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
#2651
Andrew Kliman
#2654
Overall Influence
Andrew Kliman is an American economist and professor of Economics. He is the author of several publications on Marxian economics. His book Reclaiming Marx's "Capital" defends the Temporal Single System Interpretation of Karl Marx's value theory against claims of inconsistency from neoclassical, neo-Ricardian, and other economists.
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Michael Kirby
#2655
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Michael Donald Kirby is an Australian jurist and academic who is a former Justice of the High Court of Australia, serving from 1996 to 2009. He has remained active in retirement; in May 2013 he was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to lead an inquiry into human rights abuses in North Korea, which reported in February 2014.
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August Wilson
#2656
Overall Influence
1945 - 2005 (60 years)
August Wilson was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called , which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences and The Piano Lesson , both of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Joe Turner's Come and Gone . In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
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John Ousterhout
#2657
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
John Kenneth Ousterhout is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He founded Electric Cloud with John Graham-Cumming. Ousterhout was a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley where he created the Tcl scripting language and the Tk platform-independent widget toolkit, and proposed the idea of coscheduling. Ousterhout led the research group that designed the experimental Sprite operating system and the first log-structured file system. Ousterhout also led the team that developed the Magic VLSI computer-aided design program.
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Richard Schickel
#2658
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Richard Warren Schickel was an American film historian, journalist, author, documentarian, and film and literary critic. He was a film critic for Time magazine from 1965–2010, and also wrote for Life magazine and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His last writings about film were for Truthdig.
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H. T. Kung
#2659
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Hsiang-Tsung Kung is a Taiwanese-born American computer scientist. He is the William H. Gates professor of computer science at Harvard University. His early research in parallel computing produced the systolic array in 1979, which has since become a core computational component of hardware accelerators for artificial intelligence, including Google's Tensor Processing Unit . Similarly, he proposed optimistic concurrency control in 1981, now a key principle in memory and database transaction systems, including MySQL, Apache CouchDB, Google's App Engine, and Ruby on Rails. He remains an active r...
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John Gribbin
#2660
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John R. Gribbin is a British science writer, an astrophysicist, and a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. His writings include quantum physics, human evolution, climate change, global warming, the origins of the universe, and biographies of famous scientists. He also writes science fiction.
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David Gauthier
#2661
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
David Gauthier was a Canadian philosopher best known for his neo-Hobbesian social contract theory of morality, as developed in his 1986 book Morals by Agreement. Life and career David Gauthier was born in Toronto on 10 September 1932. He was educated at the University of Toronto , Harvard University , and the University of Oxford .
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Per Brinch Hansen
#2662
Overall Influence
1938 - 2007 (69 years)
Per Brinch Hansen was a Danish-American computer scientist known for his work in operating systems, concurrent programming and parallel and distributed computing. Biography Early life and education Per Brinch Hansen was born in Frederiksberg, an enclave surrounded by Copenhagen, Denmark. His father, Jørgen Brinch Hansen, worked as a civil engineer, becoming a leading expert in soil mechanics, and later accepting a professorship at Technical University of Denmark. His mother, Elsebeth Brinch Hansen , was the daughter of Danish composer Oluf Ring and worked as a hairdresser before marrying.
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Max Hastings
#2663
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings is a British journalist and military historian, who has worked as a foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph, and editor of the Evening Standard. He is also the author of thirty books, most significantly histories, which have won several major awards. Hastings currently writes a bimonthly column for Bloomberg Opinion and contributes to The Times and The Sunday Times.
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David Blackwell
#2664
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
David Harold Blackwell was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first African American full professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. In 2012, President Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the National Medal of Science.
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Tomaso Poggio
#2665
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Tomaso Armando Poggio , is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and director of both the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, a multi-institutional collaboration headquartered at the McGovern Institute since 2013.
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Hedi Slimane
#2666
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Hedi Slimane is a French photographer and grand couturier. From 2000 to 2007, he held the position of creative director for Dior Homme . From 2012 to 2016, he was the creative director for Yves Saint Laurent. Since February 1, 2018, Slimane has been the creative, artistic and image director of Celine.
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Bruno Rossi
#2667
Overall Influence
1905 - 1993 (88 years)
Bruno Benedetto Rossi was an Italian experimental physicist. He made major contributions to particle physics and the study of cosmic rays. A 1927 graduate of the University of Bologna, he became interested in cosmic rays. To study them, he invented an improved electronic coincidence circuit, and travelled to Eritrea to conduct experiments that showed that cosmic ray intensity from the West was significantly larger than that from the East.
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Terry Sejnowski
#2668
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Terrence Joseph Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the director of the Crick-Jacobs center for theoretical and computational biology. He has performed pioneering research in neural networks and computational neuroscience.
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Ralph Ellison
#2669
Overall Influence
1914 - 1994 (80 years)
Ralph Ellison was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison wrote Shadow and Act , a collection of political, social, and critical essays, and Going to the Territory . The New York Times dubbed him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus".
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May-Britt Moser
#2670
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
May-Britt Moser is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, who is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology . She and her former husband, Edvard Moser, shared half of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded for work concerning the grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, as well as several additional space-representing cell types in the same circuit that make up the positioning system in the brain. Together with Edvard Moser she established the Moser research environment at NTNU, which they lead. Since 2012 she has he...
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Roy Meadow
#2671
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Sir Samuel Roy Meadow is a British retired paediatrician infamous for facilitating several wrongful convictions of mothers for murdering their babies. He was awarded the Donald Paterson prize of the British Paediatric Association in 1968 for a study of the effects on parents of having a child in hospital. In 1977, he published an academic paper describing a phenomenon dubbed Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy . In 1980 he was awarded a professorial chair in paediatrics at St James's University Hospital, Leeds, and in 1998, he was knighted for services to child health.
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Timur Kuran
#2672
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
#2670
Aubrey de Grey
#2673
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey is an English author and biomedical gerontologist. He is the author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging and co-author of Ending Aging . He is known for his view that medical technology may enable human beings alive today not to die from age-related causes. As an amateur mathematician, he has contributed to the study of the Hadwiger–Nelson problem in geometric graph theory, making the first progress on the problem in over 60 years.
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Tom Kibble
#2674
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Sir Thomas Walter Bannerman Kibble was a British theoretical physicist, senior research investigator at the Blackett Laboratory and Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. His research interests were in quantum field theory, especially the interface between high-energy particle physics and cosmology. He is best known as one of the first to describe the Higgs mechanism, and for his research on topological defects. From the 1950s he was concerned about the nuclear arms race and from 1970 took leading roles in promoting the social responsibility of the scientist.
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Carolyn Merchant
#2675
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Carolyn Merchant is an American ecofeminist philosopher and historian of science most famous for her theory on The Death of Nature, whereby she identifies the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century as the period when science began to atomize, objectify, and dissect nature, foretelling its eventual conception as composed of inert atomic particles. Her works are important in the development of environmental history and the history of science. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Environmental History, Philosophy, and Ethics at UC Berkeley.
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George McGovern
#2676
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
George Stanley McGovern was an American historian and South Dakota politician who was a U.S. representative and three-term U.S. senator, and the Democratic Party presidential nominee in the 1972 presidential election.
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James Wood
#2677
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
James Douglas Graham Wood is an English literary critic, essayist and novelist. Wood was The Guardians chief literary critic between 1992 and 1995. He was a senior editor at The New Republic between 1995 and 2007. , he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.
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David Brinkley
#2678
Overall Influence
1920 - 2003 (83 years)
David McClure Brinkley was an American newscaster for NBC and ABC in a career lasting from 1943 to 1997. From 1956 through 1970, he co-anchored NBC's top-rated nightly news program, The Huntley–Brinkley Report, with Chet Huntley and thereafter appeared as co-anchor or commentator on its successor, NBC Nightly News, through the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, Brinkley was host of the popular Sunday This Week with David Brinkley program and a top commentator on election-night coverage for ABC News. Over the course of his career, Brinkley received ten Emmy Awards, three George Foster Peabody Aw...
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Michael Huemer
#2679
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has defended ethical intuitionism, direct realism, libertarianism, veganism, the repugnant conclusion, and philosophical anarchism.
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Jean Tinguely
#2680
Overall Influence
1925 - 1991 (66 years)
Jean Tinguely was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century. Tinguely's art satirized automation and the technological overproduction of material goods.
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John Hinckley Jr.
#2681
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
John Warnock Hinckley Jr. is an American man who attempted to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C., on March 30, 1981, two months after Reagan's first inauguration. Using a .22 caliber revolver, Hinckley wounded Reagan; police officer Thomas Delahanty; Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy; and White House Press Secretary James Brady, who was left permanently disabled and eventually died due to the extent of his injuries. Hinckley was reportedly seeking fame to impress actress Jodie Foster, with whom he had a fixation. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and remained under institutional psychiatric care for over three decades.
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Massimo Introvigne
#2682
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Massimo Introvigne is an Italian Roman Catholic sociologist of religion and intellectual property attorney. He is a founder and the managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions , a Turin-based organization which has been described as "the highest profile lobbying and information group for controversial religions".
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John Seigenthaler
#2683
Overall Influence
1927 - 2014 (87 years)
John Lawrence Seigenthaler was an American journalist, writer, and political figure. He was known as a prominent defender of First Amendment rights. Seigenthaler joined the Nashville newspaper The Tennessean in 1949, resigning in 1960 to act as Robert F. Kennedy's administrative assistant. He rejoined The Tennessean as editor in 1962, publisher in 1973, and chairman in 1982 before retiring as chairman emeritus in 1991. Seigenthaler was also the founding editorial director of USA Today from 1982 to 1991. During this period, he served on the board of directors for the American Society of Newspa...
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Eugene Parker
#2684
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Eugene Newman Parker was an American solar and plasma physicist. In the 1950s he proposed the existence of the solar wind and that the magnetic field in the outer Solar System would be in the shape of a Parker spiral, predictions that were later confirmed by spacecraft measurements. In 1987, Parker proposed the existence of nanoflares, a leading candidate to explain the coronal heating problem.
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Michael Schudson
#2685
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Michael S. Schudson is professor of journalism in the graduate school of journalism of Columbia University and adjunct professor in the department of sociology. He is professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is an expert in the fields such as journalism history, media sociology, political communication, and public culture.
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Alan MacDiarmid
#2686
Overall Influence
1927 - 2007 (80 years)
Alan Graham MacDiarmid, ONZ FRS was a New Zealand-born American chemist, and one of three recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000. Early life and education MacDiarmid was born in Masterton, New Zealand as one of five children – three brothers and two sisters. His family was relatively poor, and the Great Depression made life difficult in Masterton, due to which his family shifted to Lower Hutt, a few miles from Wellington, New Zealand. At around age ten, he developed an interest in chemistry from one of his father's old textbooks, and he taught himself from this book and from libr...
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Richard C. Atkinson
#2687
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Richard Chatham Atkinson is an American professor of psychology and cognitive science and an academic administrator. He is president emeritus of the University of California system, former chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, and former director of the National Science Foundation.
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Norodom Sihanouk
#2688
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Norodom Sihanouk was a Cambodian statesman, Sangkum and FUNCINPEC politician, film director, and composer who led Cambodia in various capacities throughout his long career, most often as both King and Prime Minister of Cambodia. In Cambodia, he is known as Samdech Euv . During his lifetime, Cambodia was under various regimes, from French colonial rule , a Japanese puppet state , an independent kingdom , a republic , the Khmer Rouge regime , a Vietnamese-backed communist regime , a transitional communist regime to eventually another kingdom .
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Nick Holonyak
#2689
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Nick Holonyak Jr. was an American engineer and educator. He is noted particularly for his 1962 invention and first demonstration of a semiconductor laser diode that emitted visible light. This device was the forerunner of the first generation of commercial light-emitting diodes . He was then working at a General Electric Company research laboratory near Syracuse, New York. He left General Electric in 1963 and returned to his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he later became John Bardeen Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics.
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Katherine Johnson
#2690
Overall Influence
1918 - 2020 (102 years)
Creola Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. During her 33-year career at NASA and its predecessor, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. The space agency noted her "historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist".
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Steve McConnell
#2691
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Steven C. McConnell is an author of software engineering textbooks such as Code Complete, Rapid Development, and Software Estimation. He is cited as an expert in software engineering and project management.
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Robert Spitzer
#2692
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Robert Leopold Spitzer was a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City. He was a major force in the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders .
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Allan Kaprow
#2693
Overall Influence
1927 - 2006 (79 years)
Allan Kaprow was an American performance artist, installation artist, painter, and assemblagist . He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings — some 200 of them — evolved over the years. Eventually Kaprow shifted his practice into what he called "Activities", intimately scaled pieces for one or several players, devoted to the study of normal human activity in a way congruent to ordinary life. Fluxus, performance art, and installation art were, in turn, influenced by his work.
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James Poniewozik
#2694
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
James Poniewozik is an American journalist and television critic. He is the chief TV critic for The New York Times. Earlier in his career, he wrote Time magazine's Tuned In column for 16 years. Early life Originally from Monroe, Michigan, Poniewozik's father was Catholic, and of Polish descent. His mother was Jewish from a Sephardi background from Morocco. Poniewozik attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, graduating with a BA in English . He subsequently attended but did not complete the graduate program in fiction writing at New York University.
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Ben Shapiro
#2695
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Benjamin Aaron Shapiro is an American lawyer, columnist, author, and conservative political commentator. Shapiro writes columns for Creators Syndicate, Newsweek, and Ami Magazine, and serves as editor emeritus for The Daily Wire, which he co-founded in 2015. Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, a daily political podcast and live radio show. He was editor-at-large of Breitbart News from 2012 until his resignation in 2016. Shapiro has authored sixteen books.
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Derek Chauvin
#2696
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Derek Michael Chauvin is an American former police officer who murdered George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Chauvin was a member of the Minneapolis Police Department from 2001 to 2020. In his career, Chauvin had 18 complaints against him on official record and was involved in three police shootings, one of which was fatal. He received two letters of reprimand for misconduct. On May 25, 2020, Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for about nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down on the street, calling out "I can't breathe", during an arrest made with three other officers.
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Akira Suzuki
#2697
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
#2695
Hosni Mubarak
#2698
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak was an Egyptian politician and military officer who served as the fourth president of Egypt from 1981 to 2011. Before he entered politics, Mubarak was a career officer in the Egyptian Air Force. He served as its commander from 1972 to 1975 and rose to the rank of air chief marshal in 1973. In 1975, he was appointed vice president by President Anwar Sadat and assumed the presidency after his assassination in 1981. Mubarak's presidency lasted almost thirty years, making him Egypt's longest-serving ruler since Muhammad Ali Pasha, who ruled the country for 43 years...
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Isaac Bashevis Singer
#2699
Overall Influence
1902 - 1991 (89 years)
Isaac Bashevis Singer was a Polish-born Jewish-American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator. Some of his works were adapted for the theater. He wrote and published first in Yiddish and later translated his own works into English with the help of editors and collaborators. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. A leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, he was awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw and one in Fiction for his collection A Cr...
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Daniel Everett
#2700
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Daniel Leonard Everett is an American linguist and author best known for his study of the Amazon basin's Pirahã people and their language. Everett is currently Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. From July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2018, Everett served as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley. Prior to Bentley University, Everett was chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. He has taught at the University of Manchester and the University of Campinas and is former chair of the ...
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Sam Simon
#2701
Overall Influence
1955 - 2015 (60 years)
Samuel Michael Simon was an American television producer and animal rights activist who co-developed the television series The Simpsons. While at Stanford University, Simon worked as a newspaper cartoonist and after graduating became a storyboard artist at Filmation Studios. Simon submitted a spec script for the sitcom Taxi, which was produced, and he later became the series' showrunner. Over the next few years, Simon wrote and produced for Cheers, It's Garry Shandling's Show and other programs, as well as writing the 1991 film The Super.
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Rupert Gethin
#2702
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Rupert Mark Lovell Gethin is Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and codirector of the Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Bristol, and president of the Pali Text Society. He holds a BA in Comparative Religion , a master's degree in Buddhist Studies , and a PhD in Buddhist Studies , all from the University of Manchester. He was appointed Lecturer in Indian Religions by the University of Bristol in 1987, and then Professor In Buddhist Studies in 2009.
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Cynthia Ozick
#2703
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. Biography Cynthia Ozick was born in New York City. The second of two children, Ozick was raised in the Bronx by her parents, Celia and William Ozick. They were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and proprietors of the Park View Pharmacy in the Pelham Bay neighborhood.
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