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
#2501
Bengt Holmström
#2503
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Bengt Robert Holmström is a Finnish economist who is currently Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together with Oliver Hart, he received the Central Bank of Sweden Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016.
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Jonathan Israel
#2504
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jonathan Irvine Israel is a British historian specialising in Dutch history, the Age of Enlightenment, Spinoza's Philosophy and European Jews. Israel was appointed as Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, in January 2001 and retired in July 2016. He was previously Professor of Dutch History and Institutions at the University College London.
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David Riesman
#2505
Overall Influence
1909 - 2002 (93 years)
David Riesman was an American sociologist, educator, and best-selling commentator on American society. Career Born to a wealthy German Jewish family, Riesman attended Harvard College, where he graduated in 1931 with a degree in biochemistry. He attended Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review. Riesman clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis between 1935 and 1936. He also taught at what is now the University at Buffalo Law School and at the University of Chicago.
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Robert Ludlum
#2506
Overall Influence
1927 - 2001 (74 years)
Robert Ludlum was an American author of 27 thriller novels, best known as the creator of Jason Bourne from the original The Bourne Trilogy series. The number of copies of his books in print is estimated between 300 million and 500 million. They have been published in 33 languages and 40 countries. Ludlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.
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Howard Cosell
#2507
Overall Influence
1918 - 1995 (77 years)
Howard William Cosell was an American sports journalist, broadcaster and author. Cosell became prominent and influential during his tenure with ABC Sports from 1953 until 1985. Cosell was widely known for his blustery, confident personality. Cosell said of himself, "I've been called arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. And, of course, I am." Cosell was sardonically nicknamed "Humble Howard" by fans and media critics. In its obituary for Cosell, The New York Times described Cosell's effect on American sports coverage: He entered sports broadcasting in the mid-1950s,...
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Wayne Grudem
#2508
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Wayne A. Grudem is a New Testament scholar turned theologian, seminary professor, and author. He co-founded the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and served as the general editor of the ESV Study Bible.
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Holger Bech Nielsen
#2509
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Holger Bech Nielsen is a Danish theoretical physicist and professor emeritus at the Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, where he started studying physics in 1961. Work Nielsen has made original contributions to theoretical particle physics, specifically in the field of string theory. Independently of Nambu and Susskind, he was the first to propose that the Veneziano model was actually a theory of strings, leading him to be considered among the fathers of string theory. He was awarded the Humboldt Prize in 2001 for his research. Several physics concepts are named after him, e.g.
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Christine Blasey Ford
#2510
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Christine Margaret Blasey Ford is an American professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She specializes in designing statistical models for research projects. During her academic career, Ford has worked as a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine Collaborative Clinical Psychology Program.
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Thomas Cech
#2511
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Thomas Robert Cech is an American chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, suggesting that life might have started as RNA. He found that RNA can not only transmit instructions, but also that it can speed up the necessary reactions.
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Lu Jeu Sham
#2512
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Lu Jeu Sham is an American physicist. He is best known for his work with Walter Kohn on the Kohn–Sham equations. Biography Lu Jeu Sham's family was from Fuzhou, Fujian, but he was born in British Hong Kong on April 28, 1938. He was graduated from the Pui Ching Middle School in 1955 and then traveled to England for his higher education. He received his Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Imperial College, University of London in 1960 and his PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge in 1963. In 1963–1966, he worked with Prof. W. Kohn as a postdoctoral fellow in University of California, San Diego.
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William W. Cooper
#2513
Overall Influence
1914 - 2012 (98 years)
William Wager Cooper was an American operations researcher, known as a father of management science and as "Mr. Linear Programming". He was the founding president of The Institute of Management Sciences, founding editor-in-chief of Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, a founding faculty member of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology , founding dean of the School of Urban and Public Affairs at CMU, the former Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Accounting at Harvard University, and the Foster Parker Professor Emeritus of Management, F...
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Benjamin Bloom
#2514
Overall Influence
1913 - 1999 (86 years)
Benjamin Samuel Bloom was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery learning. He is particularly noted for leading educational psychologists to develop the comprehensive system of describing and assessing educational outcomes in the mid-1950s. He has influenced the practices and philosophies of educators around the world from the latter part of the twentieth century.
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James Childress
#2515
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
James Franklin Childress is a philosopher and theologian whose scholarship addresses ethics, particularly biomedical ethics. Currently he is the John Allen Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and teaches public Policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He is also Professor of Medical Education at this university and directs its Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life. He holds a B.A. from Guilford College, a B.D. from Yale Divinity School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. He was vice-...
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Ingo Rechenberg
#2516
Overall Influence
1934 - 2021 (87 years)
Ingo Rechenberg was a German researcher and professor in the field of bionics. Rechenberg was a pioneer of the fields of evolutionary computation and artificial evolution. In the 1960s and 1970s he invented a highly influential set of optimization methods known as evolution strategies . His group successfully applied the new algorithms to challenging problems such as aerodynamic wing design. These were the first serious technical applications of artificial evolution, an important subset of the still growing field of bionics.
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Giovanni Sartori
#2517
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
Giovanni Sartori was an Italian political scientist who specialized in the study of democracy, political parties, and comparative politics. Biography Born in Florence in 1924, Sartori graduated in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Florence in 1946. He stayed on at the University of Florence, teaching History of Modern Philosophy and Doctrine of the State starting in 1946. He became a lecturer in Modern Philosophy and in Political Science , and subsequently professor of Sociology . Sartori became full professor of Political Science and taught at Florence University from 1966 ...
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Pierre Samuel
#2518
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Pierre Samuel was a French mathematician, known for his work in commutative algebra and its applications to algebraic geometry. The two-volume work Commutative Algebra that he wrote with Oscar Zariski is a classic. Other books of his covered projective geometry and algebraic number theory.
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Martin Rodbell
#2519
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Martin Rodbell was an American biochemist and molecular endocrinologist who is best known for his discovery of G-proteins. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Alfred G. Gilman for "their discovery of G-proteins and the role of these proteins in signal transduction in cells."
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Kim Stanley Robinson
#2520
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Kim Stanley Robinson is an American writer of science fiction. He has published 22 novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his Mars trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes and feature scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. The Atlantic has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." According to an article i...
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Arleigh Burke
#2521
Overall Influence
1901 - 1996 (95 years)
Arleigh Albert Burke was an admiral of the United States Navy who distinguished himself during World War II and the Korean War, and who served as Chief of Naval Operations during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.
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Ben Roy Mottelson
#2522
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Ben Roy Mottelson was an American-Danish nuclear physicist. He won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei. Early life Mottelson was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 9 July 1926, the son of Georgia and Goodman Mottelson, an engineer. His family was Jewish. After graduating from Lyons Township High School in La Grange, Illinois, he joined the United States Navy and was sent to attend officers training at Purdue University, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1947. He then earned a PhD in nuclear physics from Harvard University in 1950. His...
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Diane Greene
#2523
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Diane B. Greene is an American technology entrepreneur and executive. Greene started her career as a naval architect before transitioning to the tech industry, where she was a founder and CEO of VMware from 1998 until 2008. She was a board director of Google and CEO of Google Cloud from 2015 until 2019. She was also the co-founder and CEO of two startups, Bebop and VXtreme, which were acquired by Google and Microsoft, for $380 million and $75 million.
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Ward Churchill
#2524
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ward LeRoy Churchill is an American author and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1990 until 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States government. His work features controversial views, written in a direct, often confrontational style. While Churchill has claimed Native American ancestry, genealogical research has failed to unearth such ancestry and he is not a member of a tribe.
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Peter Oborne
#2525
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Peter Alan Oborne is a British journalist and broadcaster. He is the former chief political commentator of The Daily Telegraph, from which he resigned in early 2015. He is author of The Rise of Political Lying, The Triumph of the Political Class, and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, and along with Frances Weaver of the pamphlet Guilty Men. He has also authored a number of books about cricket. He writes a political column for Middle East Eye and a diary column for the Byline Times.
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Donald Broadbent
#2526
Overall Influence
1926 - 1993 (67 years)
Donald Eric Broadbent CBE, FRS was an influential experimental psychologist from the United Kingdom. His career and research bridged the gap between the pre-World War II approach of Sir Frederic Bartlett and what became known as Cognitive Psychology in the late 1960s. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Broadbent as the 54th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Jerome Wiesner
#2527
Overall Influence
1915 - 1994 (79 years)
Jerome Bert Wiesner was a professor of electrical engineering, chosen by President John F. Kennedy as chairman of his Science Advisory Committee . Educated at the University of Michigan, Wiesner was associate director of the university's radio broadcasting service and provided electronic and acoustical assistance to the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan. During World War II, he worked on microwave radar development at the MIT Radiation Laboratory. He worked briefly after the war at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, then returned to MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics from 1946 to 1961.
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Herbert York
#2528
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Herbert Frank York was an American nuclear physicist of Mohawk origin. He held numerous research and administrative positions at various United States government and educational institutes. Biography Herbert York was born to a family of Mohawk ancestry, in Rochester, New York. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in 1943, from the University of Rochester, and then went on to obtain his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1949. During World War II he was a physicist at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory and at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of the Manhattan Project.
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George Gilder
#2529
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
George Franklin Gilder is an American investor, author, economist, and co-founder of the Discovery Institute. His 1981 book, Wealth and Poverty, advanced a case for supply-side economics and capitalism during the early months of the Reagan administration. He is the chairman of George Gilder Fund Management, LLC.
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Terence McKenna
#2530
Overall Influence
1946 - 2000 (54 years)
Terence Kemp McKenna was an American ethnobotanist and mystic who advocated the responsible use of naturally occurring psychedelic plants. He spoke and wrote about a variety of subjects, including psychedelic drugs, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, metaphysics, alchemy, language, philosophy, culture, technology, ethnomycology, environmentalism, and the theoretical origins of human consciousness. He was called the "Timothy Leary of the '90s", "one of the leading authorities on the ontological foundations of shamanism", and the "intellectual voice of rave culture".
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Jock Young
#2531
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Jock Young was a British sociologist and an influential criminologist. Biography Jock Young was educated at the London School of Economics. His PhD was an ethnography of drug use in Notting Hill, West London, out of which he developed the concept of moral panic. The research was published as The Drugtakers. He was a founding member of the National Deviancy Conferences and a group of critical criminologists in which milieu he wrote the groundbreaking, The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance in 1973, with Ian Taylor and Paul Walton and The Manufacture of News .
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Allan Gibbard
#2532
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Allan Fletcher Gibbard is the Richard B. Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Gibbard has made major contributions to contemporary ethical theory, in particular metaethics, where he has developed a contemporary version of non-cognitivism. He has also published articles in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and social choice theory.
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Philip Johnson-Laird
#2533
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird, FRS, FBA is a philosopher of language and reasoning and a developer of the mental model theory of reasoning. He was a professor at Princeton University's Department of Psychology, as well as the author of several notable books on human cognition and the psychology of reasoning.
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Brian Schmidt
#2534
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Brian Paul Schmidt is the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University . He was previously a Distinguished Professor, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at the University's Mount Stromlo Observatory and Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. He currently holds an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. Schmidt shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter ...
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Philip Jenkins
#2535
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Philip Jenkins is a professor of history at Baylor University in the United States, and co-director for Baylor's Program on Historical Studies of Religion in the Institute for Studies of Religion. He is also the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University . He was professor and a distinguished professor of history and religious studies at the same institution; and also assistant, associate and then full professor of criminal justice and American studies at PSU, 1980–93.
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George Mackey
#2536
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
George Whitelaw Mackey was an American mathematician known for his contributions to quantum logic, representation theory, and noncommutative geometry. Career Mackey earned his bachelor of arts at Rice University in 1938 and obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1942 under the direction of Marshall H. Stone. He joined the Harvard University Mathematics Department in 1943, was appointed Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science in 1969 and remained there until he retired in 1985.
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David Chipperfield
#2537
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Sir David Alan Chipperfield, is a British architect. He established David Chipperfield Architects in 1985, which grew into a global architectural practice with offices in London, Berlin, Milan, and Shanghai.
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Michael Eric Dyson
#2538
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Michael Eric Dyson is an American academic, author, ordained minister, and radio host. He is a professor in the College of Arts and Science and in the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University. Described by Michael A. Fletcher as "a Princeton Ph.D. and a child of the streets who takes pains never to separate the two", Dyson has authored or edited more than twenty books dealing with subjects such as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Marvin Gaye, Barack Obama, Nas's debut album Illmatic, Bill Cosby, Tupac Shakur and Hurricane Katrina.
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Geoffrey Chew
#2539
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Geoffrey Foucar Chew was an American theoretical physicist. He is known for his bootstrap theory of strong interactions. Life Chew worked as a professor of physics at the UC Berkeley since 1957 and was an emeritus since 1991. Chew held a PhD in theoretical particle physics from the University of Chicago. Between 1950 and 1956, he was a physics faculty member at the University of Illinois. In addition, Chew was a member of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also a founding member of the International Center for Transdisciplinary Resea...
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George F. R. Ellis
#2540
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
George Francis Rayner Ellis, FRS, Hon. FRSSAf , is the emeritus distinguished professor of complex systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, published in 1973, and is considered one of the world's leading theorists in cosmology. From 1989 to 1992 he served as president of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. He is a past president of the International Society for Science and Religion. He...
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Paul Cockshott
#2541
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
William Paul Cockshott is a Scottish academic in the fields of computer science and Marxist economics. He is a Reader at the University of Glasgow. Since 1993 he has authored multiple works in the tradition of scientific socialism, most notably Towards a New Socialism and How the World Works.
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Robert Stalnaker
#2542
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Robert Culp Stalnaker is an American philosopher who is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
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Brian Kobilka
#2543
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Brian Kent Kobilka is an American physiologist and a recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Lefkowitz for discoveries that reveal the workings of G protein-coupled receptors. He is currently a professor in the department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also a co-founder of ConfometRx, a biotechnology company focusing on G protein-coupled receptors. He was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.
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Andy Murray
#2544
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Sir Andrew Barron Murray is a British professional tennis player. He was ranked world No. 1 in singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals for 41 weeks, and finished as the year-end No. 1 in 2016. Murray has won three Grand Slam singles titles, two at Wimbledon and one at the US Open , and has reached eleven major finals. Murray was ranked in the top 10 for all but one month from July 2008 through to October 2017, and was no lower than world No. 4 in eight of the nine year-end rankings during that span. Murray has won 46 ATP Tour singles titles, including 14 Masters 1000 events and ...
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Robert Hughes
#2545
Overall Influence
1938 - 2012 (74 years)
Robert Studley Forrest Hughes AO was an Australian-born art critic, writer, and producer of television documentaries. He was described in 1997 by Robert Boynton of The New York Times as "the most famous art critic in the world."
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Charles F. Hockett
#2546
Overall Influence
1916 - 2000 (84 years)
Charles Francis Hockett was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralist linguistics. He represents the post-Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism often referred to as "distributionalism" or "taxonomic structuralism". His academic career spanned over half a century at Cornell and Rice universities. Hockett was also a firm believer of linguistics as a branch of anthropology, making contributions that were significant to the field of anthropology as well.
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Larry Bird
#2547
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Larry Joe Bird is an American former professional basketball player, coach, and executive in the National Basketball Association . Nicknamed "the Hick from French Lick" and "Larry Legend", Bird is widely regarded as one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He is the only person in NBA history to be named Rookie of the Year, Most Valuable Player, Finals MVP, All-Star MVP, Coach of the Year, and Executive of the Year.
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Gerald Weinberg
#2548
Overall Influence
1933 - 2018 (85 years)
Gerald Marvin Weinberg was an American computer scientist, author and teacher of the psychology and anthropology of computer software development. His most well-known books are The Psychology of Computer Programming and Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
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Rudolf Mössbauer
#2549
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer was a German physicist best known for his 1957 discovery of 'recoilless nuclear resonance fluorescence', for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics. This effect, called the Mössbauer effect, is the basis for Mössbauer spectroscopy.
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Gordon Bell
#2550
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Chester Gordon Bell is an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of Engineering 1972–1983, overseeing the development of the VAX computer systems. Bell's later career includes entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate 1986–1987, and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research, 1995–2015.
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Boris Chertok
#2551
Overall Influence
1912 - 2011 (99 years)
Boris Yevseyevich Chertok was a Russian engineer in the former Soviet space program, mainly working in control systems, and later found employment in Roscosmos. Major responsibility under his guidance was primarily based on computerized control system of the Russian missiles and rocketry system, and authored the four-volume book Rockets and People– the definitive source of information about the history of the Soviet space program.
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Rosalind Hursthouse
#2552
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Rosalind Hursthouse is a British-born New Zealand moral philosopher noted for her work on virtue ethics. She is one of the leading exponents of contemporary virtue ethics, though she has also written extensively on philosophy of action, history of philosophy, moral psychology, and biomedical ethics. Hursthouse is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at the University of Auckland and Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
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