Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

#24451

Sid Gillman

#24462

Overall Influence

1911 - 2003 (92 years)

Sidney Gillman was an American football player, coach and executive. Gillman's insistence on stretching the football field by throwing deep downfield passes, instead of short passes to running backs or wide receivers at the sides of the line of scrimmage, was instrumental in making football into the modern game that it is today. He was inducted as a coach into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983, and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1989.

#24452

Tatsuhiko Seo

#24463

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Tatsuhiko Seo is a Japanese historian and professor who has written a number of books about Japan and China. As of 2008 he is a professor of Chuo University's Faculty of Literature. Biography Born in 1952 in a town in Hiroshima Prefecture and raised in West Tokyo, he graduated in 1977 from Ritsumeikan University Faculty of Letters, Department of Oriental History. In 1979 he received a master's degree from Osaka University Graduate School of Letters. In 1983, he received his PhD degree from the same university, same department. After graduation, he became an associate professor, serving at the Hokkaido University of Education and then the University of Tsukuba .

#24453

Elton Brand

#24464

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (47 years)

Elton Tyron Brand is an American former professional basketball player and the general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers of the National Basketball Association . After playing college basketball for Duke, he was selected with the first overall pick in the 1999 NBA draft by the Chicago Bulls, and later played for the Philadelphia 76ers, the Los Angeles Clippers, Dallas Mavericks and Atlanta Hawks. He was a two-time NBA All Star and an All-NBA Second Team selection in 2006.

#24454

Carole Hillenbrand

#24465

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Carole Hillenbrand, , is a British Islamic scholar who is Emerita Professor in Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh and Professor of Islamic History at the University of St Andrews. She is the Vice-President of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and a Member of the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics.

#24455

Susann Cokal

#24466

Overall Influence

Susann Cokal is an American author. She is best known for having written the novels The Kingdom of Little Wounds, Mirabilis, Mermaid Moon, and Breath and Bones, along with short stories, literary and pop-culture criticism, and book reviews. The Kingdom of Little Wounds won a Printz silver medal from the American Library Association in 2014.

#24456

Dede Rosyada

#24467

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Dede Rosyada is a Muslim academic and intellectual from Indonesia. He has been rector of UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta since 2015. Position Rector, UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, 2015–2019Director of Islamic Higher Education, Ministry of Religious Affairs , 2011–2014Acting Rector, IAIN Sulthan Thaha Saefudin Jambi, 2011

#24457

Giorgos Kallis

#24468

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Giorgos Kallis is an ecological economist from Greece. He is an ICREA Research Professor at ICTA - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he teaches political ecology. He is one of the principal advocates of the theory of degrowth.

#24458

Arnold Wolfendale

Arnold Wolfendale

#24469

Overall Influence

1927 - 2020 (93 years)

Sir Arnold Whittaker Wolfendale FRS was a British astronomer who served as the fourteenth Astronomer Royal from 1991 to 1995. He was Professor of Physics at Durham University from 1965 until 1992 and served as president of the European Physical Society . He was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1981 to 1983.

#24459

Luis Enrique

#24470

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Luis Enrique Martínez García , known as Luis Enrique, is a Spanish football manager and former player. He is the manager of Ligue 1 club Paris Saint-Germain. A versatile player with good technique, he was capable of playing in several different positions, but usually played as a midfielder or forward, and was also noted for his temperament and stamina. Starting in 1991 and ending in 2004, he represented both Real Madrid and Barcelona with both individual and team success, appearing in more than 500 official games and scoring more than 100 goals. He appeared with the Spain national team in thre...

#24460

Karan Singh

#24471

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Karan Singh is an Indian politician and philosopher. He was the prince regent of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. From 1952 to 1965 he was the Sadr-i-Riyasat of the state of Jammu and Kashmir . He is the chairperson trustee of the Dharmarth Trust of Jammu and Kashmir which maintains 175 temples in north India and works in other areas such as historical preservation.

#24461

Robert Kennicutt

#24472

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Robert Charles Kennicutt, Jr. FRS is an American astronomer. He is currently a professor at Texas A&M University. He is a former Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the Institute of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge. He was formerly Editor-in-Chief of the Astrophysical Journal and became a co-editor of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics as of 2021. His research interests include the structure and evolution of galaxies and star formation in galaxies.

#24462

Steve Cauthen

#24473

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Steve Cauthen is a retired American jockey. In 1977 he became the first jockey to win over $6 million in a year working with agent Lenny Goodman, and in 1978 he became the youngest jockey to win the U. S. Triple Crown. Cauthen is the only jockey ever named Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year.

#24463

Rimhak Ree

#24474

Overall Influence

1922 - 2005 (83 years)

Rimhak Ree , alternatively Im-hak Ree, was a Korean Canadian mathematician. He contributed in the field of group theory, most notably with the concept of the Ree group in . Early life Ree received his early education in Hamhung, South Hamgyong, Korea, Empire of Japan. His birthplace is now in North Korea. He attended the Hamhung #1 Public Ordinary School , and in 1934 entered the Hamhung Public High School . He went onto Keijō Imperial University, where he studied physics, which was an unusual choice for Koreans at the time. Ree graduated in 1944 with a physics degree; he then went to Fengtian...

#24464

Jay Wright

#24475

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Jay Wright is a poet, playwright, and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has received considerable critical acclaim, with some comparing Wright's poetry to the work of Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. Others associate Wright with the African-American poets Robert Hayden and Melvin B. Tolson, due to his complexity of theme and language, as well as his work's utilization and transformation of the Western literary heritage. Wright's work is representative of what...

#24465

Folke K. Skoog

#24476

Overall Influence

1908 - 2001 (93 years)

Folke Karl Skoog was a Swedish-born American plant physiologist who was a pioneer in the field of plant growth regulators, particularly cytokinins. Skoog was a recipient of the National Medal of Science 1991.

#24466

Howard Hibbett

#24477

Overall Influence

1920 - 2019 (99 years)

Howard Hibbett was a translator and professor of Japanese literature at Harvard University. He held the Victor S. Thomas Professorship in Japanese Literature. Early life Hibbett was born in Akron, Ohio, on July 27, 1920. He began his studies of Japanese language and literature as a sophomore at Harvard College in 1942 before working as a language specialist for the U.S. Army in 1942-46. After graduating from Harvard College in 1947, he went on to receive his Ph.D., also from Harvard, in 1950. He taught at UCLA before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1958. He was Director of the Edwin O.

#24467

Norma Elia Cantú

Norma Elia Cantú

#24478

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Norma Elia Cantú is a Chicana postmodernist writer and the Murchison Professor in the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Early life and education She was born in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico, to Florentino Cantú Vargas and Virginia Ramon Becerra. She was reared in Laredo in Webb County, Texas, and attended public schools there.

#24468

Victor W. Marek

#24479

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Victor Witold Marek, formerly Wiktor Witold Marek known as Witek Marek is a Polish mathematician and computer scientist working in the fields of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. Biography Victor Witold Marek studied mathematics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Warsaw. Supervised by Andrzej Mostowski, he received both a magister degree in mathematics in 1964 and a doctoral degree in mathematics in 1968. He completed habilitation in mathematics in 1972.

#24469

Efraín Ríos Montt

#24480

Overall Influence

1926 - 2018 (92 years)

José Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan military officer, politician, and dictator who served as de facto President of Guatemala from 1982 to 1983. His brief tenure as chief executive was one of the bloodiest periods in the long-running Guatemalan Civil War. Ríos Montt's counter-insurgency strategies significantly weakened the Marxist guerrillas organized under the umbrella of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity , while also leading to accusations of war crimes and genocide perpetrated by the Guatemalan Army under his leadership.

#24470

Raj Jain

#24481

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Raj Jain is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Education Dr. Jain obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1978, an M.E. in Automation from Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India in 1974, and a B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Awdhesh Pratap Singh University, Rewa, Madhya Pradesh, India in 1972.

#24471

Tim Ryan

#24482

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Tim Ryan is a Canadian-born American retired sportscaster. He was born in Winnipeg and raised in Toronto and attended De La Salle College . His father, Joe, was general manager of three Canadian Football League teams in Winnipeg, Montreal and Edmonton and is an honoured member of both the Canadian Football Hall of Fame and Canada's Sports Hall of Fame.

#24472

Devin Townsend

#24483

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Devin Garrett Townsend is a Canadian singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. He founded extreme metal band Strapping Young Lad and was its primary songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist from 1994 to 2007. He has also had an extensive solo career and has released a total of 28 albums across all of his projects as of 2022.

#24473

R. A. W. Rhodes

#24484

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Roderick Arthur William Rhodes , usually cited as R. A. W. Rhodes, is a British professor of political science. Rod Rhodes is professor of government at the University of Southampton and director of the Centre for Political Ethnography. He is also emeritus professor of politics at the University of Newcastle . Previously, he was: Professor of Government at Griffith University ; director of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘Whitehall Programme’ ; distinguished professor of political science at the Australian National University ; and director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University .

#24474

Walter Becker

#24485

Overall Influence

1950 - 2017 (67 years)

Walter Carl Becker was an American musician, songwriter, and record producer. He was the co-founder, guitarist, bassist, and co-songwriter of the jazz rock band Steely Dan. Becker met future songwriting partner Donald Fagen while they were students at Bard College. After a brief period of activity in New York City, the two moved to Los Angeles in 1971 and formed the nucleus of Steely Dan, which enjoyed a critically and commercially successful ten-year career. Following the group's dissolution, Becker moved to Hawaii and reduced his musical activity, working primarily as a record producer. In ...

#24475

David L. Norton

#24486

Overall Influence

1930 - 1995 (65 years)

David Lloyd Norton was an American philosopher. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, March 27, 1930, to Cecil V. Norton and Ruth Essick Norton. He was the brother of Douglas C. Norton of Norton's Fine Art in St. Louis.

#24476

Willi Jäger

#24487

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Willi Jäger is a German mathematician. He completed his PhD in 1966 the University of Munich under the direction of Erhard Heinz. From 1969 to 1970 Jäger was a visiting scientist at the Courant Institute in New York City. In 1970 he became professor of mathematics at the University of Münster and from 1974 he became professor of applied mathematics at the Heidelberg University. In 1987 Jäger was founding member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing in Heidelberg. He is a board member of the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach.

#24477

D. Gale Johnson

#24488

Overall Influence

1916 - 2003 (87 years)

David Gale Johnson was an American economist and an expert on Russia and China. Among other notable contributions to economics, Johnson concluded that the strength of an industry depends on how the market works and not so much on government actions. Johnson was chairman of the department of economics at the University of Chicago and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was also a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The New York Times called him "a pioneer in agricultural economics". The University of Chicago called him "one of the world's most eminent researchers of agricultural and development economics".

#24478

Chris Lilley

#24489

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Christopher Daniel Lilley is an Australian comedian, actor, writer, musician, director, and producer. He is known for his creation and portrayal of several fictional characters in the mockumentary television series We Can Be Heroes: Finding The Australian of the Year , Summer Heights High , Angry Boys , Ja'mie: Private School Girl , Jonah from Tonga , and the web series Lunatics . He is a two-time winner of the Logie Award for Most Popular Actor.

#24479

Leslie Caron

#24490

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Leslie Claire Margaret Caron is a French and American actress and dancer. She is the recipient of a Golden Globe Award, two BAFTA Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award, in addition to nominations for two Academy Awards. She is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.

#24480

Sandra Laugier

#24491

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Sandra Laugier is a French philosopher, who works on moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of language, gender studies, and popular culture. She is a full professor of philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a Senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She currently serves as the deputy director of the Institut des sciences juridique et philosophique de la Sorbonne . In 2014, she received the title of the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. In 2022, she was awarded the Grand Prix Moron by the Académie française.

#24481

Melanne Verveer

#24492

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Melanne Verveer is the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security at Georgetown University. She is a founding partner of Seneca Point Global, a worldwide women's strategy firm, and a co-founder of Seneca Women. Melanne Verveer co-authored the book Fast Forward: How Women Can Achieve Power and Purpose with Kim Azzarelli.

#24482

Ralph H. Hruban

#24493

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Ralph H. Hruban is professor of pathology and oncology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is currently Director of the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center at Johns Hopkins, and Baxley Professor and Director of the Department of Pathology. He is a world expert on pancreatic cancer.

#24483

Noam Elkies

#24494

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Noam David Elkies is a professor of mathematics at Harvard University. At the age of 26, he became the youngest professor to receive tenure at Harvard. He is also a pianist, chess national master and a chess composer.

#24484

Earl Rose

#24495

Overall Influence

1926 - 2012 (86 years)

Earl Forrest Rose was an American forensic pathologist, professor of medicine, and lecturer of law. Rose was the medical examiner for Dallas County, Texas, at the time of the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy and he performed autopsies on J. D. Tippit, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Ruby. After being shoved by Kennedy's aides, he stepped aside and allowed Kennedy's body to be removed from Parkland Memorial Hospital without performing an autopsy.

#24485

Dianne Neumark-Sztainer

#24496

Overall Influence

Dianne Neumark-Sztainer is a University of Minnesota Regents Professor in the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health at the School of Public Health. She is a scholar on adolescent and young adult eating and weight-related health.

#24486

João Sayad

#24497

Overall Influence

1945 - 2021 (76 years)

João Sayad was a Brazilian economist, professor of the Department of Economics, Management and Accounting of the University of Sao Paulo and a Secretary of Finance for the state of Sao Paulo. He was awarded a PhD in economics by Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Sayad was also once president and chairman of the board of directors of the Inter-American Development Bank in São Paulo and director of the Economic Research Institute Foundation at the University of São Paulo.

#24487

Fred Siegel

#24498

Overall Influence

1945 - 2023 (78 years)

Fred Siegel was an American historian and conservative writer who was a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank which focuses on urban policy and politics. He served as a professor of history and the humanities at Cooper Union and was a contributor to numerous publications, including The New York Post , The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Commonweal, Tikkun, and Telos.

#24488

Theodor Otto Diener

Theodor Otto Diener

#24499

Overall Influence

1921 - 2023 (102 years)

Theodor Otto Diener was a Swiss-American plant pathologist. In 1971, he discovered that the causative agent of the potato spindle tuber disease is not a virus, but a novel agent, which consists solely of a short strand of single-stranded RNA without a protein capsid, eighty times smaller than the smallest viruses. He proposed to name it, and similar agents yet to be discovered, viroids. Viroids displaced viruses as the smallest known infectious agents.

#24489

Bernard N. Fields

#24500

Overall Influence

1938 - 1995 (57 years)

Bernard Nathan Fields was an American microbiologist and virologist. Fields was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Fields was the Adele Lehman Professor and chairman of the department of microbiology and molecular genetics of Harvard Medical School, and he was the head of division of infectious diseases at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Prior to that, he was on the faculty at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He was the editor-in-chief of the journal Virology.

#24490

Morton Gurtin

#24501

Overall Influence

1934 - 2020 (86 years)

Morton E. Gurtin was a mechanical engineer who became a mathematician and mathematical physicist. He was an emeritus professor of mathematical sciences at Carnegie-Mellon University, where for many years he held an endowed chair as the Alumni Professor of Mathematical Science. His main work is in materials science, in the form of the mathematical, rational mechanics of non-linear continuum mechanics and thermodynamics, in the style of Clifford Truesdell and Walter Noll, a field also known under the combined name of continuum thermomechanics. He has published over 250 papers, many among them ...

#24491

John W. Ryan

#24502

Overall Influence

1929 - 2011 (82 years)

John William Ryan was an American academic administrator who most notably served as the President of Indiana University for sixteen years. Early life and career Ryan was born in Chicago, Illinois and earned a B.A. from the University of Utah in 1951, where he was a 1950 initiate of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. He earned master's and Ph.D. degrees from Indiana University in 1958 and 1959, respectively. While in graduate school, Ryan served in two professional roles: first as a research analyst in the Kentucky Department of Revenue, then in establishing the graduate public administration program at Thammasat University.

#24492

Bimal Kumar Bose

Bimal Kumar Bose

#24503

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Bimal Kumar Bose , also known as B. K. Bose, is an electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, scientist, educator, and currently a professor emeritus of power electronics in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

#24493

Lee Dixon

#24504

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Lee Michael Dixon is an English retired professional footballer and pundit who played as a right-back. Dixon was also capped 22 times for England. His father Roy was a goalkeeper with Manchester City and many of Dixon's formative years were spent on the terraces at Maine Road. But it was nearby Burnley he joined as a junior and he graduated to the senior team for a handful of games before John Bond released him to Chester City. After one and a half seasons there he signed for Bury before joining Stoke City where he instantly impressed, forging a fine defensive partnership with Steve Bould. T...

#24494

Kees Versteegh

#24505

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Cornelis Henricus Maria "Kees" Versteegh is a Dutch academic linguist. He served as a professor of Islamic studies and the Arabic language at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands until April 2011.

#24495

Gregorio Baro

#24506

Overall Influence

1928 - 2012 (84 years)

Gregorio Baró was an Argentine scientist. He was born in Santiago Temple, Córdoba and died in Buenos Aires. Biography The son of Spanish immigrants from the Province of León, more precisely from Cabreros del Río, Baró married the writer María Dhialma Tiberti. He completed his Associate of Science in Chemistry degree at the Otto Krause Technical School in Buenos Aires, in 1945. Afterward, he pursued his studies at Universidad de Buenos Aires from which he obtained a Bachelor of Science, followed by a PhD in Chemistry in 1961 at the Instituut voor Kernphysisch Onderzoek, in Amsterdam. In 1968,...

#24496

Adrian Mathias

#24507

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Adrian Richard David Mathias is a British mathematician working in set theory. The forcing notion Mathias forcing is named for him. Career Mathias was educated at Shrewsbury and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics and graduated in 1965. After graduation, he moved to Bonn in Germany where he studied with Ronald Jensen, visiting UCLA, Stanford, the University of Wisconsin, and Monash University during that period.

#24497

Corey Hébert

#24508

Overall Influence

1901 - Present (125 years)

Corey Hébert is an American physician, journalist, and educator practicing in New Orleans, Louisiana, and is the Chief Medical Correspondent for WWL-TV, the CBS Affiliate for New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He is an assistant professor in private practice at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center and Tulane University. Hébert is also the Chief Medical Officer of CareRx Inform, a prescription service.

#24498

John Grogan

#24509

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

John Joseph Grogan is an American journalist and non-fiction writer. His memoir Marley & Me was a best-selling book about his family's dog, Marley. Early life Grogan was born to a Catholic family of Irish descent in Detroit, Michigan on March 20, 1957, the youngest of four siblings.

#24499

Jonathan Ross

#24510

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Jonathan Stephen Ross is an English broadcaster, film critic, comedian, actor, writer, and producer. He presented the BBC One chat show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross during the 2000s and early 2010s, hosted his own radio show on BBC Radio 2 from 1999 to 2010, and served as film critic and presenter of the Film programme.

#24500

Tom Leonard

#24511

Overall Influence

1944 - 2018 (74 years)

Tom Leonard was a Scottish poet, writer and critic. He was best known for his poems written in Glaswegian dialect, particularly his Six Glasgow Poems and The Six O'Clock News. His work frequently dealt with the relationship between language, class and culture.

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