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
#24701
Edwin Battistella
#24712
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Edwin Battistella is an American linguist known for work on markedness, syntax, and language attitudes. He is an emeritus professor of Humanities and Culture at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon.
Go to Profile#24702
Charles Camic
#24713
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Charles Michael Camic is the Lorraine H. Morton Professor of sociology at Northwestern University. His research focuses on sociological theory, the sociology of science, and historical sociology. Education and career Camic received his B.A. in sociology summa cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh in 1973. He went on to receive his M.A. and Ph.D., also in sociology, from the University of Chicago in 1975 and 1979, respectively. In 1979, he became an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was promoted to associate professor in 1984 and to full professor in 1988.
Go to Profile#24703
Syed Manzoorul Islam
#24714
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Syed Manzoorul Islam is a Bangladeshi critic, writer and a former professor of Dhaka University. As a literary critic, he has written criticism on writers including Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Sudhindranath Dutta, Samar Sen, and Shamsur Rahman. He received a Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1996, and his 2005 short stories collection Prem o Prarthanar Galpo was Prothom Alo's book of the year. He became the president of PEN Bangladesh in January 2018.
Go to Profile#24704
Heinrich Kleisli
#24715
Overall Influence
1930 - 2011 (81 years)
Heinrich Kleisli was a Swiss mathematician. He is the namesake of several constructions in category theory, including the Kleisli category and Kleisli triples. He is also the namesake of the Kleisli Query System, a tool for integration of heterogeneous databases developed at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#24705
Christopher Hampton
#24716
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Sir Christopher James Hampton is a British playwright, screenwriter, translator and film director. He is best known for his play Les Liaisons Dangereuses based on the novel of the same name and the film adaptation. He has thrice received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay: for Dangerous Liaisons , Atonement and The Father ; winning for the former and latter.
Go to Profile#24706
Pierre Lelong
#24717
Overall Influence
1912 - 2011 (99 years)
Pierre Lelong was a French mathematician who introduced the Poincaré–Lelong equation, the Lelong number and the concept of plurisubharmonic functions. Career Lelong earned his doctorate in 1941 from the École Normale Supérieure, under the supervision of Paul Montel. On 5 June 1981 Lelong received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Mathematics and Science at Uppsala University, Sweden. He became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1985.
Go to Profile#24707
Antonio Giordano
#24718
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Antonio Giordano is an oncologist, pathologist, geneticist, researcher, professor and writer. A naturalized American from Italy, he is the Director of the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine in Philadelphia, and a professor of Anatomy and Pathological Histology at the Department of Medical Biotechnology of the University of Siena. He has discovered some key factors in the regulation of the cell cycle and of mechanisms linked to the onset of tumors. In particular, he distinguished himself for having isolated the tumor suppressor gene, the RB2/p130, subsequently demons...
Go to Profile#24708
Steven C. Beering
#24719
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Steven Claus Beering served as president of Purdue University from 1983 to 2000. Previously, he was dean of the Indiana University School of Medicine for nine years. During his leadership, Purdue's main campus in West Lafayette, Indiana, grew by more than 20 buildings. He replaced John W. Hicks and was succeeded by Martin C. Jischke. Beering was well known for his opposition to financial earmarks. In his honor, the former Liberal Arts Education Building , was renamed Beering Hall. He also founded an eponymous scholarship which provides recipients with full tuition and fees, room and board, an...
Go to Profile#24709
David Kennedy
#24720
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David W. Kennedy is an American academic and legal scholar known for his work on, and criticism of, international law. he is the Manley Hudson Professor of Law and the Director of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School, where he teaches the courses "Global Law and Governance", "Law and Economic Development" and "Expertise and Rulership in Law and Science". He has been a professor at Harvard Law School since 1981, although for a few years he held an appointment at Brown University, as Vice President International Affairs and the David and Marianna Fisher University Pro...
Go to Profile#24710
Stephen H. Davis
#24721
Overall Influence
1939 - 2021 (82 years)
Stephen Howard Davis was an American applied mathematician working in the fields of fluid mechanics and materials science. Davis was the McCormick School Institute Professor and the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University. Davis has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited researcher in Engineering. His work was acknowledged in festschrifts in 2002.
Go to Profile#24711
Karl Turekian
#24722
Overall Influence
1927 - 2013 (86 years)
Karl Karekin Turekian was a geochemist and Sterling Professor at Yale University. During his career at Yale, he examined an uncommonly broad range of topics in planetary science — including the sediments of the deep seas, the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, meteorite strikes, and the composition of Moon rocks.
Go to Profile#24712
Xiaole Shirley Liu
#24723
Overall Influence
Xiaole Shirley Liu is computational biologist, cancer researcher, and entrepreneur. She has been a Professor in the Department of Data Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is now the co-founder and CEO of GV20 Therapeutics.
Go to Profile#24713
Harry Wiener
#24724
Overall Influence
Harry Wiener was an Austrian-American chemist, physician and psychologist, a pioneer in cheminformatics and chemical graph theory, and a long-time employee at Pfizer. Education and career Wiener was born in Vienna in 1924 to Jewish parents Joseph Wiener and Beile Wiener. His family emigrated to New York City, US, in 1941 by way of France and Portugal. Wiener attended Brooklyn College and received a BS in chemistry in 1945. Wiener attended Long Island College of Medicine and obtained an MD in 1949. Wiener was appointed to the management team at Pfizer in 1958 and remained at the company until ...
Go to Profile#24714
Barouh Berkovits
#24725
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Barouh Vojtec Berkovits was one of the pioneers of bio-engineering, particularly the cardiac defibrillator and artificial cardiac pacemaker. In particular, Berkovits invented the "demand pacemaker" and the DC defibrillator.
Go to Profile#24715
Christian Giordano
#24726
Overall Influence
1945 - 2018 (73 years)
Christian Giordano was a Swiss anthropologist and sociologist born in Lugano, Switzerland. Since 1989, he has been Professor of Ethnology and Social Anthropology and Head of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He has also been teaching 'Contemporary Social Theories' at the UNESCO Chair in Intercultural Exchanges, Bucharest in Romania.
Go to Profile#24716
Jochen Heisenberg
#24727
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Jochen Heisenberg is a German physicist specializing in nuclear physics, and Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of New Hampshire. He is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was a co-founder of the quantum mechanics, and who, in particular, introduced the uncertainty principle. He is the brother of German neurobiologist and geneticist Martin Heisenberg and the uncle of film director Benjamin Heisenberg.
Go to Profile#24717
D. Lawrence Kincaid
#24728
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
D. Lawrence Kincaid is a senior advisor for the Research and Evaluation Division of the Center for Communication Programs and an associate scientist in the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Go to Profile#24718
Len Bass
#24729
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Leonard Joel Bass is an American software engineer, Emeritus professor and former researcher at the Software Engineering Institute , particularly known for his contributions on software architecture in practice.
Go to Profile#24719
Razia Khan
#24730
Overall Influence
1936 - 2011 (75 years)
Razia Khan Amin was a Bangladeshi writer, poet and educationist. She was also a journalist, theatre actor and columnist for newspapers. She was awarded Ekushey Padak in 1997 for her contribution to education by the Government of Bangladesh.
Go to Profile#24720
Steven C. Wheelwright
#24731
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Steven Charles Wheelwright was the 9th president of Brigham Young University–Hawaii from 2007 to 2015. Prior to that appointment, he was a professor and senior associate dean at Harvard Business School.
Go to Profile#24721
Gordon Tucker
#24732
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gordon Tucker is a prominent rabbi, with a reputation as both a political and a theological liberal in Conservative Judaism. He is the former senior rabbi of Temple Israel Center in White Plains, New York. Since September 2020, he has served as the Vice Chancellor for Religious Life and Engagement at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
Go to Profile#24722
Gilles Saint-Paul
#24733
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Gilles Saint-Paul is a French economist at Paris School of Economics. He also is a scientific advisor to the Economic Studies Directorate at the French Ministry of the Environment. His main interests include the political economy of unemployment and how information technology affects wage inequality.
Go to Profile#24723
Don Larsen
#24734
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Don James Larsen was an American professional baseball pitcher. During a 15-year Major League Baseball career, he pitched from 1953 to 1967 for seven different teams: the St. Louis Browns / Baltimore Orioles , New York Yankees , Kansas City Athletics , Chicago White Sox , San Francisco Giants , Houston Colt .45's / Astros , and Chicago Cubs .
Go to Profile#24724
Milan Komar
#24735
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
Milan Komar, also known as Emilio Komar was a Slovene Argentine Catholic philosopher and essayist. Life He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, to a Slovene family who had emigrated from the Italian-occupied Julian March. His father, Ludvik was a retired officer of the Austro-Hungarian Army. Milan spent his childhood in Ljubljana and Škofja Loka, and in 1939 he enrolled in the University of Ljubljana where he studied law. He specialized in Canonical law and continued his studies at the University of Turin, where he graduated in 1942. He firs...
Go to Profile#24725
Fernando Haddad
#24736
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Fernando Haddad is a Brazilian scholar, lawyer and politician who has served as the Brazilian Minister of Finance since 1 January 2023. He was previously the mayor of São Paulo from 2013 to 2017 and the Brazilian minister of education from 2005 to 2012.
Go to Profile#24726
Mahmoud Vaezi
#24737
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Mahmoud Vaezi is an Iranian engineer, politician and former diplomat. He was minister of communication from 2013 until 2017 and chief of staff of the president of Iran from 2017 to 2021. He obtained B.S. and M.S. in degrees in electrical engineering from Sacramento State University and San Jose State University and was PhD student in telecommunications engineering at Louisiana State University, which he left unfinished. He holds M.A. and PhD in international relations from Tehran and Warsaw Universities, respectively.
Go to Profile#24727
Hiromi Itō
#24738
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Hiromi Itō is one of the most prominent women writers of contemporary Japan, with more than a dozen collections of poetry, several works of prose, numerous books of essays, and several major literary prizes to her name. She divides her time between the towns of Encinitas, California and Kumamoto in southern Japan. She is currently teaching at School of Culture, Media and Society in Waseda University, Tokyo.
Go to Profile#24728
Mark T. Vande Hei
#24739
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Mark Thomas Vande Hei is a retired United States Army officer and current NASA astronaut who has served as a flight Engineer for Expedition 53, 54, 64, 65, and 66 on the International Space Station.
Go to Profile#24729
Nikolay Kudryavtsev
#24740
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nikolay Kudryavtsev is rector at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Career Nikolay Kudryavtsev graduated from the Department of Molecular and Chemical Physics of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1973. He received his Ph.D. in physics and mathematics from the same institute in 1977. Dr. Kudryavtsev worked at MIPT in various positions including Molecular Physics Chair and dean of the Department of Molecular and Chemical Physics. He became professor in 1990. Since June 1997 he serves as rector at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. In 2007 he was elected to Schlumberger Board of Directors.
Go to Profile#24730
Henry Waxman
#24741
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Henry Arnold Waxman is an American politician and lobbyist who was a U.S. representative from California from 1975 to 2015. He is a member of the Democratic Party. His district included much of the western part of the city of Los Angeles, as well as West Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Beverly Hills, and was numbered the 24th district from 1975 to 1993, the 29th district from 1993 to 2003, and the 30th district from 2003 to 2013, changing because of redistricting after the 1990, 2000, and 2010 censuses.
Go to Profile#24731
Lixia Zhang
#24742
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Lixia Zhang is the Jonathan B. Postel Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her expertise is in computer networks; she helped found the Internet Engineering Task Force, designed the Resource Reservation Protocol, coined the term "middlebox", and pioneered the development of named data networking.
Go to Profile#24732
Weston Ochse
#24743
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Weston Ochse was an American author and educator. He has won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for his short fiction. His novel SEAL Team 666 is currently being shopped by Seven Bucks Productions. Dwayne Johnson has attached himself to the film to executive produce as well as act in a leading role.
Go to Profile#24733
François Gros
#24744
Overall Influence
1925 - 2022 (97 years)
François Gros was a French biologist and one of the pioneers of cellular biochemistry in France. His scientific career concerned genes and their role in regulating cellular functions. Honorary professor at the Collège de France, member of the Institute of France, he was also director of the Pasteur Institute and advisor to Prime Ministers Pierre Mauroy and Laurent Fabius .
Go to Profile#24734
Jorge Wagensberg Lubinski
#24745
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Jorge Wagensberg Lubinski , was a Spanish professor, researcher and writer. Graduate and PhD in Physics with extraordinary prize from the University of Barcelona, where he was Professor of Theory of Irreversible Processes and Statistical mechanics in the Faculty of Physics from 1981 to 2016. He was also a visiting professor at Danube University Krems .
Go to Profile#24735
Steven Girvin
#24746
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Steven M. Girvin is an American physicist who is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale University and who served as deputy provost for research at Yale from 2007 to 2017. Girvin is noted for his theoretical work on quantum many body systemss such as the fractional quantum Hall effect, and as co-developer of circuit QED, the application of the ideas of quantum optics to superconducting microwave circuits. Circuit QED is now the leading architecture for construction of quantum computers based on superconducting qubits.
Go to Profile#24736
Susan Bies
#24747
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Susan Schmidt Bies is an American economist and corporate executive who served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2001 to 2007. Bies was born in Buffalo, New York, and received a B.S. in education from Buffalo State College in 1967 and an M.A. and a Ph.D. , both in economics, from Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#24737
Bonnie Henry
#24748
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Bonnie J. Fraser Henry is a Canadian physician and public servant who has been the provincial health officer at the British Columbia Ministry of Health since 2014. Henry is also a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia. She is a specialist in public health and preventive medicine, and is a family doctor. In her role as provincial health officer, Henry notably led the response to COVID-19 in British Columbia .
Go to Profile#24738
Asifa Quraishi
#24749
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Asifa Bano Quraishi is an American educator and legal scholar. She is a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches courses in Islamic law and U.S. constitutional law. She has served as a law clerk in United States federal courts. Her recent publications address issues of Islamic constitutionalism, in the context of separation of legal authority as well as methodologies of textual interpretation. Quraishi has also written articles for news outlets like The Washington Post and Middle East Eye addressing myths and issues associated with Islam.
Go to Profile#24739
Jamie Redknapp
#24750
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Jamie Frank Redknapp is an English former professional footballer who was active from 1989 until 2005. He is a pundit at Sky Sports and an editorial sports columnist at the Daily Mail. A technically skillful and creative midfielder, who was also an accurate and powerful free-kick taker, Redknapp played for AFC Bournemouth, Southampton, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur, captaining the latter two. He also gained 17 England caps between 1995 and 1999, and was a member of England’s squad that reached the semi-finals of Euro 1996. His 11 years at Liverpool were the most prolific, playing more than ...
Go to Profile#24740
Gilbert Arenas
#24751
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Gilbert Jay Arenas Jr. is an American former professional basketball player. Arenas attended Grant High School in the Valley Glen district of Los Angeles, and accepted a scholarship offer to the University of Arizona late in his junior year. He was drafted by the Golden State Warriors with the 31st overall pick in the 2001 NBA draft.
Go to Profile#24741
Alfred Mueller
#24752
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Alfred H. Mueller is an American theoretical physicist, and the Enrico Fermi Professor of Physics at Columbia University. Mueller studied at Iowa State University, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1961 and in 1965 completed his PhD at MIT. He then served until 1971 as a post-doc at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Since 1972 he has been at Columbia University. He was also a visiting scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study , at the nuclear research centers in Saclay, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, New York University, and at SL...
Go to Profile#24742
Gao Mobo
#24753
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Gao Mobo is a Chinese-Australian professor of Chinese studies. Biography Mobo Gao was born as the son of peasants in a village in Jiangxi that had no electricity at the time. As a child, he experienced a brief period of famine that followed the Great Leap Forward.
Go to Profile#24743
Ryan T. Anderson
#24754
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Ryan Timothy Anderson is an American conservative political philosopher who is best known for his opposition to same-sex marriage. He is currently president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He was previously the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the founder and editor-in-chief of Public Discourse, the Witherspoon Institute's online journal.
Go to Profile#24744
Nikodem Popławski
#24755
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Nikodem Janusz Popławski is a Polish theoretical physicist, most widely noted for the hypothesis that every black hole could be a doorway to another universe and that the universe was formed within a black hole which itself exists in a larger universe. This hypothesis was listed by National Geographic and Science magazines among their top ten discoveries of 2010.
Go to Profile#24745
Jason Newsted
#24756
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jason Curtis Newsted is an American musician who was the bassist of heavy metal band Metallica from 1986 to 2001. He first performed with thrash metal band Flotsam and Jetsam from 1981 to 1986 before joining Metallica to succeed the deceased Cliff Burton. Newsted performed on the albums ...And Justice for All , Metallica , Load , and Reload .
Go to Profile#24746
Alison Jolly
#24757
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Alison Jolly was a primatologist, known for her studies of lemur biology. She wrote several books for both popular and scientific audiences and conducted extensive fieldwork on Lemurs in Madagascar, primarily at the Berenty Reserve, a small private reserve of gallery forest set in the semi-arid spiny desert area in the far south of Madagascar.
Go to Profile#24747
Harold Garner
#24758
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Harold Ray Garner , known informally as "Skip", is a biophysicist with research careers in plasma physics, bioengineering and bioinformatics. Garner was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his B.S. degree in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Missouri, Rolla in 1976 and a PhD in plasma/high temperature matter physics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1982. He also holds an honorary professional engineering degree also from the University of Missouri, Rolla.
Go to Profile#24748
Els Witte
#24759
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Els, Baroness Witte is a Belgian historian. She was professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and honorary rector of the university. Els Witte was the first female rector of a Belgian university. She was a member of the Coudenberg group, a Belgian federalist think tank.
Go to Profile#24749
Jan Peters
#24760
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Jan Peters is a German computer scientist. He is Professor of Intelligent Autonomous Systems at Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Peters is renowned for his research in machine learning and robotics.
Go to Profile#24750
Nikolay Konstantinov
#24761
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Nikolay Nikolayevich Konstantinov was a leading Soviet and Russian mathematical educator and organizer of numerous mathematics competitions for high school students. He is best known as the creator of the system of math schools and math classes and as the creator and chief organizer of the Tournament of the Towns. For his work he was awarded the Paul Erdős award in 1992.
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