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
#25151
Paul Fry
#25162
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Paul Fry is the William Lampson Professor of English at Yale University, a specialist in British Romantic poetry. He received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Go to Profile#25152
Shirley Meng
#25163
Overall Influence
Ying Shirley Meng is a Singaporean-American materials scientist and academic. She is a professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science chief scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. Meng is the author and co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, two book chapter and six patents. She serves on the executive committee for battery division at the Electrochemical Society and she is the Editor-in-Chief for MRS Energy & Sustainability.
Go to Profile#25153
Frank Grosveld
#25164
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Franklin Gerardus "Frank" Grosveld, FRS is a Dutch molecular biologist whose research interests are in the regulation of transcription during development with a particular emphasis on mammalian erythroid differentiation. He is a professor and former Head of the Department of Cell Biology at the Erasmus MC, Rotterdam.
Go to Profile#25154
Walter Abish
#25165
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Walter Abish was an Austrian-born American author of experimental novels and short stories. He was conferred the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1981 and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship six years later.
Go to Profile#25155
Melvin Fitting
#25166
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Melvin Fitting is a logician with special interests in philosophical logic and tableau proof systems. He was a professor at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. from 1968 to 2013. At the Graduate Center he was in the departments of Computer Science, Philosophy, and Mathematics, and at Lehman College he was in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science. He is now Professor emeritus.
Go to Profile#25156
Harvey Leibenstein
#25167
Overall Influence
1922 - 1994 (72 years)
Harvey Leibenstein was a Ukrainian-born American economist. One of his most important contributions to economics was the concept of X-inefficiency and the critical minimum effort thesis in development economics.
Go to Profile#25157
Lisa Raymond
#25168
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Lisa Raymond is an American retired professional tennis player who has achieved notable success in doubles tennis. Raymond has eleven Grand Slam titles to her name: six in women's doubles and five in mixed doubles. On June 12, 2000, she reached the world No. 1 ranking in doubles for the first time, becoming the 13th player to reach the milestone. Raymond was ranked No. 1 on five separate occasions in her career over a combined total of 137 weeks and finished as the year-end No. 1 doubles player in both 2001 and 2006. She currently holds the record of most doubles match wins and most doubles...
Go to Profile#25158
Philip Hanawalt
#25169
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Philip C. Hanawalt is an American biologist who discovered the process of repair replication of damaged DNA in 1963. He is also considered the co-discoverer of the ubiquitous process of DNA excision repair along with his mentor, Richard Setlow, and Paul Howard-Flanders. He holds the Dr. Morris Herzstein Professorship in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, with a joint appointment in the Dermatology Department in Stanford University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#25159
S Katharine Hammond
#25170
Overall Influence
Sally Katharine Hammond is a Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. Her research considers the impact of pollution and passive smoking on public health. It resulted in the Federal Aviation Administration issuing a ban on smoking on aeroplanes. Hammond serves on the World Health Organization study group on Tobacco Product Regulation.
Go to Profile#25160
Gwyn Jones
#25171
Overall Influence
1907 - 1999 (92 years)
Gwyn Jones was a Welsh novelist and story writer, and a scholar and translator of Nordic literature and history. Personal life and academic career Gwyn Jones was born on 24 May 1907 in New Tredegar, Monmouthshire, the second child of George Henry Jones , a miner, and his second wife, Lily Florence, née Nethercott , a midwife. He was brought up in nearby Blackwood. He attended Tredegar county school and studied at University College, Cardiff as an undergraduate and a postgraduate.
Go to Profile#25161
Christine A. Varney
#25172
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Christine A. Varney is an American antitrust attorney who served as the U.S. assistant attorney general of the Antitrust Division for the Obama Administration and as a Federal Trade commissionerer in the Clinton Administration. Since August 2011, Varney has been a partner of the New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where she chairs the antitrust department.
Go to Profile#25162
David Hogness
#25173
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
David Swenson Hogness was an American biochemist, geneticist, and developmental biologist and emeritus professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. Life Hogness spent most of his youth in Chicago, the son of Thorfin R. Hogness and Phoebe S. Hogness. His parents were both children of immigrants and graduates of the University of Minnesota; his father later received a PhD in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, taught at Berkeley, and in 1930 joined the faculty at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#25163
Friedrich Merz
#25174
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Joachim-Friedrich Martin Josef Merz is a German politician serving as Leader of the Christian Democratic Union since 31 January 2022 and as leader of the Union parliamentary group as well as the Leader of the Opposition in the Bundestag since 15 February 2022.
Go to Profile#25164
Ozzie Smith
#25175
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Osborne Earl Smith is an American former professional baseball player. Nicknamed "the Wizard of Oz", Smith played shortstop for the San Diego Padres and St. Louis Cardinals in Major League Baseball, winning the National League Gold Glove Award for defensive play at shortstop for 13 consecutive seasons. A 15-time All-Star, Smith accumulated 2,460 hits and 580 stolen bases during his career, and won the National League Silver Slugger Award as the best hitter at shortstop in 1987. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility in 2002. He was also elected to the St....
Go to Profile#25165
Horst Siebert
#25176
Overall Influence
1938 - 2009 (71 years)
Horst Siebert was a German economist. He was a member of the German Council of Economic Experts from 1990 to 2003. Siebert also served as a member of both the Group of Economic Analysis and the Group of Economic Policy Analysis , a number of "European economists who advise the European Commission’s president." From 2002 to 2004, as a member of GEA, he advised EU President Romano Prodi. From 2005 to 2007, as a member of GEPA, he advised EU President Jose Manuel Barroso Siebert spent most of his academic career at the University of Kiel, where he held the chair for economic theory from 1989 to...
Go to Profile#25166
Gang Chen
#25177
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Gang Chen is a Chinese-born American mechanical engineer and nanotechnologist. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he is currently the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering and he was head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering from July 23, 2013 to June 30, 2018. He directs the Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center formerly funded by the United States Department of Energy. He became an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010.
Go to Profile#25167
Younan Xia
#25178
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Younan Xia is a Chinese-American chemist, materials scientist, and bioengineer. He is the Brock Family Chair and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, with joint appointments in the School of Chemistry & Biochemistry, the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, and Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#25168
Don Marquis
#25179
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Don Marquis was an American philosopher and deontologist whose main academic interests were in ethics and medical ethics. Marquis was Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas until his death.
Go to Profile#25169
Elihu Abrahams
#25180
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Elihu Abrahams was a theoretical physicist, specializing in condensed matter physics. Abrahams attended Brooklyn Technical High School, graduating in 1944. In 1947 Abrahams received his bachelor's degree and in 1952 his PhD, with Charles Kittel as thesis advisor, from the University of California, Berkeley with thesis Spin-lattice relaxation in ferromagnetics. In 1952–1953 he was a research associate in physics at UC Berkeley. He was in 1953–1955 a research associate and in 1955–1956 an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 1956 he became an assistant profess...
Go to Profile#25170
Dick Weber
#25181
Overall Influence
1929 - 2005 (76 years)
Richard Anthony Weber was an American professional ten-pin bowler and founding member of the Professional Bowlers Association . Along with Don Carter, Weber is widely regarded as professional bowling's first superstar. He is one of only eight players in history to accumulate at least 30 career PBA Tour titles, and was also the first player to reach that plateau.
Go to Profile#25171
Anita Bryant
#25182
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Anita Jane Bryant is an American singer and anti-gay activist. She had three Top 20 hits in the United States in the early 1960s. She was the 1958 Miss Oklahoma beauty pageant winner, and a brand ambassador from 1969 to 1980 for the Florida Citrus Commission.
Go to Profile#25172
Stephen Gull
#25183
Overall Influence
Stephen Gull is a British physicist based at St John's College, Cambridge credited, together with Anthony N. Lasenby, Joan Lasenby and Chris J. L. Doran, with raising the interest of the physics community to the mathematical language and methods of geometric algebra and geometric calculus. These have been rediscovered and refined by David Hestenes, who built on the fundamental work of William Kingdon Clifford and Hermann Grassmann. In 1998, together with Lasenby and Doran, he proposed gauge theory gravity.
Go to Profile#25173
A. I. Sabra
#25184
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Abdelhamid Ibrahim Sabra was a professor of the history of science specializing in the history of optics and science in medieval Islam. He died December 18, 2013. Sabra provided English translation and commentary for Books I-III of Ibn al-Haytham's seven book Kitab al-Manazir , written in Arabic in the 11th century.
Go to Profile#25174
Ervin Staub
#25185
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Ervin Staub is a professor of psychology, emeritus, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the founding director of the doctoral program on the psychology of peace and violence. He is most known for his works on helping behavior and altruism, and on the psychology of mass violence and genocide. He was born in Hungary and received his Ph.D. from Stanford. He later taught at Harvard University. He worked in many settings, both conducting research and applying his research and theory. He worked in schools to raise caring and non-violent children, and to promote active bystandership by...
Go to Profile#25175
John Robinson
#25186
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
John Frederick Robinson , known professionally as JR, is an American drummer and session musician who has been called "one of the most recorded drummers in history". He is known for his work with producer Quincy Jones, including Michael Jackson's multi-platinum Off the Wall album and the charity single "We Are the World". JR's drum fill kicks off Jackson's chart topper "Rock with You", and his drum solo opens the Steve Winwood album Back in the High Life to begin the number 1 song "Higher Love".
Go to Profile#25176
Mamoni Raisom Goswami
#25187
Overall Influence
1942 - 2011 (69 years)
Indira Goswami , known by her pen name Mamoni Raisom Goswami and popularly as Mamoni Baideo, was an Indian writer, poet, professor, scholar and editor. She was the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award , the Jnanpith Award and Principal Prince Claus Laureate . A celebrated writer of contemporary Indian literature, many of her works have been translated into English from her native Assamese which include The Moth Eaten Howdah of the Tusker, Pages Stained With Blood and The Man from Chinnamasta.
Go to Profile#25177
Enrico Berti
#25188
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Enrico Berti was an Italian philosopher. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Padua. Biography Born in Valeggio sul Mincio, Italy, Berti graduated in philosophy in 1957 at the University of Padua, and after a few years teaching at the University of Perugia he was professor in his alma mater for almost forty years. His major interest was Aristotle, to whom he dedicated many works, and of whom he made his own translation of the Metaphysics, published in 2017.
Go to Profile#25178
Douglas Kahn
#25189
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Douglas Kahn is known for his historical and theoretical writings on the use of sound in the avant-garde and experimental arts and music, energies in the arts, and history and theory of the media arts. His writings have been influential in the scholarly area of sound studies and the practical area of sound art; as well as in the studies of energies in the arts. He is Honorary Professor at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, Professor Emeritus at University of New South Wales, Australia, and Professor Emeritus at University of California, Davis, where he was the Founding Director of Technocultural Studies.
Go to Profile#25179
Hilarion
#25190
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Hilarion is a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church and the current metropolitan of Budapest and Hungary. He is also a noted theologian, church historian and composer and has published books on dogmatic theology, patristics and church history as well as numerous compositions for choir and orchestra.
Go to Profile#25180
Norman Zide
#25191
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Norman H. Zide is an American linguist and specialist in the Munda languages. Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He taught Hindi and Urdu at the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilization at the Department of Linguistics for four decades and published several books and articles on the subject. However, his greater fame lies in his contributions to the Munda languages and to Austroasiatic linguistics in general. He has also done considerable work as a translator, especially of poetry. In The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, he did or assisted in translations of poetry from both North Indian and Austroasiatic languages.
Go to Profile#25181
Alan Gilbert
#25192
Overall Influence
1944 - 2010 (66 years)
Alan David Gilbert AO was an Australian historian and academic administrator who was until June 2010 the president and vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester. During his tenure as vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, he pushed for and established Melbourne University Private, a private university offshoot which ultimately failed. This, and his well-known controversial views on private funding of universities, led to Richard Davis in 2002 dubbing him the "doyen of economically rationalist vice-chancellors".
Go to Profile#25182
Yuri Golfand
#25193
Overall Influence
1922 - 1994 (72 years)
Yuri Abramovich Golfand was a Russian and Israeli physicist known, in particular, for his 1971 paper where they proposed supersymmetry between bosonic and fermionic particles by extending the Poincaré algebra with anticommuting spinor generators. The algebra they constructed is also called a Super-Poincaré algebra. In the very same paper they presented the first four-dimensional supersymmetric gauge field theory – supersymmetric quantum electrodynamics with the mass term of the photon/photino fields, plus two chiral matter supermultiplets .
Go to Profile#25183
Bola Tinubu
#25194
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Chief Bola Ahmed Adekunle Tinubu is a Nigerian politician who is the 16th and current president of Nigeria. He was the governor of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007; and senator for Lagos West in the Third Republic.
Go to Profile#25184
Josh A. Cassada
#25195
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Josh Aaron Cassada is an American physicist, test pilot, and NASA astronaut. Prior to his selection to join NASA in 2013, Cassada served as a test pilot in the US Navy, and has over 3,500 hours in more than 40 aircraft, and 23 combat missions. In August 2018, Cassada was selected for CTS-1, the first operational mission of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner, but subsequently reassigned to SpaceX Crew-5.
Go to Profile#25185
Katie Halper
#25196
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Katherine Rose Halper is an American comedian, writer, filmmaker, podcaster, and political commentator. She is the host of the podcast The Katie Halper Show and co-host of the podcast Useful Idiots with Matt Taibbi.
Go to Profile#25186
Joanna Bryson
#25197
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Joanna Joy Bryson is professor at Hertie School in Berlin. She works on Artificial Intelligence, ethics and collaborative cognition. She has been a British citizen since 2007. Education Bryson attended Glenbard North High School and graduated in 1982. She studied Behavioural Science at the University of Chicago, graduating with an AB in 1986. In 1991 she moved to the University of Edinburgh where she completed an MSc in Artificial Intelligence before an MPhil in Psychology. Bryson moved to MIT to complete her PhD, earning a doctorate under Lynn Andrea Stein in 2001 for her thesis "Intelligence by Design: Principles of Modularity and Coordination for Engineering Complex Adaptive Agents".
Go to Profile#25187
Gregory Areshian
#25198
Overall Influence
1949 - 2020 (71 years)
Gregory Areshian was an Armenian-American archeologist and historian who was a professor at American University of Armenia. He was the co-director of the international team of archeologists who, led by Boris Gasparyan, found the 5,500 years old shoe in and the oldest winery in Areni of which Areshian said:
Go to Profile#25188
Haruomi Hosono
#25199
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
, sometimes credited as Harry Hosono, is a Japanese musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. He is considered to be one of the most influential musicians in Japanese pop music history, credited with shaping the sound of Japanese pop for decades as well as pop music outside of Japan. He also inspired genres such as city pop and Shibuya-kei, and as leader of Yellow Magic Orchestra, contributed to the development and pioneering of numerous electronic genres.
Go to Profile#25189
Simone Badal-McCreath
#25200
Overall Influence
Simone Anne Marie Badal-McCreath is a Jamaican chemist and cancer researcher. In 2014 she was one of five women awarded the Elsevier Foundation Award for Early Career Scientists in the Developing World for her creation of a lab at the Natural Products Institute to research the anti-cancer properties of natural Jamaican products. She currently lectures in Basic Medical Sciences
Go to Profile#25190
Jeff Kipnis
#25201
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jeffrey Kipnis is an American architectural critic, theorist, designer, film-maker, curator, and educator. Education, honors, and career Not a registered architect, Kipnis first came to prominence through his association with Bahram Shirdel, and Peter Eisenman . Kipnis holds a master's degree in physics from Georgia State University, USA , and in 2006, he was awarded an honorary diploma by the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, in recognition of his contributions to the discipline of architecture as a teacher, critic, and theorist. Other honors include the AIA Bronze M...
Go to Profile#25191
Sam Neill
#25202
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Sir Nigel John Dermot "Sam" Neill is a New Zealand actor. Neill's career has included leading roles in both dramas and blockbusters. Considered an "international leading man", he has been regarded as one of the most versatile actors of his generation.
Go to Profile#25192
Paul Barker
#25203
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Paul Gordon Barker , also referred to as Hermes Pan, is an American musician, best known as the former bass guitarist, producer and engineer for industrial metal band Ministry from 1986 to 2003. Prior to Ministry, he provided bass for the Seattle post-punk ensemble The Blackouts alongside future Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin and his brother, one-time Ministry touring keyboardist/saxophonist Roland Barker, from 1979 until 1985.
Go to Profile#25193
Sivaramakrishna Chandrasekhar
#25204
Overall Influence
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
Sivaramakrishna Chandrasekhar FNA, FRS was an Indian physicist who won the Royal Medal in 1994. He was the founder-president of the International Liquid Crystal Society. Chandrasekhar was born on 6 August 1930 at Kolkata. He received his MSc degree in physics with first rank from Nagpur University in 1951. Subsequently, he joined the Raman Research Institute , Bangalore to work for his doctoral degree in physics under the guidance of his maternal uncle, C. V. Raman. The main topic of his research was related to optical rotatory dispersion measurements on several crystals. He received the D Sc degree from Nagpur University in 1954.
Go to Profile#25194
Armin von Bogdandy
#25205
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Armin von Bogdandy is a German legal scholar. He is director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg and Professor for Public Law, European Law, and International and Economic Law at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Armin von Bogdandy's research centers on the structural changes affecting public law, be they theoretical, doctrinal, or practical.
Go to Profile#25195
Mark Weinberg
#25206
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Mark Samuel Weinberg is a former judge of the Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court of Victoria from July 2008 to May 2018. He is a former judge of the Federal Court of Australia who served from July 1998 to July 2008.
Go to Profile#25196
Mick Ronson
#25207
Overall Influence
1946 - 1993 (47 years)
Michael Ronson was an English musician, songwriter, arranger, and producer. He achieved critical and commercial success working with David Bowie as the guitarist of the Spiders from Mars. He was a session musician who recorded five studio albums with Bowie followed by four with Ian Hunter, and also worked as a sideman in touring bands with Van Morrison and Bob Dylan.
Go to Profile#25197
Larry Walker
#25208
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Larry Kenneth Robert Walker is a Canadian former professional baseball right fielder. During his 17-year Major League Baseball career, he played with the Montreal Expos, Colorado Rockies, and St. Louis Cardinals. In 1997, he became the only player in major league history to register both a .700 slugging percentage and 30 stolen bases in the same season, on his way to winning the National League Most Valuable Player Award . The first player in more than 60 years to record a batting average of .360 in three consecutive seasons from 1997 to 1999, Walker also won three NL batting championships.
Go to Profile#25198
Stephen Zunes
#25209
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Stephen Zunes is an American international relations scholar specializing in the Middle Eastern politics, U.S. foreign policy, and strategic nonviolent action. He is known internationally as a leading critic of United States policy in the Middle East, particularly under the George W. Bush administration, and an analyst of nonviolent civil insurrections against autocratic regimes.
Go to Profile#25199
Ezra Getzler
#25210
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ezra Getzler is an Australian mathematician and mathematical physicist. Education and career Getzler studied from 1979 to 1982 at the Australian National University in Canberra . In 1982 he moved to Harvard University with a Fulbright Scholarship; he received his PhD in 1986 under Arthur Jaffe, with a thesis entitled Degree theory for Wiener maps and supersymmetric quantum mechanics.
Go to Profile#25200
Alexander Kibrik
#25211
Overall Influence
1939 - 2012 (73 years)
Alexander Kibrik was a Russian linguist, doctor of philology and the head of the department of theoretical and applied linguistics of the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University. Life Kibrik was born in Leningrad, the son of the painter Yevgeny Kibrik. He became the head of the department of theoretical and applied linguistics of the Philological Faculty of the Moscow State University in 1992. He worked in the fields of linguistic typology, Northeast Caucasian languages and theoretical linguistics. Kibrik was especially well known for his longtime fieldwork and field teaching, as wel...
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