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
#26051
Barry Beyerstein
#26062
Overall Influence
1947 - 2007 (60 years)
Barry L Beyerstein was a scientific skeptic and professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. Beyerstein's research explored brain mechanisms of perception and consciousness, the effects of drugs on the brain and mind, sense of smell and its lesser-known contributions to human cognition and emotion. He was founder and chair of the BC Skeptics Society, a Fellow and member of the Executive Council of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal , now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. Associate editor of the Scientific...
Go to Profile#26052
Alexander H. Leighton
#26063
Overall Influence
1908 - 2007 (99 years)
Alexander H. Leighton was a sociologist and psychiatrist of dual citizenship . He is best known for his work on the Stirling County Study and his contributions to the field of psychiatric epidemiology. Leighton died at the age of 99 at his home in Digby, Nova Scotia.
Go to Profile#26053
Herman K. van Dijk
#26064
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Herman Koene van Dijk is a Dutch economist Consultant at the Research Department of Norges Bank and Professor Emeritus at the Econometric Institute of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, known for his contributions in the field of Bayesian analysis.
Go to Profile#26054
Roy Wood
#26065
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Roy Wood is an English musician, singer and songwriter. He was particularly successful in the 1960s and 1970s as member and co-founder of the Move, Electric Light Orchestra and Wizzard. Wood formed the Move in 1965, and had hits including "Flowers in the Rain". While the Move were still together, Wood, along with his band colleagues Jeff Lynne and Bev Bevan, founded Electric Light Orchestra , which was later to gain major commercial success. After increasing tensions, Wood left ELO in 1972 and formed a new group, Wizzard, who had seven hits, including Wood's most regularly broadcast song, "I ...
Go to Profile#26055
Howard J. Wiarda
#26066
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Howard J. Wiarda was an American academic who was the Dean Rusk Professor of International Relations and Founding Head of the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. He also served in two think tanks in Washington, DC.
Go to Profile#26056
Patriarch Daniel of Romania
#26067
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Daniel is the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church. The elections took place on 12 September 2007. Daniel won with a majority of 95 votes out of 161 against Bartolomeu Anania. He was officially enthroned on 30 September 2007 in the Patriarchal Cathedral in Bucharest. As such, his official title is "Archbishop of Bucharest, Metropolitan of Muntenia and Dobrogea, Locum tenens of the throne of Caesarea of Cappadocia, Patriarch of All Romania".
Go to Profile#26057
Elena Poniatowska
#26068
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amélie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor , known professionally as Elena Poniatowska , is a French-born Mexican journalist and author, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered to be disenfranchised especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper-class parents, including her mother whose family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape the Second World War. When she was eighteen and without a university education, she began writing for the newspaper Excélsior, doing interviews and society columns.
Go to Profile#26058
Lee Ming-liang
#26069
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Lee Ming-liang is a Taiwanese geneticist who led the Department of Health from 2000 to 2002. After Lee left office, Taiwan was hit by the 2003 SARS outbreak, and he was named to a committee convened to research the disease.
Go to Profile#26059
Gunnar Svedberg
#26070
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Professor Gunnar Svedberg was the Rector of the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden. Svedberg studied at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and received a PhD in chemical engineering in 1975. He became a full professor at the KTH in 1989. He was the Rector of Mid Sweden University College from 1999 to 2003, and of the University of Gothenburg between July 2003 and September 2006. He was President of Innventia, until his retirement in June 2011.
Go to Profile#26060
Jeffrey Koo Sr.
#26071
Overall Influence
1933 - 2012 (79 years)
Jeffrey Koo Sr. was a Taiwanese billionaire banker, who served as honorary chairman and governor of Chinatrust Bank, and co founded Koos Group. Family ancestry The rise of the Koo family dates back to the late nineteenth century in Lukang, which was the capital at the time. The first generation Koo ancestors held monopolistic investments in camphor, salt, sugar, and land.
Go to Profile#26061
Konrad Jarausch
#26072
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Konrad H. Jarausch is a German-American historian and the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The focus of his work has been German history, with his earlier work being on Hitler's rise to power, and his later work more concerned with East Germany, re-unification and cultural democratization. He is the son of a German soldier and considered a critic of the Third Reich.
Go to Profile#26062
Erik Scherder
#26073
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Erik Johan Anton Scherder is a Dutch professor of neuropsychology who is connected to the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam . Scherder followed his education to physiotherapist in the late seventies after which he worked in the Valeriuskliniek in Amsterdam. Afterwards he followed the study psychology at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam with a specialization in neuropsychology, in which he promoted in 1995.
Go to Profile#26063
Esi Sutherland-Addy
#26074
Overall Influence
Esi Sutherland-Addy is a Ghanaian academic, writer, educationalist, and human rights activist. She is a professor at the Institute of African Studies, where she has been senior research fellow, head of the Language, Literature, and Drama Section, and associate director of the African Humanities Institute Program at the University of Ghana. She is credited with more than 60 publications in the areas of education policy, higher education, female education, literature, theatre and culture, and serves on numerous committees, boards and commissions locally and internationally. She is the first daug...
Go to Profile#26064
Sarah Whiting
#26075
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sarah M. Whiting is an American architect, critic, and academic administrator. Whiting is currently Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design, in addition to being a founding partner of WW Architecture, along with her husband, Ron Witte. She previously served as Dean and William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture at Rice School of Architecture. In addition to her work as an academic administrator, Whiting is most commonly identified as an intellectual figure within the field of architecture's "post-critical" turn in the early 2000s.
Go to Profile#26065
Erdağ Göknar
#26076
Overall Influence
Erdağ Göknar is a Turkish-American scholar, literary translator, and poet. He is an Associate Professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and Director of the Duke University Middle East Studies Center.
Go to Profile#26066
Carol M. Highsmith
#26077
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Carol McKinney Highsmith is an American photographer, author, and publisher who has photographed in all the states of the United States as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. She photographs the entire American vista in all fifty U.S. states as a record of the early 21st century.
Go to Profile#26067
Erlendur Haraldsson
#26078
Overall Influence
1931 - 2020 (89 years)
Erlendur Haraldsson was a professor emeritus of psychology on the faculty of social science at the University of Iceland. He published in various psychology and psychiatry journals. In addition, he published parapsychology books and authored a number of papers for parapsychology journals.
Go to Profile#26068
Ajit Varki
#26079
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Ajit Varki is a physician-scientist who is distinguished professor of medicine and cellular and molecular medicine, founding co-director of the Glycobiology Research and Training Center at the University of California, San Diego , and founding co-director of the UCSD/Salk Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny . He is also executive editor of the textbook Essentials of Glycobiology and distinguished visiting professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. He is a specialist advisor to the Human Gene Nome...
Go to Profile#26069
Joseph Richard Pawlik
#26080
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Joseph Richard Pawlik is a marine biologist. He is the Frank Hawkins Kenan Distinguished Professor of Marine Biology in the Department of Biology and Marine Biology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is best known for studies of sponges on Caribbean coral reefs that reveal ecological principles such as resource trade-offs, trophic cascades and indirect effects.
Go to Profile#26070
Stephen D. Houston
#26081
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Stephen Douglas Houston is an American anthropologist, archaeologist, epigrapher, and Mayanist scholar, who is particularly renowned for his research into the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. He is the author of a number of papers and books concerning topics such as the Maya script, the history, kingships and dynastic politics of the pre-Columbian Maya, and archaeological reports on several Maya archaeological sites, particularly Dos Pilas and El Zotz. In 2021, National Geographic noted that he participated in the correct cultural association assigned to a half-size replica dis...
Go to Profile#26071
Volker Markl
#26082
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Volker Markl is a German computer scientist and database systems researcher. Career In 1999, Markl received his PhD in computer science under the direction of Rudolf Bayer at the Technical University of Munich. His doctoral research led to the development of the UB-Tree. From 1997 to 2000, he was research group leader at FORWISS, the Bavarian research center for knowledge-based systems. From 2001 to 2008, he was project leader at the IBM Almaden Research Center, Silicon Valley. Since 2008, he has been full professor and Chair of the Database Systems and Information Management Group at the Technical University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#26072
Pedro A. Sanchez
#26083
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Pedro Sanchez is the director of the Agriculture & Food Security Center, senior research scholar, and director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Sanchez was director general of the World Agroforestry Centre headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya from 1991-2001, and served as co-chair of the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force. He is also professor emeritus of soil science and forestry at North Carolina State University, and was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#26073
James L. Gelvin
#26084
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
James L. Gelvin is an American scholar of Middle Eastern history. He has been a faculty member in the department of history at the University of California, Los Angeles since 1995 and has written extensively on the history of the modern Middle East, with particular emphasis on nationalism and the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East.
Go to Profile#26074
Mehrdad Bahar
#26085
Overall Influence
1930 - 1994 (64 years)
Mehrdād Bahār was a prominent Iranist, linguist, mythologist and Persian historian. Early life Mehrdad Bahar, was the youngest son of Persian poet Mohammad Taghi Bahar. He held a Ph.D. in Persian literature and Ancient Iranian languages from Tehran University. He received an MA degree in "Ancient and Medieval Persian history" from the University of London where he studied with Professor Mary Boyce at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He began his career as a linguist with focus on Middle Persian. Later in his career he became interested in Persian mythology. He developed theories o...
Go to Profile#26075
Fred R. Harris
#26086
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Fred Roy Harris is an American former politician who served as a U.S. senator from Oklahoma from 1964 to 1973. Born in Walters, Oklahoma, Harris was elected to the Oklahoma Senate after graduating from the University of Oklahoma College of Law. He ousted the appointed U.S. Senate incumbent J. Howard Edmondson and won a 1964 special election to succeed Robert S. Kerr, narrowly defeating football coach Bud Wilkinson. Harris strongly supported the Great Society programs but criticized President Lyndon B. Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War. He was reelected in 1966 and declined to seek another...
Go to Profile#26076
Ursula Reutner
#26087
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Ursula Reutner is a German linguist. She holds the Chair of Romance Languages and Cultures at the University of Passau. Reutner is an internationally renowned expert in Romance Studies and Intercultural Communication, who has won several awards for her work, including the Prix Germaine de Staël, the Elise Richter Prize and an honorary doctorate from the Universidad del Salvador .
Go to Profile#26077
Ahmed Cemal Eringen
#26088
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
Ahmet Cemal Eringen was a Turkish engineering scientist. He was a professor at Princeton University and the founder of the Society of Engineering Science. The Eringen Medal is named in his honor. Education Eringen was born in Kayseri, Turkey and studied at the Technical University of Istanbul and graduated with a diploma degree in 1943 and then worked for the Turkish Aircraft Co. until 1944. In 1944–1945, he was a trainee at the Glenn L. Martin Company and in 1945 was group leader at the Turkish Air League Company. He continued his studies at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in New York ...
Go to Profile#26078
Raphael David Levine
#26089
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Raphael David Levine is an Israeli chemist who is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles and the Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Go to Profile#26079
Sun Zhiwei
#26090
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sun Zhiwei is a Chinese mathematician, working primarily in number theory, combinatorics, and group theory. He is a professor at Nanjing University. Biography Sun Zhiwei was born in Huai'an, Jiangsu. Sun and his twin brother Sun Zhihong proved a theorem about what are now known as the Wall–Sun–Sun primes.
Go to Profile#26080
Ahmat Taboye
#26091
Overall Influence
Ahmat Taboye is a literary critic from Chad. As head of the Department of Letters at the University of N'Djamena, he published Anthologie de la littérature tchadienne in 2003, which covers 40 years of Chadian literature. In May 2007, the Ministry of Cultural and Artistic Development named him a director.
Go to Profile#26081
Rupert E. Billingham
#26092
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
Rupert Everett Billingham FRS was a British biologist who did significant research in the fields of reproductive immunology and organ transplantation. "He made numerous fundamental contributions to our modern knowledge of the mechanisms of graft rejection and how to prevent it, and he analysed some of the mechanisms responsible for the survival of the mammalian foetus in an immunologically hostile environment".
Go to Profile#26082
Jamie Shea
#26093
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Jamie Patrick Shea is a retired member of NATO. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium until his retirement in late September 2018.
Go to Profile#26083
Warren G
#26094
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Warren Griffin III is an American rapper, DJ, and producer known for his role in West Coast rap's 1990s ascent. A pioneer of G-funk, he attained mainstream success with the 1994 single "Regulate", a duet with Nate Dogg. He significantly helped Snoop Dogg's career during the latter's beginnings, also introducing him to Dr. Dre, who later signed Snoop Dogg.
Go to Profile#26084
Ludwig Finscher
#26095
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Ludwig Finscher was a German musicologist. He was a professor of music history at the University of Heidelberg from 1981 to 1995 and editor of the encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. He is respected internationally as an authority on the history of Western Classical music from the 16th century to contemporary classical music, with a view on music in cultural, social, historical and philosophical context, in a clear language for both specialists and lay readers.
Go to Profile#26085
Trevor Colbourn
#26096
Overall Influence
1927 - 2015 (88 years)
Harold Trevor Colbourn was an Australian professor and academic administrator, who served as the second president of the University of Central Florida, previously named Florida Technological University.
Go to Profile#26086
John Scott
#26097
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Peter Scott is an English sociologist working on issues of economic and political sociology, social stratification, the history of sociology, and social network analysis. He is currently working independently, and has previously worked at the Universities of Strathclyde, Leicester, Essex, and Plymouth. He is a Fellow of the British Academy , a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts , and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences . He has been a member of the British Sociological Association since 1970. In 2015 he became Chair of Section S4 of the British Academy. In 2016 he was awarded an...
Go to Profile#26087
Ralph Cicerone
#26098
Overall Influence
1943 - 2016 (73 years)
Ralph John Cicerone was an American atmospheric scientist and administrator. From 1998 to 2005, he was the chancellor of the University of California, Irvine. From 2005 to 2016, he was the president of the National Academy of Sciences . He was a "renowned authority" on climate change and atmospheric chemistry, and issued an early warning about the grave potential risks of climate change.
Go to Profile#26088
Javier Bardem
#26099
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Javier Ángel Encinas Bardem is a Spanish actor. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as assassin Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers' western drama film No Country for Old Men . Bardem has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls , a criminal with cancer in Biutiful , and Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos .
Go to Profile#26089
Amos Storkey
#26100
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Amos James Storkey is Professor of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Storkey studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge and obtained his doctorate from Imperial College, London. In 1997 during his PhD, he worked on the Hopfield Network a form of recurrent artificial neural network popularized by John Hopfield in 1982. Hopfield nets serve as content-addressable memory systems with binary threshold nodes and Storkey developed what became known as the "Storkey Learning Rule".
Go to Profile#26090
Peter Kollman
#26101
Overall Influence
1944 - 2001 (57 years)
Peter Andrew Kollman was a professor of chemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco. He is known for his work in computational chemistry, molecular modeling and bioinformatics, especially for his role in the development of the AMBER force field and molecular dynamics software package.
Go to Profile#26091
Colin Raston
#26102
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Colin Llewellyn Raston is a Professor of Chemistry of Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia and the Premier's Professorial Fellow in Clean Technology. In 2015, he was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in "for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg". In 2016, Raston was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his services to science.
Go to Profile#26092
Wendy Carlos
#26103
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Wendy Carlos is an American musician and composer best known for her electronic music and film scores. Born and raised in Rhode Island, Carlos studied physics and music at Brown University before moving to New York City in 1962 to study music composition at Columbia University. Studying and working with various electronic musicians and technicians at the city's Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, she helped in the development of the Moog synthesizer, Robert Moog's first commercially available keyboard instrument.
Go to Profile#26093
Arnold Kaufmann
#26104
Overall Influence
1911 - 1994 (83 years)
Arnold Kaufmann was a French engineer, professor of Applied Mechanics and Operations Research at the Mines ParisTech in Paris, at the Grenoble Institute of Technology and the Université catholique de Louvain, and scientific advisor at Groupe Bull. He is known for writing the first book on fuzzy sets, and as cofounder of the International Project Management Association.
Go to Profile#26094
Fred Cummings
#26105
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Frederick W. Cummings was an American theoretical physicist and professor at the University of California, Riverside. He specialised in cavity quantum electrodynamics, many-body theory, non-linear dynamics, and biophysics.
Go to Profile#26095
James G. Herman
#26106
Overall Influence
James Gordon Herman is an American oncologist. Herman studied chemistry at Hope College and earned a medical degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Duke University in 1992, and a fellowship in medical oncology at Johns Hopkins in 1996. Herman then became associate professor of oncology at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, and later the UPMC Endowed Chair for Lung Cancer Research at the University of Pittsburgh.
Go to Profile#26096
Peter Kenen
#26107
Overall Influence
1932 - 2012 (80 years)
Peter Bain Kenen was an American economist, who was the Walker Professor of Economics and International Finance at Princeton University, and senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Go to Profile#26097
Richard Lashof
#26108
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Richard K. Lashof was an American mathematician. He contributed to the field of geometric and differential topology, working with Shiing-Shen Chern, Stephen Smale, among others. Lashof is regarded as "the key figure in sustaining the Chicago Mathematics Department as an international center for research and the training of topologists" by Melvin Rothenberg.
Go to Profile#26098
Jeffrey Miron
#26109
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Jeffrey Alan "Jeff" Miron is an American economist. He served as the chairman of the department of economics at Boston University from 1992 to 1998, and currently teaches at Harvard University, serving as a senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in Harvard's economics department. Miron holds the position of director of economic policy studies at the Cato Institute.
Go to Profile#26099
Paul Lewis
#26110
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Paul Lewis is head of investigations at The Guardian. He was previously the newspaper's Washington Correspondent, San Francisco Bureau Chief and Associate Editor and has won 12 awards, mostly for investigative reporting. He is the co-author of Undercover; The True Story of Britain's Secret Police.
Go to Profile#26100
Doug Collins
#26111
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Paul Douglas Collins is an American basketball executive, former player, coach and television analyst in the National Basketball Association . He played in the NBA from 1973 to 1981 for the Philadelphia 76ers, earning four NBA All-Star selections. He then became an NBA coach in 1986, and had stints coaching the Chicago Bulls, Detroit Pistons, Washington Wizards and Philadelphia 76ers. Collins also served as an analyst for various NBA-related broadcast shows. He is a recipient of the Curt Gowdy Media Award.
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