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
#26251
Jimmy Butler
#26262
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Jimmy Butler III is an American professional basketball player for the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association . Nicknamed "Jimmy Buckets" and "Playoff Jimmy", he is a six-time NBA All-Star, a five-time All-NBA Team honoree, and a five-time NBA All-Defensive Second Team honoree. He won a gold medal as a member of the 2016 U.S. Olympic team.
Go to Profile#26252
Joseph Maroon
#26263
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Joseph Maroon is an American neurosurgeon, author, and triathlon athlete. He is the professor and vice chairman of the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and is the current medical director of WWE. He is particularly known for his work studying concussions and concussion prevention as well as his hypothesis on the development of chronic traumatic encephalopathy .
Go to Profile#26253
Carol Harris-Shapiro
#26264
Overall Influence
Carol Harris-Shapiro is a lecturer at Temple University in the Intellectual Heritage Department. She has written a controversial book on Messianic Judaism, a belief system considered by most Christians and Jews to be a form of Christianity, adhered to by groups that seek to combine Christianity and Judaism.
Go to Profile#26254
Jason Nelson
#26265
Overall Influence
Jason Nelson is a digital and hypermedia poet and artist. He is Associate Professor of Digital Culture and a PI at the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, where he was also a Fulbright Fellow from 2016-17. Until 2020 he was a lecturer on Cyberstudies, digital writing and creative practice at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He is best known for his artistic flash games/essays such as Game, game, game and again game and I made this. You play this. We are Enemies. He has worked on the Australia Council of the Arts Literature Board and the Board of the Electroni...
Go to Profile#26255
Pat Thane
#26266
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Pat Thane is a professor of Contemporary History at King's College London as well as a general historian. She teaches on the MA in Politics and Contemporary History: modules on Welfare and the State in Britain 1900–1945, 1945–present and contributes to modules on politics and society since . She was the Leverhulme Professor of Contemporary British History in 1998–2001 at the Institute of Historical Research and a professor at the University of Sussex from 1994 until 2001.
Go to Profile#26256
Luigi Broglio
#26267
Overall Influence
1911 - 2001 (90 years)
Luigi Broglio , was an Italian aerospace engineer, airforce lieutenant colonel and dean of the school of aeronautical engineering at the University of Rome La Sapienza. Known as "the Italian von Braun", he is best known as the architect of the San Marco programme.
Go to Profile#26257
John Barry
#26268
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
John Barry Prendergast was an English composer and conductor of film music. He composed the scores for eleven of the James Bond films between 1963 and 1987, as well as arranging and performing the "James Bond Theme" for the first film in the series, 1962's Dr. No. He wrote the Grammy- and Academy Award-winning scores to the films Dances with Wolves and Out of Africa, as well as the scores of The Scarlet Letter, Chaplin, The Cotton Club, Game of Death, The Tamarind Seed, Mary, Queen of Scots and the theme for the television series The Persuaders!, in a career spanning over 50 years. In 1999, ...
Go to Profile#26258
David Malament
#26269
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David B. Malament is an American philosopher of science, specializing in the philosophy of physics. Biography Malament attended Stuyvesant High School and received a B.A. in mathematics 1968 at Columbia College, Columbia University, and Ph.D. in philosophy 1975 at Rockefeller University. After teaching for nearly a quarter-century at the University of Chicago, Malament left to become Distinguished Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he is now emeritus. His book Topics in the Foundations of General Relativity and Newtonian Gravitation Th...
Go to Profile#26259
George Deukmejian
#26270
Overall Influence
1928 - 2018 (90 years)
Courken George Deukmejian Jr. was an American politician who served as the 35th governor of California from 1983 to 1991. A member of the Republican Party, he was the state's first governor of Armenian descent.
Go to Profile#26260
Kyle Busch
#26271
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Kyle Thomas Busch is an American professional stock car racing driver and racing team owner. He competes full-time in the NASCAR Cup Series, driving the No. 8 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 for Richard Childress Racing and part-time in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, driving a Chevrolet Silverado for Spire Motorsports. Busch is the 2009 NASCAR Nationwide Series champion and the 2015 and 2019 Cup Series champion. Busch is currently 9th on the all-time NASCAR Cup Series wins list and his dominance of NASCAR's three major series has him ranked as one of the greatest racing drivers of all time. Busch is also a one-time WWE 24/7 Champion.
Go to Profile#26261
Geoffrey M. Heal
#26272
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Geoffrey M. Heal is a British-American economist known for his work on environmental and resource economics. He is the Donald C. Waite III Professor of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School. Biography Heal was born in 1944 in Bangor, Wales. He received his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate, all from Churchill College, Cambridge. He taught at Christ's College, Cambridge from 1968 to 1973, before joining the faculty of the University of Sussex from 1973 to 1980 and the University of Essex from 1980 to 1983. He joined the faculty of Columbia Business School in 1983 as a professor econom...
Go to Profile#26262
Shane Douglas
#26273
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Troy Allan Martin is an American professional wrestler and promoter, better known by his ring name Shane Douglas. He is best known for his tenures in Extreme Championship Wrestling , World Championship Wrestling , World Wrestling Federation as Dean Douglas, and Total Nonstop Action Wrestling , where he worked as a wrestler and manager.
Go to Profile#26263
John Marburger
#26274
Overall Influence
1941 - 2011 (70 years)
John Harmen "Jack" Marburger III was an American physicist who directed the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the administration of President George W. Bush, serving as the Science Advisor to the President. His tenure was marred by controversy regarding his defense of the administration against allegations from over two dozen Nobel Laureates, amongst others, that scientific evidence was being suppressed or ignored in policy decisions, including those relating to stem cell research and global warming. However, he has also been credited with keeping the political effects of the Septemb...
Go to Profile#26264
Glen Rebka
#26275
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Glen Anderson Rebka Jr. was an American physicist. Biography Rebka attained a doctorate 1961 at Harvard, where he began study in 1953. Starting from 1961 he was at Yale University and starting from 1970 at the University of Wyoming, where he was from 1983 to 1991 department head of the physics faculty and became in 1997 professor emeritus. In addition to his academic career he did much work as an experimental elementary-particle physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. At the University of Wyoming he built up the astrophysics faculty.
Go to Profile#26265
Robert Alfano
#26276
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Robert Alfano is an Italian-American experimental physicist. He is a Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering at the City College and Graduate School of New York of the City University of New York, where he is also the founding director of the Institute for Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers . He is a pioneer in the fields of Biomedical Imaging and Spectroscopy, Ultrafast lasers and optics, tunable lasers, semiconductor materials and devices, optical materials, biophysics, nonlinear optics and photonics; he has also worked extensively in nanotechnology and coherent backscattering. H...
Go to Profile#26266
Neil Jordan
#26277
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Neil Patrick Jordan is an Irish film director, screenwriter, novelist and short-story writer. He won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards, a Golden Lion and a Silver Bear. He was honoured with receiving the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1996. He is known for writing and directing acclaimed dramas such as Mona Lisa , The Crying Game , Michael Collins , The Butcher Boy and The End of the Affair . Jordan also created the Showtime series The Borgias and Sky Atlantic's Riviera . Jordan is also known as an author. He wrote Night in Tunisia which won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Guard...
Go to Profile#26267
Eric Brewer
#26278
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Eric Allen Brewer is professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and vice-president of infrastructure at Google. His research interests include operating systems and distributed computing. He is known for formulating the CAP theorem about distributed network applications in the late 1990s.
Go to Profile#26268
Lawrence Alexander Sidney Johnson
#26279
Overall Influence
1925 - 1997 (72 years)
Lawrence Alexander Sidney Johnson FAA, known as Lawrie Johnson, was an Australian taxonomic botanist. He worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, for the whole of his professional career, as a botanist , Director and Honorary Research Associate .
Go to Profile#26269
Larry Hagman
#26280
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Larry Martin Hagman was an American film and television actor, director, and producer, best known for playing ruthless oil baron J. R. Ewing in the 1978–1991 primetime television soap opera Dallas, and the befuddled astronaut Major Anthony Nelson in the 1965–1970 sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. Hagman had supporting roles in numerous films, including Fail-Safe, Harry and Tonto, S.O.B., Nixon, and Primary Colors. His television appearances also included guest roles on dozens of shows spanning from the late 1950s until his death, and a reprise of his signature role on the 2012 revival of Dallas. Hagman also worked as a television producer and director.
Go to Profile#26270
J. C. D. Clark
#26281
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark is a British historian of both British and American history. He received his undergraduate degree at Downing College, Cambridge. Having previously held posts at Peterhouse, Cambridge and All Souls College, Oxford into 1996, he has since held the Joyce C. and Elizabeth Ann Hall Distinguished Professorship of British History at the University of Kansas.
Go to Profile#26271
Sirindhorn
#26282
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Princess Sirindhorn of Thailand, the Princess Royal and the Princess Debaratana Rajasuda , formerly Princess Sirindhorn Debaratanasuda Kitivadhanadulsobhak , is the second daughter of King Bhumibol Adulyadej and younger sister of King Vajiralongkorn. Thais commonly refer to her as "Phra Thep" , meaning "princess angel". Her title in Thai is the female equivalent of the title once held by her brother, King Maha Vajiralongkorn. The Thai constitution was altered in 1974 to allow for female succession, thus making her eligible for the throne. Having been the eldest female child of the royal fami...
Go to Profile#26272
David Salsburg
#26283
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
David S. Salsburg is an author. His 2002 book The Lady Tasting Tea, subtitled How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century, provides a layman's overview of important developments in the field of statistics in the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly in the areas of experiment design, the study of random distributions, and the careers of major researchers in the field such as Ronald Fisher, Karl Pearson, and Jerzy Neyman.
Go to Profile#26273
Izuo Hayashi
#26284
Overall Influence
1922 - 2005 (83 years)
Izuo Hayashi was a Japanese physicist. Hayashi was born in Tokyo in 1922 and graduated from the faculty of science, University of Tokyo in 1946. He worked as assistant professor at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the same university and defended his PhD in 1962. After the PhD defense, he stayed for a year at MIT, and between 1964 and 1971 worked at Bell Labs on semiconductor lasers. In 1971 he joined the Research Laboratories of NEC where he continued his studies of semiconductor lasers, aiming to improve their reliability and lifetime. Between 1982 and 1987 he was a head scientist at N...
Go to Profile#26274
Justin Vernon
#26285
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Justin DeYarmond Edison Vernon is an American singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist. He is best-known as the primary songwriter and frontman of indie folk band Bon Iver. He is also a member of the bands Volcano Choir, Big Red Machine, the Shouting Matches, and Gayngs, and was previously a member of the now-defunct band DeYarmond Edison. Known for his distinct falsetto voice, Vernon has received widespread acclaim for his work, predominantly with Bon Iver.
Go to Profile#26275
Michel Barnier
#26286
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michel Barnier is a French politician who served as the European Commission's Head of Task Force for Relations with the United Kingdom from 2019 to 2021. He previously served as Chief Negotiator, Task Force for the Preparation and Conduct of the Negotiations with the United Kingdom under Article 50 TEU from October 2016 to November 2019.
Go to Profile#26276
Jeremy Adler
#26287
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jeremy Adler is a British scholar and poet, and emeritus professor and senior research fellow at King's College London. As a poet he is known especially for his concrete poetry and artist's books. As an academic he is known for his work on German literature specialising in the Age of Goethe, Romanticism, Expressionism and Modernism with contributions on figures such as Goethe, Hölderlin, and Kafka.
Go to Profile#26277
Tsvetana Pironkova
#26288
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Tsvetana Kirilova Pironkova is a Bulgarian former tennis player. Considered to be one of the best grass court players of her generation, she has been noted for her "cerebral" skills on the surface, reaching the semifinals at the Wimbledon Championships. Pironkova also found success playing on the quick hardcourts throughout her career, winning a title in Sydney and reaching the quarterfinals of the US Open.
Go to Profile#26278
Randall Dipert
#26289
Overall Influence
1951 - 2019 (68 years)
Randall Roy Dipert was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Fredonia, the United States Military Academy, and the University at Buffalo where he retired as the C. S. Peirce Chair of American Philosophy.
Go to Profile#26279
Takamitsu Azuma
#26290
Overall Influence
1933 - 2015 (82 years)
Takamitsu Azuma was a Japanese architect, and winner of the 1995 the Prize of AIJ . He was a follower of Le Corbusier and was one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, combining traditional Japanese styles with modernism, and designed new types of houses symbolized living in the metropolis.
Go to Profile#26280
Gustavo Petro
#26291
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego is a Colombian politician, economist, and former member of the M19 armed guerrilla movement. He has been serving as the president of Colombia since 2022. Upon his inauguration, he became the first left-wing president in the recent history of Colombia.
Go to Profile#26281
David Corfield
#26292
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
David Neil Corfield is a British philosopher specializing in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of psychology. He is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. Education Corfield studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and later earned his MSc and PhD in the philosophy of science and mathematics at King's College London. His doctoral advisor was Donald A. Gillies.
Go to Profile#26282
Elizabeth Dole
#26293
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Mary Elizabeth Alexander Dole is an American attorney, author, and politician who served as a United States Senator from North Carolina from 2003 to 2009. A member of the Republican Party, she previously served in five presidential administrations, including as U.S. Secretary of Transportation under President Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1987 and as U.S. Secretary of Labor under Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, from 1989 until 1990. Dole then left government to serve as president of the American Red Cross from 1991 to 1999; she departed from that position to seek the Republican nomination...
Go to Profile#26283
Prashant V. Kamat
#26294
Overall Influence
Prashant V. Kamat is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a principal scientist of the radiation laboratory, University of Notre Dame. He is affiliated with the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering as a concurrent professor. He earned his master's and doctoral degree in physical chemistry from Bombay University, and carried out his postdoctoral research at Boston University and University of Texas at Austin .
Go to Profile#26284
Nikolay Dikansky
#26295
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Nikolay Sergeevich Dikansky — is a Russian/Soviet physicist, a scientist in the fields of accelerator physics and particle accelerators, the head of the laboratory in Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, since 2011 academician of Russian Academy of Sciences, the chancellor of Novosibirsk State University .
Go to Profile#26285
Robert Drews
#26296
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Robert Drews is an American historian who is Professor of Classical Studies Emeritus at Vanderbilt University. He received his B.A. from Northwestern College, his M.A. from University of Missouri and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Drews specializes in ancient history and prehistory, in particular the evolution of warfare and of religion.
Go to Profile#26286
Fred Lukoff
#26297
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
Fred Lukoff was an American linguist who specialized in the study of the Korean language and was the first president of the International Association for Korean Language Education . A student of Zellig Harris, with whom he wrote "The phonemes of Kingwana-Swahili" in 1942, Lukoff received his bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1947, his master's from the same institution in 1948, and his doctorate, also from Penn, in 1954. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics the same year as Noam Chomsky to work on machine translation under Vict...
Go to Profile#26287
Stefano Zacchiroli
#26298
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Stefano Zacchiroli is an Italian and French academic and computer scientist who lives and works in Paris, and a former Debian Project Leader. Debian involvement Zacchiroli became a Debian Developer in 2001. After attending LinuxTag in 2004, he became more involved in the Debian community and the project itself, eventually being elected as DPL in 2010, succeeding Steve McIntyre, a position in which he served from April 2010 to April 2013. In April 2011, he was re-elected unopposed as project leader. He was himself succeeded by Lucas Nussbaum in an election where he himself was no longer a cand...
Go to Profile#26288
Bernard Dacorogna
#26299
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Bernard Dacorogna is a Swiss mathematician, born 15 October 1953, in Alexandria, Egypt. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and his Ph.D. at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, in 1980 under the supervision of John M. Ball. He is professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , Switzerland. He is a specialist of the calculus of variations and of partial differential equations. He has written several articles and books. The Chaire de la Vallée Poussin 2018 of the Université Catholique de Louvain is attributed to him.
Go to Profile#26289
Salman A. Avestimehr
#26300
Overall Influence
Salman A. Avestimehr is a Dean's professor at the Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Departments of University of Southern California, where he is the inaugural director of the USC-Amazon Center for Secure and Trusted Machine Learning and the director of the Information Theory and Machine Learning research lab. He is also the CEO and Co-Founder of FedML. Avestimehr's contributions in research and publications are in the areas of information theory, machine learning, large-scale distributed computing, and secure/private computing and learning. In particular, he is best known for deterministic approximation approaches to network information theory and coded computing.
Go to Profile#26290
Peter Adamson
#26301
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Peter Scott Adamson is an American philosopher and intellectual historian. He holds two academic positions: professor of philosophy in late antiquity and in the Islamic world at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; and professor of ancient and medieval philosophy at King's College London.
Go to Profile#26291
Preston Scott Cohen
#26302
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Preston Scott Cohen is a professor of Harvard Graduate School of Design . In 2004, he established a partnership with two registered architects, Amit Nemlich and Gilles Quintal, and became the Design Principal of Preston Scott Cohen, Inc. based in Central Square Cambridge, Massachusetts. Preston Scott Cohen, Inc. is renowned for the design of cultural, educational, commercial buildings and urban design projects around the world. Projects include the Sarmiento Performing Arts Center in Bogota, Colombia; a new building for Taubman College at the University of Michigan; the Taiyuan Museum of Art i...
Go to Profile#26292
Andrew Breeze
#26303
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Andrew Breeze FRHistS FSA , has been professor of philology at the University of Navarra since 1987. Early life Breeze was born in 1954 and educated at Sir Roger Manwood's School, Emmanuel College, Cambridge , and at St John's College, Oxford . In 1986, he worked as a scholar for the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies at the school of Celtic Studies. He is married with six children.
Go to Profile#26293
LeAnn Rimes
#26304
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Margaret LeAnn Rimes Cibrian is an American singer, songwriter and actress. She originally rose to success as a country music artist at age 13 with 1996's "Blue". She has since crossed over into pop, contemporary Christian, and other musical genres. Rimes has placed over 40 singles on international charts since 1996. In addition, she has sold over 37 million records worldwide, with 20.8 million album sales in the United States according to Nielsen SoundScan. Billboard ranked her number 17 in terms of sales success in the 1990–2000 decade.
Go to Profile#26294
Scott B. Rae
#26305
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Scott Bothic Rae is an American Old Testament scholar, theologian, and professor of Christian ethics. He serves as dean of the faculty and chair of the department of philosophy at Biola University's Talbot School of Theology. In 2014, Rae was elected to serve a term as president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is a senior fellow for The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity.
Go to Profile#26295
David Shmoys
#26306
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
David Bernard Shmoys is a Professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering and the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. His major focus has been in the design and analysis of algorithms for discrete optimization problems.
Go to Profile#26296
Sarah Springman
#26307
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Dame Sarah Marcella Springman is a British-Swiss triathlete, civil engineer, and academic. She was educated in England and spent much of her career in Switzerland. She is a former rector of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and currently Principal of St Hilda's College at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#26297
Gordon J. F. MacDonald
#26308
Overall Influence
1929 - 2002 (73 years)
Gordon James Fraser MacDonald was an American geophysicist and environmental scientist, best known for his principled skepticism regarding continental drift , involvement in the development of the McNamara Line electronic defense barrier during the Vietnam War, and early research and advocacy on human-made global climate change. MacDonald was admired for his creative mind, and his ability to connect scientific issues and matters of public policy.
Go to Profile#26298
Salamishah Tillet
#26309
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Salamishah Margaret Tillet is an American scholar, writer, and feminist activist. She is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University–Newark, where she also directs the New Arts Justice Initiative. Tillet is also a contributing critic-at-large at The New York Times.
Go to Profile#26299
William Dyrness
#26310
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
William A. Dyrness is an American theologian and professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. He teaches courses in theology, culture, and the arts, and is a founding member of the Brehm Center.
Go to Profile#26300
Les Back
#26311
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Les Back is a professor of sociology at the University of Glasgow and former Director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a researcher and author of numerous books and academic studies on a wide range of topics, including racism, music and urban cultures.
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