez is an American writer who became famous as the author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez , a narrative about his intellectual development. Early life He was born on July 31, 1944, into a Mexican immigrant family in San Francisco, California. Rodriguez spoke Spanish until he went to a Catholic school at 6. As a youth in Sacramento, California, he delivered newspapers and worked as a gardener. He graduated from Sacramento's Christian Brothers High School.
Go to Profile#24446
Paul A. Freund
#24457
Overall Influence
1908 - 1992 (84 years)
Paul Abraham Freund was an American legal scholar. He taught most of his life at Harvard Law School and is known for his writings on the United States Constitution and the Supreme Court of the United States.
Go to Profile#24447
Hamlet Isakhanli
#24458
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Hamlet Abdulla oglu Isayev is an Azerbaijani polymath, mathamatician, professor, poet, publicist, translator, entrepreneur, writer, author specialist in science, culture and history of education, founder of Khazar University who served as University president from April 1991 to September 2010. He is currently the Chairman of the Board of Directors and Trustees, founder of Dunya School, and founder of a publishing house as well as a translator of poetry, lecturer, and editor. He is a founding member of the Eurasian Academy.
Go to Profile#24448
John McLaughlin
#24459
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
John McLaughlin , also known as Mahavishnu, is an English guitarist, bandleader, and composer. A pioneer of jazz fusion, his music combines elements of jazz with rock, world music, Western classical music, flamenco, and blues. After contributing to several key British groups of the early 1960s, McLaughlin made Extrapolation, his first album as a bandleader, in 1969. He then moved to the U.S., where he played with drummer Tony Williams's group Lifetime and then with Miles Davis on his electric jazz fusion albums In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, and On the Corner. His 1970...
Go to Profile#24449
Mia Hamm
#24460
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Mariel Margaret Hamm is an American former professional soccer player, two-time Olympic gold medalist and two-time FIFA Women's World Cup champion. Hailed as a soccer icon, she played as a forward for the United States national team from 1987 to 2004. Hamm was the face of the Women's United Soccer Association , the first professional women's soccer league in the United States, where she played for the Washington Freedom from 2001 to 2003. She played college soccer for the North Carolina Tar Heels and helped the team win four NCAA Division I Women's Soccer Championship titles.
Go to Profile#24450
Jessica Utts
#24461
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Jessica Utts is a parapsychologist and statistics professor at the University of California, Irvine. She is known for her textbooks on statistics and her investigation into remote viewing. Statistics education In 2003, Utts published an article in American Statistician, a journal published by the American Statistical Association, calling for significant changes to collegiate level statistics education. In the article she argued that curricula do a fine job of covering the mathematical side of statistics, but do a poor job of teaching students the skills necessary to properly interpret statistical results in scientific studies.
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