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
#2551
Sarah Wyatt
#121917
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Sarah Wyatt is an American, plant molecular biologist. She is a Professor in the Department of Environmental and Plant Biology at Ohio University, as well as director of the Ohio University Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Molecular and Cellular Biology. Wyatt's research interests include molecular biology, genomics, and signaling events. She is considered one of the world's experts on gravitational signaling in plants, and some of her recent research includes an experiment on board the International Space Station .
Go to Profile#2552
Harry Kroger
#122005
Overall Influence
Harry Kroger was an American physicist and electrical engineer. He used to be a Bartle professor of electrical engineering at Binghamton University, a part of the State University of New York system. He had been a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers since 1964 and became a Life Fellow of the IEEE in 2001. He initially retired to Florida, then moved back to Austin, Texas.
Go to Profile#2553
Thomas Edward Cravens
#122039
Overall Influence
#2554
Fred Bechly
#122077
Overall Influence
1924 - 2004 (80 years)
Fred Lorin Bechly was an American electrical engineer and inventor in the field of color television broadcasting. Early life Fred Bechly was born in Watseka, Illinois, to Edward Bechly and Ferne Smiley . He married and had two children.
Go to Profile#2555
Tsu Teh Soong
#122110
Overall Influence
#2556
Robert S. McMillan
#122212
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Robert S. McMillan is an astronomer at the University of Arizona, and heads the Spacewatch project, which studies minor planets. He has made various discoveries, including notably 20000 Varuna. On October 19, 2008, he discovered a short-periodic comet 208P/McMillan.
Go to Profile#2557
Ross L. Coppel
#122236
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
#2558
David J. Bottjer
#122277
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
#2559
R. C. Van Wagoner
#122292
Overall Influence
#2560
Rolf Heinrich Sabersky
#122476
Overall Influence
1920 - 2016 (96 years)
Rolf Heinrich Sabersky was professor emeritus in mechanical engineering at Caltech. He worked with luminaries throughout his career including Apollo M. O. Smith and Theodore von Kármán at Aerojet. James Van Allan sought his expertise for the development of the Ajax and Bumblebee rocket programs.
Go to Profile#2561
Julia Mundy
#122531
Overall Influence
Julia Mundy is an American experimental condensed matter physicist. She was awarded the 2019 George E. Valley Jr. Prize by the American Physical Society for "the pico-engineering and synthesis of the first room-temperature magnetoelectric multi-ferroic material." This prize recognizes an "individual in the early stages of his or her career for an outstanding scientific contribution to physics that is deemed to have significant potential for a dramatic impact on the field." She is an assistant professor of physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Go to Profile#2562
Francisco de León
#122534
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Francisco de León from the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, New York. was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for contributions to transformer modeling for electromagnetic transient studies.
Go to Profile#2563
Domitilla Del Vecchio
#122611
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Domitilla Del Vecchio is an Italian control theorist, whose research connects control theory to systems biology, synthetic biology, synthetic biological circuits, and regenerative medicine. She has also studied self-organization in traffic control. She is a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the MIT Synthetic Biology Center.
Go to Profile#2564
Marjorie Corcoran
#122688
Overall Influence
1950 - 2017 (67 years)
Marjorie Diane Blasius Corcoran was an American particle physicist who worked as a professor at Rice University. Biography Born as Marjorie Blasius, she grew up in Beavercreek, Ohio, and was 1968 co-valedictorian of Beavercreek High School. She earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1972 from the University of Dayton, graduating summa cum laude, and in the same year married Christopher Corcoran, taking his surname. As a graduate student at Indiana University Bloomington, she began doing high-energy physics research at Fermilab. Her 1977 doctoral dissertation, Measurement of the polarizatio...
Go to Profile#2565
Morris J. Birnbaum
#122692
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
#2566
Anna Hasenfratz
#122707
Overall Influence
Anna Hasenfratz is a Hungarian-American theoretical high energy physicist whose research involves non-perturbative theories, especially in lattice quantum chromodynamics. She is a professor of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Go to Profile#2567
Stefan Iglauer
#122724
Overall Influence
#2568
Joel M. Moss
#122737
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Joel Marshall Moss is an American experimental nuclear physicist. Education and career Moss received his bachelor's degree from Fort Hays State University in 1964 and his doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969. As a postdoc he was from 1969 to 1971 a research associate at the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre and from 1971 to 1973 an instructor in physics at the University of Minnesota. He was from 1973 to 1978 an assistant professor and from 1978 to 1980 associate professor at Texas A&M University. There he studied giant resonances of atomic nuclei with Texas A...
Go to Profile#2569
Marilyn Anderson
#122860
Overall Influence
Marilyn Anderson is an Australian scientist and entrepreneur in the area of biochemistry and plant molecular biology. She is a professor at La Trobe University and co-founded Hexima, an agribiotechnology company, in 1998.
Go to Profile#2570
Kerstin Nordstrom
#122960
Overall Influence
Kerstin N. Nordstrom is an American physicist who is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on soft matter physics; her work has been featured in the LA Times and in the BBC News.
Go to Profile#2571
Stephen E. Haggerty
#122988
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Stephen E. "Steve" Haggerty is an American geophysicist and Fulbright scholar. He served as a principal investigator in the U.S. Apollo and the Soviet Luna sample return programs. The metallic mineral known as "haggertyite" is named in his honor.
Go to Profile#2572
Andrew Soward
#122995
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Andrew Michael Soward is a British fluid dynamicist. He is an emeritus professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Exeter. Education Soward was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge. He earned his PhD in 1969, under the supervision of Keith Moffatt.
Go to Profile#2573
Howard Kent Birnbaum
#123101
Overall Influence
1932 - 2005 (73 years)
Howard Kent Birnbaum was an American metallurgist who was well known due to his works on the interaction of point, linear and planar defects in plastic deformation of materials. He received his BS in 1953 and MS in 1955 from Columbia University. In 1958 he received his PhD in metallurgy from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1958 he started teaching at the University of Chicago and joined University of Illinois in 1961.
Go to Profile#2574
John A. Quinn
#123142
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
John A. Quinn, Ph.D. was the Robert D. Bent Professor Emeritus of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science. He was a leader in the fields of mass transfer and membrane transport in synthetic membranes since the 1960s. In the early phase of his career at the University of Illinois, Quinn and his students devised simple, elegant experiments to elucidate the role of the interface in mass transfer between phases. In later work at Penn, he applied these insights to problems of engineering and biological significance involving chemical reaction and diffusion within and through both finely porous and reactive membranes.
Go to Profile#2575
Surita Bhatia
#123422
Overall Influence
Surita Bhatia is an American chemist who is professor and vice provost of faculty affairs at Stony Brook University. Her work considers the structure of soft materials, including polymeric hydrogels and colloidal glasses. She was elected Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the Society of Rheology in 2020.
Go to Profile#2576
Mathew Alexander Vadas
#123442
Overall Influence
#2577
John Peoples Jr.
#123479
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
John Peoples Jr. is an American physicist who served as Fermilab's third director, served as director of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and oversaw the shutdown of the Superconducting Super Collider. Early life and education John Peoples Jr. was born on January 22, 1933, in New York City. After graduating from Staten Island Academy in 1950, he received a BSEE from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1955. He worked as an engineer at Martin-Marietta Corporation until 1959, when he entered Columbia University.
Go to Profile#2578
David Schlaepfer
#123489
Overall Influence
David Schlaepfer is a California-born scientist known for his studies on cell migration and cancer metastasis. His early research focused on signaling by protein kinases, with a subsequent focus on the proteins that regulate the turnover of cell contacts with the extracellular matrix. In particular, Schlaepfer is well known for his studies on focal adhesion kinase .
Go to Profile#2579
Keith Burrell
#123544
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Keith Howard Burrell is an American plasma physicist. Early life and career Burrell received bachelor's degree in physics from Stanford University in 1968. He then received a master's degree and a Ph.D. in physics from Caltech in 1970 and 1975 respectively. He then worked at General Atomics in fusion research with tokamaks, in particular DIII-D tokamak from General Atomics. Before that, he did research at the ISX-A and ISA-B Tokamak of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#2580
Yukiyasu Kamitani
#123560
Overall Influence
Yukiyasu Kamitani is a Japanese professor in the Graduate School of Informatics, at the University of Kyoto in Japan. Kamitani received international attention in 2012 when it was announced that a team he led had used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of people as they slept, enabling them to decode the visual content of their dreams.
Go to Profile#2581
Michael Gurnis
#123668
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
#2582
David J. Anderson
#123684
Overall Influence
#2583
Maria Specovius Neugebauer
#123831
Overall Influence
#2584
Glen Rowan Cass
#123856
Overall Influence
#2585
Wendy Mao
#124038
Overall Influence
Wendy Li-Wen Mao is an American geologist who is a professor at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Her research considers the mineral physics of planetary interiors, new materials under extreme environments and novel characterisation techniques. In 2021 she was elected Fellow of the European Association of Geochemistry.
Go to Profile#2586
Michelle Povinelli
#124056
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Michelle Povinelli is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southern California and Fellow of the OSA and SPIE. Povinelli's research in nanophotonics focuses on the behavior of light inside complex materials.
Go to Profile#2587
Jens Randel Nyengaard
#124063
Overall Influence
#2588
Geoffrey Blake
#124108
Overall Influence
#2589
Ross Hardison
#124170
Overall Influence
Ross C. Hardison is an American biochemist and molecular biologist, currently the T. Ming Chu Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Eberly College of Science, of the Pennsylvania State University.
Go to Profile#2590
Adam Showman
#124230
Overall Influence
1968 - 2020 (52 years)
Adam P. Showman was a planetary scientist and professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona. He was known for his research on the atmospheric dynamics of exoplanets, which has been the paradigm for hot gas giant atmospheric circulation models, and recognized as the world's leading authority in the field of atmospheric dynamics of exoplanets.
Go to Profile#2591
Velia Fowler
#124280
Overall Influence
Velia M. Fowler is an American cell biologist and biochemist specializing in the cytoskeleton. She is a professor and chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Delaware. Early life and education Fowler obtained her bachelor of arts from Oberlin College in 1974 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1980. While working on her PhD, she was named a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow.
Go to Profile#2592
Thomas Francis Gallagher
#124479
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
#2593
Byron D. Tapley
#124480
Overall Influence
#2594
Lynne A. Hillenbrand
#124706
Overall Influence
#2595
Ghaleb Husseini
#124713
Overall Influence
Ghaleb A. Husseini is a chemical-engineering professor in the College of Engineering at the American University of Sharjah . He is a member of the Mohammed bin Rashed Academy of Scientists in the United Arab Emirates.
Go to Profile#2596
James F. Blinn
#124768
Overall Influence
#2597
Junqiao Wu
#124827
Overall Influence
Junqiao Wu is a Chancellor's professor and Department Chair of materials science at the University of California, Berkeley. Wu's materials science research focuses on semiconductors, electronic materials and thermal energy transport. Wu's research in semiconductors has led to major discoveries in the field, such as indium gallium nitride alloys have bandgaps spanning the entire near infrared to ultraviolet spectrum, electrons in vanadium dioxide conduct energy without conducting heat, a temperature adaptive radiative coating that automatically switches thermal emissivity, as well as a range of applications in solar cells, infrared imaging, photonics, and thermoelectrics.
Go to Profile#2598
William J. Nellis
#124912
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
William J. Nellis is an American physicist. He is an Associate of the Physics Department of Harvard University. His work has focused on ultra-condensed matter at extreme pressures, densities and temperatures achieved by fast dynamic compression. He is most well-known for the first experimental observation of a metallic phase of dense hydrogen, a material predicted to exist by Eugene Wigner and Hillard Bell Huntington in 1935.
Go to Profile#2599
Rana X. Adhikari
#124924
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Rana X. Adhikari is an American experimental physicist. He is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and an associate faculty member of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research .
Go to Profile#2600
Naftali Kaminski
#124936
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
