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
#251
Peter G. Schultz
#10361
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
#252
Roddam Narasimha
#10385
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Roddam Narasimha FRS was an Indian aerospace scientist and fluid dynamicist. He was a professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science , director of the National Aerospace Laboratories and the chairman of the Engineering Mechanics Unit at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research . He was the DST Year-of-Science Chair Professor at JNCASR and concurrently held the Pratt & Whitney Chair in Science and Engineering at the University of Hyderabad. Narasimha was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian award, in 2013. for his contributions to...
Go to Profile#253
Ezra T. Newman
#10459
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Ezra Theodore Newman was an American physicist, known for his many contributions to general relativity theory. He was professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. Newman was awarded the 2011 Einstein Prize from the American Physical Society.
Go to Profile#254
Robert Calderbank
#10488
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Robert Calderbank is a professor of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics and director of the Information Initiative at Duke University. He received a BSc from Warwick University in 1975, an MSc from Oxford in 1976, and a PhD from Caltech in 1980, all in mathematics. He joined Bell Labs in 1980, and retired from AT&T Labs in 2003 as Vice President for Research and Internet and network systems. He then went to Princeton as a professor of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Applied and Computational Mathematics, before moving to Duke in 2010 to become Dean of Natural S...
Go to Profile#255
Tsutomu Shimomura
#10603
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Tsutomu Shimomura is a Japanese-born physicist and computer security expert. He is known for helping the FBI track and arrest hacker Kevin Mitnick. Takedown, his 1996 book on the subject with journalist John Markoff, was later adapted for the screen in Track Down in 2000.
Go to Profile#256
James R. Heath
#10653
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
James R. Heath is an American chemist and the president and professor of Institute of Systems Biology. Previous to this, he was the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, after having moved from University of California Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#257
E. Mark Gold
#10695
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
E. Mark Gold is an American physicist, mathematician, and computer scientist. He became well known for his article Language identification in the limit which pioneered a formal model for inductive inference of formal languages, mainly by computers. Since 1999, an award of the conference on Algorithmic learning theory is named after him.
Go to Profile#258
Gordon L. Kane
#10717
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Gordon Leon Kane is Victor Weisskopf Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan and director emeritus at the Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics , a leading center for the advancement of theoretical physics. He was director of the LCTP from 2005 to 2011 and Victor Weisskopf Collegiate Professor of Physics from 2002 - 2011. He received the Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society in 2012, and the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics in 2017.
Go to Profile#259
Alexei Kitaev
#10730
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
Alexei Yurievich Kitaev is a Russian–American professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and permanent member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is best known for introducing the quantum phase estimation algorithm and the concept of the topological quantum computer while working at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is also known for introducing the complexity class QMA and showing the 2-local Hamiltonian problem is QMA-complete, the most complete result for k-local Hamiltonians. Kitaev is also known for contributions to research on a model re...
Go to Profile#260
Uri Alon
#10759
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Uri Alon is a Professor and Systems Biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His highly cited research investigates gene expression, network motifs and the design principles of biological networks in Escherichia coli and other organisms using both computational biology and traditional experimental wet laboratory techniques.
Go to Profile#261
Pierre Baldi
#10770
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Pierre Baldi is a distinguished professor of computer science at University of California Irvine and the director of its Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics. Education and early life Born in Rome , Pierre Baldi received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees at the University of Paris, in France. He then obtained his Ph.D. degree in mathematics at the California Institute of Technology in 1986 supervised by R. M. Wilson.
Go to Profile#262
Katharine Way
#10856
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Katharine "Kay" Way was an American physicist best known for her work on the Nuclear Data Project. During World War II, she worked for the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. She became an adjunct professor at Duke University in 1968.
Go to Profile#263
Thomas J.R. Hughes
#10862
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Thomas Joseph Robert Hughes is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and currently holds the Computational and Applied Mathematics Chair at the Oden Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. Hughes has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.
Go to Profile#264
Daniel Kevles
#10957
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Daniel J. Kevles is an American historian of science best known for his books on American physics and eugenics and for a wide-ranging body of scholarship on science and technology in modern societies. He is Stanley Woodward Professor of History, Emeritus at Yale University and J. O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#265
Arnold J. Levine
#11043
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Arnold Jay Levine , is an American molecular biologist. He was awarded the 1998 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry and was the first recipient of the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research in 2001 for his discovery of the tumor suppressor protein p53.
Go to Profile#266
Xiuxiong Chen
#11126
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Xiuxiong Chen is a Chinese-American mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry and differential equations. A professor at Stony Brook University since 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2015 and awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry in 2019. In 2019, he was awarded the Simons Investigator award.
Go to Profile#267
Samuel Mitja Rapoport
#11140
Overall Influence
1912 - 2004 (92 years)
Samuel Mitja Rapoport was a Russian Empire-born German university professor of biochemistry in East Germany. Of Jewish descent and a committed communist, he fled Austria after its annexation by Nazi Germany, and moved to the United States. In 1950, as a result of an investigation of un-American activities, he was offered a professorship in East Berlin. He was married to the renowned pediatrician Ingeborg Rapoport.
Go to Profile#268
Peidong Yang
#11219
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Peidong Yang is a Chinese–American chemist, material scientist, and businessman. He is currently a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Materials Science. His research group studies the synthesis of nanomaterials and their electronic and optical properties. He is also a Department Head at the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Deputy Director of the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems .
Go to Profile#269
Usama Fayyad
#11227
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Usama M. Fayyad is an American-Jordanian data scientist and co-founder of KDD conferences and ACM SIGKDD association for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. He is a speaker on Business Analytics, Data Mining, Data Science, and Big Data. He recently left his role as the Chief Data Officer at Barclays Bank.
Go to Profile#270
Peter S. Kim
#11273
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Peter S. Kim is an American scientist. He was president of Merck Research Laboratories 2003–2013 and is currently Virginia & D.K. Ludwig Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University, Institute Scholar at Stanford ChEM-H, and Lead Investigator of the Infectious Disease Initiative at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
Go to Profile#271
Alvin Trivelpiece
#11277
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (94 years)
Alvin William Trivelpiece was an American physicist whose varied career included positions as director of the Office of Energy Research of the U.S. Department of Energy , executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , and director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory . He was also a professor of physics and a corporate executive. Trivelpiece's research focused on plasma physics, controlled thermonuclear research, and particle accelerators. He received several patents for accelerators and microwave devices. He died in Rancho Santa Margarita, California in August 2...
Go to Profile#272
Vladimir Markovic
#11280
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (52 years)
Vladimir Marković is a Professor of Mathematics at University of Oxford. He was previously the John D. MacArthur Professor at the California Institute of Technology and Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge .
Go to Profile#273
Charles Critchfield
#11303
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Charles Louis Critchfield was an American mathematical physicist. A graduate of George Washington University, where he earned his PhD in physics under the direction of Edward Teller in 1939, he conducted research in ballistics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, and received three patents for improved sabot designs.
Go to Profile#274
Milton S. Plesset
#11331
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
Milton Spinoza Plesset was an American applied physicist who worked in the field of fluid mechanics and nuclear energy. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1979 for his fundamental contributions to multiphase flows, bubble dynamics, and safety of nuclear reactors. Plesset served as professor of engineering science at California Institute of Technology during 1951 to 1978. Notable scientists Andrea Prosperetti, Norman Zabusky, and Chris Whipple finished their doctoral work under Plesset's guidance. Milton Plesset, Andrea Prosperetti, and Chris Whipple were elected to the N...
Go to Profile#275
Lihong V. Wang
#11382
Overall Influence
Lihong V. Wang is the Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering at California Institute of Technology and was formerly the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professorship of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Wang is renowned for his contributions to the field of Photoacoustic imaging technologies and inventing the world's fastest camera with more than 10 trillion frames per second. Wang was elected as the member of National Academy of Engineering in 2018.
Go to Profile#276
Edmund Hlawka
#11465
Overall Influence
1916 - 2009 (93 years)
Edmund Hlawka was an Austrian mathematician. He was a leading number theorist. Hlawka did most of his work at the Vienna University of Technology. He was also a visiting professor at Princeton University and the Sorbonne. Hlawka died on February 19, 2009, in Vienna.
Go to Profile#277
Hugh David Politzer
#11494
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Hugh David Politzer is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Gross and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics.
Go to Profile#278
Po-Shen Loh
#11515
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Po-Shen Loh is an American professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in combinatorics, and formerly served as the national coach of the United States' International Math Olympiad team. He is the founder of educational websites Expii and Live, and lead developer of contact-tracing app NOVID.
Go to Profile#279
Richard Lerner
#11561
Overall Influence
1938 - 2021 (83 years)
Richard Alan Lerner was an American research chemist. He was best known for his work on catalytic antibodies and combinatorial antibody libraries. Lerner served as President of The Scripps Research Institute from 1987 until January 1, 2012, and was a member of its Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, in La Jolla, California.
Go to Profile#280
Kimishige Ishizaka
#11569
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Kimishige "Kimi" Ishizaka was a Japanese immunologist who, with his wife Teruko Ishizaka, discovered the antibody class Immunoglobulin E in 1966–1967. Their work was regarded as a major breakthrough in the understanding of allergy. He was awarded the 1973 Gairdner Foundation International Award and the 2000 Japan Prize for his work in immunology.
Go to Profile#281
Ken Mogi
#11590
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Kenichirō "Ken" Mogi is a Japanese scientist. He is a senior researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories and a visiting professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. According to the profile posted at his personal blog, his mission is "to solve the so-called mind-brain problem."
Go to Profile#282
Richard Zare
#11605
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Richard Neil Zare is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and a Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University. Throughout his career, Zare has made a considerable impact in physical chemistry and analytical chemistry, particularly through the development of laser-induced fluorescence and the study of chemical reactions at the molecular and nanoscale level. LIF is an extremely sensitive technique with applications ranging from analytical chemistry and molecular biology to astrophysics. One of its applications was the sequencing of the human genome.
Go to Profile#283
Seymour Jonathan Singer
#11610
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Seymour Jonathan Singer was an American cell biologist and professor of biology, emeritus, at the University of California, San Diego. Biography Singer was born in New York City and attended Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. in 1943. He received his doctorate from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1947. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Linus Pauling at Caltech during 1947–1948, where he, along with Harvey Itano, co-discovered the basis of abnormal hemoglobin in sickle-cell anemia, reported in the famous paper "Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease". He worked for the U.S.
Go to Profile#284
Eric Fossum
#11651
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
#285
Bernard Carr
#11690
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Bernard J. Carr is a British professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London . His research interests include the early universe, dark matter, general relativity, primordial black holes, and the anthropic principle.
Go to Profile#286
Robert N. Hall
#11711
Overall Influence
1919 - 2016 (97 years)
Robert Noel Hall was an American engineer and applied physicist. He demonstrated the first semiconductor laser and invented a type of magnetron commonly used in microwave ovens. He also contributed to the development of rectifiers for power transmission.
Go to Profile#287
Danny Cohen
#11735
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Danny Cohen was an Israeli American computer scientist specializing in computer networking. He was involved in the ARPAnet project and helped develop various fundamental applications for the Internet. He was one of the key figures behind the separation of TCP and IP ; this allowed the later creation of UDP.
Go to Profile#288
Wilfried Schmid
#11746
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Wilfried Schmid is a German-American mathematician who works in Hodge theory, representation theory, and automorphic forms. After graduating as valedictorian of Princeton University's class of 1964, Schmid earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley in 1967 under the direction of Phillip Griffiths, and then taught at Berkeley and Columbia University, becoming a full professor at Columbia at age 27. In 1978, he moved to Harvard University, where he served as the Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics until his retirement in 2019.
Go to Profile#289
Amer Iqbal
#11772
Overall Influence
Amer Iqbal is a Pakistanii American theoretical physicist. He is primarily known for his work in string theory and mathematical physics. Biography Amer Iqbal has a Doctorate in Theoretical physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He carried out his doctoral research under the supervision of Barton Zwiebach. He has held a faculty position at University of Washington and postdoctoral positions at the University of Texas at Austin and at Harvard University. He also worked as an associate professor of physics at Lahore University of Management Sciences and Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences.
Go to Profile#290
Alex Filippenko
#11778
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Alexei Vladimir "Alex" Filippenko is an American astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko graduated from Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California. He received a Bachelor of Arts in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology in 1984, where he was a Hertz Foundation Fellow. He was a postdoctoral Miller Fellow at Berkeley from 1984 to 1986 and was appointed to Berkeley's faculty in 1986. In 1996 and 2005, he a Miller Research Professor, and he is currently a Senior Miller Fellow.
Go to Profile#291
Stanley Deser
#11845
Overall Influence
1931 - 2023 (92 years)
Stanley Deser was an American physicist known for his contributions to general relativity. He was an emeritus Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and a senior research associate at California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#292
Donald D. Clayton
#11885
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (90 years)
Donald Delbert Clayton is an American astrophysicist whose most visible achievement was the prediction from nucleosynthesis theory that supernovae are intensely radioactive. That earned Clayton the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for “theoretical astrophysics related to the formation of elements in the explosions of stars and to the observable products of these explosions”. Supernovae thereafter became the most important stellar events in astronomy owing to their profoundly radioactive nature. Not only did Clayton discover radioactive nucleosynthesis during explosive silicon b...
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Bill Dally
#11910
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (65 years)
William James Dally is an American computer scientist and educator. Formerly a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and MIT, he is the chief scientist and senior vice president at Nvidia where he leads the company's research efforts in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .
Go to Profile#294
Salvatore Pais
#11949
Overall Influence
Salvatore Cezar Pais is an American aerospace engineer and inventor, currently working for the United States Space Force. He formerly worked at the Naval Air Station Patuxent River. His patent applications for the US Navy attracted attention for their potential energy-producing applications, but also doubt about their feasibility, and speculation that they may be scams, pseudoscience, or disinformation intended to mislead the United States' adversaries.
Go to Profile#295
Kevin C. Dittman
#12089
Overall Influence
Kevin C. Dittman is an American computer scientist, IT consultant and Professor of Information Technology at the Purdue University, especially known for his textbook Systems analysis and design methods written with Lonnie D. Bentley and Jeffrey L. Whitten, which is in its 7th edition.
Go to Profile#296
Preston McAfee
#12142
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Randolph Preston McAfee is an American economist and distinguished scientist at Google. Previously, he served as chief economist at Microsoft. He has also served as an economist at Google, vice president and research fellow at Yahoo! Research, where he led the Microeconomics and Social Systems group, and was the J. Stanley Johnson Professor of Business, Economics, and Management at the California Institute of Technology, where he was the executive officer for the social sciences. He has taught business strategy, managerial economics, and introductory microeconomics.
Go to Profile#297
Donald Truhlar
#12168
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Donald Gene Truhlar is an American scientist working in theoretical and computational chemistry and chemical physics with special emphases on quantum mechanics and chemical dynamics. Early life, education, and early work Donald Gene Truhlar was born in Chicago on 27 February 1944 to John Joseph Truhlar and Lucille Marie Vancura, both of Czech ancestry. Truhlar received a B.A., from St. Mary's College of Minnesota , and a Ph. D., from Caltech , under Aron Kuppermann. He has been on the faculty of the University of Minnesota from 1969–present.
Go to Profile#298
Norman Alexander
#12175
Overall Influence
1907 - 1997 (90 years)
Sir Norman Stanley Alexander was a New Zealand physicist instrumental in the establishment of many Commonwealth universities, including Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, and the Universities of the West Indies, the South Pacific and Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. He was knighted in 1966.
Go to Profile#299
Paul MacCready
#12293
Overall Influence
1925 - 2007 (82 years)
Paul B. MacCready Jr. was an American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the first Kremer prize. He devoted his life to developing more efficient transportation vehicles that could "do more with less".
Go to Profile#300
Jacques Distler
#12322
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Jacques Distler is a Canadian-born American physicist working in string theory. He has been a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin since 1994. Early life and education Distler was born to a Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he attended Herzliah High School . He attended Harvard University for both his bachelors and doctorate in physics. His 1987 thesis Compactified String Theories was supervised by Sidney Coleman.
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