The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people
#26201
Georges Rey
#26212
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Georges Leon Rey is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland. Biography Rey received a doctoral degree in philosophy from Harvard University in 1978. His thesis was titled The possibility of psychology: some preliminary issues, and was completed under Hilary Putnam.
Go to Profile#26202
Paul Coffey
#26213
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Paul Douglas Coffey is a Canadian former professional ice hockey defenceman who played for nine teams over 21 seasons in the National Hockey League . Known for his speed and scoring prowess, Coffey ranks second all-time among NHL defencemen in goals, assistss, and pointss, behind only Ray Bourque. He won the James Norris Memorial Trophy as the NHL's best defenceman three times and was voted to eight end-of-season All-Star teams . He holds the record for the most goals by a defenceman in one season, 48 in 1985–86, and is the only defenceman to have scored 40 goals more than once, also doing it in 1983–84.
Go to Profile#26203
Viktor Golyshev
#26214
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Viktor Petrovich Golyshev is a well-known English-to-Russian translator. His translations include Light in August, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, All the King's Men, Theophilus North, 1984, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Set This House on Fire, Pulp, and others. He has won the Foreign Literature and Illuminator awards. He has said about modern American literature, "It isn't quite worthy of consideration. It has almost nothing to say about life."
Go to Profile#26204
Fergus I. M. Craik
#26215
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Fergus Ian Muirden Craik FRS is a cognitive psychologist known for his research on levels of processing in memory. This work was done in collaboration with Robert Lockhart at the University of Toronto in 1972 and continued with another collaborative effort with Endel Tulving in 1975. Craik has received numerous awards and is considered a leader in the area of memory, attention and cognitive aging. Moreover, his work over the years can be seen in developmental psychology, aging and memory, and the neuropsychology of memory.
Go to Profile#26205
Hendrik Spruyt
#26216
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Hendrik Spruyt is a Dutch political scientist. He is the Norman Dwight Harris Professor of International Relations at Northwestern University. He is known for his research on state formation and sovereignty. Spruyt has advanced arguments for the emergence of the modern state that emphasize institutionalist aspects .
Go to Profile#26206
James Cuno
#26217
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
James "Jim" Bash Cuno is an American art historian and curator. From 2011–22 Cuno served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Career A native of St. Louis, Cuno received a Bachelor of Arts in History from Willamette University in 1973. He then earned two Master of Arts degrees in Art History from the University of Oregon and Harvard University, in 1978 and 1980 respectively. In 1977, Cuno married his Willamette classmate, Sarah Stewart. He continued on at Harvard to receive a Doctor of Philosophy in Art History in 1985, and his doctoral dissertation was on the ...
Go to Profile#26207
Shigeo Hirose
#26218
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Shigeo Hirose is a pioneer of robotics technology and a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Born in Tokyo and attending Hibiya High School, he graduated from Yokohama National University in 1971 and received a Ph.D. from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1976 where he later took professorship.
Go to Profile#26208
Bárbara Jacobs
#26219
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Bárbara Jacobs is a Mexican writer, poet, essayist and translator. Life Born in Mexico City in 1947, Jacobs grew up in a home where five languages were spoken. Her grandparents were Lebanese Jewish and Lebanese Maronites. After attending school in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, she returned to Mexico and received a degree in psychology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Go to Profile#26209
Carles Boix
#26220
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Carles Boix i Serra is a Catalan and American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, currently teaching at Princeton University. He is a leading scholar in empirical democratic theory and comparative political economy.
Go to Profile#26210
Richard P. Brent
#26221
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Richard Peirce Brent is an Australian mathematician and computer scientist. He is an emeritus professor at the Australian National University. From March 2005 to March 2010 he was a Federation Fellow at the Australian National University. His research interests include number theory , random number generators, computer architecture, and analysis of algorithms.
Go to Profile#26211
John Brownstein
#26222
Overall Influence
John Brownstein is a Canadian epidemiologist and Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School as well as the Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital. His research focuses on development of computational methods in epidemiology for applications to public health also known as computational epidemiology or e-epidemiology He is also the founder of several global public health surveillance systems including HealthMap. He is most known for his work on global tracking of disease outbreaks.
Go to Profile#26212
Johnny Manziel
#26223
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Johnathan Paul Manziel , nicknamed "Money Manziel" and "Johnny Football", is a former American football quarterback. Manziel played two seasons with the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League and was also a member of the Canadian Football League's Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Montreal Alouettes in 2018 and the Alliance of American Football's Memphis Express in 2019.
Go to Profile#26213
Waded Cruzado
#26224
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Waded Cruzado is a Puerto Rican professor of Spanish language and Spanish literature. She served as Interim President of New Mexico State University from 2008 to 2009, and since 2010 has served as the 12th President of Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana.
Go to Profile#26214
Everett Fox
#26225
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Everett Fox is a scholar and translator of the Hebrew Bible. A graduate of Brandeis University, he is currently the Allen M. Glick Professor of Judaic and Biblical Studies and director of the program in Jewish Studies at Clark University.
Go to Profile#26215
Yoichi Miyaoka
#26226
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Yoichi Miyaoka is a mathematician who works in algebraic geometry and who proved the Bogomolov–Miyaoka–Yau inequality in an Inventiones Mathematicae paper. In 1984, Miyaoka extended the Bogomolov–Miyaoka–Yau inequality to surfaces with quotient singularities, and in 2008 to orbifold surfaces. Doing so, he obtains sharp bound on the number of quotient singularities on surfaces of general type. Moreover, the inequality for orbifold surfaces gives explicit values for the coefficients of the so-called Lang-Vojta conjecture relating the degree of a curve on a surface with its geometric genus.
Go to Profile#26216
Gerhard Lehmbruch
#26227
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Gerhard Lehmbruch was a member of the University of Konstanz. Lehmbruch received a doctorate and a Habilitation in Political Science from the University of Tübingen. Thereafter, he was professor at the universities of Heidelberg, Tübingen and Konstanz, from 1969 to 1996.
Go to Profile#26217
Emin Gün Sirer
#26228
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Emin Gün Sirer is a Turkish-American computer scientist. Sirer developed the Avalanche Consensus protocol underlying the Avalanche blockchain platform, and is currently the CEO and co-founder of Ava Labs. He was an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, and is the former co-director of The Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts . He is known for his contributions to peer-to-peer systems, operating systems and computer networking.
Go to Profile#26218
Gary W. Gallagher
#26229
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Gary William Gallagher is an American historian specializing in the history of the American Civil War. Gallagher is currently the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia. He produced a lecture series on the American Civil War for The Great Courses lecture series.
Go to Profile#26219
Alan Gribben
#26230
Overall Influence
Alan Gribben is a professor emeritus of English at Auburn University at Montgomery in Alabama and a Mark Twain scholar. He was distinguished research professor from 1998 to 2001 and the Dr. Guinevera A. Nance Alumni Professor from 2006 to 2009. He engendered widespread controversy in 2011 when he announced the publication of expurgated versions of Twain's works.
Go to Profile#26220
Ken George
#26231
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Kenneth John George is a British oceanographer, poet, and linguist. He is noted as being the originator of Kernewek Kemmyn, an orthography for the revived Cornish language which he claims is more faithful to Middle Cornish phonology than its precursor, .
Go to Profile#26221
James A. Sanders
#26232
Overall Influence
1927 - 2020 (93 years)
James A. Sanders was an American scholar of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and one of the Dead Sea Scrolls editors. Sanders grew up in racially segregated Memphis, attended a Methodist church, and went to Nashville to attend Vanderbilt University where he associated with Baptist & Methodist fellowships. He was the first to translate and edit the Psalm Scroll, which contained a previously unknown psalm. Sanders retired in the late 1990s, but published and lectured regularly into his 90s.
Go to Profile#26222
Dido
#26233
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O'Malley Armstrong , known professionally as Dido , is an English singer and songwriter. She attained international success with her debut album No Angel . Hit singles from the album include "Here with Me" and "Thank You". It sold over 21 million copies worldwide, and it won her several awards, including two Brit Awards; additionally, she won Best British Album and Best British Female as well as the MTV Europe Music Award for Best New Act. The first verse of "Thank You" is sampled in "Stan", a critically acclaimed collaboration with American rapper Eminem. Her next album, Life for Rent , continued her success with the hit singles "White Flag" and "Life for Rent".
Go to Profile#26223
Colin Adams
#26234
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Colin Conrad Adams is a mathematician primarily working in the areas of hyperbolic 3-manifolds and knot theory. His book, The Knot Book, has been praised for its accessible approach to advanced topics in knot theory. He is currently Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, where he has been since 1985. He writes "Mathematically Bent", a column of math for the Mathematical Intelligencer. His nephew is popular American singer Still Woozy.
Go to Profile#26224
Wolfhart Zimmermann
#26235
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Wolfhart Zimmermann was a German theoretical physicist, known for his contribution in quantum field theory. He is one of the developers of the LSZ reduction formula. Biography Zimmermann was born in Freiburg im Breisgau.
Go to Profile#26225
Phil Moorby
#26236
Overall Influence
2000 - 2022 (22 years)
Phil Moorby was a British engineer and computer scientist. Moorby was born and brought up in Birmingham, England, and studied Mathematics at Southampton University, England. Moorby received his master's degree in computer science from Manchester University, England, in 1974. He moved to the United States in 1983.
Go to Profile#26226
Nikolay Nenovsky
#26237
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Nikolay Nenovsky is a Bulgarian economist, working in the fields of monetary theory and policy, monetary history and history of economic thought. He is Professor of economics at the University of Picardie Jules Verne, LEFMI, Amiens, France from 2012. Nikolay Nenovsky is currently associate researcher at SU HSE, department of theoretical economics and also associate professor at RUDN University. Since June 2020 he is a Member of the Governing Council of the Bulgarian Central Bank.
Go to Profile#26227
Dieter Medicus
#26238
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Dieter Medicus was a German jurist. Until his retirement in 1994 he was professor of Private Law and history of Ancient law at the University of Munich. Life Medicus was born 1929 in Berlin. His father was a chemist. He studied law at the Humboldt University Berlin, University of Würzburg and University of Münster. In 1954 he passed the first state exam and in 1957 the second state exam dissertation Zur Geschichte des Senatus consultum Velleianum—‘On the History of the Senatus Consultum Velleianium’ in 1956Id quod interest. Studien zum römischen Recht des Schadensersatzes—‘Id quod interest. ...
Go to Profile#26228
Caroline Robbins
#26239
Overall Influence
1903 - 1999 (96 years)
Caroline Robbins or Caroline Herben was a British historian who was a professor at Bryn Mawr College. Life Robbins was born in Middlesex in 1903. Her parents were Rowland Richard and Rosa Marion Robbins . Her father was a farmer and he was a Councillor on the Middlesex County Council. Her brother, Lionel, would become an economist.
Go to Profile#26229
George W. Comstock
#26240
Overall Influence
1915 - 2007 (92 years)
George Wills Comstock was a public health physician, epidemiologist, and educator. He was known for significant contributions to public health, specifically in the fields of micronutrient deficiencies, tuberculosis, and cardiovascular disease. He served as the editor-in-chief for the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Go to Profile#26230
Winston Wole Soboyejo
#26241
Overall Influence
Winston Wole Soboyejo commonly known as "Wole" is an American Scientist of Yoruba Nigerian parentage. He is a materials scientist whose research focuses on biomaterials and the use of nanoparticles for the detection and treatment of disease, the mechanical properties of materials, and the use of materials science to promote global development. He was appointed President at SUNY Polytechnic Institute and began his service on October 2, 2023.
Go to Profile#26231
Laura Ayres
#26242
Overall Influence
1922 - 1992 (70 years)
Laura Ayres was a virologist who was one of Portugal's pioneers in the fight against AIDS. Early training Laura Guilhermina Martins Ayres was born on 1 June 1922 in Loulé in the Faro District of Portugal. She graduated in Medicine in 1946. It was during her subsequent internships in hospitals that she became interested in the study of communicable diseases. After her hospital training, she did an internship between 1950 and 1953 in Lisbon at the Instituto Superior de Higiene , the former designation of the Instituto Nacional de Saúde Dr. Ricardo Jorge . There she carried out studies on the in...
Go to Profile#26232
Annabelle Bennett
#26243
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Annabelle Claire Bennett is the Chancellor of Bond University and a former Judge of the Federal Court of Australia. Early life and education Annabelle Claire Bennett was born in Sydney, Australia, to Emanuel Darin and Raissa Darin .
Go to Profile#26233
Alan Robock
#26244
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Alan Robock is an American climatologist. He is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He advocates nuclear disarmament and, in 2010 and 2011, met with Fidel Castro during lecture trips to Cuba to discuss the dangers of nuclear weapons. Alan Robock was a 2007 IPCC author, a member of the organisation when it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such cha...
Go to Profile#26234
Denis Lamoureux
#26245
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Denis O. Lamoureux holds a professorial chair of science and religion at St. Joseph's College at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He has doctoral degrees in dentistry, theology, and biology. The author of Evolutionary Creation and of I Love Jesus and I Accept Evolution, he has also written Darwinism Defeated? The Johnson-Lamoureux Debate on Biological Origins, on the creation–evolution controversy .
Go to Profile#26235
Philippe de Montebello
#26246
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Philippe de Montebello is a museum director. He served from 1977 to 2008 as the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. On his retirement, he was both the longest-serving director in the institution's history and the third longest-serving director of any major art museum in the world . From January 2009, Montebello took up a post as the first Fiske Kimball Professor in the History and Culture of Museums at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts.
Go to Profile#26236
Benoît Roux
#26247
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Benoît Roux is an Amgen Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the University of Chicago. He has previously taught at University of Montreal and Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Benoît Roux was a recipient of the 1998 Rutherford Memorial Medal in Chemistry, awarded by the Royal Society of Canada.
Go to Profile#26237
Claire Denis
#26248
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Claire Denis is a French film director and screenwriter. Her feature film Beau Travail has been called one of the greatest films of the 1990s and of all time. Other acclaimed works include Trouble Every Day , 35 Shots of Rum , White Material , High Life and Both Sides of the Blade , the last of which won her the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival. For her film Stars at Noon , Denis competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. She won the Grand Prix, sharing the award with Lukas Dhont's film Close.
Go to Profile#26238
Joseph Rothschild
#26249
Overall Influence
1931 - 2000 (69 years)
Joseph Arthur Rothschild was an American professor of history and political science at Columbia University, specializing in Central European and Eastern European history. Rothschild was a member of the Academy of Political Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, Phi Beta Kappa and American Professors for Peace in the Middle East . From 1985 he was also a member of the Commission on International Affairs for the American Jewish Congress.
Go to Profile#26239
George Rankine Irwin
#26250
Overall Influence
1907 - 1998 (91 years)
George Rankin Irwin was an American scientist in the field of fracture mechanics and strength of materials. He was internationally known for his study of fracture of materials. Early life and education George R. Irwin was born in El Paso, Texas. His family moved to Springfield, Illinois where he went to school.
Go to Profile#26240
Michael Mingos
#26251
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David Michael Patrick Mingos, FRS is a British chemist and academic. He was Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford from 1999 to 2009, and Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford. Education Mingos attended the Harvey Grammar School, King Edward VII School Lytham St Anne's, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology , and the University of Sussex .
Go to Profile#26241
Martha Grimes
#26252
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Martha Grimes is an American writer of detective fiction. She is best known for a series featuring Richard Jury, a Scotland Yard inspector, and Melrose Plant, an aristocrat turned amateur sleuth. Biography Grimes was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to William Dermit Grimes, Pittsburgh's city solicitor, and June Dunnington, who owned the Mountain Lake Hotel in Western Maryland, where Martha and her brother spent much of their childhood. Grimes earned her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Maryland and did postgraduate work at the University of Iowa. She has taught at the University of Iowa, ...
Go to Profile#26242
Justin Hayward
#26253
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
David Justin Hayward is an English musician. He was the guitarist and frontman of the rock band the Moody Blues from 1966 until that group's dissolution in 2018. He became the group's principal vocalist and its most prolific songwriter over the 1967–1974 period, and composed several international hit singles for the band.
Go to Profile#26243
Linda K. Kerber
#26254
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Linda Kaufman Kerber is an American feminist, a political and intellectual historian, and educator who specializes in the history and development of the democratic mind in America, and the history of women in America.
Go to Profile#26244
Joshua Prager
#26255
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Joshua Philip Prager M.D., M.S. is an American physician. Prager specializes in pain medicine and is the executive director of Center for the Rehabilitation Pain Syndromes at UCLA Medical Plaza. Early life and education Joshua P. Prager was born in New York City, the son of Julian Arthur Prager and Eleanor Vernon Goldsmith . Joshua is the son of a New York City police officer, and later, a public school mathematics teacher, and a United Cerebral Palsy shelter workshop supervisor. Prager was educated in the New York City public school system
Go to Profile#26245
Martin Pope
#26256
Overall Influence
1918 - 2022 (104 years)
Martin Pope was an American physical chemist and professor at New York University. His discoveries of ohmic contacts and research in the fields of organic insulatorss and semiconductors led to techniques enabling organic semiconductors to carry relatively large currents, and to convert electricity into light and vice versa. These discoveries have had application in electrophotography, organic light-emitting diodes , photovoltaic cells, biological sensors, transistors, molecular electronics, and batteries.
Go to Profile#26246
Richard Janko
#26257
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Richard Charles Murray Janko is an Anglo-American classical scholar and the Gerald F. Else Distinguished University Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. Family and education Janko was born on May 30, 1955, the descendant of an Austro-Hungarian revolutionary who left Vienna in 1848 to find refuge in London.
Go to Profile#26247
James Moore
#26258
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
James Moore is a historian of science at the Open University and the University of Cambridge and visiting scholar at Harvard University, is noted as the author of several biographies of Charles Darwin. As a Cambridge research scholar and a member of the teaching staff at the Open University, he has studied and written about Darwin since the 1970s, co-authoring with Adrian Desmond the major biography Darwin, and also writing The Darwin Legend, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, and many articles and reviews.
Go to Profile#26248
Chris Godsil
#26259
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Christopher David Godsil is a professor and the former Chair at the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization in the faculty of mathematics at the University of Waterloo. He wrote the popular textbook on algebraic graph theory, entitled Algebraic Graph Theory, with Gordon Royle, His earlier textbook on algebraic combinatorics discussed distance-regular graphs and association schemes.
Go to Profile#26249
Jean-Michel Berthelot
#26260
Overall Influence
1945 - 2006 (61 years)
Jean-Michel Berthelot was a French sociologist, philosopher, epistemologist and social theorist, specialist in philosophy of social sciences, history of sociology, sociology of education, sociology of knowledge, sociology of science and sociology of the body.
Go to Profile#26250
Christoph Loch
#26261
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Christoph Loch was the Director of Cambridge Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge from 2011 until August 31, 2021 when he was replaced by Professor Mauro Guillén who joined from Wharton . He also held a fellowship at Pembroke College. He was announced he would step down in the summer of 2021 after two mandates. Professor Loch took office on 1 September 2011, having previously held the position of GlaxoSmithKline Chaired Professor of Corporate Innovation and Professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD, where he also served as Dean of the INSEAD PhD programme from 2006-2009.
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