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
#26401
Zsa Zsa Gabor
#26412
Overall Influence
1917 - 2016 (99 years)
Zsa Zsa Gabor was a Hungarian-American socialite and actress. Her sisters were actresses Eva and Magda Gabor. Gabor competed in the 1933 Miss Hungary pageant, where she placed as second runner-up, and began her stage career in Vienna the following year. She emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1941. Becoming a sought-after actress with "European flair and style", she was considered to have a personality that "exuded charm and grace". Her first film role was a supporting role in Lovely to Look At . She later acted in We're Not Married! and played one of her few leading roles in the John Huston-directed film Moulin Rouge .
Go to Profile#26402
Joseph Frank
#26413
Overall Influence
1918 - 2013 (95 years)
Joseph Frank was an American literary scholar and leading expert on the life and work of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Frank's five-volume biography of Dostoevsky is frequently cited among the major literary biographies of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#26403
John Darsee
#26414
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
John Roland Darsee is an American physician and former medical researcher. After compiling an impressive list of publications in reputable scientific journals, he was found to have fabricated data for his publications.
Go to Profile#26404
Bryan Clarke
#26415
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Bryan Campbell Clarke was a British Professor of genetics, latterly emeritus at the University of Nottingham. Clarke is particularly noted for his work on apostatic selection and other forms of frequency-dependent selection, and work on polymorphism in snails, much of it done during the 1960s. Later, he studied molecular evolution. He made the case for natural selection as an important factor in the maintenance of molecular variation, and in driving evolutionary changes in molecules through time. In doing so, he questioned the over-riding importance of random genetic drift advocated by King, Jukes, and Kimura.
Go to Profile#26405
Kanji Nishio
#26416
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
is a Japanese intellectual and professor emeritus of literature at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, Japan. He was awarded a degree in German literature and a PhD in literature from the University of Tokyo. He has translated the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer into Japanese and has written over seventy published works and over thirty translations.
Go to Profile#26406
Roy S. Herbst
#26417
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Roy S. Herbst is an American oncologist who is the Ensign Professor of Medicine, Professor of Pharmacology, Chief of Medical Oncology, and Associate Director for Translational Research at Yale Cancer Center and Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.
Go to Profile#26407
John C. Loehlin
#26418
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
John Clinton Loehlin was an American behavior geneticist, computer scientist, and psychologist. Loehlin served as president of the Behavior Genetics Association and of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology. He was an ISIR lifetime achievement awardee.
Go to Profile#26408
Karl Widerquist
#26419
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Karl Widerquist is an American political philosopher and economist at Georgetown University in their campus in Qatar. He is best known as an advocate of basic income, but is also an interdisciplinary academic writer who has published in journals in fields as diverse as economics, politics, philosophy, and anthropology. He is a consistent critic of propertarianism, right-libertarianism, social contract theory, and the belief that modern societies fulfill the Lockean proviso.
Go to Profile#26409
Charles M. Schulz
#26420
Overall Influence
1922 - 2000 (78 years)
Charles Monroe "Sparky" Schulz was an American cartoonist and the creator of the comic strip Peanuts, featuring his two best-known characters, Charlie Brown and Snoopy. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists in history, and cited by many cartoonists as a major influence, including Jim Davis, Murray Ball, Bill Watterson, Matt Groening, and Dav Pilkey.
Go to Profile#26410
James O. Freedman
#26421
Overall Influence
1935 - 2006 (71 years)
James Oliver Freedman was an American educator and academic administrator. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he served as Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School from 1979 to 1982, before becoming the 16th president of the University of Iowa from 1982 to 1987, and then the 15th president of Dartmouth College, from 1987 to 1998. At both Iowa and Dartmouth, Freedman sought to create as The New York Times described it, "a haven for intellectuals," with mixed results. Freedman was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical...
Go to Profile#26411
Heinz Gerischer
#26422
Overall Influence
1919 - 1994 (75 years)
Heinz Gerischer was a German chemist who specialized in electrochemistry. He was the thesis advisor of future Nobel laureate Gerhard Ertl. The Heinz Gerischer Award of the European section of The Electrochemical Society is named in his honour.
Go to Profile#26412
Raymond Delacy Adams
#26423
Overall Influence
1911 - 2008 (97 years)
Raymond Delacy Adams was an American neurologist and neuropathologist. He was Bullard Professor of Neuropathology at Harvard Medical School and chief of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Along with Maurice Victor, Adams was the author of Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology.
Go to Profile#26413
Thomas Strothotte
#26424
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Thomas Strothotte is a German-Canadian computer scientist and university administrator living in Germany. Strothotte was born in 1959 in Regina, Canada, and raised in Vancouver. His first degrees were taken at Simon Fraser University . His further graduate work was done in Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart, McGill University in Montréal/Québec and the University of Waterloo/Ontario, leading to a Ph.D. in 1984. He also holds an MBA from Columbia University and an MBA from the London Business School .
Go to Profile#26414
Fa-Yueh Wu
#26425
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Fa-Yueh Wu was a Chinese-born theoretical physicist, mathematical physicist, and mathematician who studied and contributed to solid-state physics and statistical mechanics. Life Early stage Born on January 5, 1932, in Shimen County, Hunan Province, Republic of China, with his father, a member of the Legislature, as his fourth child. The temporary capital of the Chiang Kai-shek administration of Nationalist government was placed in Chongqing in December 1938, but before that, in 1937, he evacuated to Chongqing with his father and stepmother and entered an elementary school there. However, due to repeated Bombing of Chongqing, he was unable to settle in one place.
Go to Profile#26415
Lauri Karttunen
#26426
Overall Influence
1941 - 2022 (81 years)
Lauri Juhani Karttunen was an adjunct professor in linguistics at Stanford and an ACL Fellow. He died in 2022. Career Karttunen received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1969 from Indiana University in Bloomington. At the University of Texas at Austin in the 1970s he worked mostly on semantics. He published a series of seminal papers on discourse referents, presuppositions, implicative verbs, conventional implicatures, and questions. In the 1980s Karttunen became, along with Ronald M. Kaplan, Martin Kay, and Kimmo Koskenniemi, one of the pioneers in computational linguistics on the application of finite-state transducers to phonology and morphology.
Go to Profile#26416
Csaba Horváth
#26427
Overall Influence
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
Csaba Horváth was a Hungarian-American chemical engineer, particularly noted for building the first high-performance liquid chromatograph. Early life and education Csaba Horváth was born in Szolnok, Hungary and graduated in chemical engineering from the Budapest Institute of Technology. In 1956 he went to West Germany to work for Hoechst AG. He then studied physical chemistry at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, receiving his Ph.D. in 1963.
Go to Profile#26417
Yoshitomo Nara
#26428
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Yoshitomo Nara is a Japanese artist. He lives and works in Nasushiobara, Tochigi Prefecture, though his artwork has been exhibited worldwide. Nara has had nearly 40 solo exhibitions since 1984. His art work has been housed at the MoMA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . His most well-known and repeated subjects are "big-headed girls" with piercing eyes, who one Nara scholar describes as having "childlike expressions [that] resonate with adult emotions, [their] embodiment of kawaii carries a dark humor, and any explicit cultural references are intertwined with personal memories."
Go to Profile#26418
Joseph A. Alutto
#26429
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Joseph Anthony Alutto served two terms as interim president of Ohio State University located in Columbus, Ohio. He was formerly the dean of Ohio State's Max M. Fisher College of Business. Alutto was the first member of his family to go to college. While studying for his bachelor's degree in business administration at Manhattan College, he drove trucks and worked at a grocery store and a chemical company to pay for his studies. After that he pursued his Master's in industrial relations at the University of Illinois and finished a Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Cornell University. He has worked to become a business management expert.
Go to Profile#26419
Margherita Guarducci
#26430
Overall Influence
1902 - 1999 (97 years)
Margherita Guarducci, also spelled Guarduci, was an Italian archaeologist, classical scholar, and epigrapher. She was a major figure in several crucial moments of the 20th-century academic community. A student of Federico Halbherr, she edited his works after his death. She was the first woman to lead archaeological excavations at the Vatican, succeeding Ludwig Kaas, and completed the excavations on Saint Peter's tomb, identifying finds as relics of Saint Peter. She has also engaged in discussions on the authenticity of the Praeneste fibula, arguing that its inscription is a forgery.
Go to Profile#26420
Julia Wolf
#26431
Overall Influence
Julia Wolf is a British mathematician specialising in arithmetic combinatorics who was the 2016 winner of the Anne Bennett Prize of the London Mathematical Society. She is currently a professor in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#26421
David Trobisch
#26432
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David Johannes Trobisch is a German scholar whose work has focused on formation of the Christian Bible, ancient New Testament manuscripts and the epistles of Paul. Life Trobisch grew up in Cameroon where his parents served as Lutheran missionaries, and David Trobisch grew up in West Africa.
Go to Profile#26422
Patrick Juola
#26433
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Patrick Juola is an internationally noted expert in text analysis, security, forensics, and stylometry. He is a professor of computer science at Duquesne University. As a faculty member at Duquesne University, he has authored two books and more than 100 scientific publications as well as generated more than two million dollars in Federal research grant funding. He works in the field of computer linguistics and computer security currently serving as Director of Research at Juola & Associates and Principal of the Evaluating Variations in Language Laboratory. He is credited with co-creating the original biometric word list.
Go to Profile#26423
John E. Thomas
#26434
Overall Influence
1926 - 1996 (70 years)
John Edward Thomas was a British-born Canadian philosopher and pioneer of medical ethics in Canada. Biography Early life and education Born in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales in 1926, John Thomas moved to Birmingham, England with his parents, David Llewlyn Thomas and Ann Olwyn Thomas, where he worked for two years at the Birmingham Small Arms. Thomas moved to Scotland to enter the Bible Training Institute in Glasgow, and there met Moreen Duff Muir , daughter of William C. Muir a noted herbalist and Jeanne Duff. Thomas married Muir in 1947 and they left the United Kingdom for Canada, where they settled in St.
Go to Profile#26424
Katie Bouman
#26435
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Katherine Louise Bouman is an American engineer and computer scientist working in the field of computer imagery. She led the development of an algorithm for imaging black holes, known as Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors , and was a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team that captured the first image of a black hole.
Go to Profile#26425
Noel Castree
#26436
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Noel Castree FAcSS is a British geographer whose research has focused on capitalism-environment relationships and, more recently, on the role that various experts play in discourses about global environmental change. He is currently the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Human Geography.
Go to Profile#26426
Marie Fredriksson
#26437
Overall Influence
1958 - 2019 (61 years)
Gun-Marie Fredriksson was a Swedish singer, best known internationally as the lead vocalist of pop rock duo Roxette, which she formed in 1986 with Per Gessle. The duo achieved international success in the late 1980s and early 1990s with their albums Look Sharp! and Joyride , and had multiple hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including four number ones.
Go to Profile#26427
Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins
#26438
Overall Influence
Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins is a Canadian philosopher who holds a Canada Research Chair and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. She is also a professor at the Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen. Her primary research areas are epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics. She is one of the principal editors of the journal Thought.
Go to Profile#26428
Robert Lomas
#26439
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Robert Lomas is a British writer, physicist and business studies academic. He writes primarily about the history of Freemasonry as well as the Neolithic period, ancient engineering, and archaeoastronomy.
Go to Profile#26429
Crispin Gardiner
#26440
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Crispin William Gardiner is a New Zealand physicist, who has worked in the fields of quantum optics, ultracold atoms and stochastic processes. He has written about 120 journal articles and several books in the fields of quantum optics, stochastic processes and ultracold atoms
Go to Profile#26430
Kenneth Judd
#26441
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Kenneth Lewis Judd is a computational economist at Stanford University, where he is the Paul H. Bauer Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1980. He is perhaps best known as the author of Numerical Methods in Economics, and he is also among the editors of the Handbook of Computational Economics and of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.
Go to Profile#26431
George W. Housner
#26442
Overall Influence
1910 - 2008 (98 years)
George W. Housner was a professor of earthquake engineering at the California Institute of Technology and National Medal of Science laureate. Biography Housner received his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Michigan where he was influenced by Stephen Timoshenko. He earned his masters' and doctoral degrees from the California Institute of Technology where he had been a professor of earthquake engineering from 1945 to 1981, and Professor Emeritus thereafter.
Go to Profile#26432
Stuart Woolf
#26443
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Stuart Joseph Woolf was an English-Italian historian. Woolf was emeritus professor of contemporary history at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where he had taught from 1996 to 2006. Prior to this he taught at the European University Institute in Florence from 1984 to 1992 and at the University of Essex where he was Foundation Professor of History beginning in 1975. He previously held appointments at the University of Reading and Pembroke College in the University of Cambridge. He also held a number of visiting appointments at European, American and Australian universities, including Colu...
Go to Profile#26433
Hu Angang
#26444
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Hu Angang is an economics professor at Tsinghua University. Hu Angang was born on 27 April 1953. He is a professor in the School of Public Policy & Management at Tsinghua University as well as Director of the Center for China Study at Tsinghua-CAS .
Go to Profile#26434
Bernie Parent
#26445
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Bernard Marcel Parent is a Canadian former professional ice hockey goaltender who played 13 National Hockey League seasons with the Philadelphia Flyers, Boston Bruins, and Toronto Maple Leafs between 1965 and 1979, and also spent one season in the World Hockey Association with the Philadelphia Blazers during the 1972–73 season. Parent is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest goaltenders of all time.
Go to Profile#26435
Jeffery D. Long
#26446
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Jeffery D. Long is a religious studies scholar who works on the religions and philosophies of India, particularly Hinduism and Jainism. He is a professor of religion and Asian studies at Elizabethtown College.
Go to Profile#26436
David Neil MacKenzie
#26447
Overall Influence
1926 - 2001 (75 years)
David Neil MacKenzie FBA was a scholar of Iranian languages. Biography Neil MacKenzie was born in London in 1926 and attended a succession of schools in Southern England. In 1943, aged 17, he enlisted in the British Army. In 1945 and 1946 he served as a soldier on the North-West Frontier Province of British India, where he learned Pashto. Thus acquainted with Iranian languages, he acquired a Bachelor's degree in New Persian and a Master's degree in Old- and Middle Persian at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. His PhD dissertation, Kurdish Dialect Studies...
Go to Profile#26437
Ruedi Aebersold
#26448
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Rudolf Aebersold is a Swiss biologist, regarded as a pioneer in the fields of proteomics and systems biology. He has primarily researched techniques for measuring proteins in complex samples, in many cases via mass spectrometry. Ruedi Aebersold is a professor of Systems biology at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology in ETH Zurich. He was one of the founders of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington, where he previously had a research group.
Go to Profile#26438
Richard Battin
#26449
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Richard "Dick" Horace Battin was an American engineer, applied mathematician and educator who led the design of the Apollo guidance computer during the Apollo missions during the 1960s. Battin was born on March 3, 1925, in Atlantic City, New Jersey to Martha Scheu and Horace L. Battin.
Go to Profile#26439
Gholamreza Aavani
#26450
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Gholamreza Aavani is an Iranian philosopher and emeritus professor of philosophy at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. A former head of the Institute for Research in Philosophy, Aavani is a member of the Academy of Sciences of Iran and a steering committee Member of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies. He has also served as the Kenan Rifai Distinguished Professor of Islamic Studies at Beijing University, China, and is currently a research fellow at Al-Mahdi Institute.
Go to Profile#26440
Jimmy Armfield
#26451
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
James Christopher Armfield, was an English professional football player and manager who latterly worked as a football pundit for BBC Radio Five Live. He played the whole of his Football League career at Blackpool, usually at right back. Between 1954 and 1971 he played 627 games in all competitions, scored six goals, and spent a decade as the club's captain. He also represented the England national team 43 times between 1959 and 1966, and captained them in 15 games. He was a member of England's 1966 World Cup-winning squad. After retiring from playing, Armfield managed Bolton Wanderers and Le...
Go to Profile#26441
William T. Miller
#26452
Overall Influence
1911 - 1998 (87 years)
William Taylor Miller was an American professor of organic chemistry at Cornell University. His experimental research included investigations into the mechanism of addition of halogens, especially fluorine, to hydrocarbons. His work focused primarily on the physical and chemical properties of fluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons, and the synthesis of novel electrophilic reagents.
Go to Profile#26442
Paul Salamunovich
#26453
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
Paul Salamunovich KCSG was a Grammy-nominated, American conductor and educator. He was the Music Director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale from 1991 to 2001 and its Music Director Emeritus from 2001 until his death in 2014. He served as Director of Music at St. Charles Borromeo Church in North Hollywood, California, for 60 years between 1949 and 2009. In addition, he held academic positions at a number of Southern California universities. He was also a master clinician, having been invited to conduct just under 1000 festivals and workshops around the world including an unprecedented four co...
Go to Profile#26443
Lionel Gossman
#26454
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Lionel Gossman was a Scottish-American scholar of French literature. He taught Romance Languages at Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University, and wrote extensively on the history, theory and practice of historiography, and on aspects of German cultural history.
Go to Profile#26444
J. Bryan Hehir
#26455
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Joseph Bryan Hehir is an American Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian in the United States. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984. Career Hehir has served as the Secretary of Health and Social Services for the Archdiocese of Boston. He was also the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government until his retirement in 2021.
Go to Profile#26445
Maarten Hajer
#26456
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Maarten Allard Hajer is a Dutch political scientist and regional planner. Since 1 October 2015, Hajer has been Faculty Professor of Urban Futures at Utrecht University, where he leads the Urban Futures Studio.
Go to Profile#26446
Tony Cohen
#26457
Overall Influence
1956 - 2017 (61 years)
Anthony Lawrence Cohen was an Australian music record producer and sound engineer. He worked with Nick Cave's groups the Birthday Party, and then the Bad Seeds from 1979 to 2001. In mid-1986 he had followed Cave to London and then onto Berlin, in January 1987, to continue to work on their material. At the ARIA Music Awards of 1994 Cohen won Producer of the Year for The Cruel Sea's second album, The Honeymoon Is Over . At the 1995 ceremony he won Producer of the Year and Engineer of the Year for the Cruel Sea's Three Legged Dog. Cohen had been a long-term alcohol and drug user, his health deteriorated in the 2010s and he died in 2017 at Dandenong Hospital, aged 60.
Go to Profile#26447
Michael Catherwood
#26458
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Michael Dwight Catherwood , also known as Psycho Mike, is an American radio personality. He is known primarily for his work at KROQ-FM on Kevin and Bean and as the co-host of Loveline from 2010 to 2016, and Neon Black podcast.
Go to Profile#26448
Ashtar Ausaf Ali
#26459
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ashtar Ausaf Ali is a Pakistani lawyer who twice served as the Attorney General for Pakistan from 2016 to 2018, and from 2022 to 2023. In his first term, he co-drafted the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan, which merged the Federally Administered Tribal Areas with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Go to Profile#26449
Miguel Benasayag
#26460
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Miguel Benasayag is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, epistemology researcher and former Franco-Argentinian Guévariste resistance fighter. He is close to the left-libertarian movement. Biography Miguel Benasayag was born in Argentina, into a family he describes as "intellectual Jews". He studied medicine in Argentina at the same time as he fought for the Guévariste guerillas.
Go to Profile#26450
Seth Roberts
#26461
Overall Influence
1953 - 2014 (61 years)
Seth Roberts was a professor of psychology at Tsinghua University in Beijing and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the author of the bestselling book The Shangri-La Diet, and a prolific blogger. He was well known for his work in self-experimentation which led to many discoveries, including his diet, multiple publications and a popular blog.
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