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
#25101
Clive Wake
#25112
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Clive Wake is a critic, editor and translator of modern African and French literature. Born in Cape Town, Clive Wake studied at Cape Town University and the Sorbonne. He taught at the University of Rhodesia, and the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he is Emeritus Professor of French and African Literature. He served as Lord Mayor of Canterbury for the Liberal Democrats party and was Vice-Chancellor of Chaucer College Canterbury.
Go to Profile#25102
Václav Bělohradský
#25113
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Václav Bělohradský is a Czech philosopher and sociologist. Life and career A graduate in philosophy and Czech from Charles University, Prague, from 1970 to 2010s he lived in Italy, where he was Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Trieste. He is said to be a successor of Jan Patočka. He is a representative of biocentrism, which he developed to refusing anthropocentric overestimation of symbol and culture. He also thinks we need to step back from "us" to be able to lay foundations of new and freer society. He co-participated with Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Žižek at Monument to Transformation.
Go to Profile#25103
Micky Adams
#25114
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Michael Richard Adams is an English former professional footballer and football manager . As a player, he was a full back, and made a total of 438 league appearances in a nineteen-year professional career in the English Football League, including five years with Southampton at the highest level. He began his managerial career as player-manager for Fulham in 1996 and has led several teams at varying levels with mixed success, being named Manager of the Season twice, dismissed a number of times and earning four promotionss for the teams he has managed.
Go to Profile#25104
Michael Mandel
#25115
Overall Influence
1948 - 2013 (65 years)
Michael Mandel was a Canadian legal academic, specializing in criminal law with a particular interest in criminal sentencing and legal theory. He was the author of the 2005 book How America Gets Away With Murder.
Go to Profile#25105
Jody Azzouni
#25116
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jody Azzouni is an American philosopher, poet, and writer. He currently is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Education He received his bachelor's degree and master's degree from New York University and his PhD from the City University of New York.
Go to Profile#25106
Asuman Özdağlar
#25117
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Asuman "Asu" Özdağlar is a Turkish academic. Early life She was born to İsmail Özdağlar and Zahide Özdağlar on December 16, 1974. Her father İsmail Özdağlar was a former Minister of State, between December 13, 1983 and January 15, 1985 in the 45th government of Turkey, who was convicted and jailed of misuse of ministerial powers.
Go to Profile#25107
Gita Ramjee
#25118
Overall Influence
1956 - 2020 (64 years)
Gita Ramjee was a Ugandan-South African scientist and researcher in HIV prevention. In 2018, she was awarded the ‘Outstanding Female Scientist’ award from the European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership. She died in Umhlanga, Durban, South Africa, from COVID-19 related complications.
Go to Profile#25108
Michelle Effros
#25119
Overall Influence
Michelle Effros is the George Van Osdol Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. She has made significant contributions to data compression. Early life and education Effros earned her bachelor's degree at Stanford University in 1989. She was awarded the Stanford University Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award for excellence in engineering. She remained there for her graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1990 and a PhD in 1994. She worked under the supervision of Robert M. Gray. She spent 1988 and 1989 at Hughes Aircraft Company, studying modulation schemes and future space technology.
Go to Profile#25109
Abdul Salam Azimi
#25120
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Abdul Salam Azimi is an Afghan judge who was the Chief Justice of Afghanistan and, as such, the head of the Afghan Supreme Court from August 2006 to October 2014, when he resigned his position. A former professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha in the United States, Azimi served as legal advisor to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and assisted with writing the 2004 Constitution of Afghanistan. He is an ethnic Pashtun of the Alizai tribe. Prior to the Soviet Invasion of 1979, Azimi and his family resided in the Kabul province of Afghanistan and were forced to flee the country in 1981 after the fall of the Communist regime and resulting civil war.
Go to Profile#25110
Jason Terry
#25121
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Jason Eugene Terry is an American professional basketball coach and former player who is an assistant coach for the Utah Jazz of the National Basketball Association . He played 19 seasons in the NBA as a combo guard and is nicknamed "the Jet". With the Dallas Mavericks, Terry won the NBA Sixth Man of the Year Award in 2009 and an NBA championship in 2011. As of January 2023, Terry has made the eighth-most three-point field goals in NBA history.
Go to Profile#25111
Alan R. Hildebrand
#25122
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Alan Russell Hildebrand is a planetary scientist and Associate Professor in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary. He has specialized in the study of asteroid impact cratering, fireballss and meteorite recovery. His work has shed light on the extinction event caused by the Chicxulub asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous period. Hildebrand is one of the leaders of the Prairie Meteorite Network search project.
Go to Profile#25112
Engelbert Humperdinck
#25123
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Arnold George Dorsey , known professionally as Engelbert Humperdinck, is a British pop singer who has been described as "one of the finest middle-of-the-road balladeerss around". He achieved international prominence in 1967 with his recording of "Release Me".
Go to Profile#25113
Andrew Gurr
#25124
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Andrew John Gurr is a contemporary literary scholar who specializes in William Shakespeare and English Renaissance theatre. Life and work Born in Leicester, Gurr was raised in New Zealand, and educated at the University of Auckland and at Cambridge University. He has taught at the Universities of Wellington, Leeds, and Nairobi ; at the latter institution he was also head of his department.
Go to Profile#25114
Joel Beinin
#25125
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Joel Beinin is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. From 2006 to 2008 he served as director of Middle East studies and professor of history at the American University in Cairo.
Go to Profile#25115
Bruce Caldwell
#25126
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Bruce J. Caldwell is an American historian of economics, Research Professor of Economics at Duke University, and Director of the Center for the History of Political Economy. Prior to holding this position, Caldwell was the Joe Rosenthal Excellence Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In 1979, he received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and did post-doctoral work at New York University, where he was influenced by both Ludwig Lachmann and Israel Kirzner.
Go to Profile#25116
Guido Weiss
#25127
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Guido Leopold Weiss in St. Louis Childhood Weiss was born in Trieste Italy into a Jewish family. His parents, Edoardo and Vonda Weiss, were both psychiatrists. Weiss was forced out of school at the age of 9, upon the passage of Italy's Italian Racial Laws, which forbade all Jewish children from attending public school. He attended a Jewish school in Rome until the end of 1939 when his father was sponsored by members of the Menninger family to emigrate to America. The family settled in Topeka, Kansas.
Go to Profile#25117
Karl-Heinz Petzinka
#25128
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Karl-Heinz Petzinka is a German architect, and Rector of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He is known for office buildings in Düsseldorf and Berlin. He converted historic industrial buildings, and was responsible for the section architecture for the Ruhr.2010 project.
Go to Profile#25118
David S. Reynolds
#25129
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David S. Reynolds is an American literary critic, biographer, and historian who has written about American literature and culture. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, on the Civil War era—including figures such as Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Lippard, and John Brown. Reynolds has been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Christian Gauss Award, the Ambassador Book Award, the Gustavus Myers Book Award, the John Hope Franklin Prize , and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Go to Profile#25119
Richard Haag
#25130
Overall Influence
1923 - 2018 (95 years)
Richard Haag was an American landscape architect who was known for his role in Gas Works Park in Seattle, Washington and on the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island. Richard Haag's modernist and minimalist ideals also set the tone for Northwestern landscape design.
Go to Profile#25120
Tomotaka Takahashi
#25131
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Tomotaka Takahashi is a Japanese roboticist and founder of Kyoto University's ROBO-GARAGE since 2018. Takahashi creates humanoid robots known for their smooth, fluid motions and sleek appearance. Having built many humanoid robots entirely by himself, from simple concepts to production, Takahashi's designs have been featured in several art exhibitions celebrating the creation of Astroboy, Time Magazine's Coolest Inventions of 2004, and promotions for Bandai, Panasonic, and Pepsi. He has also worked with toy companies to produce relatively inexpensive robots for the hobby market, including thos...
Go to Profile#25121
Artur Juncosa Carbonell
#25132
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Artur Juncosa Carbonell ; 5 October 1925 – 13 December 2010 Early years Juncosa was born in Les Borges del Camp , into a traditionalist family. He studied engineering in Madrid and graduated in philosophy and in Theology from the Faculty of San Francisco de Borja and from the University of Barcelona , where he received his PhD in 1979.
Go to Profile#25122
Andrew Streitwieser
#25133
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Andrew Streitwieser was an American chemist known for his contributions to physical organic chemistry. Streitwieser was born in 1927 in Buffalo, New York and he grew up in New York City. He attended Columbia College and then Columbia University where he earned a PhD in the research group of William von Eggers Doering in 1952. He then was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of John D. Roberts at MIT. He has been Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley since 1953.
Go to Profile#25123
John David Brewer
#25134
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
John David Brewer HDSSc, MRIA, FRSE, FAcSS, FRSA is an Irish-British sociologist who was the former President of the British Sociological Association , and was Professor of Post Conflict Studies in the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University Belfast , and is now Emeritus Professor in the Mitchell Institute. He is also Honorary Professor Extraordinary, Stellenbosch University and Honorary Professor of Sociology, Warwick University . He was formerly Sixth-Century Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen . He is a member of the United Nations Roster of Global Experts for his work on peace processes .
Go to Profile#25124
Francis A. Sullivan
#25135
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Francis Alfred Sullivan was an American Catholic theologian and a Jesuit priest, best known for his research in the area of ecclesiology and the magisterium. Early life and Jesuit formation Francis "Frank" A. Sullivan was born in Boston on May 21, 1922, to George Edward and Bessie [Peterson] Sullivan, the second of four boys.
Go to Profile#25125
Philippe of Belgium
#25136
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Philippe or Filip is King of the Belgians. He is the eldest child of King Albert II and Queen Paola. He succeeded his father upon the latter's abdication for health reasons on 21 July 2013. He married Mathilde d'Udekem d'Acoz in 1999, with whom he has four children. Their eldest child, Princess Elisabeth, is first in the line of succession.
Go to Profile#25126
Morihiro Hosokawa
#25137
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
is a Japanese politician who was Prime Minister of Japan from 1993 to 1994, leading a coalition government which was the first non-Liberal Democratic Party government of Japan since 1955. After successfully implementing various election and trade reforms, he stepped down from the role of Prime Minister in early 1994. He later ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for Governor of Tokyo in the February 2014 gubernatorial election as an independent supported by the Democratic Party of Japan. He has been, since 2005, the head of the Kumamoto-Hosokawa clan, one of the former noble families of Japan.
Go to Profile#25127
Helmar Frank
#25138
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Helmar Gunter Frank was a German mathematician and pedagogist. He was among the first scientists to apply mathematical methods in teaching and psychology. He established a method to measure intelligence on an absolute and homogeneous scale rather than by comparison between individuals.
Go to Profile#25128
Giles Tillotson
#25139
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Giles Henry Rupert Tillotson is a writer and lecturer on Indian history and architecture. Career He was previously Reader in History of Art and Chair of Art & Archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies , University of London. He is also Fellow and a former Director of the Royal Asiatic Society, London.
Go to Profile#25129
Atif Mian
#25140
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Atif Rehman Mian is a Pakistani-American economist who serves as the John H. Laporte Jr. Class of 1967 Professor of Economics, Public Policy, and Finance at Princeton University, and as the Director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021, and was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2021.
Go to Profile#25130
Michael Röckner
#25141
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Michael Röckner is a mathematician working in the fields of Stochastic analysis and Mathematical Physics. He obtained his PhD at the University of Bielefeld in 1984 under the supervision of Sergio Albeverio and Christopher John Preston.
Go to Profile#25131
Darryl Strawberry
#25142
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Darryl Eugene Strawberry is an American former professional baseball right fielder who played 17 seasons in Major League Baseball . Throughout his career, Strawberry was one of the most feared sluggers in the sport, known for his prodigious home runs and his intimidating presence in the batter's box with his frame and his long, looping swing that elicited comparisons to Ted Williams.
Go to Profile#25132
JoAnn E. Manson
#25143
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
JoAnn Elisabeth Manson is an American physician and professor known for her pioneering research, public leadership, and advocacy in the fields of epidemiology and women's health. Manson's research has contributed to the understanding of the causes of chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and breast cancer. She is one of the most highly cited researchers in the world according to Google Scholar, with an h-index of over 300. She is the Michael and Lee Bell Professor of Women's Health at Harvard Medical School, a professor of epidemiology in the Harvard School of Public He...
Go to Profile#25133
Paul Chester Kainen
#25144
Overall Influence
Paul Chester Kainen is an American mathematician, an adjunct associate professor of mathematics and director of the Lab for Visual Mathematics at Georgetown University. Kainen is the author of a popular book on the four color theorem, and is also known for his work on book embeddings of graphs.
Go to Profile#25134
Roman L. Weil
#25145
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Roman Lee Weil Jr. was an American economist, accountant, consultant, and Emeritus faculty member of Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, especially known for his work on bond duration.
Go to Profile#25135
León Ávalos y Vez
#25146
Overall Influence
1906 - 1991 (85 years)
León Ávalos y Vez was a Mexican mechanical engineer who served as the founding director-general of the Monterrey Institute of Technology and as director-general of the National School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering of the National Polytechnic Institute .
Go to Profile#25136
Leonard Beeghley
#25147
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Leonard Beeghley is Professor Emeritus of sociology at the University of Florida since 1975. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Riverside in 1975 and has since published seven books over the course of his career. Two of these seven books, The Emergence of Sociological Theory and The Structure of Social Stratification in the United States "become standard references in the field." His interests include the relationships between social stratification, public policy and societal problems. He has been covering the socio-economic class structure of the United States in five...
Go to Profile#25137
Penelope Eckert
#25148
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Penelope "Penny" Eckert is Albert Ray Lang Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Stanford University. She specializes in variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.
Go to Profile#25138
Anne Michaels
#25149
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction.
Go to Profile#25139
Nick Yee
#25150
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Nick Yee is an American researcher who studies self-representation and social interaction in virtual environments. Biography Yee earned his bachelor's degree in psychology from Haverford College and received his Ph.D. in communication from Stanford University in 2007. He was a researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center in California from 2005 to 2012.
Go to Profile#25140
Matt Hasselbeck
#25151
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Matthew Michael Hasselbeck is an American former professional football player who was a quarterback in the National Football League . He played college football for the Boston College Eagles and was selected in the sixth round of the 1998 NFL Draft by the Green Bay Packers. After a season on the practice squad and two seasons backing up Brett Favre, he was traded to the Seattle Seahawks in 2001, where he spent the majority of his career. Hasselbeck led Seattle to six playoff appearances, including the franchise’s first Super Bowl appearance during the 2005 season. He was selected to three Pro Bowls in his career.
Go to Profile#25141
Piotr Wilczek
#25152
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Piotr Antoni Wilczek is a Polish intellectual historian, a specialist in comparative literature and a literary translator, who served as the Ambassador of Poland to the United States and the United Kingdom .
Go to Profile#25142
Svetozar Gligorić
#25153
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Svetozar Gligorić was a Serbian and Yugoslav chess grandmaster and musician. He won the championship of Yugoslavia a record twelve times, and is considered the best player ever from Serbia. In 1958, he was declared the best athlete of Yugoslavia.
Go to Profile#25143
Reginald H. Fuller
#25154
Overall Influence
1915 - 2007 (92 years)
Reginald Horace Fuller was an Anglo-American biblical scholar, ecumenist, and Anglican priest. His works are recognized for their consequential analysis of New Testament Christology. One aspect of his work is on the relation of Jesus to the early church and the church today. For this, his analysis, which uses the historical-critical method, has been described as neo-orthodox.
Go to Profile#25144
Kent Roach
#25155
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Kent Roach is a professor of law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. He is well known for his expertise and writings on criminal law, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and more recently anti-terrorism law. He is a graduate of the university and served as a law clerk to Justice Bertha Wilson of the Supreme Court of Canada. Roach is a recipient of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship . He was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2015.
Go to Profile#25145
Mary Carskadon
#25156
Overall Influence
Mary A. Carskadon is one of the most prominent American researchers in sleep. She is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She is also the Director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Research Lab at E.P. Bradley Hospital. She is considered to be an expert on sleep and circadian rhythms during childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. She researches issues related to daytime sleepiness. She has also contributed important research on school start times as it relates to sleep patterns and sleepiness in adolescence. Every summer, Dr.
Go to Profile#25146
Joseph R. Lakowicz
#25157
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Joseph Raymond Lakowicz is an American biochemist . He is a professor at the school of medicine of the University of Maryland in Baltimore and director of the Center for Fluorescence Spectroscopy and author of the standard work in this field, which was published in 2006 in the third edition.
Go to Profile#25147
Eero Simoncelli
#25158
Overall Influence
Eero Simoncelli is an American computational neuroscientist and Silver Professor at New York University. He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator from 2000 to 2020. In 2020, he became the inaugural director of the Center for Computational Neuroscience at the Flatiron Institute of the Simons Foundation.
Go to Profile#25148
Kim Seungok
#25159
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Kim Seungok is a South Korean novelist and screenwriter. Biography Born in Osaka, Japan, Kim Seungok returned to Korea after its liberation in 1945. There, he was raised in Suncheon in Jeollanam-do where he graduated from Suncheon High School. In 1960, he studied French Literature at Seoul National University at a time that department and University were the center of intellectual discontent in Seoul. While at Seoul National University, Kim was a cartoonist for a Seoul newspaper and published his first major story at age 19 . While a junior in 1962, Kim founded a literary Journal, The Age of Prose, and some of his first works were published there.
Go to Profile#25149
Daniel Little
#25160
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Daniel E. Little is professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and professor of sociology and public policy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He previously served as the Chancellor for the University of Michigan-Dearborn .
Go to Profile#25150
Becky Lynch
#25161
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Rebecca Quin is an Irish professional wrestler. She is signed to WWE under the ring name Becky Lynch, where she performs on the Raw brand. Lynch is one of WWE's most recognizable and highest-paid wrestlers. Twitter named her sixth on their list of Top Female Athletes Worldwide in 2019.
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