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).
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List of the most influential people
#251
Leonard Kleinrock
#251
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Leonard Kleinrock is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He is a long-tenured professor at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. In the early 1960s, Kleinrock pioneered the application of queueing theory to model delays in message switching networks in his Ph.D. thesis, published as a book in 1964. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he played an influential role in the development of the ARPANET. He applied queueing theory to model and measure the performance of packet switching networks and published several of the standard works on the subject in the mid 1970s.
Go to Profile#252
Germaine Greer
#252
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminism movement in the latter half of the 20th century. Specializing in English and women's literature, she has held academic positions in England at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge, and in the United States at the University of Tulsa. Based in the United Kingdom since 1964, she has divided her time since the 1990s between Queensland, Australia, and her home in Essex, England.
Go to Profile#253
Samuel P. Huntington
#253
Overall Influence
1927 - 2008 (81 years)
Samuel Phillips Huntington was an American political scientist, adviser, and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor.
Go to Profile#254
Viktor Frankl
#254
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories.
Go to Profile#255
Dr. Seuss
#255
Overall Influence
1904 - 1991 (87 years)
Theodor Seuss Geisel was an American children's author and cartoonist. He is known for his work writing and illustrating more than 60 books under the pen name Dr. Seuss . His work includes many of the most popular children's books of all time, selling over 600 million copies and being translated into more than 20 languages by the time of his death.
Go to Profile#256
Michael Shermer
#256
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michael Brant Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, executive director of The Skeptics Society, and founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a publication focused on investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The author of over a dozen books, Shermer is known for engaging in debates on pseudoscience and religion in which he emphasizes scientific skepticism.
Go to Profile#257
Donna Haraway
#257
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.
Go to Profile#258
Shigeru Miyamoto
#258
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
is a Japanese video game designer, producer and game director at Nintendo, where he serves as one of its representative directors as an executive since 2002. Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential designers in the history of video games, he is the creator of some of the most acclaimed and best-selling game franchises of all time, including Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Star Fox and Pikmin.
Go to Profile#259
Czesław Miłosz
#259
Overall Influence
1911 - 2004 (93 years)
Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. He primarily wrote his poetry in Polish. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".
Go to Profile#260
Mohammed VI of Morocco
#260
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Mohammed VI is King of Morocco. A member of the 'Alawi dynasty, he acceded to the throne on 23 July 1999, upon the death of his father, King Hassan II. Mohammed has vast business holdings across several economic sectors in Morocco. His net worth has been estimated at between and over US$8.2 billion. In 2015, Forbes named him the richest king in Africa and the fifth wealthiest monarch in the world.
Go to Profile#261
Paul R. Ehrlich
#261
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Paul Ralph Ehrlich is an American biologist known for his predictions and warnings about the consequences of population growth, including famine and resource depletion. Ehrlich is the Bing Professor Emeritus of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University, and President of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology.
Go to Profile#262
Howard Zinn
#262
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Howard Zinn was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist intellectual and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote over 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States in 1980. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People's History of the United States.
Go to Profile#263
Edgar F. Codd
#263
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases and relational database management systems. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most mentioned, analyzed and celebrated achievement.
Go to Profile#264
Elinor Ostrom
#264
Overall Influence
1933 - 2012 (79 years)
Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom was an American political scientist and political economist whose work was associated with New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Go to Profile#265
George Akerlof
#265
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#266
William Lane Craig
#266
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
William Lane Craig is an American analytic philosopher, Christian apologist, author, and Wesleyan theologian who upholds the view of Molinism and neo-Apollinarianism. He is currently a Professor of Philosophy at Houston Christian University and a Research Professor of Philosophy at Biola University's Talbot School of Theology. Craig has updated and defended the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. He has also published work where he argues in favor of the historical plausibility of the resurrection of Jesus. His study of divine aseity and Platonism culminated with his book Go...
Go to Profile#267
Bjarne Stroustrup
#267
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
#268
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
#268
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a German-American academic associated with Austrian School economics, anarcho-capitalism, right-wing libertarianism, and opposition to democracy. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas , senior fellow of the Mises Institute think tank, and the founder and president of the Property and Freedom Society.
Go to Profile#269
Christopher Hitchens
#269
Overall Influence
1949 - 2011 (62 years)
Christopher Eric Hitchens was a British author and journalist who is widely regarded as one of the most influential atheists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Author of 18 books on faith, culture, politics, and literature, he was born and educated in Britain, graduating in the 1970s from Oxford with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair. Known as "one of the 'four horsemen'" of New Atheism, he gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. His epistemological razor, which states that "what ca...
Go to Profile#270
David Harvey
#270
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
David W. Harvey is a British Marxist economic geographer, podcaster, and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.
Go to Profile#271
Bob Kahn
#271
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Robert Elliot Kahn is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol , the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.
Go to Profile#272
Carl Sagan
#272
Overall Influence
1934 - 1996 (62 years)
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. He assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, which were universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. He argued in favor of the hypothesis, which has since been accepted, that the high surfac...
Go to Profile#273
Paul Ricœur
#273
Overall Influence
1913 - 2005 (92 years)
Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. As such, his thought is within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gabriel Marcel. In 2000, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for having "revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory."
Go to Profile#274
Saunders Mac Lane
#274
Overall Influence
1909 - 2005 (96 years)
Saunders Mac Lane was an American mathematician who co-founded category theory with Samuel Eilenberg. Early life and education Mac Lane was born in Norwich, Connecticut, near where his family lived in Taftville. He was christened "Leslie Saunders MacLane", but "Leslie" fell into disuse because his parents, Donald MacLane and Winifred Saunders, came to dislike it. He began inserting a space into his surname because his first wife found it difficult to type the name without a space. He was the oldest of three brothers; one of his brothers, Gerald MacLane, also became a mathematics professor at Rice University and Purdue University.
Go to Profile#275
Bhikkhu Bodhi
#275
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Bhikkhu Bodhi , born Jeffrey Block, is an American Theravada Buddhist monk ordained in Sri Lanka. He teaches in the New York and New Jersey area. He was appointed the second president of the Buddhist Publication Society and has edited and authored several publications grounded in the Theravada Buddhist tradition.
Go to Profile#276
Maurice Blanchot
#276
Overall Influence
1907 - 2003 (96 years)
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher and literary theorist. His work, exploring a philosophy of death alongside poetic theories of meaning and sense, bore significant influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Go to Profile#277
Alexander Dubček
#277
Overall Influence
1921 - 1992 (71 years)
Alexander Dubček was a Slovak statesman who served as the First Secretary of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from January 1968 to April 1969 and as Chairman of the Federal Assembly from 1989 to 1992 following the Velvet Revolution. He oversaw significant reforms to the communist system during a period that became known as the Prague Spring, but his reforms were reversed and he was eventually sidelined following the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968.
Go to Profile#278
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
#278
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Go to Profile#279
Hélène Cixous
#279
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Hélène Cixous is a French writer, playwright and literary critic. During her academic career, she was primarily associated with the Centre universitaire de Vincennes , which she co-founded in 1969 and where she created the first centre of women's studies at a European university. Known for her experimental writing style and great versatility as a writer and thinker, she has written more than seventy books dealing with multiple genres: theater, literary and feminist theory, art criticism, autobiography and poetic fiction.
Go to Profile#280
Ken Wilber
#280
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Kenneth Earl Wilber II is an American theorist and writer on transpersonal psychology and his own integral theory, a four-quadrant grid which purports to encompass all human knowledge and experience.
Go to Profile#281
Peter L. Berger
#281
Overall Influence
1929 - 2017 (88 years)
Peter Ludwig Berger was an Austrian-born American sociologist and Protestant theologian. Berger became known for his work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, study of modernization, and theoretical contributions to sociological theory.
Go to Profile#282
Daniel Ellsberg
#282
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Daniel Ellsberg was an American political activist, economist, and United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, he precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.
Go to Profile#283
John Paul Stevens
#283
Overall Influence
1920 - 2019 (99 years)
John Paul Stevens was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1975 to 2010. At the time of his retirement, he was the second-oldest justice in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court and the third-longest-serving justice. At the time of his death in 2019 at age 99, he was the longest-lived Supreme Court justice ever. His long tenure saw him write for the Court on most issues of American law, including civil liberties, the death penalty, government action, and intellectual property. Despite being a registered Republican who ...
Go to Profile#284
Carl Gustav Hempel
#284
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel was a German writer, philosopher, logician, and epistemologist. He was a major figure in logical empiricism, a 20th-century movement in the philosophy of science. Hempel articulated the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, which was considered the "standard model" of scientific explanation during the 1950s and 1960s. He is also known for the raven paradox .
Go to Profile#285
Shiing-Shen Chern
#285
Overall Influence
1911 - 2004 (93 years)
Shiing-Shen Chern was a Chinese-American mathematician and poet. He made fundamental contributions to differential geometry and topology. He has been called the "father of modern differential geometry" and is widely regarded as a leader in geometry and one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, winning numerous awards and recognition including the Wolf Prize and the inaugural Shaw Prize. In memory of Shiing-Shen Chern, the International Mathematical Union established the Chern Medal in 2010 to recognize "an individual whose accomplishments warrant the highest level of recogn...
Go to Profile#286
Jeremy Clarkson
#286
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson is an English television presenter, journalist, and writer who specialises in motoring. He is best known for the motoring programmes Top Gear and The Grand Tour alongside Richard Hammond and James May. He also currently writes weekly columns for The Sunday Times and The Sun. Since 2018, Clarkson has hosted the ITV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.
Go to Profile#287
Naomi Campbell
#287
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Naomi Elaine Campbell is an English model. Beginning her career at the age of 8, Campbell was one of six models of her generation declared supermodels by the fashion industry and the international press. She was the first black woman to appear on the covers of Time and Vogue France.
Go to Profile#288
Charlie Rose
#288
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Charles Peete Rose Jr. is an American former television journalist and talk show host. From 1991 to 2017, he was the host and executive producer of the talk show Charlie Rose on PBS and Bloomberg LP.
Go to Profile#289
Peter Naur
#289
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Peter Naur was a Danish computer science pioneer and Turing award winner. He is best remembered as a contributor, with John Backus, to the Backus–Naur form notation used in describing the syntax for most programming languages. He also contributed to creating the language ALGOL 60.
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Franco Modigliani
#290
Overall Influence
1918 - 2003 (85 years)
Franco Modigliani was an Italian-American economist and the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. He was a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT Sloan School of Management.
Go to Profile#291
Jim Lovell
#291
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
James Arthur Lovell Jr. is an American retired astronaut, naval aviator, test pilot and mechanical engineer. In 1968, as command module pilot of Apollo 8, he became, with Frank Borman and William Anders, one of the first three astronauts to fly to and orbit the Moon. He then commanded the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970 which, after a critical failure en route, circled the Moon and returned safely to Earth.
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Paul McCartney
#292
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Sir James Paul McCartney is an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame with the Beatles, for whom he played bass guitar and shared primary songwriting and lead vocal duties with John Lennon. One of the most successful composers and performers of all time, McCartney is known for his melodic approach to bass-playing, versatile and wide tenor vocal range, and musical eclecticism, exploring genres ranging from pre–rock and roll pop to classical, ballads, and electronica. His songwriting partnership with Lennon is the most successful in modern music history.
Go to Profile#293
Tom Wolfe
#293
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. was an American author and journalist widely known for his association with New Journalism, a style of news writing and journalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s that incorporated literary techniques. Much of Wolfe's work was satirical and centred on the counterculture of the 1960s and issues related to class, social status, and the lifestyles of the economic and intellectual elites of New York City.
Go to Profile#294
Jiang Qing
#294
Overall Influence
1914 - 1991 (77 years)
Jiang Qing , also known as Madame Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary, actress, and major political figure during the Cultural Revolution . She was the fourth wife of Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party and Paramount leader of China. She used the stage name Lan Ping during her acting career , and was known by many other names. Jiang was best known for playing a major role in the Cultural Revolution and for forming the radical political alliance known as the "Gang of Four".
Go to Profile#295
Myron Scholes
#295
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Myron Samuel Scholes is a Canadian–American financial economist. Scholes is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, and co-originator of the Black–Scholes options pricing model. Scholes is currently the chairman of the Board of Economic Advisers of Stamos Capital Partners. Previously he served as the chairman of Platinum Grove Asset Management and on the Dimensional Fund Advisors board of directors, American Century Mutual Fund board of directors and the Cutwater Advisory Board. He was a principal and...
Go to Profile#296
Antonio Negri
#296
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Antonio "Toni" Negri is an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of Empire and his work on Spinoza. Born in Padua, he became a political philosophy professor in his hometown university. Negri founded the Potere Operaio group in 1969 and was a leading member of Autonomia Operaia, and has published hugely influential books urging "revolutionary consciousness".
Go to Profile#297
Janet Yellen
#297
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Janet Louise Yellen is an American economist serving as the 78th United States secretary of the treasury since January 26, 2021. She previously served as the 15th chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018. She is the first person to hold those positions having also led the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the first woman to hold either post.
Go to Profile#298
Niklas Luhmann
#298
Overall Influence
1927 - 1998 (71 years)
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory. Biography Luhmann was born in Lüneburg, Free State of Prussia, where his father's family had been running a brewery for several generations. He entered the Gymnasium Johanneum at Luneburg in 1937. In 1943, he was conscripted as a Luftwaffenhelfer in World War II and served for two years until, at the age of 17, he was taken prisoner of war by American troops in 1945. After the war Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, where he obtained a law degree, and then began a career in Lüneburg's public administration.
Go to Profile#299
William Westmoreland
#299
Overall Influence
1914 - 2005 (91 years)
William Childs Westmoreland was a United States Army general, most notably commander of United States forces during the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1968. He served as Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1968 to 1972.
Go to Profile#300
Ursula K. Le Guin
#300
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. She was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an "American ...
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