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
#26551
Robert M. Chanock
#26562
Overall Influence
1924 - 2010 (86 years)
Robert Merritt Chanock was an American pediatrician and virologist who made major contributions to the prevention and treatment of childhood respiratory infections in more than 50 years spent at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Go to Profile#26552
Matti Klinge
#26563
Overall Influence
1936 - 2023 (87 years)
Matti Klinge was a Finnish historian. Klinge studied at the University of Helsinki and gained his Ph.D. in 1969. He later served as a visiting professor at the University of Paris and held the Swedish Professorship of History at the University of Helsinki between 1975 and 2001. Klinge was one of the most prolific Finnish historians.
Go to Profile#26553
Peter Likins
#26564
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Peter William Likins was president of the University of Arizona from 1997 until his retirement in summer 2006. Previous posts in order of most recent were:President of Lehigh UniversityProvost for professional schools at Columbia University,Dean of Columbia's engineering school.At each of these universities, Likins was a professor of engineering.
Go to Profile#26554
K. K. Talwar
#26565
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Kewal Kishan Talwar is an Indian cardiologist, medical academic and writer, and a former chairman of the Medical Council of India. He is a former director of the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research and is reported to have performed the first implantation of Implantable cardioverter-defibrillator therapy in South Asia. He is also credited with the introduction of Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy in India. He is a recipient of several honours including B. C. Roy Award, the highest Indian award in the medical category. The Government of India awarded him the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan, in 2006, for his contributions to medicine.
Go to Profile#26555
David Sidorsky
#26566
Overall Influence
1927 - 2021 (94 years)
David Sidorsky was an American professor emeritus of philosophy, who joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1959. Background David Sidorsky was born on July 7, 1925, in Calgary, Alberta, after his Zionist parents emigrated from Lithuania. He received a BA in 1948 and MA in 1954 from New York University. He received his doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in 1962. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on "The Nature of Disagreement in Social Philosophy: Four Criticisms of Liberalism."
Go to Profile#26556
Penny Sackett
#26567
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Penny Diane Sackett is an American-born Australian astronomer and former director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University . Professor Sackett was the Chief Scientist of Australia from November 2008 until March 2011.
Go to Profile#26557
Espen Aarseth
#26568
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Espen J. Aarseth is a Norwegian academic specializing in the fields of video game studies and electronic literature. Aarseth completed his doctorate at the University of Bergen. He co-founded the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen, and worked there until 2003, at which time he was a full professor.
Go to Profile#26558
Yuri Pivovarov
#26569
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Yuri Sergeyevich Pivovarov is a historian and political scientist, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and since 1998, the Director of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#26559
Hu Xingdou
#26570
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Hu Xingdou is a Chinese economist. He is a professor of economics at Beijing Institute of Technology, and is the founder of China Studies as well as various schools and 100 teaching posts and business management to guide the work of graduate students.
Go to Profile#26560
Philip J. Reny
#26571
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Philip J. Reny is the Hugo F. Sonnenschein Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and in the college at the University of Chicago. Reny is known as an economic theorist and perhaps is best known for the textbook Advanced microeconomic theory written jointly with Geoffrey A. Jehle. He is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and was the Head Editor of Journal of Political Economy. In 1996, Reny became a fellow of the Econometric Society. He has also been a charter member of the Game Theory Society since 1999, and a fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic ...
Go to Profile#26561
Reid Miles
#26572
Overall Influence
1927 - 1993 (66 years)
Reid Miles was an American graphic designer and photographer best known for his work for Blue Note Records in the 1950s and 1960s. Biography Miles was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 4, 1927, but, following the Stock Market Crash and the separation of his parents, moved with his mother to Long Beach, California, in 1929.
Go to Profile#26562
Jan van Bemmel
#26573
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Jan H. van Bemmel is a Dutch former professor of medical informatics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He was rector magnificus of the Erasmus University Rotterdam between 2000 and 2003.
Go to Profile#26563
Robert Ghrist
#26574
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Robert W. Ghrist is an American mathematician, known for his work on topological methods in applied mathematics. Life and Work Ghrist received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Toledo in 1991, and in 1994 his master's degree and in 1995 his PhD from Cornell University under Philip Holmes with thesis The link of periodic orbits of a flow. From 1996 to 1998, he was R. H. Bing Instructor at the University of Texas and from 1998 an assistant professor and then from 2002 an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2002 he became an associate professor and in 2004 a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Go to Profile#26564
Natalie Kononenko
#26575
Overall Influence
Natalie Kononenko is a professor of folklore currently with the University of Alberta. Kononenko is a major contributor to the study of Ukrainian Blind Minstrels as well as in the area of witchcraft in Slavic cultures. She currently holds the Peter and Doris Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography and is the head of the Slavic and East European section of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies. She attended Radcliffe College and Harvard University.
Go to Profile#26565
Matt Sorum
#26576
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Matthew William Sorum is an American drummer. He is best known as both a former member of the hard rock band Guns N' Roses, with whom he recorded three studio albums, and as a member of the supergroup Velvet Revolver. Sorum is currently on tour with Billy Gibbons, with whom he also records, is a member of the touring project Kings of Chaos, and is a former member of both The Cult and Y Kant Tori Read. Sorum was also a member of Guns N' Roses side projects, Slash's Snakepit and Neurotic Outsiders, and has released two solo albums, Hollywood Zen and Stratosphere . He was the touring drummer for the supergroup Hollywood Vampires from 2015 to 2017.
Go to Profile#26566
Kaoru Hasuike
#26577
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
is a Japanese citizen who was abducted by North Korean spies along with his girlfriend Yukiko Okudo. They were abducted from their hometown of Kashiwazaki in Niigata prefecture on July 19, 1978. Hasuike was a law student at the time. During their captivity, in May 1980, Hasuike and Okudo were married. They had two children: a daughter, Shigeyo, and a son, Katsuya. On October 15, 2002, the North Korean government allowed Hasuike, Okudo and other victims to leave North Korea to visit Japan. Once there, Hasuike and Okudo decided to remain in Japan and to plead for the release of their children, ...
Go to Profile#26567
Margaret Murphy
#26578
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Margaret Murphy is a British crime writer. Biography Margaret Murphy was born and brought up in Liverpool, Lancashire where she gained a degree in Environmental Biology at the University of Liverpool and later an MA with Distinction in Writing at Liverpool JMU, a course on which she lectured for several years. She has been a countryside ranger, science teacher, dyslexia specialist and psychology student. After a string of successful stand-alone novels and a duology featuring Chester-based lawyer, Clara Pascal, Murphy began her first series with The Dispossessed which was followed by Now You See Me, featuring detectives Jeff Rickman, Lee Foster and Naomi Hart.
Go to Profile#26568
Dan Devine
#26579
Overall Influence
1924 - 2002 (78 years)
Daniel John Devine was an American football player and coach. He served as the head football coach at Arizona State University from 1955 to 1957, the University of Missouri from 1958 to 1970, and the University of Notre Dame from 1975 to 1980, compiling a career college football mark of 173–56–9. Devine was also the head coach of the National Football League 's Green Bay Packers from 1971 to 1974, tallying a mark of 25–27–4. His 1977 Notre Dame team won a national championship after beating Texas in the Cotton Bowl. Devine was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1985...
Go to Profile#26569
Leanne Hinton
#26580
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Leanne Hinton is an American linguist and emerita professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. Education and career Hinton received her PhD in 1977 from UC San Diego, with a dissertation entitled "Havasupai songs: a linguistic perspective," written under the supervision of Margaret Langdon. After joining the Berkeley faculty in 1978, Hinton began working with California languages.
Go to Profile#26570
Pedro de la Rosa
#26581
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Pedro Martínez de la Rosa is a Spanish former Formula One driver who has participated in 107 Grands Prix for the Arrows, Jaguar, McLaren, Sauber and HRT teams. He made his Formula One debut on 7 March 1999, becoming one of seventy-eight drivers to score a point in his first race. He has scored a total of 35 championship points, which includes a podium finish at the 2006 Hungarian Grand Prix.
Go to Profile#26571
Jaap Kruithof
#26582
Overall Influence
1929 - 2009 (80 years)
Jaap Kruithof was a Belgian philosopher and writer. His parents were Dutch Protestants. He took degrees in history, law and philosophy in Ghent, and in Paris. Then he earned a Ph.D. on Hegel's ontology, with honours. Since the 1960s he was, along with Etienne Vermeersch and Leo Apostel, one of the icons of the Ghent University and the Flemish intelligentsia in general. He was also a musician and taught the sociology of music at the Royal Music Conservatory in Antwerp.
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Janet Nelson
#26583
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Dame Janet Laughland Nelson , also known as Jinty Nelson, is a British historian. She is Emerita Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. Early life Born on 28 March 1942 in Blackpool, Nelson was educated at Keswick School, Cumbria, and at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she received her BA degree in 1964 and her PhD degree in 1967.
Go to Profile#26573
Gary Namie
#26584
Overall Influence
Gary Namie is a social psychologist and anti-workplace bullying activist. He is the co-founder and director of the Workplace Bullying Institute, and is widely regarded as North America's foremost authority on the topic of workplace bullying.
Go to Profile#26574
Joan Birman
#26585
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Joan Sylvia Lyttle Birman is an American mathematician, specializing in low-dimensional topology. She has made contributions to the study of knots, 3-manifolds, mapping class groups of surfaces, geometric group theory, contact structures and dynamical systems. Birman is research professor emerita at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she has been since 1973.
Go to Profile#26575
André Guichaoua
#26586
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
André Guichaoua is a French sociologist and former expert witness for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He has been described by Scott Straus as "a leading scholar of Rwanda and the Habyarimana period".
Go to Profile#26576
Shamnad Basheer
#26587
Overall Influence
1976 - 2019 (43 years)
Shamnad Basheer was an Indian legal scholar and founder of the blog SpicyIP. He was also the founder of IDIA, a trust which works on making legal education accessible for underprivileged students. Basheer was a Ministry of Human Resource Development Chaired Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the WBNUJS, Kolkata, and the Frank H. Marks Visiting Associate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the George Washington University Law School, and a research associate at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Center . He founded several initiatives such as SpicyIP, IDIA, P-PIL and Lex Biosis.
Go to Profile#26577
Nigel Kalton
#26588
Overall Influence
1946 - 2010 (64 years)
Nigel John Kalton was a British-American mathematician, known for his contributions to functional analysis. Career Kalton was born in Bromley and educated at Dulwich College, where he excelled at both mathematics and chess. After studying mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, he received his PhD, which was awarded the Rayleigh Prize for research excellence, from Cambridge University in 1970. He then held positions at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, Warwick, Swansea, University of Illinois, and Michigan State University, before becoming full professor at the University of Missouri, Col...
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Mark Philippoussis
#26589
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Mark Anthony Philippoussis is an Australian tennis coach and former professional tennis player of Greek and Italian descent. Philippoussis' greatest achievements are winning two Davis Cup titles with Australia in 1999 and 2003, winning the deciding rubber in the final of each. He also reached the final of the 1998 US Open and the 2003 Wimbledon singles tournaments. Philippoussis reached a career-high singles ranking of world No. 8.
Go to Profile#26579
Bronwen Maddox
#26590
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Bronwen Maria Maddox is a former journalist who has served as the director and CEO of think tank Chatham House since August 2022. Prior to this, she was the Director of the Institute for Government between 2016 and 2022. Maddox is also a former foreign editor of The Times newspaper and editor of current affairs magazine Prospect.
Go to Profile#26580
Peter Lerche
#26591
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Peter Lerche was a German jurist. Between 1964 and 1996 he held a chair for constitutional law at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His research interests also included media law. Born in Leitmeritz, Sudetenland, Lerche studied law at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, earning his Habilitation in 1958 under supervision of Theodor Maunz. He accepted a chair at the Free University of Berlin in 1961, before joining the faculty at LMU in 1964.
Go to Profile#26581
Muhammad Abdel-Haleem
#26592
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Muhammad A. S. Abdel Haleem , , is an Egyptian Islamic studies scholar and the King Fahd Professor of Islamic Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in London, England. He is the editor of the Journal of Qur'anic Studies.
Go to Profile#26582
Jennifer Finney Boylan
#26593
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Jennifer Finney Boylan is a bestselling author, transgender activist, professor at Barnard College, and a former contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is a vice president of PEN America.
Go to Profile#26583
Tomasz Kitliński
#26594
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Tomasz Kitliński is a Polish political philosopher, cultural and social analyst, and civic activist. He is a lecturer and trade unionist at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University and an author of books , articles, petitions and letters of protest. In his research and teaching, he deals with contemporary society, culture and politics, intellectual history, literary and critical theory, art practice, religious studies and social anthropology. In his activism, he champions women's, LGBT, labour and refugee rights and participation.
Go to Profile#26584
Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani
#26595
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Ahmad Mahdavi Damghani was an Iranian scholar and university professor. Biography Born in Mashhad, Iran, on 5 September 1926, he held a Ph.D. in Persian Literature and a Ph.D. in Islamic Theology from Tehran University, where he was a professor at the School of Literature and at the School of Theology between 1962 and 1985. Beginning in 1987, he taught Islamic sciences, Islamic literature, advanced Arabic and Persian Sufi texts, and Islamic philosophy at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Mahdavi Damghani also taught at the Autonomous University of Madrid for three years.
Go to Profile#26585
Stephen Merchant
#26596
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Stephen James Merchant is an English comedian, actor, director, and writer. Alongside Ricky Gervais, Merchant was the co-writer and co-director of the British TV comedy series The Office , and co-writer, co-director, and co-star of both Extras and Life's Too Short . With Gervais and Karl Pilkington, he hosted The Ricky Gervais Show in its radio, podcast, audiobook, and television formats; the radio version won a bronze Sony Award. He also provided the voice of the robotic "Intelligence Dampening Sphere" Wheatley in the 2011 video game Portal 2. Merchant co-developed the Sky One travel docume...
Go to Profile#26586
Jorge Gardea-Torresdey
#26597
Overall Influence
Jorge Gardea-Torresdey is a Mexican-American chemist and academic. He is the Dudley Professor of Chemistry and Environmental Science and Engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso . In 2002, he led a team that discovered the ability of alfalfa to take up gold from soil and to store it in the form of nanoparticles.
Go to Profile#26587
Andrea Moro
#26598
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Andrea Carlo Moro is an Italian linguist, neuroscientist and novelist. He is currently full professor of general linguistics at the Institute for Advanced Study IUSS Pavia, Italy, founder and former director of NeTS and of the Department of Cognitive Behavioural and Social Sciences. He studied at the university of Pavia for his laurea, then he got a Ph.D. at the university of padua; he has been visiting scientist for several times at MIT, first with a Fulbright grant, then at Harvard. He was professor of at the University of Bologna and at the Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele. He is member...
Go to Profile#26588
Daniel H. Wilson
#26599
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Daniel H. Wilson is a New York Times bestselling author, television host and robotics engineer. He currently resides in Portland, Oregon. His books include the award-winning humor titles How to Survive a Robot Uprising, Where's My Jetpack? and How to Build a Robot Army and the bestseller Robopocalypse.
Go to Profile#26589
Rodolfo Dirzo
#26600
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Rodolfo Dirzo is a professor, conservationist, and tropical ecologist. He is a Bing Professor in environmental science at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. His research interests mainly focus on plant-animal interactions, evolutionary ecology, and defaunation in the tropics of Latin America, Africa, and the Central Pacific. He was a member of the Committee on A Conceptual Framework for New K-12 Science Education Standards, co-authoring the framework in 2012, and continues to educate local communities and young people about science and environment...
Go to Profile#26590
Malcolm Slaney
#26601
Overall Influence
Malcolm Slaney is an American electrical engineer, whose research has focused on machine perception and multimedia analysis. He is a Fellow of the IEEE for "contributions to perceptual signal processing and tomographic imaging". He is a consulting professor at the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics and an affiliate faculty member in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#26591
George Newlands
#26602
Overall Influence
George McLeod Newlands is a Scottish theologian widely published in the fields of modern systematic theology, Christology, emancipatory theology, and the history of Christian thought. He is Emeritus Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, and served as Chair of the Theology, Divinity & Religious Studies panel of the UK's 2008 Research Assessment Exercise and as President of the Society for the Study of Theology for 2013–14.
Go to Profile#26592
Scott Plous
#26603
Overall Influence
Scott Plous is an American academic social psychologist. He is currently a Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University and Executive Director of Social Psychology Network. Early life and education Scott Plous was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He attended college at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and earned his PhD in social psychology at Stanford University, where he also completed a MacArthur Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in International Peace and Cooperation. His doctoral advisor at Stanford was Philip Zimbardo.
Go to Profile#26593
Anthony Bebbington
#26604
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Anthony Bebbington is a geographer, International Director for Natural Resources and Climate Change at the Ford Foundation and Higgins Professor of Environment and Society in the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, USA . He was previously ARC Laureate Professor at the School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia .
Go to Profile#26594
Cathy Caruth
#26605
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Cathy Caruth is Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, where she holds appointments in the departments of Literatures in English and Comparative Literature. After graduating cum laude from Princeton University, she received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale. Before coming to Cornell, she taught at Yale, then Emory, where she developed an archive of Holocaust testimony, co-organized a national interdisciplinary conference on trauma, and significantly expanded the graduate program in Comparative Literature.
Go to Profile#26595
Lynne Viola
#26606
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Lynne Viola is a scholar on the Soviet Union. She is a professor at the University of Toronto and has written four books and 30 articles. Early life Raised in Nutley, New Jersey, she graduated from Nutley High School in 1973.
Go to Profile#26596
Lotika Sarkar
#26607
Overall Influence
1923 - 2013 (90 years)
Lotika Sarkar was a noted Indian feminist, social worker, educator and lawyer, who was a pioneer in the field of women's studies and women's rights in India. She was a founding member of Centre for Women's Development Studies , Delhi, established in 1980, and also Indian Association for Women Studies, established in 1982. Starting in 1951, she taught law at Faculty of Law, University of Delhi till 1983, and also remained the head of the law faculty; thereafter she taught at Indian Law Institute. She was the first Indian woman to graduate from Cambridge University, and later in 1951 she also b...
Go to Profile#26597
Richard Restak
#26608
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Richard Restak is an American neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, author and professor. Education Restak is a graduate of Gettysburg College and Georgetown University School of Medicine. He performed his postgraduate training in New York City at St. Vincent's Hospital , where he completed his internship. His first psychiatric residency was also in New York City at Mount Sinai Hospital. This was followed by two residencies in Washington, D.C.: a psychiatric residency at Georgetown University Hospital and a residency in neurology at George Washington University Hospital.
Go to Profile#26598
Dave Lombardo
#26609
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
David Lombardo is a Cuban-American drummer, best known as a co-founding member of American thrash metal band Slayer. He currently plays drums with Fantômas, Dead Cross, Mr. Bungle, Empire State Bastard, and Misfits.
Go to Profile#26599
MS Dhoni
#26610
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Mahendra Singh Dhoni is an Indian professional cricketer, who plays as a wicket-keeper-batsman. Widely regarded as one of the world's greatest wicket-keeper-batsmen and captains in the history of the sport, he is known for his explosive batting, wicket-keeping and leadership skills. He was the captain of the Indian national team in limited-overs formats from 2007 to 2017 and in Test cricket from 2008 to 2014. Dhoni is the first cricketer to be a winning captain of all three major ICC trophies, as under his captaincy, India won the 2007 ICC World Twenty20, the 2011 Cricket World Cup, and the 2013 ICC Champions Trophy, the most by any captain.
Go to Profile#26600
DJ Kool Herc
#26611
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Clive Campbell , better known by his stage name DJ Kool Herc, is a Jamaican American DJ who is a pioneer of hip hop music in the Bronx, New York City, in the 1970s. Nicknamed the Father of Hip-Hop, Campbell began playing hard funk records of the sort typified by James Brown.
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