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
#25401
Nicolás Massú
#25412
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Nicolás Alejandro Massú Fried , nicknamed El Vampiro , is a Chilean former professional tennis player. A former world No. 9 in singles, he won the singles and doubles gold medals at the 2004 Athens Olympics. He is the only man to have won both gold medals at the same Games since the re-introduction of Olympic tennis in 1988, and they are Chile's only two Olympic gold medals. Massú also reached the final of the 2003 Madrid Masters and won six singles titles. He was the coach of 2020 US Open champion and former world No. 3 Dominic Thiem from 2019 to 2023.
Go to Profile#25402
Sabine Lisicki
#25413
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Sabine Katharina Lisicki is a German professional tennis player. Lisicki turned professional in 2006, and her breakthrough came in 2009 when she reached the quarterfinals of the Wimbledon Championships, and also won her first title on the WTA Tour, at the Family Circle Cup. In March 2010, she suffered an ankle injury at the Indian Wells Open that kept her out of competition for five months and saw her fall out of the top 200. Lisicki rebounded in 2011 and won the Birmingham Classic, before entering the Wimbledon Championships as a wildcard and going on to reach the semifinals, where she lost to Maria Sharapova.
Go to Profile#25403
Kurt Almqvist
#25414
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
Kurt Almqvist was a Swedish poet, intellectual and spiritual figure, representative of the Traditionalist School and the Perennial philosophy. Almqvist was a lifelong disciple of the Swiss metaphysician and spiritual guide Frithjof Schuon. He came into close contact with the spiritual representatives of the Shadhiliyya order in the beginning of the 1940s. He introduced Schuon's teachings on spirituality and transcendent unity of religions in a number of publications. He also introduced the works of René Guénon in his writings. He was a frequent contributor to the quarterly journal, Studies in...
Go to Profile#25404
Christopher R. Johnson
#25415
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Christopher Ray Johnson is an American computer scientist. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Utah, and founding director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute . His research interests are in the areas of scientific computing and scientific visualization.
Go to Profile#25405
Dietrich Braess
#25416
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Dietrich Braess is a German mathematician. He is known for Braess's paradox, which deals with traffic equilibrium. Braess' focus has centered on numerical treatment of elliptical differential equations and nonlinear approximation theories.
Go to Profile#25406
Sally Katzen
#25417
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Sally Katzen is an American lawyer, legal scholar, and government official. Katzen was a member of the Obama-Biden Transition Project's Agency Review Working Group responsible for the Executive Office of the President and government operations agencies, and held White House positions in the Clinton administration, including as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
Go to Profile#25407
Robert H. Burris
#25418
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Robert H. Burris was a professor in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1961. Research in Burris's lab focused on enzyme reaction mechanisms, and he made significant contributions to our knowledge of nitrogen fixation.
Go to Profile#25408
Flood
#25419
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Mark Ellis , known by his professional pseudonym Flood, is a British rock and synthpop record producer and audio engineer. Flood's list of work includes projects with New Order, U2, Nine Inch Nails, Marc and the Mambas, Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, Sneaker Pimps, King, Ministry, The Charlatans, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Erasure, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey, Foals, a-ha, Orbital, Sigur Rós, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Smashing Pumpkins, The Killers, White Lies, Pop Will Eat Itself, Warpaint, EOB, and Interpol. His co-production collaborations have included projects with Brian Eno, Danie...
Go to Profile#25409
Kevin Hart
#25420
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Kevin Darnell Hart is an American comedian and actor. After winning several stand-up comedy competitions, Hart had his first breakthrough when Judd Apatow cast him in a recurring role on the TV series Undeclared . He has since had roles in films such as Paper Soldiers , Scary Movie 3 , Soul Plane , In the Mix , Little Fockers , Think Like a Man , Grudge Match , Ride Along About Last Night , Get Hard , Central Intelligence , The Secret Life of Pets film franchise , Ride Along 2 , Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie , the Jumanji film franchise , and Night School . He also created and sta...
Go to Profile#25410
Andy Worthington
#25421
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Andy Worthington is a British historian, investigative journalist, and film director. He has published three books, two on Stonehenge and one on the war on terror, been published in numerous publications and directed documentary films. Articles by Worthington have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, AlterNet, ZNet, the Future of Freedom Foundation and Amnesty International, and Qatar-based Al Jazeera. He has appeared on television with Iran-based Press TV In 2008, he began writing articles for Cageprisoners, and became its Senior Researcher in June 2010.
Go to Profile#25411
Thomas Müller
#25422
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Thomas Müller is a German professional footballer who plays for club Bayern Munich and the Germany national team. He has been deployed in a variety of attacking roles – as an attacking midfielder, second striker, centre forward, and on either wing. He has been praised for his positioning, teamwork, stamina, and work-rate, and has shown consistency in both scoring and creating goals.
Go to Profile#25412
Peter Libby
#25423
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Peter Libby is an American physician, focusing in atherosclerosis, cardiology and preventive cardiology, currently the Mallinckrodt Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
Go to Profile#25413
Samuel G. Freedman
#25424
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Samuel G. Freedman is an American author and journalist and currently a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has authored six nonfiction books, including Who She Was: A Son's Search for His Mother's Life, a book about his mother's life as a teenager and young woman, and Letters to a Young Journalist.
Go to Profile#25414
Jennifer Skeem
#25425
Overall Influence
Jennifer Lynne Skeem is an American psychologist and the Mack Distinguished Professor in the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare, where she is also the Associate Dean of Research. She is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on criminal justice and behavioral science, including how to improve the ways that the criminal justice system treats people with mental illness. From 2013 to 2014, she was the president of the American Psychology-Law Society. Since 2013, she has been a fellow of the Association for Psychological...
Go to Profile#25415
Greg Nelson
#25426
Overall Influence
1953 - 2015 (62 years)
Charles Gregory Nelson was an American computer scientist. Biography Nelson grew up in Honolulu. As a boy he excelled at gymnastics and tennis. He attended the University Laboratory School. He received his B.A. degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1976. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1980 under the supervision of Robert Tarjan. He lived in Juneau, Alaska for a year before settling permanently in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Go to Profile#25416
Hugh Sidey
#25427
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Hugh Swanson Sidey was an American journalist who worked for Life magazine starting in 1955, then moved on to Time magazine in 1957. He covered nine Presidents, from Eisenhower to Clinton, and was author of the book Hugh Sidey's Portraits of the Presidents.
Go to Profile#25417
David O'Leary
#25428
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David Anthony O'Leary is a football manager and former player. The majority of his 20-year playing career was spent as a central defender at Arsenal, where his tally of 722 appearances stands as a club record. He played 68 times for the Republic of Ireland from 1976 to 1993, and was part of the squad that reached the quarter-finals of the 1990 FIFA World Cup.
Go to Profile#25418
Iain Benson
#25429
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Iain Tyrrell Benson is a legal philosopher and practising legal consultant. The main focus of his work in relation to law and society has been to examine some of the various meanings that underlie terms of common but confused usage. His work towards an understanding of secular and secularism has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada and the Constitutional Court of South Africa. He has also given critical study to the terms pluralism, faith, believer, unbeliever, liberalism and accommodation and examined the implications for various legal and non-legal usages.
Go to Profile#25419
David A. King
#25430
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
David A. King is a British-American historian and author. He was the Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures and History of Science at New York University and the director of the Smithsonian Institution project on medieval Islamic astronomy and Director of the Institute for the History of Science in Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.
Go to Profile#25420
Paul Cernat
#25431
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Paul Cernat is a Romanian essayist and literary critic. He has a Ph.D. summa cum laude in philology. Cernat has been a member of the Writers' Union of Romania since 2009. As of 2013, he is lecturer of Romanian literature in the Department of History of the University of Bucharest.
Go to Profile#25421
Christopher A. Bartlett
#25432
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Christopher A. Bartlett is an Australian organizational theorist, and Emeritus Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, known for his work on multinational corporation and transnational management with Sumantra Ghoshal.
Go to Profile#25422
Jan D. Achenbach
#25433
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Jan Drewes Achenbach was a professor emeritus at Northwestern University. Achenbach was born in the northern region of the Netherlands, in Leeuwarden. He studied aeronautics at Delft University of Technology, which he finished with a M.Sc. degree in 1959. Thereafter, he went to the United States, Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1962. After working for a year as a preceptor at Columbia University, he was then appointed as assistant professor at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#25423
Jeff Kahn
#25434
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jeffry Ned Kahn is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University notable for his work in combinatorics. Education Kahn received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1979 after completing his dissertation under his advisor Dijen K. Ray-Chaudhuri.
Go to Profile#25424
Irun Cohen
#25435
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Irun Cohen is an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. He moved from the U.S. to Israel in 1968. His contributions to immunology includes, in 1989, the development of the theory of the immunological homunculus, a hypothetical self-image used by the immune system to govern its responses. The bulk of Professor Cohen's work is in the search for treatment for autoimmune disease. Throughout his career he has collaborated with scientists of all nationalities, including the Cuban immunologist Enrique Montero. Cohen is currently the Israeli scientist with the second largest numb...
Go to Profile#25425
Wendy M. Grossman
#25436
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Wendy M. Grossman is a journalist, blogger, and folksinger. Her writing has been published in several newspapers, magazines, and specialized publications. She is the recipient of the 2013 Enigma Award for information security reporting.
Go to Profile#25426
Gary Anderson
#25437
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Gary Dean Anderson is an American graphic designer and architect. He is most well known as the designer of the recycling symbol, one of the most readily recognizable logos in the world. Gary Anderson's contribution to modern graphic design has been compared to those of early pioneering modernist graphic designers such as Herbert Bayer. His design for a symbol to embody the concept of recycling has been compared to iconic trademarks such as those for Coca-Cola and Nike. It has been called one of America's "most important design icons," it is one of the most recognizable graphic symbols in the world and has helped to encourage global recycling.
Go to Profile#25427
Lea Brilmayer
#25438
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Roberta "Lea" Brilmayer is an American legal scholar. She is the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and an expert in conflict of laws, personal jurisdiction, and international law.
Go to Profile#25428
Bascha Mika
#25439
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Bascha Mika is a German journalist and publicist. From 1998 to July 2009, she was editor-in-chief of Die Tageszeitung and has held the same post at Frankfurt Rundschau since April 2014. At Die Tageszeitung, Mika was the only female editor-in-chief of a national newspaper in Germany.
Go to Profile#25429
George Duke
#25440
Overall Influence
1946 - 2013 (67 years)
George M. Duke was an American keyboardist, composer, singer-songwriter and record producer. He worked with numerous artists as arranger, music director, writer and co-writer, record producer and as a professor of music. He first made a name for himself with the album The Jean-Luc Ponty Experience with the George Duke Trio. He was known primarily for 32 solo albums, of which A Brazilian Love Affair from 1979 was his most popular, as well as for his collaborations with other musicians, particularly Frank Zappa.
Go to Profile#25430
Homa Darabi
#25441
Overall Influence
1940 - 1994 (54 years)
Homa Darabi was an Iranian child psychiatrist, academic, and political activist affiliated with the Nation Party of Iran. She is known for her political self-immolation in protest to the compulsory hijab, which led to her death.
Go to Profile#25431
Keith Ewing
#25442
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Keith David Ewing is professor of public law at King's College London and recognised as a leading scholar in public law, constitutional law, law of democracy, labour law and human rights. Ewing has been described as "one of the leading lights of English public law" and "one of the world's leading scholars of the constitution of social democracy". He is co-author of two standard textbooks in constitutional and administrative law, and labour law.
Go to Profile#25432
Mary Ellen Snodgrass
#25443
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Mary Ellen Snodgrass is an American educator and writer of textbooks and general reference works. Biography Snodgrass was born on February 29, 1944, in Wilmington, North Carolina, to William and Lucy Robinson. She attended University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Appalachian State University and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Go to Profile#25433
Alice ter Meulen
#25444
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Alice Geraldine Baltina ter Meulen is a Dutch linguist, logician, and philosopher of language whose research topics include genericity in linguistics, intensional logic, generalized quantifiers, discourse representation theory, and the linguistic representation of time. She is a professor emerita at the University of Geneva.
Go to Profile#25434
Ivan Vidav
#25445
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Ivan Vidav was a Slovenian mathematician. Ivan Vidav was born in Villa Opicina near Trieste, Italy. He was a student of Josip Plemelj. Vidav received his Ph.D. with Plemelj as his advisor in 1941 at the University of Ljubljana with the dissertation Kleinovi teoremi v teoriji linearnih diferencialnih enačb .
Go to Profile#25435
Steven Neuberg
#25446
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Steven L. Neuberg is an experimental social psychologist whose research has contributed to topics pertaining to person perception, impression formation, stereotyping, prejudice, self-fulfilling prophecies, stereotype threat, and prosocial behavior. His research can be broadly characterized as exploring the ways motives and goals shape social thought processes; extending this approach, his later work employs the adaptationist logic of evolutionary psychology to inform the study of social cognition and social behavior. Neuberg has published over sixty scholarly articles and chapters, and has co...
Go to Profile#25436
David Magerman
#25447
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
David Mitchell Magerman is an American computer scientist and philanthropist. He spent 22 years working for an investment management company and hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies. Early life and education Magerman was born to Melvin and Sheila Magerman. His father owned All-City Taxi in Miami, Florida, and his mother was a secretary for a group of accounting firms in Tamarac.
Go to Profile#25437
David Silverman
#25448
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
David Silverman is an American secular advocate. Silverman previously served as president of American Atheists, a non-profit organization supporting the rights of atheists and the removal of expressions of religion in government, from 2010 to 2018. His annual anti-Christmas billboard which calls Christmas "a myth" has often sparked controversy. Silverman is also the subject of the popular Are You Serious ? internet meme.
Go to Profile#25438
Alexander Bogomolny
#25449
Overall Influence
1948 - 2018 (70 years)
Alexander Bogomolny was a Soviet-born Israeli-American mathematician. He was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Iowa, and formerly research fellow at the Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics, senior instructor at Hebrew University and software consultant at Ben Gurion University. He wrote extensively about arithmetic, probability, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and mathematical games.
Go to Profile#25439
Steven M. Sheffrin
#25450
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Steven M. Sheffrin is an economist who focuses on property tax limitations in the United States. He is the Director Emeritus of Tulane University’s Murphy Institute and a professor of economics. Sheffrin is an expert in state taxation and served as a member on Louisiana's state Task Force on the Structural Changes in Budget and Tax Policy in 2016.
Go to Profile#25440
Peter Lachmann
#25451
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Sir Peter Julius Lachmann was a British immunologist, specialising in the study of the complement system. He was emeritus Sheila Joan Smith Professor of Immunology at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge and honorary fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and of Imperial College. He was knighted for service to medical science in 2002.
Go to Profile#25441
Donald I. Williamson
#25452
Overall Influence
1922 - 2016 (94 years)
Donald Irving Williamson was a British planktologist and carcinologist. Education Williamson gained his first degree from the Newcastle division of Durham University in 1942. He earned his PhD from the same university in 1948, and a DSc from Newcastle University in 1972. He worked at the Port Erin Marine Laboratory of the University of Liverpool from 1948 to 1997, and published on Irish Sea plankton, crustacean behaviour and taxonomy, and crustacean larvae.
Go to Profile#25442
Edmund Keeley
#25453
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Edmund Leroy "Mike" Keeley was an American novelist, translator, and essayist, a poet, and Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University. He was a noted expert on the Greek poets C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Yannis Ritsos, and on post-Second World War Greek history.
Go to Profile#25443
Sabu Thomas
#25454
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Sabu Thomas is an Indian professor who is serving as the vice-chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala. He is also a full professor of Polymer Science and Engineering at the School of Chemical Sciences. He was the Pro-Vice Chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala during the period of 31 August 2017 to 31 August 2018, Director of School of Chemical Science during the period of 1 November 2010 to 31 December 2013. Hon. Director of International & Inter-University Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology during the period of 28 March 2009 to 11 September 2015, 2 February 2016...
Go to Profile#25444
Rosaria Butterfield
#25455
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is a writer, speaker, homemaker, and former tenured professor of English at Syracuse University. Career Butterfield, who earned her Ph.D. from Ohio State University in English Literature, served in the English Department and Women's Studies Program at Syracuse University from 1992 to 2002. During her academic career, she published the book The Politics of Survivorship: Incest, Women's Literature, and Feminist Theory as well as many scholarly articles. Her academic interest was focused on feminist theory, queer theory and 19th century British literature. She was awarded tenure in 1999, the same year that she converted to Christianity.
Go to Profile#25445
Cheryl Praeger
#25456
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Cheryl Elisabeth Praeger is an Australian mathematician. Praeger received BSc and MSc degrees from the University of Queensland , and a doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1973 under direction of Peter M. Neumann. She has published widely and has advised 27 PhD students . She is currently Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Western Australia. She is best known for her works in group theory, algebraic graph theory and combinatorial designs.
Go to Profile#25446
Paul Woodruff
#25457
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Paul Bestor Woodruff was an American classicist, professor of philosophy, and was dean at The University of Texas at Austin, where he once chaired the department of philosophy and has more recently held the Hayden Head Regents Chair as director of Plan II Honors program, which he resigned in 2006 after 15 years of service. On September 21, 2006, University President William C. Powers, Jr. named Dr. Woodruff the inaugural dean of undergraduate studies. He is best known for his work on Socrates, Plato, and philosophy of theater. A beloved professor, he taught courses outside his Ancient Greek ...
Go to Profile#25447
Clifford Charles Butler
#25458
Overall Influence
1922 - 1999 (77 years)
Sir Clifford Charles Butler FRS was an English physicist, best known for the discovery of the hyperon and meson types of particles. In later life, Butler was involved in educational policy, serving as director of the Nuffield Foundation and vice-chancellor of Loughborough University.
Go to Profile#25448
Eduardo García de Enterría
#25459
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Eduardo García de Enterría y Martínez-Carande was a Spanish jurist and a major contributor to the research and teaching of Public Law in Spain. In 1984, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences for his "important research and teaching work".
Go to Profile#25449
Alfred Dürr
#25460
Overall Influence
1918 - 2011 (93 years)
Alfred Dürr was a German musicologist. He was a principal editor of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, the second edition of the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Professional career Dürr studied musicology and Classical philology at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen from 1945 to 1950. He wrote his thesis about Bach's early cantatass. From 1951 until his retirement in 1983 he was an employee of the Johann Sebastian Bach Institute in Göttingen, West Germany, from 1962 to 1981 its deputy director. His work involved collaboration with colleagues in East Germany. He was a principal editor of the...
Go to Profile#25450
H. Bradford Westerfield
#25461
Overall Influence
1928 - 2008 (80 years)
Holt Bradford Westerfield was a Damon Wells Professor of International Studies and professor of political science at Yale University. Biography He was educated at The Choate School , Yale, where he was president of the Yale Political Union, and Harvard, where he earned his graduate degrees and taught from 1952 to 1956. After a year at the University of Chicago he joined the Yale faculty in 1957, and remained there for 40 years. Westerfield was a legendary teacher at Yale, where one of his popular courses was nicknamed by students "Lies and Spies." In 1993 he received the inaugural Byrnes-Sewall Award for undergraduate teaching, and in 2003 he received the Phi Beta Kappa Devane Medal.
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