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
#26501
Pete Best
#26512
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Randolph Peter Best is an English musician who was the drummer for The Beatles from 1960 to 1962. He was dismissed immediately prior to the band achieving worldwide fame and is one of several people who have been referred to as a fifth Beatle.
Go to Profile#26502
Lisa Sauermann
#26513
Overall Influence
1992 - Present (34 years)
Lisa Sauermann is a mathematician from Germany known for her performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad, where in 2011 she had the single highest score. She won four gold medals and one silver medal at the olympiad, representing Germany.
Go to Profile#26503
Ann Hamilton
#26514
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ann Hamilton is an American visual artist who emerged in the early 1980s known for her large-scale multimedia installations. After receiving her BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979, she lived in Banff, Alberta, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada before deciding to pursue an MFA in sculpture at Yale in 1983. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. She was appointed a Distinguished University Professor in 2011.
Go to Profile#26504
Giandomenico Majone
#26515
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Giandomenico Majone was an Italian scholar of political science whose expertise was regulatory governance within the European Union as well as theories of delegation and their effect on the perceived democratic deficit of the EU. He was an Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
Go to Profile#26505
Kate Stith
#26516
Overall Influence
Kate Stith, also known as Kate Stith-Cabranes, is the Lafayette S. Foster Professor of Law and the former acting dean of Yale Law School. Her appointment was announced on March 23, 2009, by Yale University President Richard Levin, when former dean Harold Koh was nominated to serve as Legal Adviser of the Department of State. Stith is a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Go to Profile#26506
Jurij Toplak
#26517
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Jurij Toplak is a constitutional scholar, university administrator, election law, and human rights expert. He is a recurring visiting professor at the Fordham University School of Law in New York. Since 2016, he has served as the provost and vice-president of the Alma Mater Europaea university. The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe published his legal comments.
Go to Profile#26507
Joel Silver
#26518
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Joel Silver is an American film producer. Life and career Silver was born and raised in South Orange, New Jersey, the son of a writer and a public relations executive. His family is Jewish. He attended Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. During his time there, Silver, Buzzy Hellring and Jonny Hines created the rules for what he called "Ultimate Frisbee". He was later inducted into the USA Ultimate Hall of Fame as a result of this. He finished his undergraduate studies at the New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Go to Profile#26508
Roberta Romano
#26519
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Roberta Romano is Sterling Professor of Law at the Yale Law School. She is the first woman at Yale Law School to be named a Sterling Professor. Roberta Romano joined the Yale Law School faculty as a professor of law in 1985. She was named the Allen Duffy/Class of 1960 Professor of Law in 1991 and the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Professor of Law in 2005. She is Director of the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law and Professor at the Yale School of Management.
Go to Profile#26509
Zoe Pikramenou
#26520
Overall Influence
Zoe Pikramenou is Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and Photophysics at the University of Birmingham, where she is the first female professor in the chemistry department. Education and career Pikramenou graduated in 1987 with a B.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Athens in Greece. She then moved to Michigan State University where she worked in the lab of Daniel G. Nocera, graduating with a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1993. She then conducted post-doctoral studies at University of Strasbourg in France as a Marie Curie and Collège de France fellow working with Nobel prize-winner Jean-Marie Lehn. ...
Go to Profile#26510
John M. Hobson
#26521
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
John Montagu Hobson, FBA is a political scientist, international relations scholar and academic. Since 2005, he has been Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield.
Go to Profile#26511
Jarkko Nieminen
#26522
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Jarkko Kalervo Nieminen is a Finnish former professional tennis player. His highest ranking of world No. 13, achieved in July 2006, is a Finnish record. He has won two ATP singles titles and five doubles titles in his career. His best performances in Grand Slam tournaments have been reaching the quarterfinals of the 2005 US Open, the 2006 Wimbledon Championships, and the 2008 Australian Open.
Go to Profile#26512
Karim Adiprasito
#26523
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Karim Alexander Adiprasito is a German mathematician working at the University of Copenhagen and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who works in combinatorics. He completed his Ph.D. in 2013 at Free University Berlin under the supervision of Günter M. Ziegler. He has been a professor at the Hebrew University since 2015, and at the University of Copenhagen since 2019. He is of German and Indonesian descent, and bears an Indonesian surname.
Go to Profile#26513
Mick Doohan
#26524
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Michael Sydney Doohan is an Australian former Grand Prix motorcycle road racing World Champion, who won five consecutive 500 cc World Championships. Biography Originally from the Gold Coast, Queensland, Doohan attended St Joseph's College, Gregory Terrace and Aspley State High School, Brisbane. He raced in Australian Superbikes in the late 1980s, and also won both races as Superbike World Championship visited Oran Park in as well as the second leg of the Japanese round held earlier in the year. In a break-out season he also won the final Australian motorcycle Grand Prix to be held in the TT...
Go to Profile#26514
Marc McGinnes
#26525
Overall Influence
J. Marc McGinnes is an environmental leader, lawyer, and educator. He became a public interest environmental lawyer and led the founding of the Community Environmental Council and the Environmental Defense Center .
Go to Profile#26515
Bill Kovacs
#26526
Overall Influence
1949 - 2006 (57 years)
Bill Kovacs was a pioneer of commercial computer animation technology. Early career Kovacs received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 1971. He worked for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill while getting a Masters of Environmental Design from Yale University . He was then transferred to the Chicago Office, where he worked on a computer-aided design system.
Go to Profile#26516
Marcelo Ríos
#26527
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Marcelo Andrés Ríos Mayorga is a Chilean former world No. 1 tennis player. He became the first Latin American player to reach the top position on the Association of Tennis Professionals singles rankings in March 1998, holding the spot for six weeks. He also held the top ranking in juniors. At , Ríos is the shortest man to hold the number 1 ranking in men's tennis.
Go to Profile#26517
Susan M. Ervin-Tripp
#26528
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Susan Moore Ervin-Tripp was an American linguist whose psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research focused on the relation between language use and the development of linguistic forms, especially the developmental changes and structure of interpersonal talk among children.
Go to Profile#26518
Sadaharu Oh
#26529
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sadaharu Oh , also known as Wang Chen-chih , is a Japanese-born former baseball player and manager who is currently the chairman of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of Nippon Professional Baseball. Oh holds the world lifetime home run record, having hit 868 home runs during his professional career. He established many NPB batting records, including runs batted in , slugging percentage , bases on balls , and on-base plus slugging percentage . In 1977, Oh became the first recipient of the People's Honour Award. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994.
Go to Profile#26519
Enrico Letta
#26530
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Enrico Letta is an Italian politician who served as Prime Minister of Italy from April 2013 to February 2014, leading a grand coalition of centre-left and centre-right parties. He was the leader of the Democratic Party from March 2021 to March 2023.
Go to Profile#26520
Aoife McLysaght
#26531
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Aoife McLysaght is an Irish geneticist and a professor in the Molecular Evolution Laboratory of the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. Education McLysaght was educated at the Trinity College Dublin where she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Genetics in 1998, followed by a PhD in 2002 for research supervised by Kenneth H. Wolfe on the evolution of vertebrate genome organisation.
Go to Profile#26521
Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller
#26532
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller is a Mexican writer, journalist, researcher, and the wife of the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Personal life and education Gutiérrez Müller was born in Mexico City, the daughter of Juan Gutiérrez Canet and Nora Beatriz Müller Bentjerodt, a German Chilean. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in communications from the Ibero-American University Puebla in 1998, with her thesis Regulación del uso de los medios de comunicación en leyes electorales federales . She also graduated with a master's degree from the same university in 2002 with her thesis El arte de la memoria en la Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España .
Go to Profile#26522
Marc Sautet
#26533
Overall Influence
1947 - 1998 (51 years)
Marc Sautet was a French writer, teacher, translator , and philosopher. He was a Doctor of Philosophy at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Sautet was a former Trotskyist who however edited two books on the German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche. Marc Sautet emphasised that Nietzsche was a precursor of his time.
Go to Profile#26523
Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands
#26534
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Willem-Alexander is King of the Netherlands, having acceded to the throne following his mother's abdication in 2013. Willem-Alexander was born in Utrecht as the eldest child of Princess Beatrix and German diplomat Claus van Amsberg. He became Prince of Orange as heir apparent upon his mother's accession as Queen on , and succeeded her following her abdication on . He went to public primary and secondary schools in the Netherlands, an international sixth-form college in Wales, served in the Royal Netherlands Navy, and studied history at Leiden University. He married Máxima Zorreguieta Cerruti ...
Go to Profile#26524
Jenson Button
#26535
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Jenson Alexander Lyons Button is a British racing driver. He won the 2009 Formula One World Championship when he drove for the Brawn GP team. After his F1 career, he became champion of the 2018 season of the Super GT Series alongside Naoki Yamamoto, with whom he shared a Honda racing car at Team Kunimitsu. He currently competes part-time in the NASCAR Cup Series, driving the No. 15 Ford Mustang for Rick Ware Racing with support from Stewart-Haas Racing and sponsorship from Mobil 1.
Go to Profile#26525
Marilyn Durham
#26536
Overall Influence
1930 - 2015 (85 years)
Marilyn Durham was an American author of fiction. Her best-known novel is her first, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing, which was made into a film of the same name. Early life Durham was born in Evansville, Indiana, in 1930, to Russell and Stacy Birdsall Wall. Her father was an L&N blacksmith. Durham attended Evansville College for a year . She married Kilburn Durham, a field representative for Social Security, in November 1950, and settled into life as a wife and mother and self-described "frumpy housewife." The Durhams had two daughters, Elaine and Jennifer. Durham had a lifelong interest in t...
Go to Profile#26526
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
#26537
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , also known by her initials AOC, is an American politician and activist. She has served as the U.S. representative for New York's 14th congressional district since 2019, as a member of the Democratic Party.
Go to Profile#26527
Asifa Akhtar
#26538
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Asifa Akhtar is a Pakistani biologist who has made significant contributions to the field of chromosome regulation. She is Senior Group Leader and Director of the Department of Chromatin Regulation at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics. Akhtar was awarded EMBO membership in 2013. She became the first international and female Vice President of the Max Planck Society's Biology and Medicine Section in July 2020.
Go to Profile#26528
John G. West
#26539
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
John G. West is a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute , and associate director and vice president for public policy and legal affairs of its Center for Science and Culture , which serves as the main hub of the pseudoscientific Intelligent design movement.
Go to Profile#26529
Paul Rabinowitz
#26540
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Paul H. Rabinowitz is the Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics and a Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received a Ph.D. from New York University in 1966 under the direction of Jürgen Moser. From 1966 to 1969 he held a position as assistant professor at Stanford University. He has visited many mathematical institutions all over the world . In 1978 Paul Rabinowitz became a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Go to Profile#26530
Rosemary M. Collyer
#26541
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Rosemary Mayers Collyer is an inactive Senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and a former judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Go to Profile#26531
Luther Christman
#26542
Overall Influence
1915 - 2011 (96 years)
Luther Parmalee Christman was an American nurse, professor of nursing, university administrator and advocate for gender and racial diversity in nursing. His career included service with the Michigan Department of Mental Health and academic posts at the University of Michigan, Vanderbilt University and Rush University. In 1967, Christman became the first man to hold the position of dean at a nursing school.
Go to Profile#26532
Kevin J. Murphy
#26543
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Kevin James Murphy is a professor at the University of Southern California. Since 2006, Murphy has held the Kenneth L. Trefftzs Chair in Finance at the USC Marshall School of Business. He is also a Professor of Law at the USC Gould School of Law and Professor of Economics at USC's College of Letters, Arts & Science.
Go to Profile#26533
Manuel García Pelayo
#26544
Overall Influence
1909 - 1991 (82 years)
Manuel García Pelayo , prominent Spanish political scientist and jurist. He was the founder of the modern Department of Political Science of the Central University of Venezuela and was elected President of the Constitutional Court of Spain in 1980.
Go to Profile#26534
Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle
#26545
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Eduardo Alfredo Juan Bernardo Frei Ruiz–Tagle is a Chilean politician and civil engineer who served as president of Chile from 1994 to 2000. He was also a Senator, fulfilling the role of President of the Senate from 2006 to 2008. He attempted a comeback as the candidate of the ruling Concertación coalition for the 2009 presidential election, but was narrowly defeated. His father was Eduardo Frei Montalva, president of Chile from 1964 to 1970.
Go to Profile#26535
Gabriela Soto Laveaga
#26546
Overall Influence
Gabriela Soto Laveaga is a historian of science specializing in Latin America. She is currently a professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Background She received her B.A. from California State University, Dominguez Hills; her M.A. and doctorate in history from University of California, San Diego, with Eric Van Young as her mentor. Before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2016, she earned tenure in the history department at the University of California, Santa Barbara ; and was assistant professor of history at Michigan State University . From 2019 to 2020, she was member a...
Go to Profile#26536
David Ellefson
#26547
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
David Warren Ellefson is an American musician, best known for his long tenure as the bassist for thrash metal band Megadeth. Ellefson initially became an accomplished bassist and honed his songwriting skills while leading several of his own bands through the club scene of North America's Midwest region before relocating to Los Angeles. He was then the bassist of Megadeth from 1983 to their breakup in 2002, and again from 2010 to 2021.
Go to Profile#26537
Marc Davis
#26548
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Marc Davis is an American professor of astronomy and physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Davis received his bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, his Ph.D from Princeton University in 1973 and has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He taught for a year at Princeton, 1973–74, then was on the astronomy faculty at Harvard from 1975 to 1981. Since 1981, he has been on the faculty of the Department of Astronomy and Physics at the University of California at Berkeley.
Go to Profile#26538
Dave Sexton
#26549
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
David James Sexton was an English football manager and player. He was notable for managing Chelsea to their first ever major European trophy. Playing career Son of former professional boxer Archie Sexton, he started his professional career with Luton Town in 1951, following spells with non-league clubs Newmarket Town and Chelmsford City. Playing mainly at inside-forward, he would finish his career with time at West Ham United, Leyton Orient, Brighton and Hove Albion, and Crystal Palace. His biggest success came at Brighton, where he won the Third Division Title in 1957–58.
Go to Profile#26539
David Avis
#26550
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
David Michael Avis is a Canadian and British computer scientist known for his contributions to geometric computations. Avis is a professor in computational geometry and applied mathematics in the School of Computer Science, McGill University, in Montreal. Since 2010, he belongs to Department of Communications and Computer Engineering, School of Informatics, Kyoto University.
Go to Profile#26540
Adam Heller
#26551
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Adam Heller is an Israeli American scientist and engineer. He is Chief Science Officer of SynAgile Corp. of Wilson, Wyoming, consults to Abbott Diabetes Care of Alameda, California, and is Ernest Cockrell Sr. Chair Emeritus of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. His 1973 paper with James J. Auborn established the feasibility of high energy density, high-voltage, non-rechargeable lithium batteries. Their 3.6-volt lithium thionyl chloride and 3.7-volt lithium sulfuryl chloride batteries remain in use in applications requiring very high energy density and a shelf life of 20 years o...
Go to Profile#26541
Wafik El-Deiry
#26552
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Wafik El-Deiry is an American physician and cancer researcher who is the Associate Dean for Oncologic Sciences at the Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University, Director of the Cancer Center at Brown University, and the Director of the Joint Program in Cancer Biology at Brown University and its affiliated hospitals. He was previously deputy director of Translational Research at Fox Chase Cancer Center, where he was also co-Leader of the Molecular Therapeutics Program.
Go to Profile#26542
Dani Alves
#26553
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Daniel Alves da Silva is a Brazilian professional footballer who last played as a right-back for Liga MX club UNAM. Widely considered one of the greatest full-backs of all time, Alves is the joint-most decorated player in the history of professional football, together with Lionel Messi .
Go to Profile#26543
Elmer G. Gilbert
#26554
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Elmer Grant Gilbert was an American aerospace engineer and a Professor Emeritus of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in Instrumentation Engineering from Michigan in 1957.
Go to Profile#26544
Les Claypool
#26555
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Leslie Edward Claypool is an American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, filmmaker, and author. He is best known as the founder, lead singer, bassist, and primary songwriter of the band Primus since its formation in 1984. Frequently considered to be one of the greatest bassists of all time, his playing style is well known for mixing tapping, flamenco-like strumming, whammy bar bends, and slapping.
Go to Profile#26545
Valerie Plame
#26556
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Valerie Elise Plame is an American writer, spy novelist, and former Central Intelligence Agency officer. As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as a CIA officer was leaked to and subsequently published by Robert Novak of The Washington Post. She described this period and the media firestorm that ensued as "mortifying, and I think I was in shock for a couple years".
Go to Profile#26546
Barbara Sahakian
#26557
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, is professor of clinical neuropsychology at the department of psychiatry and Medical Research Council /Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge. She is also an honorary clinical psychologist at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge. She has an international reputation in the fields of cognitive psychopharmacology, neuroethics, neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry and neuroimaging.
Go to Profile#26547
Jimmy Barnes
#26558
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
James Dixon Barnes is a Scottish-born Australian rock singer. His career, both as a solo performer and as the lead vocalist with the rock band Cold Chisel, has made him one of the most popular and best-selling Australian music artists of all time.
Go to Profile#26548
Scott Wittman
#26559
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Scott Wittman is an American director, lyricist, composer and writer for Broadway, concerts, and television. Life and career Wittman was raised in Nanuet, New York, graduated from Nanuet Senior High School in 1972 and attended Emerson College in Boston for two years before leaving to pursue a career in musical theatre in New York City. While directing a show for a Greenwich Village club he met songwriter and composer Marc Shaiman, and the two became collaborators and professional partners. While Shaiman wrote for television shows, including Saturday Night Live, Wittman directed concerts for su...
Go to Profile#26549
Ralf Reski
#26560
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Ralf Reski is a German professor of plant biotechnology and former dean of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Freiburg. He is also affiliated to the French École supérieure de biotechnologie Strasbourg and Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.
Go to Profile#26550
Morten Olsen
#26561
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Morten Per Olsen is a Danish football manager and former player. He was the head coach of the Denmark national team for 15 years from 2000 until 2015, guiding Denmark to the 2002 FIFA World Cup, 2004 European Championship, 2010 FIFA World Cup and 2012 European Championship. He has also managed Brøndby to two Danish Superliga championships and Ajax to the Double of the 1998 Eredivisie championship and Dutch Cup trophy. He is one of only two persons ever in football, alongside Didier Deschamps, to achieve 100 national matches for his country both as player as well as coach.
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