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
#25501
Kirk Varnedoe
#25512
Overall Influence
1946 - 2003 (57 years)
John Kirk Train Varnedoe was an American art historian, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art from 1988 to 2001, Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and Professor of Fine Arts at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.
Go to Profile#25502
Hagit Messer Yaron
#25513
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Hagit Messer Yaron is an Israeli electrical engineer and businesswoman. She is a professor of electrical engineering. She is the Kranzberg Chair Professor in Signal Processing at Tel Aviv University. She was the President of Open University of Israel from 2008 to 2013. Messer Yaron is the first woman in Israel to be appointed as a full professor of electrical engineering.
Go to Profile#25503
Philippe Frémeaux
#25514
Overall Influence
1949 - 2020 (71 years)
Philippe Frémeaux was a French economic journalist with the magazine Alternatives économiques. Biography After his studies in economic science, public rights, and political science, Frémeaux pursued a career in teaching, journalism, and consulting. He first worked as a professor of social sciences and economics at Sciences Po from 1975 to 1983. He was also a lecturer at CELSA Paris in the 2000s. As a consultant, Frémeaux worked for Le BIPE from 1983 to 1999, where he led numerous advisory missions for the French Ministry of Industry and the European Commission.
Go to Profile#25504
Phil Rizzuto
#25515
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Philip Francis Rizzuto , nicknamed "the Scooter", was an American Major League Baseball shortstop. He spent his entire 13-year baseball career with the New York Yankees , and was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994.
Go to Profile#25505
Robert Hutchings
#25516
Overall Influence
Robert Hutchings is the Walt and Elspeth Rostow Chair in National Security at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and served as dean of the school from 2010 to 2015. Previously he was Diplomat-in-Residence at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Hutchings joined the Princeton faculty in 1997, and his research interests include international relations, diplomacy, and European affairs. Hutchings is best known as the former chair of the National Intelligence Council, a position he held from 2003 to 2005, during a leave of absence from Princeton.
Go to Profile#25506
Tamsin Edwards
#25517
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Tamsin Edwards is a British climate scientist and Professor at King's College London. She is a popular science communicator and writes for the Public Library of Science . Early life and education Edwards became interested in physics after reading A Brief History of Time. The daughter of Michael Edwards, she completed A-Levels in Physics, Chemistry and Maths at St Margaret's School, in Exeter. She studied physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester. She completed a PhD in Particle Physics at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Brian Cox. Her ...
Go to Profile#25507
Valentin A. Bazhanov
#25518
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Valentin A. Bazhanov is a professor and chairperson of the Philosophy Department at Ulyanovsk State University in Russia. Biography Bazhanov was born on 10 January 1953 in Kazan, Russia. He received his Candidate from Leningrad University in 1989, and was awarded the degree of Dr. Sci. in Philosophy from the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1988. He was on the faculty of Philosophy at Kazan University from 1979 to 1993. He was a senior research member at the Institute of Philosophy in 1987–1988. Since 1993 he has been at the Ulyanovsk branch of Moscow State Univer...
Go to Profile#25508
Patricia Daugherty
#25519
Overall Influence
Patricia Joan Daugherty is a retired American management scientist specializing in logistics, supply chains, and cooperation. She has been Siegfried Chair in Marketing at the University of Oklahoma, Bowersox–Thull Chair in Logistics and Supply Chain Management at Michigan State University, and Debbie and Jerry Ivy Chair in Business at Iowa State University.
Go to Profile#25509
Konrad Rudnicki
#25520
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Konrad Rudnicki was a Polish astronomer, professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and a priest of the Old Catholic Mariavite Church. He was a member of the Free European Academy of Science, of Commission 28 of the International Astronomical Union, and of the Mathematical-Astronomical Section at the Goetheanum in Switzerland.
Go to Profile#25510
Harris Wofford
#25521
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Harris Llewellyn Wofford Jr. was an American attorney, civil rights activist, and Democratic Party politician who represented Pennsylvania in the United States Senate from 1991 to 1995. A noted advocate of national service and volunteering, Wofford was also the fifth president of Bryn Mawr College from 1970 to 1978, served as chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party in 1986 and also as Pennsylvania Secretary of Labor and Industry in the cabinet of Governor Robert P. Casey from 1987 to 1991, and was a surrogate for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. He introduced Obama in Philadel...
Go to Profile#25511
Itzhak Perlman
#25522
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Itzhak Perlman is an Israeli-American violinist. He has performed worldwide and throughout the United States, in venues that have included a state dinner for Elizabeth II at the White House in 2007, and at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. He has conducted the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Westchester Philharmonic. In 2015, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Perlman has won 16 Grammy Awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and four Emmy Awards.
Go to Profile#25512
James Veneris
#25523
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
James George Veneris was an American soldier during the Korean War who was captured by the Chinese and was one of 21 American soldiers at the end of the war who decided they would rather stay in China than return to the United States.
Go to Profile#25513
Howard E. Haber
#25524
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Howard Eli Haber is an American physicist, specializing in theoretical elementary particle physics. Howard Haber received in 1973 his bachelor's degree and master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received in 1978 his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He was a postdoc at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1978 to 1980 and at the University of Pennsylvania from 1980 to 1982. He joined the faculty of the physics department and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he became an associate professor in 1989 and a full professor in 1990 .
Go to Profile#25514
Janet Dean Fodor
#25525
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Janet Dean Fodor was distinguished professor emerita of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her primary field was psycholinguistics, and her research interests included human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 acquisition.
Go to Profile#25515
E. Dale Saunders
#25526
Overall Influence
1919 - 1995 (76 years)
E. Dale Saunders was an American scholar of Romance languages and literature, Japanese Buddhism, classical Japanese literature, and East Asian civilization. Life Saunders obtained an A.B. degree from Western Reserve University in 1941 and an M.A. in Romance Philology from Harvard in 1942. He continued his studies in Japanese after joining the U.S. Naval Reserve, later earning an M.A. from Harvard in 1948 and an Doctorat de l'Université de Paris in 1953.
Go to Profile#25516
Arnaud Clément
#25527
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Arnaud Clément is a French former professional tennis player and Davis Cup captain. Clément reached the final of the 2001 Australian Open and achieved a career-high ranking of world No. 10 in April of that year. Partnering Michaël Llodra in men's doubles, he won Wimbledon in 2007 and two Masters titles.
Go to Profile#25517
Arthur Mourant
#25528
Overall Influence
1904 - 1994 (90 years)
Arthur Ernest Mourant FRS was a British chemist, hematologist and geneticist who pioneered research into biological anthropology and its distribution, genetics, clinical and laboratory medicine, and geology.
Go to Profile#25518
NoViolet Bulawayo
#25529
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
NoViolet Bulawayo is the pen name of Elizabeth Zandile Tshele , a Zimbabwean author. In 2012, the National Book Foundation named her a "5 under 35" honoree. She was named one of the Top 100 most influential Africans by New African magazine in 2014. Her debut novel, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize, and her second novel, Glory, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, making her "the first Black African woman to appear on the Booker list twice".
Go to Profile#25519
Maleeha Lodhi
#25530
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Maleeha Lodhi is a Pakistani diplomat, political scientist, and a former Pakistan's Representative to the United Nations. She was the first woman to hold the position. Previously, she served as Pakistan's envoy to the Court of St James' and twice as its ambassador to the United States.
Go to Profile#25520
Msugh Moses Kembe
#25531
Overall Influence
Msugh Moses Kembe is an academic and the 5th substantive Vice chancellor of Benue State University. He was appointed by Benue state governor Dr. Samuel Ortom and assumed office on November 3, 2015. Early life and education Kembe attended Bristow Secondary School in Gboko , and received his WASSCE in 1979. He received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics at the University of Jos in 1984, a masters in statistics in 1992 at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and his Ph.D. in statistics in 2009 at the Federal University of Agriculture, Makurdi. Kembe started his academic career as a lecturer in m...
Go to Profile#25521
Felix Genn
#25532
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Felix Genn is a German bishop of the Catholic Church who is currently the Bishop of Münster. Previously, he was the Bishop of Essen and, prior to that, was an Auxiliary Bishop of Trier. Since 2013, he has been a member of the Congregation for Bishops.
Go to Profile#25522
Manu Chao
#25533
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Manu Chao is a French singer of Spanish descent. He sings in French, Spanish, English, Italian, Arabic, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Greek, and occasionally in other languages. Chao began his musical career in Paris, busking and playing with groups such as Hot Pants and Los Carayos, which combined a variety of languages and musical styles. With friends and his brother Antoine Chao, he founded the band Mano Negra in 1987, achieving considerable success, particularly in Europe. He became a solo artist after its breakup in 1995 and since then tours regularly with his live band, Radio Bemba.
Go to Profile#25523
Andrew Sutherland
#25534
Overall Influence
Andrew Victor Sutherland is an American mathematician and Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on computational aspects of number theory and arithmetic geometry. He is known for his contributions to several projects involving large scale computations, including the Polymath project on bounded gaps between primes, the L-functions and Modular Forms Database, the sums of three cubes project, and the computation and classification of Sato-Tate distributions.
Go to Profile#25524
Shūichi Katō
#25535
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Shūichi Katō was a Japanese critic and author best known for his works on literature and culture. Biography Born in Tokyo, Katō trained as a medical doctor at the University of Tokyo during World War II, specializing in haematology. The experience of living under Japan’s fascist government and American bombing of Tokyo would shape a lifelong opposition to war, especially nuclear arms, and imperialism. It was also in this period that he began to write.
Go to Profile#25525
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn
#25536
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn was an American professor of history and author. Terborg-Penn specialized in African-American history and black women's history. Her book African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 was a ground-breaking work that recovered the histories of black women in the women's suffrage movement in the United States. She was a faculty member of Morgan State University.
Go to Profile#25526
Norman Lamont
#25537
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Norman Stewart Hughson Lamont, Baron Lamont of Lerwick, is a British politician and former Conservative MP for Kingston-upon-Thames. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1990 until 1993. He was created a life peer in 1998. Lamont was a supporter of the Eurosceptic organisation Leave Means Leave.
Go to Profile#25527
Grant McCracken
#25538
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Grant David McCracken is a Canadian anthropologist and author, known for his books about culture and commerce. He was the founder and director of the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum and was a member of Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He coined the term the Diderot effect. He lives in Rowayton, Connecticut.
Go to Profile#25528
Mauro Guillén
#25539
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Mauro F. Guillén is a Spanish/American sociologist, political economist, management educator. In March 2021 he was announced as the new Director of the Cambridge Judge Business School, and a Fellow of Queens' College at the University of Cambridge before resigning in 2023 to return to his family and his professorship at Wharton. Until July 2021, he was the Zandman Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Penn Lauder Center for International Business Education and Research . He was the Anthony L. Davis Director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies from 2007 to 2019.
Go to Profile#25529
Pierre Rosenstiehl
#25540
Overall Influence
1933 - 2020 (87 years)
Pierre Rosenstiehl was a French mathematician recognized for his work in graph theory, planar graphs, and graph drawing. The Fraysseix-Rosenstiehl's planarity criterion is at the origin of the left-right planarity algorithm implemented in Pigale software, which is considered the fastest implemented planarity testing algorithm.
Go to Profile#25530
Jean-Pierre Jouannaud
#25541
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jean-Pierre Jouannaud is a French computer scientist, known for his work in the area of term rewriting. He was born on 21 May 1947 in Aix-les-Bains . From 1967 to 1969 he visited the Ecole Polytechnique . In 1970, 1972, and 1977, he wrote his Master thesis , PhD thesis , and Habilitation thesis , respectively, at the Université de Paris VI. In 1979, he became an associate professor at the Nancy University; 1985 he changed to the Université de Paris-Sud, where he became a full professor in 1986.
Go to Profile#25531
Kevin de Queiroz
#25542
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kevin de Queiroz is a vertebrate, evolutionary, and systematic biologist. He has worked in the phylogenetics and evolutionary biology of squamate reptiles, the development of a unified species concept and of a phylogenetic approach to biological nomenclature, and the philosophy of systematic biology.
Go to Profile#25532
Evgeni Malkin
#25543
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Evgeni Vladimirovich Malkin is a Russian professional ice hockey centre and alternate captain for the Pittsburgh Penguins of the National Hockey League . Nicknamed "Geno", Malkin began his career with his hometown club Metallurg Magnitogorsk, playing for their junior and senior teams. He was then selected second overall in the 2004 NHL Entry Draft by the Pittsburgh Penguins, though an international transfer dispute delayed the start of his NHL career until 2006.
Go to Profile#25533
John Monteith
#25544
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
John Lennox Monteith DSc, FRS was a British scientist who pioneered the application of physics to biology. He was an authority in the related fields of water management for agricultural production, soil physics, micrometeorology, transpiration, and the influence of the natural environment on field crops, horticultural crops, forestry, and animal production.
Go to Profile#25534
Stefan Thurner
#25545
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Stefan Thurner is an Austrian physicist and complexity researcher. He has been professor for Science of Complex Systems at the Medical University of Vienna since 2009, external professor at the Santa Fe Institute since 2007, and guest professor at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore since 2016.
Go to Profile#25535
Chris Marker
#25546
Overall Influence
1921 - 2012 (91 years)
Chris Marker was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La Jetée , A Grin Without a Cat and Sans Soleil . Marker is usually associated with the Left Bank subset of the French New Wave that occurred in the late 1950s and 1960s, and included such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy.
Go to Profile#25536
Roy Mottahedeh
#25547
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Roy Parviz Mottahedeh is an American historian who is Gurney Professor of History, Emeritus at Harvard University, where he taught courses on the pre-modern social and intellectual history of the Islamic Middle East and is an expert on Iranian culture. Mottahedeh served as the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies from 1987 to 1990, and as the inaugural director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University from 2005 to 2011. He is a follower of the Baha'i faith.
Go to Profile#25537
Luis Fonsi
#25548
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Luis Alfonso Rodríguez López-Cepero , known by his stage name Luis Fonsi , is a Puerto Rican-American singer-songwriter. He is known for his soulful and dance oriented songs, most notably 2017's "Despacito".
Go to Profile#25538
Eric Ash
#25549
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Sir Eric Albert Ash was a British electrical engineer, past Rector of Imperial College and President of IEE, UK. He was elected an international member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for innovations in optics and acoustics and for leadership in education.
Go to Profile#25539
James H. McClellan
#25550
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
James H. McClellan is the Byers Professor of Signal Processing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is widely known for his creation of the McClellan transform and for his co-authorship of the Parks–McClellan filter design algorithm.
Go to Profile#25540
Magnus Hestenes
#25551
Overall Influence
1906 - 1991 (85 years)
Magnus Rudolph Hestenes was an American mathematician best known for his contributions to calculus of variations and optimal control. As a pioneer in computer science, he devised the conjugate gradient method, published jointly with Eduard Stiefel.
Go to Profile#25541
Luis Camnitzer
#25552
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Luis Camnitzer is a German-born Uruguayan artist, curator, art critic, and academic who was at the forefront of 1960s Conceptual Art. Camnitzer works primarily in sculpture, printmaking, and installation, exploring topics such as repression, institutional critique, and social justice.
Go to Profile#25542
William W. Howells
#25553
Overall Influence
1908 - 2005 (97 years)
William White Howells was a professor of anthropology at Harvard University. Howells, grandson of the novelist William Dean Howells, was born in New York City, the son of John Mead Howells, the architect of the Chicago Tribune Tower, and Abby MacDougall White. He graduated with an S.B. in 1930 and obtained a doctorate from Harvard in 1934 and worked for the American Museum of Natural History. He lectured at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1937 to 1954, serving as a lieutenant in the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II. He taught at Harvard from 1954 until his retirement ...
Go to Profile#25543
Mike Joy
#25554
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Michael Kinsey Joy is an American TV sports announcer, businessman, and former politician who currently serves as the lap-by-lap voice of Fox Sports' coverage of NASCAR. His color analyst is Clint Bowyer. Counting 2023, Joy has been part of the live broadcast of 44 Daytona 500s . He also serves as expert analyst for A&E Networks History Channel and FYI live TV coverage of collector car auctions.
Go to Profile#25544
Stanley J. Korsmeyer
#25555
Overall Influence
1950 - 2005 (55 years)
Stanley Joel Korsmeyer was an American research scientist known for his work on B cell lymphomas and apoptosis. Born and educated in the US state of Illinois, Korsmeyer spent most of his career as a professor at Washington University School of Medicine and later the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. He rose to prominence in the early 1980s as a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute. There he co-discovered the genetic cause of most cases of the cancer follicular lymphoma – the misregulation of the gene Bcl-2. Korsmeyer went on to start his own laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis, further studying the role of Bcl-2 in cell biology.
Go to Profile#25545
Kevin Crossley-Holland
#25556
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Kevin John William Crossley-Holland is an English translator, children's author and poet. His best known work is probably the Arthur trilogy , for which he won the Guardian Prize and other recognition.
Go to Profile#25546
Chris Distefano
#25557
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Christopher Paul Anthony Distefano is an American comedian. Primarily a stand-up comedian, Distefano began his career in entertainment on MTV and MTV2's shows Guy Code and Girl Code. Distefano's first hour-long standup special, Chris Distefano: Size 38 Waist, was released in 2019 by Comedy Central. His second special, Speshy Weshy, premiered on Netflix in May 2022. Distefano co-hosts Hey Babe! podcast with Sal Vulcano from Impractical Jokers and hosts his own podcast, Chrissy Chaos.
Go to Profile#25547
Edwin McClellan
#25558
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Edwin McClellan was a British Japanologist, teacher, writer, translator, and interpreter of Japanese literature and culture. Biography McClellan was born in Kobe, Japan in 1925 to a Japanese mother, Teruko Yokobori, and a British father who worked for Lever Brothers in Japan. His mother and older brother died when he was two. Bilingual from birth and educated at the Canadian Academy in Kobe, McClellan and his father were repatriated to Britain in 1942 aboard the Tatsuta Maru, a passenger liner requisitioned by the Imperial Japanese Navy to repatriate British nationals from throughout Southeas...
Go to Profile#25548
James A. Ibers
#25559
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
James A. Ibers was the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry before becoming an emeritus professor of chemistry at Northwestern University upon retirement. He is recognized for contributions to inorganic chemistry, especially in the areas of coordination chemistry, bio-inorganic chemistry, solid state synthesis and X-ray crystallography. Ibers passed on December 14, 2021 at the age of 91.
Go to Profile#25549
Max Poll
#25560
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
Max Fernand Leon Poll was a Belgian ichthyologist who specialised in the Cichlidae. In the years 1946 and 1947 he organised an expedition to Lake Tanganyika. He has described several species of Pseudocrenilabrinae, such as Lamprologus signatus, Steatocranus casuarius, Neolamprologus brichardi, and Neolamprologus pulcher.
Go to Profile#25550
John Platt
#25561
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
John Carlton Platt is an American computer scientist. He is currently a distinguished scientist at Google. Formerly he was a deputy managing director at Microsoft Research Redmond Labs. Platt worked for Microsoft from 1997 to 2015. Before that, he served as director of research at Synaptics.
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