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
#26651
Kevin Costello
#26662
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Kevin Joseph Costello FRS is an Irish mathematician, since 2014 the Krembil Foundation's William Rowan Hamilton chair of theoretical physics at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Education Costello was educated at the University of Cambridge where he was awarded a PhD in 2003 for research on Gromov–Witten invariants supervised by Ian Grojnowski.
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Robert Desimone
#26663
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Robert Desimone is an American neuroscientist who currently serves as the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#26653
William Herbert Dray
#26664
Overall Influence
1921 - 2009 (88 years)
William Herbert Dray was a Canadian philosopher of history. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Ottawa. He is known for his version of anti-positivist Verstehen in history, in Laws and Explanation in History, and his work on R. G. Collingwood.
Go to Profile#26654
David Matsumoto
#26665
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
David Matsumoto is an author, psychologist and judoka. His areas of expertise include culture, emotion, facial expressions, nonverbal behavior and microexpressions. He has published over 400 articles, manuscripts, book chapters and books on these subjects. Matsumoto is a professor at San Francisco State University and also the director of Humintell - a company that provides "unique training in the fields of facial expression of emotion, nonverbal behavior, detecting deception and cultural adaptation." In addition, he is an 8th degree black belt in judo and the founder and program advisor of the East Bay Judo Institute in El Cerrito, California.
Go to Profile#26655
Megan Thee Stallion
#26666
Overall Influence
1995 - Present (31 years)
Megan Jovon Ruth Pete , known professionally as Megan Thee Stallion , is an American rapper. Originally from Houston, Texas, she first garnered attention when videos of her freestyling became popular on social media platforms such as Instagram. She signed with 300 Entertainment in 2018, where she would achieve her mainstream breakthrough in the following year with the release of her singles: "Hot Girl Summer" and "Cash Shit" ; the former peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 while the latter became certified quadruple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America . The latt...
Go to Profile#26656
Alan Feduccia
#26667
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
John Alan Feduccia is a paleornithologist specializing in the origins and phylogeny of birds. He is S. K. Heninger Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina. Feduccia's authored works include three major books, The Age of Birds, The Origin and Evolution of Birds, Riddle of the Feathered Dragons, and many peer-reviewed papers in ornithological and biological journals.
Go to Profile#26657
Edward Slingerland
#26668
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Edward Slingerland is a Canadian-American sinologist and philosopher. He is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he also holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Asian Studies. His research interests include early Chinese thought, comparative religion and cognitive science of religion, big data approaches to cultural analysis, cognitive linguistics, digital humanities, and humanities-science integration.
Go to Profile#26658
Tommy Thompson
#26669
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Tommy George Thompson is an American politician who served as the 19th United States secretary of Health and Human Services from 2001 to 2005 in the cabinet of President George W. Bush. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as the 42nd governor of Wisconsin from 1987 to 2001 and as the Republican leader of the Wisconsin State Assembly from 1981 to 1987.
Go to Profile#26659
Verlyn Klinkenborg
#26670
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Verlyn Klinkenborg is an American non-fiction author, academic, and former newspaper editor, known for his writings on rural America. Early life and education Klinkenborg was born in Meeker, Colorado and raised on a farm in Iowa. He attended elementary school in Clarion, Iowa until the 6th grade before his family relocated to Osage, Iowa. His family then moved to Sacramento, California.
Go to Profile#26660
Warner T. Koiter
#26671
Overall Influence
1914 - 1997 (83 years)
Warner Tjardus Koiter was an influential mechanical engineer and the Professor of Applied Mechanics at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands from 1949 to 1979. Life and education Warner Tjardus Koiter was born in Amsterdam. After primary and secondary education, he enrolled into Delft University of Technology in 1931, graduating with honours as a mechanical engineer in 1936.
Go to Profile#26661
Michael R. Rose
#26672
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Michael R. Rose is a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. Michael Roberson Rose was born on July 25, 1955. He obtained his B.S. in 1975 from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In 1976 he obtained his M.S.. In 1978 he obtained his Ph.D from the University of Sussex.
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Makan Delrahim
#26673
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Makan Delrahim is an Iranian-American attorney and lobbyist. From 2017 to 2021, Delrahim served under President Donald Trump as Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division.
Go to Profile#26663
Boris Nuraliev
#26674
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Boris Georgievich Nuraliev — is a Soviet and Russian entrepreneur, billionaire, one of the founders of the 1C company and scientist, who heads the «Corporate Information Systems» department at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the «1С» specialised department at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics.
Go to Profile#26664
Roger Haight
#26675
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Roger Haight is an American Jesuit theologian and former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He is regarded as a knowledgeable and pioneering theologian, whose experiences with censorship have led to widespread debate over how to handle controversial ideas in the Catholic church today.
Go to Profile#26665
Gary Sheffield
#26676
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Gary Antonian Sheffield is an American former professional baseball outfielder who played in Major League Baseball for eight teams from 1988 to 2009. In retirement he is a sports agent. For most of his career, Sheffield played right field, though he has also played left field, third base, shortstop, and a handful of games at first base. He played for the Milwaukee Brewers, San Diego Padres, Florida Marlins, Los Angeles Dodgers, Atlanta Braves, New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers, and the New York Mets. Sheffield was a first-round pick of the Brewers, who selected him sixth overall in the amateur draft after a standout prep career at Hillsborough High School in Tampa, Florida.
Go to Profile#26666
Robert Elegant
#26677
Overall Influence
1928 - 2023 (95 years)
Robert Sampson Elegant was an American-British author and journalist. He spent many years in Asia as a journalist. The Asian settings of all but one of his novels reflect that experience. He covered both the Korean and the Vietnam Wars, as well as four or five lesser conflicts. One of his last novels, Cry Peace, is centered on the Korean War.
Go to Profile#26667
Elizabeth Solopova
#26678
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Elizabeth Solopova is a Russian-British philologist and medievalist undertaking research at New College, Oxford. She is known outside academic circles for her work on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings.
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Bernard T. Feld
#26679
Overall Influence
1919 - 1993 (74 years)
Bernard Taub Feld was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He helped develop the atomic bomb, and later led an international movement among scientists to banish nuclear weapons.
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Barbara Olshansky
#26680
Overall Influence
Barbara Olshansky is an American human rights lawyer. The Case for Impeachment Olshansky is author with Dave Lindorff of The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office.
Go to Profile#26670
Arindam Chakrabarti
#26681
Overall Influence
Arindam Chakrabarti is, currently, a visiting professor of philosophy at Ashoka University, India. He is, also, a professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University, where he has been since 2018. Prior to moving to Stony Brook, Chakrabarti taught at the University of Hawaii, where he was the director of the EPOCH Project .
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Jaap van den Herik
#26682
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Hendrik Jacob van den Herik is a Dutch computer scientist, and professor at the University of Leiden, known for his contribution in the fields of computer chess and artificial intelligence. Biography Van den Herik studied mathematics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he obtained his MA in 1974, cum laude. In 1983 he obtained his PhD with the thesis, entitled "Computer Chess, chess and artificial intelligence", under supervision of Henk Lombaers, Adriaan de Groot and Joop Doorman.
Go to Profile#26672
Avel·lí Corma Canós
#26683
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Prof. Dr. Avel·lí Corma i Canós is a Valencian chemist distinguished for his world-leading work on heterogeneous catalysis. He received a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of València and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 1976. In 1979 he started working as a researcher at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, and in 1987 he was a full professor. He has been carrying out research in heterogeneous catalysis in academia and in collaboration with companies. He has worked on fundamental aspects of acid-base and redox catalysis with the aim of understanding the nature of the active sites and reaction mechanisms.
Go to Profile#26673
Andrzej Bogusławski
#26684
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Andrzej Stanisław Bogusławski is a Polish philologist, semanticist, semioticist and philosopher of language of international repute. Originally a specialist in Russian language, his interests broadened into the epistemology of language and linguistics.
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Kevin De Bruyne
#26685
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Kevin De Bruyne is a Belgian professional footballer who plays as a midfielder for and captains both club Manchester City and the Belgium national team. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest players of his generation as well as one of the best midfielders in the world. Pundits have described him as a complete footballer.
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Antoine Joux
#26686
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Antoine Joux is a French cryptographer, one of the three 2013 Gödel Prize laureates., specifically cited for his paper A one round protocol for tripartite Diffie-Hellman. He was at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and researcher in the CRYPT team of the laboratory of computer science PRISM of CNRS, currently he is Chair of Cryptology of the Fondation partenariale of UPMC, professeur associé at the Laboratoire d'informatique de Paris 6, and Senior Crypto-Security Expert at CryptoExperts.
Go to Profile#26676
Christine Todd Whitman
#26687
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Christine Temple Whitman is an American politician and author who served as the 50th governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 and as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003. , Whitman is the only woman to have served as governor of New Jersey.
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Philip Baldi
#26688
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Philip Baldi is an American linguist and classical scholar specializing in Indo-European studies. He is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Classics at Pennsylvania State University. Biography Baldi was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1946. He received his B.A. from the University of Scranton in Classics in 1968, his M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Rochester in 1971 and 1973, respectively. He was appointed Professor of Linguistics and Classics at Pennsylvania State University in 1981. Baldi specializes in Indo-European studies, on which he is the author of numerous bo...
Go to Profile#26678
Luís Lindley Cintra
#26689
Overall Influence
1925 - 1991 (66 years)
Luís Filipe Lindley Cintra was a prominent figure in Portuguese philology and linguistics. A prolific writer with over 80 published works. Another special interest was the relationship between Galician and Portuguese, as evinced by his study of the dialects of Madeira and his plan, together with Manuel de Paiva Boléo and José G. Herculano de Carvalho, for a linguistic-ethnographic atlas of Portugal and Galicia . He is also co-author, with Celso Ferreira da Cunha, of a major work on Portuguese grammar, the Nova Gramática do Português Contemporâneo.
Go to Profile#26679
H. F. C. Smith
#26690
Overall Influence
Abdullahi Smith was a scholar of West African history and culture. He was particularly interested in Arab influence in Nigeria. Professor Smith was the first Director of Arewa House personally picked by its founder Ahmadu Bello.
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Bernd Girod
#26691
Overall Influence
Bernd Girod is a German-American engineer, the Robert L. and Audrey S. Hancock Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Girod is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Education and Career Girod received his M.S. in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and his Dr.-Ing in electrical engineering from the University of Hannover, Germany .
Go to Profile#26681
Rami Grossberg
#26692
Overall Influence
Rami Grossberg is a full professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University and works in model theory. Work Grossberg's work in the past few years has revolved around the classification theory of non-elementary classes. In particular, he has provided, in joint work with Monica VanDieren, a proof of an upward "Morley's Categoricity Theorem" for Abstract Elementary Classes with the amalgamation property, that are tame. In another work with VanDieren, they also initiated the study of tame Abstract Elementary Classes. Tameness is both a crucial technical property in categoricity transfer pro...
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Nalo Hopkinson
#26693
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor. Her novels – Brown Girl in the Ring , Midnight Robber , The Salt Roads , The New Moon's Arms – and short stories such as those in her collection Skin Folk often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling.
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James M. Redfield
#26694
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
James M. Redfield is the Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. He has made numerous contributions to current scholarship on Homer and Herodotus, probably the most notable of which is his book, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector , an anthropological reading of the Iliad with the stated goal of analyzing Hector's role in the work.
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Calvin Plimpton
#26695
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Calvin Hastings Plimpton was an American physician and educator, who served as president of Amherst College and American University of Beirut. He is known for appointing a commission in 1970 whose findings resulted in the admission of women to Amherst in 1975.
Go to Profile#26685
Ferguson Jenkins
#26696
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Ferguson Arthur "Fergie" Jenkins CM is a Canadian former professional baseball pitcher and coach. He played Major League Baseball from 1965 to 1983 for the Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago Cubs, Texas Rangers and Boston Red Sox.
Go to Profile#26686
Margarita Zhukova
#26697
Overall Influence
1929 - 2010 (81 years)
Margarita Georgievna Zhukova was a Soviet and Russian educator and scientist. She was also a member of the Russian Union of Journalists and wrote many publications about her father, Marshal Georgy Zhukov.
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Catherine Hakim
#26698
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Catherine Hakim is a British sociologist who specialises in women's employment and women's issues. She is known for developing the preference theory, for her work on erotic capital and more recently for a sex-deficit theory. She is currently a professorial research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Civil Society , and has formerly worked in British central government and been a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics and the Centre for Policy Studies. She has also been a visiting professor at the Social Science Research Center Berlin.
Go to Profile#26688
Johnny Winter
#26699
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
John Dawson Winter III was an American singer, guitarist, songwriter and record producer. Winter was known for his high-energy blues rock albums, live performances and slide guitar playing from the late 1960s into the early 2000s. He also produced three Grammy Award-winning albums for blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. After his time with Waters, Winter recorded several Grammy-nominated blues albums. In 1988, he was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and in 2003, he was ranked 63rd in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
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Zayn Malik
#26700
Overall Influence
1993 - Present (33 years)
Zain Javadd Malik , known professionally as Zayn Malik or simply Zayn, is a British singer. Malik auditioned as a solo contestant for the British music competition television series The X Factor in 2010. After being eliminated, he was brought back to the competition to form the five-piece boy band One Direction, which went on to become one of the best-selling boy bands of all time. He left the group in March 2015 and signed a solo recording contract with RCA Records.
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Robert Hunter
#26701
Overall Influence
1941 - 2005 (64 years)
Robert Lorne Hunter was a Canadian environmentalist, journalist, author and politician. He was a member of the Don't Make a Wave Committee in 1969, and a co-founder of Greenpeace in 1971 and its first president. He led the first on-sea anti-whaling campaigns in the world, against Russian and Australian whalers, which helped lead to the ban on commercial whaling. He campaigned against nuclear testing, the Canadian seal hunt and later, climate change with his book Thermageddon: Countdown to 2030. He was named by Time as one of the "Eco-Heroes" of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#26691
Ron Rivera
#26702
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Ronald Eugene Rivera is an American football head coach for the Washington Commanders of the National Football League . He attended the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1980s, where he was recognized as an All-American linebacker for the Golden Bears. Following graduation, he was drafted by the Chicago Bears in the second round of the 1984 NFL Draft and played nine seasons with them, including as a member of the 1985 team that won Super Bowl XX.
Go to Profile#26692
Shu-Park Chan
#26703
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
Shu-Park Chan was a Chinese-born electrical engineer who served for many years as a professor at Santa Clara University and went on to found International Technological University and serve as its first president.
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Kathryn Tanner
#26704
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Kathryn Eileen Tanner is an American theologian who serves as Frederick Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. Biography Born on March 29, 1957, Tanner earned her BA, MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Yale University. Her career began at Yale by teaching for the department of religious studies. She later moved to the University of Chicago where she served as the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology. Afterwards, she returned to teach at her alma mater.
Go to Profile#26694
Raymond B. Huey
#26705
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Raymond Brunson Huey is a biologist specializing in evolutionary physiology. He has taught at the University of Washington , and he earned his Ph.D. in biology at Harvard University under E. E. Williams. He has recently been the chair of the UW Department of Biology, but a retirement celebration was held on 4 Oct. 2013 in Seattle.
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Steven E. Brenner
#26706
Overall Influence
Steven Elliot Brenner is a professor at the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California Berkeley, adjunct professor at the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, and San Francisco Faculty scientist, Physical Biosciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Go to Profile#26696
Harold Cruse
#26707
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Harold Wright Cruse was an American academic who was a social critic and teacher of African American studies at the University of Michigan until the mid-1980s. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is his best-known book.
Go to Profile#26697
John Speakman
#26708
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
John Roger Speakman is a British biologist working at the University of Aberdeen, Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, for which he was Director from 2007 to 2011. He leads the University's Energetics Research Group, which is one of the world's leading groups using doubly labeled water to investigate energy expenditure and balance in animals. Between 2011-2020, he was a '1000 talents' Professor at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, China, where he ran the molecular energetics group. In 2020 he moved to the Shenzhen I...
Go to Profile#26698
Gita Steiner-Khamsi
#26709
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Gita Steiner-Khamsi is a Professor of Comparative and International Education at Teachers College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Harriman Institute, Columbia University in New York.
Go to Profile#26699
M. T. Cheng
#26710
Overall Influence
1917 - 1998 (81 years)
M. T. Cheng or Cheng Minde was a Chinese mathematician. He was the main founder of Peking University Mathematical Research Institute, and longtime head of the Department of Mathematics of Peking University.
Go to Profile#26700
Nguyễn Cao Kỳ
#26711
Overall Influence
1930 - 2011 (81 years)
Nguyễn Cao Kỳ was a South Vietnamese military officer and politician who served as the chief of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force in the 1960s, before leading the nation as the prime minister of South Vietnam in a military junta from 1965 to 1967. Then, until his retirement from politics in 1971, he served as vice president to bitter rival General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, in a nominally civilian administration.
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