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
#25301
Vida Dujmović
#25312
Overall Influence
Vida Dujmović is a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician known for her research in graph theory and graph algorithms, and particularly for graph drawing, for the structural theory of graph width parameters including treewidth and queue number, and for the use of these parameters in the parameterized complexity of graph drawing. She is a professor of electrical engineering & computer science at the University of Ottawa, where she holds the University Research Chair in Structural and Algorithmic Graph Theory.
Go to Profile#25302
Franco Anelli
#25313
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Franco Anelli is an Italian academic and rector. Biography He has been a Professor of private law since 1993. He graduated in law at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. After a PhD in commercial law, he became an associate professor of institutions of private law at the Faculty of Economics and Business. He has dealt mainly with the law of obligations and contracts and property rights of the family. He also updates the Torrente-Schlesinger Manual of Private Law published by Giuffrè. He was appointed the rector of Università Cattolica in December 2012.
Go to Profile#25303
Aviezri Fraenkel
#25314
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Aviezri Siegmund Fraenkel is an Israeli mathematician who has made contributions to combinatorial game theory. Biography Aviezri Siegmund Fraenkel was born in Munich, Germany, to a Jewish family, which then moved to Switzerland soon thereafter. In 1939 his family moved once more, to Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#25304
Lawrence Hunter
#25315
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Lawrence E. Hunter is a Professor and Director of the Center for Computational Pharmacology and of the Computational Bioscience Program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is an internationally known scholar, focused on computational biology, knowledge-driven extraction of information from the primary biomedical literature, the semantic integration of knowledge resources in molecular biology, and the use of knowledge in the analysis of high-throughput data, as well as for his foundational work in computat...
Go to Profile#25305
Klaus Mainzer
#25316
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Klaus Mainzer is a German philosopher and scientist. Mainzer is the president of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is the author of the widely translated, cited, and reviewed book Thinking in Complexity.
Go to Profile#25306
Kazimierz Romaniuk
#25317
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Kazimierz Romaniuk is a Polish Catholic prelate, and professor of biblical studies. In 2004, Romaniuk became the bishop emeritus of the diocese of Warszawa-Praga. He was previously the rector of the Higher Metropolitan Seminary and the Academic Study of Catholic Theology in Warsaw , the auxiliary bishop of Warsaw , and the diocesan bishop of Warsaw-Praga .
Go to Profile#25307
Daniel Katz
#25318
Overall Influence
1903 - 1998 (95 years)
Daniel Katz was an American psychologist, Emeritus Professor in Psychology at the University of Michigan and an expert on organizational psychology. Biography Born in Trenton, New Jersey, Katz received his MA from the University of Buffalo in 1925, and his PhD from the Syracuse University in 1928 under Floyd Henry Allport, founder of the American experimental social psychology.
Go to Profile#25308
Robert Horry
#25319
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Robert Keith Horry is an American former professional basketball player and current sports commentator. He played 16 seasons in the National Basketball Association , winning seven championships, the most of any player not to have played for the Boston Celtics of the 1950s and 1960s. He is one of only four players to have won NBA championships with three teams; he won two with the Houston Rockets, three with the Los Angeles Lakers and two with the San Antonio Spurs with no defeats in NBA Finals. He earned the nickname "Big Shot Rob", because of his clutch shooting in important games; he is widely considered to be one of the greatest clutch performers and winners in NBA history.
Go to Profile#25309
Henri Cappetta
#25320
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Henri Cappetta is a French ichthyologist specializing in the paleontology of sharks and rayss. External links Henri Cappetta on www.isem.cnrs.fr New sharks and rays from the Cenomanian and Turonian of Charentes, France. Romain Vullo, Henri Cappetta and Didier Néraudeau, Acta Palaeontol. Pol. 52 , pp. 99–116, 2007
Go to Profile#25310
Michele Zappella
#25321
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Michele Zappella is an Italian psychiatrist and scholar of Child Neuropsychiatry. He is a native of Viareggio, Italy. Professional background Zappella graduated in 1960 in Medicine and Surgery in Rome, Italy. He initially relocated to London, where he worked with the Fountain Hospital of London from 1961 to 1963. He then moved back to Rome, where he worked in the medical field and specialized in Pediatrics. As winner of a Fulbright grant for the United States, he became a Fellow of Neurology in the Department of Child Neurology at Children's Hospital in Washington D.C., serving there from 1964 to 1965.
Go to Profile#25311
Colin Low
#25322
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Colin Archibald Low was a Canadian animation and documentary filmmaker with the National Film Board of Canada . He was known as a pioneer, one of Canada's most important filmmakers, and was regularly referred to as "the gentleman genius". His numerous honors include five BAFTA awards, eight Cannes Film Festival awards, and six Academy Award nominations.
Go to Profile#25312
Taki Theodoracopulos
#25323
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Panagiotis "Taki" Theodoracopulos is a Greek writer and publisher who founded Taki's Magazine and co-founded The American Conservative. His column "High Life" appeared in British weekly The Spectator from 1977 to 2023. He has lived in New York City, London, and Gstaad.
Go to Profile#25313
Emmy Murphy
#25324
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Emmy Murphy is an American mathematician and a professor at Princeton University who works in the area of symplectic topology, contact geometry and geometric topology. Education Murphy graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2007, She completed her doctorate at Stanford University in 2012; her dissertation, Loose Legendrian Embeddings in High Dimensional Contact Manifolds, was supervised by Yakov Eliashberg.
Go to Profile#25314
Kathleen Turner
#25325
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mary Kathleen Turner is an American actress. She has received various accolades, including two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, and two Tony Awards.
Go to Profile#25315
Gary Hartstein
#25326
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Gary Hartstein , is an American sports physician who is Clinical Professor of Anesthesia and Emergency Medicine at University of Liège Hospital, Liège, Belgium and former FIA Medical Delegate for the Formula One World Championship.
Go to Profile#25316
Anirvan Ghosh
#25327
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Anirvan Ghosh is an American neuroscientist and Biotech executive. Ghosh is a professional in the fields of Neuroscience and Biotechnology. Prior to his current role as CEO of Unity Biotechnology, he held senior positions at several renowned institutions and companies. Ghosh served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and as Chair of Neurobiology at UCSD, where he made significant contributions in the field of Neuroscience. From 2011 to 2016, he served as the Global Head of Neuroscience Discovery at F. Hoffmann-La Roche. Ghosh was founding CSO of E-Scape Bio from 2016 to 2017 and served as the Head of Research and Early Development at Biogen from 2017 to 2020.
Go to Profile#25317
James W. Wagner
#25328
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
James W. Wagner served as the 19th President of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia from 2003 to 2016. From 2000 to 2003, he served as Provost and interim President of Case Western Reserve University.
Go to Profile#25318
Kirsten Boie
#25329
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kirsten Boie is a German children's author and activist. Having worked as a teacher, she began publishing in 1985 and is the author of more than 100 books. Among her best-known works are Paule ist ein Glücksgriff, the Kinder aus dem Möwenweg series, and Ritter Trenk. She has been recognised with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and an honorary citizenship of Hamburg.
Go to Profile#25319
Kathryn Bigelow
#25330
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Kathryn Ann Bigelow is an American filmmaker. Bigelow has received numerous accolades including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and a Primetime Emmy Award. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010.
Go to Profile#25320
Jeff Lewis
#25331
Overall Influence
Jeff Lewis is an Australian academic who is professor of media and cultural studies at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology , Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of numerous refereed articles and books which focus on cultural interface and conflict. His work on political violence and terrorism has been particularly important for government, community and media debate. Lewis is also a documentary-maker and musician.
Go to Profile#25321
Jim Woodcock
#25332
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
James Charles Paul Woodcock is a British computer scientist. Woodcock gained his PhD from the University of Liverpool. Until 2001 he was Professor of Software Engineering at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, where he was also a Fellow of Kellogg College. He then joined the University of Kent and is now based at the University of York, where, since October 2012, he has been head of the Department of Computer Science.
Go to Profile#25322
Charles Guignon
#25333
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Charles Burke Guignon was an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. He is known for his expertise on Martin Heidegger's philosophy and existentialism. He became a member of the Florida Philosophical Association in the early 2000s.
Go to Profile#25323
Robert Louis Kahn
#25334
Overall Influence
1918 - 2019 (101 years)
Robert Louis Kahn was an American psychologist and social scientist, specializing in organizational theory and survey research, having been considered a "founding father" of the modern approach to these disciplines. He has also been involved in developing studies on aging and his work is critically acclaimed by experts.
Go to Profile#25324
Hans Robert Schöler
#25335
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Hans Robert Schöler is a molecular biologist and stem cell researcher. He is director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster. Biography Hans Schöler was born in 1953 in Toronto, Canada, came to Germany in 1960 and grew up in Paderborn, Munich and Heidelberg. After his studies of Biology at the University of Heidelberg, Schöler conducted the research for his doctoral degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1985 at the Centre for Molecular Biology .
Go to Profile#25325
William Croft
#25336
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
William Croft is an American professor of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, United States. From 1994 to 2005 he was successively research fellow, lecturer, reader and professor in Linguistics at the University of Manchester, UK.
Go to Profile#25326
Martin Bridson
#25337
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Martin Robert Bridson is a Manx mathematician. He is Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and the president of the Clay Mathematics Institute. He was previously the head of Oxford's Mathematical Institute. He is a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of Hertford College, Oxford. Specializing in geometry, topology and group theory, Bridson is best known for his work in geometric group theory.
Go to Profile#25327
Joanne V. Creighton
#25338
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Joanne Vanish Creighton is an American academic who served as the 16th President of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, from 1996 to 2010. On August 10, 2011, the Haverford College Board of Managers named her interim President of Haverford College, replacing Stephen G. Emerson, who resigned.
Go to Profile#25328
Andrew Parker, Baron Parker of Minsmere
#25339
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Andrew David Parker, Baron Parker of Minsmere, is a British peer and former intelligence officer who served as Director General of MI5 from 2013 to 2020. He has served as Lord Chamberlain of the Household since 1 April 2021, and is a crossbench member of the House of Lords.
Go to Profile#25329
Trisha Yearwood
#25340
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Patricia Lynn Yearwood is an American country singer. She rose to fame with her 1991 debut single "She's in Love with the Boy," which became a number one hit on the Billboard country singles chart. Its corresponding self-titled debut album would sell over two million copies. Yearwood continued with a series of major country hits during the early to mid-1990s, including "Walkaway Joe" , "The Song Remembers When" , "XXX's and OOO's " , and "Believe Me Baby " .
Go to Profile#25330
Waqar Younis
#25341
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Waqar Younis Maitla HI is a Pakistani cricket coach, commentator and former cricketer who captained Pakistan national cricket team. A right-arm fast bowler, he is regarded as one of the greatest bowlers in cricket. He is the former head coach of the Pakistani cricket team.
Go to Profile#25331
David G. Nathan
#25342
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
David Gordon Nathan is a pediatrician and hematologist. He is known for his authorship of Nathan and Oski's Hematology of Infancy and Childhood, a standard reference in pediatrics, currently in its seventh edition. Nathan remains an author on the current edition. Now retired, he was Robert A. Stranahan professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and served as president of the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. He was born in Boston.
Go to Profile#25332
George Oster
#25343
Overall Influence
1940 - 2018 (78 years)
George Frederick Oster NAS was an American mathematical biologist, and Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at University of California, Berkeley. He made seminal contributions to several varied fields including chaos theory, population dynamics, membrane dynamics and molecular motors. He was a 1985 MacArthur Fellow.
Go to Profile#25333
JD Albert
#25344
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
JD Albert is an American engineer, inventor, and educator. Albert is one of the inventors of microencapsulated electrophoretic display commonly used in electronic devices such as e-readers. In 2016 Albert became one of the youngest inventors ever inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Albert is named on over 100 US patents. He teaches product development in the University of Pennsylvania's Integrated Product Design program.
Go to Profile#25334
Günter Ropohl
#25345
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Günter Ropohl was a German philosopher of technology. Biography Günter Ropohl studied mechanical engineering and philosophy at Stuttgart University, where he was a scholar of the philosopher Max Bense. After his PhD in 1970, he wrote his Habilitation thesis in Philosophy und Sociology at Karlsruhe University 1978 under the supervision of Hans Lenk. His work dealt with the systems theory of "Technik" , leading to the concept of general technology. In 1979, Ropohl became professor at the Universität Karlsruhe . Soon after, in 1981, he became professor for Allgemeine Technologie and philosophy of technology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main, Germany .
Go to Profile#25335
Ian Chappell
#25346
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Ian Michael Chappell is a former cricketer who played for South Australia and Australia. He captained Australia between 1971 and 1975 before taking a central role in the breakaway World Series Cricket organisation. Born into a cricketing family—his grandfather and brother also captained Australia—Chappell made a hesitant start to international cricket playing as a right-hand middle-order batsman and spin bowler. He found his niche when promoted to bat at number three. Known as "Chappelli", he earned a reputation as one of the greatest captains the game has seen. Chappell's blunt verbal manner...
Go to Profile#25336
David Wise
#25347
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
David Wise was an American journalist and author who worked for the New York Herald-Tribune in the 1950s and 1960s, and published a series of non-fiction books on espionage and US politics as well as several spy novels. His book The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power won the George Polk Award , and the George Orwell Award .
Go to Profile#25337
Bernard Amadei
#25348
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Bernard Amadei is a professor of civil engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, founding president of Engineers Without Borders , co-founder of the Engineers Without Borders-International Network, and founding director of the Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities. He is also a recipient of multiple awards and distinctions and holds seven honorary doctoral degrees.
Go to Profile#25338
Robert Nicolaï
#25349
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Robert Nicolaï is a French linguist specializing in the Songhay languages, professor at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis. He is also founder and co-editor of the Journal of Language Contact. Selected publications Nicolaï, Robert . Les dialectes du songhay . Paris: SELAFNicolaï, Robert . Préliminaires à une étude sur l'origine du songhay . Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.Nicolaï, Robert . Parentés linguistiques . Paris: Editions du CNRS.Nicolaï, Robert; Zima, Petr . Songhay. Münich/Newcastle: Lincom Europa.Nicolaï, Robert. . La Traversée de l’empirique : essai d’épistémologie sur la construction des représentations de l’évolution des langues.
Go to Profile#25339
Paul Durcan
#25350
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Paul Durcan is a contemporary Irish poet. Early life Durcan was born and grew up in Dublin and in Turlough, County Mayo. His father, John, was a barrister and circuit court judge; father and son had a difficult and formal relationship. Durcan enjoyed a warmer and more natural relationship with his mother, Sheila MacBride Durcan, through whom he is a great-nephew of both Maud Gonne, the Irish social and political activist , and John MacBride, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, which began the Irish War of Independence leading to the foundation of the Irish state.
Go to Profile#25340
Daniel Passarella
#25351
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Daniel Alberto Passarella is an Argentine former footballer and manager, who is considered one of the greatest defenderss of all time. As a player for Argentina, he was part of two FIFA World Cup–winning teams; he captained his nation to victory at the 1978 World Cup which Argentina hosted, and was also part of the winning squad in 1986.
Go to Profile#25341
Derek Taunt
#25352
Overall Influence
1917 - 2004 (87 years)
Derek Roy Taunt was a British mathematician who worked as a codebreaker during World War II at Bletchley Park. Taunt attended Enfield Grammar, then the City of London School. He studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge between 1936 and 1939. He was accepted as a research student by G. H. Hardy, but this was postponed by the outbreak of World War II. Taunt registered with the Joint Recruiting Board, and was initially allocated to work on ballistics at Kemnal Manor in Chislehurst, preparing range tables for new weapons. Finding that the task required only trivial mathematics , he sought ...
Go to Profile#25342
Steve Perry
#25353
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Stephen Ray Perry is an American singer and songwriter. He was the lead singer and frontman of the rock band Journey during their most successful years from 1977 to 1987, and again from 1995 to 1998. He also wrote/co-wrote several Journey hit songs. Perry had a successful solo career between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, made sporadic appearances in the 2000s, and returned to music full-time in 2018.
Go to Profile#25343
Francis Su
#25354
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Francis Edward Su is an American mathematician. He joined the Harvey Mudd College faculty in 1996, and is currently Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics. Su served as president of the Mathematical Association of America from 2015–2017 and is serving as a Vice President of the American Mathematical Society from 2020-2023. Su has received multiple awards from the MAA, including the Henry L. Alder Award and the Haimo Award, both for distinguished teaching. He was also a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar during the 2019-2020 term.
Go to Profile#25344
Josef Flammer
#25355
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Josef Flammer is a Swiss ophthalmologist and long-time director of the Eye Clinic at Basel University Hospital. Flammer is a glaucoma specialist who developed a new pathogenetic concept of glaucomatous damage according to which unstable blood supply leads to oxidative stress, which in turn plays a major role in apoptosis of cells in the optic nerve and retina in glaucoma patients.
Go to Profile#25345
Augustus John Rush
#25356
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Augustus John Rush is an internationally renowned psychiatrist. He is a professor emeritus in Duke-NUS Medical School at the National University of Singapore , and adjunct professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. He has authored and edited more than 10 books, and over 600 scientific journal articles that are largely focused on the diagnosis and treatment of depressive and bipolar disorders.
Go to Profile#25346
Natalia Zubarevich
#25357
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Natalya Vasilyevna Zubarevich is a Russian economist-geographer specializing on the socio-economic development of the regions. She has been the professor of the Department of Economic And Social Geography of Russia of the Moscow State University since 2005.
Go to Profile#25347
Frank Honywill George
#25358
Overall Influence
1921 - 1997 (76 years)
Frank Honywill George was a British psychologist, cyberneticist and former Professor of Cybernetics and Director of the Institute of Cybernetics at the Brunel University, best known for his 1962 book The Brain as a Computer.
Go to Profile#25348
Richard Shoup
#25359
Overall Influence
1943 - 2015 (72 years)
Richard Shoup was an American computer scientist and entrepreneur, mainly known from his pioneering work on computer graphics and animation. Originally from Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, he last resided in San Jose, California.
Go to Profile#25349
Catherine Zeta-Jones
#25360
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Catherine Zeta-Jones is a Welsh actress. Recognised for her versatility, she has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, and a Tony Award. In 2010, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her film and humanitarian work.
Go to Profile#25350
Jens Marklof
#25361
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Jens Marklof FRS is a German mathematician working in the areas of quantum chaos, dynamical systems, equidistribution, modular forms and number theory. He will be president of the London Mathematical Society in the period 2023-2024.
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