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
#25001
Tony Martin
#25012
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Tony Martin was a Trinidad and Tobago-born scholar of Africana Studies. From 1973 to 2007 he worked at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and over the course of his career published more than ten books and a range of scholarly articles.
Go to Profile#25002
Noboru Takeshita
#25013
Overall Influence
1924 - 2000 (76 years)
was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1987 to 1989 during the bubble economy. Takeshita led the largest faction at the time in the Liberal Democratic Party, which he inherited from Kakuei Tanaka, from the 1980s until his death in 2000. He was dubbed the "last shadow shogun" for his behind-the-scenes influence in Japanese politics. He was the last prime minister to serve during the long rule of Emperor Shōwa. He is the grandfather of musician and actor Daigo.
Go to Profile#25003
Ismar Schorsch
#25014
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Ismar Schorsch is the Chancellor emeritus of The Jewish Theological Seminary and the Rabbi Herman Abramovitz Professor of Jewish history. Schorsch served as the sixth Chancellor at JTS for approximately 20 years, from March 1986 until his retirement in June 2006. He was succeeded by Arnold Eisen.
Go to Profile#25004
Laura Mersini-Houghton
#25015
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Laura Mersini-Houghton is an Albanian-American cosmologist and theoretical physicist, and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a proponent of the multiverse hypothesis and the author of a theory for the origin of the universe that holds that our universe is one of many selected by quantum gravitational dynamics of matter and energy. She argues that anomalies in the current structure of the universe are best explained as the gravitational tug exerted by other universes.
Go to Profile#25005
Raanan Gillon
#25016
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Raanan Evelyn Zvi Gillon FRCP is emeritus professor of medical ethics at Imperial College London, and past president of the British Medical Association. A general practitioner until his retirement in 2002, Gillon edited the Journal of Medical Ethics from 1980 to 2002, and from 1995 to 1999 was professor at Imperial. He is an author on several works on medical ethics including Philosophical Medical Ethics.
Go to Profile#25006
Guillermo Gonzalez
#25017
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Guillermo Gonzalez is an astronomer, a proponent of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design, and a research scientist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. He is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, considered the hub of the intelligent design movement, and a fellow with the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, which also promotes intelligent design.
Go to Profile#25007
Hichem Djait
#25018
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
Hichem Djait , also known as Hichem Jaiet, was a prominent historian and scholar of Islam. Biography Djait was born in 1935 in Tunis, Tunisia to a conservative upper-middle-class family. His father and some of his uncles and relatives were Islamic sages , which made the name of the Djait family become traditionally associated with the Zeytouna Mosque as well as with Islamic Fiqh and Iftah . He completed his secondary education at Sadiki College, where he studied French, world literature, Western philosophy, Arabic, and Islamic Studies. This training made him discover Enlightenment thinkers and...
Go to Profile#25008
Paul S. Appelbaum
#25019
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Paul Stuart Appelbaum is an American psychiatrist and a leading expert on legal and ethical issues in medicine and psychiatry. Appelbaum has been Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine, and Law, and Director, Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons since 2006. \Appelbaum was President of the American Psychiatric Association and President of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law .
Go to Profile#25009
Narendra Ahuja
#25020
Overall Influence
Narendra Ahuja is an Indian-American computer scientist and the Donald Biggar Willett Professor Emeritus in Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His research primarily concerns computer vision and pattern recognition.
Go to Profile#25010
Jan Miodek
#25021
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jan Franciszek Miodek , is a Polish linguist, a prescriptive grammarian and a Professor of Wrocław University. He is regarded as one of the most prominent educators and promoters of the standard Polish language.
Go to Profile#25011
Michael Scharf
#25022
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Michael P. Scharf is co-dean, Joseph C. Hostetler – BakerHostetler professor of law, and the director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. Scharf is also co-founder of the Public International Law & Policy Group , a non-governmental organization which provides pro bono legal assistance to developing states and states in transition. Since 1995 PILPG has provided pro bono legal assistance to states and governments involved in peace negotiations, drafting post-conflict constitutions, and prosecuting war criminals. Since March 2012, S...
Go to Profile#25012
Marcus Miller
#25023
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
William Henry Marcus Miller Jr. is an American musician, songwriter, and record producer. He is best known for his work as a bassist. He has worked with trumpeter Miles Davis, pianist Herbie Hancock, singer Luther Vandross, and saxophonist David Sanborn, among others. He was the main songwriter and producer on three of Davis' albums: Tutu , Music from Siesta , and Amandla . His collaboration with Vandross was especially close; he co-produced and served as the arranger for most of Vandross' albums, and he and Vandross co-wrote many of Vandross' songs, including the hits "I Really Didn't Mean It", "Any Love", "Power of Love/Love Power" and "Don't Want to Be a Fool".
Go to Profile#25013
Freya Mathews
#25024
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Freya Mathews is an Australian environmental philosopher whose main work has been in the areas of ecological metaphysics and panpsychism. Her current special interests are in ecological civilization; indigenous perspectives on "sustainability" and how these perspectives may be adapted to the context of contemporary global society; panpsychism and critique of the metaphysics of modernity; and wildlife ethics and rewilding in the context of the Anthropocene.
Go to Profile#25014
David Field
#25025
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David Field is an astrophysicist and author, living in Århus, Denmark. Education The son of E.J. and Dereen, Field studied Chemistry at Newcastle University, UK, followed by a PhD at the University of Cambridge. He was later awarded the degree of Doctor of Science by the University of Cambridge. Previously Reader in Physical Chemistry at the University of Bristol, he now researches astrophysics and experimental physics as a professor at the University of Aarhus. He has published over 175 papers in this subject. He is on the editorial board of Astrobiology, and played a key role in the discov...
Go to Profile#25015
Alain Fournier
#25026
Overall Influence
1943 - 2000 (57 years)
Alain Fournier was a computer graphics researcher. Biography Alain Fournier was born on November 5, 1943, in Lyon, France. He was married twice, first to Beverly Bickle and later to Adrienne Drobnies, with whom he had one daughter, Ariel.
Go to Profile#25016
Joseph A. Wolf
#25027
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Joseph Albert Wolf was an American mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley. Life and career Wolf graduated from at the University of Chicago with a bachelor's degree in 1956 and with his master's degree in 1957 and his Ph.D. under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern in 1959 . From 1960 to 1962, as a post-doctoral researcher, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey . In 1962 he was assistant professor and since 1966 he has been professor at Berkeley.
Go to Profile#25017
Amy Lee
#25028
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Amy Lynn Lee is an American singer-songwriter and musician. She is the co-founder, lead vocalist, lead songwriter and keyboardist of the rock band Evanescence. A classically trained pianist, Lee began writing music at age 11 and co-founded Evanescence at age 13, inspired by various musical genres and film scores from an early age. Lee has also participated in other musical projects, including Nightmare Revisited and Muppets: The Green Album, and composed music for several films, including War Story , Indigo Grey: The Passage , and the song "Speak to Me" for Voice from the Stone . She has also released the covers EP Recover, Vol.
Go to Profile#25018
Allan R. Millett
#25029
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Allan R. Millett is a historian and a retired colonel in U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He is known for his works on the Korean War, but he has written on other military topics. Early life Millett is the son of John D. Millett, who served as the President of Miami University in Ohio, and his wife Catherine. He has two brothers. He attended DePauw University, graduating in 1959.
Go to Profile#25019
Dudley Shapere
#25030
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Dudley Shapere was an American philosopher and Reynolds Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy and History of Science at Wake Forest College. He is known for his works on philosophy of science. Books Reason and the Search for Knowledge. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 78. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company 1984Philosophical Problems of Natural Science , Collier-Macmillan 1965
Go to Profile#25020
Joseph E. B. Lumbard
#25031
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Joseph E.B. Lumbard is an American Muslim scholar of Islamic studies and associate professor of Quranic studies at the College of Islamic Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar. He is the author, editor, and translator of several scholarly books and many articles on Islamic philosophy, Sufism, and Quranic studies.
Go to Profile#25021
Pierre Grimal
#25032
Overall Influence
1912 - 1996 (84 years)
Pierre Grimal was a French historian, classicist and Latinist. Fascinated by the Greek and Roman civilizations, he did much to promote the cultural inheritance of the classical world, both among specialists and the general public.
Go to Profile#25022
Mehdi Ghazanfari
#25033
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Mehdi Ghazanfari is an Iranian politician and the current chairman of the National Development Fund of Iran since October 2021. He was Minister of Industries and Business from 3 August 2011 to 15 August 2013 and Minister of Commerce in the second cabinet of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from 9 August 2009 to 3 August 2011.
Go to Profile#25023
John L. Anderson
#25034
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
John Leonard Anderson is the current president of the National Academy of Engineering. He was a professor of chemical engineering, who served as the eighth president of Illinois Institute of Technology. Prior to his appointment at IIT, Anderson held positions in academia at various institutions, serving both as the provost of Case Western Reserve University and the dean of the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.
Go to Profile#25024
Serj Tankian
#25035
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Serj Tankian is a Lebanese-born Armenian-American musician and songwriter. He is best known as the founder, lead vocalist and primary lyricist of System of a Down, which was formed in 1994. Tankian has released five albums with System of a Down and five solo albums , as well as collaborating with musicians such as rapper Tech N9ne and folk singer Arto Tunçboyacıyan. He also released Elect the Dead Symphony, a live orchestral version of Elect the Dead featuring the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. He is the founder of the record label Serjical Strike Records, and is currently represented by V...
Go to Profile#25025
Ian Brooker
#25036
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Murray Ian Hill Brooker AM , better known as Ian Brooker, was an Australian botanist. He was widely recognised as the leading authority on the genus Eucalyptus. Ian Brooker was born in Adelaide, South Australia on 2 June 1934. He obtained a B.Ag.Sc. from the University of Adelaide, and a MSc and D.Sc. from the Australian National University in Canberra. He worked with the Soil Conservation Branch of the Department of Agriculture in South Australia from 1957 to 1963; then joined the Department of Botany at the Australian National University until 1969; and then spent a year with the Western Aus...
Go to Profile#25026
Albín Brunovský
#25037
Overall Influence
1935 - 1997 (62 years)
Albín Brunovský was a Slovak painter, graphic artist, lithographer, illustrator and pedagogue, considered one of the greatest Slovak painters of the 20th century. Biography Albín Brunovský was born in Zohor, Czechoslovakia on Christmas Day, 25 December 1935. Brunovský started his early career in art by working on stage set and poster design. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava under Prof. Vincent Hložník from 1955 to 1961. The Hloznik School was well known for its high artistic and technical preparation in graphic arts and its humanist perspective. For the founder, as for many of his students, Goya's great graphic cycle "The Horrors of War" served as a pattern or model.
Go to Profile#25027
Nigel Horspool
#25038
Overall Influence
R. Nigel Horspool is a retired professor of computer science, formerly of the University of Victoria. He invented the Boyer–Moore–Horspool algorithm, a fast string search algorithm adapted from the Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm. Horspool is co-inventor of dynamic Markov compression and was associate editor and then editor-at-large of the journal Software: Practice and Experience from 2007 to 2017. He is the author of C Programming in the Berkeley UNIX Environment.
Go to Profile#25028
Merle Collins
#25039
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Merle Collins is a distinguished Grenadian poet and short story writer. Life Collins' parents are from Grenada, where they returned from Aruba shortly after her birth. Her primary education was in St George's, Grenada. She later studied at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, earning degrees in English and Spanish in 1972. She then taught history and Spanish in Grenada for two years and subsequently in St Lucia. In 1980, she graduated from Georgetown University, Washington, DC, with a master's degree in Latin American Studies. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Ph.D.
Go to Profile#25029
James B. Jacobs
#25040
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
James Barrett Jacobs was the Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the Courts at New York University School of Law, where he was a faculty member since 1982. He was a specialist in criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice.
Go to Profile#25030
Charlie Puth
#25041
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Charles Otto Puth Jr. is an American singer, songwriter, and record producer. His initial exposure came through the viral success of his song covers uploaded to YouTube. Puth signed with the record label eleveneleven in 2011 after performing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, while also songwriting and producing material for other artists.
Go to Profile#25031
John Robert Evans
#25042
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
John Robert Evans was a Canadian cardiologist, academic, businessperson, and civic leader. He was the founding dean of the McMaster University Medical School and then vice-president of Health Services at McMaster University from 1965 to 1972. From 1972 to 1978 he was President of the University of Toronto. From 1979 to 1983, he served as founding Director of the Population, Health and Nutrition Department of the World Bank in Washington, DC.
Go to Profile#25032
John R. Levine
#25043
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
John R. Levine is an Internet author and consultant specializing in email infrastructure, spam filtering, and software patents. He chaired the Anti-Spam Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force , is president of CAUCE , is a member of the ICANN Stability and Security Advisory Committee, and runs Taughannock Networks. He has co-authored many books, including The Internet For Dummies , UNIX For Dummies , Fighting Spam for Dummies , and flex & bison . He was also the mayor of the village of Trumansburg, New York, United States from March 2004 until March 2007.
Go to Profile#25033
Benjamin Kuipers
#25044
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Benjamin Kuipers is an American computer scientist at the University of Michigan, known for his research in qualitative simulation. Biography Kuipers graduated from Swarthmore College in 1970 with a B.A. in Mathematics. He then did two years of alternate service as a conscientious objector to military service, working in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. He began his doctoral studies in pure mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He soon discovered the field of Artificial Intelligence, and spent most of his time at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, where his advisor was Marvin Minsky.
Go to Profile#25034
Jason Reynolds
#25045
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Jason Reynolds is an American author of novels and poetry for young adult and middle-grade audience. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in neighboring Oxon Hill, Maryland, Reynolds found inspiration in rap and had an early focus on poetry, publishing several poetry collections before his first novel in 2014, When I Was The Greatest, which won the John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Go to Profile#25035
Frank T. Rothaermel
#25046
Overall Influence
Frank T. Rothaermel is a professor in the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology and an Alfred P. Sloan Industry Studies Fellow. He holds the Russell and Nancy McDonough Chair of Business.
Go to Profile#25036
Kavita Ramanan
#25047
Overall Influence
Kavita Ramanan is a probability theorist who works as a professor of applied mathematics at Brown University. Education and career Ramanan was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India to Anuradha Ramanan and algebraic geometer S. Ramanan. Ramanan earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1992. She completed her Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Brown University in 1996. Her dissertation, supervised by Paul Dupuis, was Construction and Large Deviation Analysis of Constrained Processes, with Applications to Communication Networks.
Go to Profile#25037
Steve Blinkhorn
#25048
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Stephen F. Blinkhorn, CPsychol, FBPsS is a British occupational psychologist and psychometrician , who continues to contribute to psychology and psychometric testing. Blinkhorn is known for publishing a number of papers, many of which have taken the form of book reviews for Nature magazine, including: 'Willow, Titwillow, Titwillow' ; 'What skulduggery?' ; and 'A gender bender' . Other papers have argued about the inappropriate use of the Rasch model, and the misuse of personality tests.
Go to Profile#25038
Titu Andreescu
#25049
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Titu Andreescu is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is firmly involved in mathematics contests and olympiads, having been the Director of American Mathematics Competitions , Director of the Mathematical Olympiad Program, Head Coach of the United States International Mathematical Olympiad Team, and Chairman of the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad. He has also authored a large number of books on the topic of problem solving and olympiad-style mathematics.
Go to Profile#25039
Fiona Apple
#25050
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart is an American singer-songwriter. She released five albums from 1996 to 2020, all of which reached the top 20 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart. Apple has received numerous awards and nominations, including three Grammy Awards, two MTV Video Music Awards, and a Billboard Music Award.
Go to Profile#25040
Roy Adler
#25051
Overall Influence
1931 - 2016 (85 years)
Roy Lee Adler was an American mathematician. Adler earned his Ph.D. in 1961 from Yale University under the supervision of Shizuo Kakutani . He then worked as a mathematician for IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
Go to Profile#25041
Scott Atran
#25052
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Scott Atran is an American-French cultural anthropologist who is Emeritus Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, Research Professor at the University of Michigan, and cofounder of ARTIS International and of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University. He has studied and written about terrorism, violence, religion, indigenous environmental management and the cross-cultural foundations of biological classification; and he has done fieldwork with terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists, as well as political...
Go to Profile#25042
Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte
#25053
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Hugh Francis Durrant-Whyte is a British-Australian engineer and academic. He is known for his pioneering work on probabilistic methods for robotics. The algorithms developed in his group since the early 1990s permit autonomous vehicles to deal with uncertainty and to localize themselves despite noisy sensor readings using simultaneous localization and mapping .
Go to Profile#25043
Neena Gupta
#25054
Overall Influence
Neena Gupta is a professor at the Statistics and Mathematics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute , Kolkata. Her primary fields of interest are commutative algebra and affine algebraic geometry.
Go to Profile#25044
Stuart Moulthrop
#25055
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Stuart Moulthrop is an innovator of electronic literature and hypertext fiction, both as a theoretician and as a writer. He is author of the hypertext fiction works Victory Garden , which was on the front-page of the New York Times Book Review in 1993, Reagan Library , and Hegirascope , amongst many others. Moulthrop is currently a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He also became a founding board member of the Electronic Literature Organization in 1999.
Go to Profile#25045
Levan Chilashvili
#25056
Overall Influence
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
Levan Chilashvili was a Georgian archaeologist and historian, an academician of the Georgian Academy of Sciences , Meritorious Scholar of Georgia, Doctor of Historical Sciences, and Professor. In 1954, he graduated from the Faculty of History of Tbilisi State University , where he was also a professor from 1967 until his death in 2004. In 1958, Chilashvili received his PhD in history, and in 1967, he received a degree as Doctor of Historical Sciences.
Go to Profile#25046
Frédéric Hélein
#25057
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Frédéric Hélein is a French mathematician. He is university professor at Paris Diderot University. Hélein earned his doctorate at École polytechnique under supervision of Jean-Michel Coron. In 1998 Hélein was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. He won the 1999 Fermat Prize, jointly with Fabrice Bethuel, for several important contributions to the theory of variational calculus.
Go to Profile#25047
France Gall
#25058
Overall Influence
1947 - 2018 (71 years)
Isabelle Geneviève Marie Anne Gall , known professionally as France Gall, was a French yé-yé singer. In 1965, aged 17, she won the Eurovision Song Contest for Luxembourg. Between 1973-92, she collaborated with singer-songwriter Michel Berger.
Go to Profile#25048
Jean-Marc Jancovici
#25059
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jean-Marc Jancovici is a French engineering consultant, energy and climate expert, professor, conference speaker, writer, and independent columnist. He is co-founder and associate at the Carbone 4 consultancy firm, and the founding president of the think-tank The Shift Project.
Go to Profile#25049
Florent Malouda
#25060
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Florent Johan Malouda is a football coach and former professional player who played as a midfielder. Born in French Guiana, he represented both France and French Guiana at international level. A left winger, he spent most of his career at Lyon and Chelsea, winning four consecutive Ligue 1 titles with the former and the UEFA Champions League in 2012 with the latter, among other honours.
Go to Profile#25050
Ian Bradley
#25061
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Ian Campbell Bradley is a British academic, author and broadcaster. He is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews, where he was Principal of St Mary's College, the Faculty and School of Divinity, and honorary Church of Scotland Chaplain.
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