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
#26751
Stephen Barr
#26762
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Stephen Matthew Barr is an American physicist who is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Delaware. A member of its Bartol Research Institute, Barr does research in theoretical particle physics and cosmology. In 2011, he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, the citation reading "for original contributions to grand unified theories, CP violation, and baryogenesis."
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Matti Kuusi
#26763
Overall Influence
1914 - 1998 (84 years)
Matti Akseli Kuusi was a Finnish folklorist, paremiographer and paremiologist. He wrote several books and a number of articles on Finnish folklore. He was the first to have introduced the type system of proverbs similar to the Aarne–Thompson classification system of folklore, the Matti Kuusi international type system of proverbs. With encouragement from Archer Taylor he founded the journal Proverbium: Bulletin d'Information sur les Recherches Parémiologiques, published from 1965 to 1975 by the Society for Finnish Literature, which was later restarted as Proverbium: International Yearbook of Proverb Scholarship.
Go to Profile#26753
David Thewlis
#26764
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
David Wheeler , better known as David Thewlis , is an English actor and filmmaker. He is known as a character actor and has appeared in a wide variety of genres in both film and television. He has received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor and nominations for two BAFTA Awards, Golden Globe Award, Primetime Emmy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Go to Profile#26754
Marcella Alsan
#26765
Overall Influence
Marcella Alsan is an infectious disease physician and an applied microeconomist studying health inequality. She is currently a professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and was previously an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University. She uses randomized evaluations and historical public health natural experiments to study how infectious disease, human capital, and economic outcomes interact. She has studied the effects of the Tuskegee Syphills Experiment on health care utilization and mortality among Black men. Alsan was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.
Go to Profile#26755
Heidi Julavits
#26766
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and was a founding editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Culture+Travel, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace , The Effect of Living Backwards , The Uses of Enchantment , and The Vanishers . She is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.
Go to Profile#26756
Andrzej Jeż
#26767
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Andrzej Jeż is a Polish Roman Catholic bishop, being the bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tarnów since 2012. He was previously the auxiliary bishop of Tarnów and titular bishop of Tigillava from 2009 to 2012.
Go to Profile#26757
David J. Stevenson
#26768
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
David John Stevenson is a professor of planetary science at Caltech. Originally from New Zealand, he received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in physics, where he proposed a model for the interior of Jupiter. He is well known for applying fluid mechanics and magnetohydrodynamics to understand the internal structure and evolution of planets and moons.
Go to Profile#26758
Benoît Paire
#26769
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (37 years)
Benoît Paire is a French professional tennis player. His best result in a Grand Slam has been reaching the fourth round, which he has achieved on four occasions. He has won three singles titles, at the 2015 Swedish Open, the 2019 Marrakesh Open and the 2019 Lyon Open, and his career-high singles ranking is World No. 18, first achieved in January 2016. He has a career-high ranking of World No. 65 in doubles achieved on 15 November 2021.
Go to Profile#26759
Brian Billick
#26770
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Brian Harold Billick is an American former football coach and commentator. He was the offensive coordinator for the Minnesota Vikings from 1994 to 1998; the team broke the NFL scoring record in the 1998 season. He then spent nine seasons as head coach of the Baltimore Ravens from January 19, 1999 to December 31, 2007.
Go to Profile#26760
Désiré Collen
#26771
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Désiré, Baron Collen is a Belgian physician, chemist, biotechnology entrepreneur and life science investor. He made several discoveries in thrombosis, haemostasis and vascular biology in many of which serendipity played a significant role. His main achievement has been his role in the development of tissue-type plasminogen activator from a laboratory concept to a life-saving drug for dissolving blood clots causing acute myocardial infarction or acute ischemic stroke. Recombinant t-PA was produced and marketed by Genentech Inc as Activase and by Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH as Actilyse, and is c...
Go to Profile#26761
Jonathan St B. T. Evans
#26772
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jonathan St B. T. Evans is a British cognitive psychologist, currently Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Plymouth. In 1975, with Peter Wason, Evans proposed one of the first dual-process theories of reasoning, an idea later developed and popularized by Daniel Kahneman. In a 2011 Festschrift, Evans' peers described him as "one of the most influential figures in the psychology of human reasoning".
Go to Profile#26762
Rudolf Grimm
#26773
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Rudolf Grimm is an experimental physicist from Austria. His work centres on ultracold atoms and quantum gases. He was the first scientist worldwide who, with his team, succeeded in realizing a Bose–Einstein condensation of molecules.
Go to Profile#26763
Bryan Singer
#26774
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Bryan Jay Singer is an American filmmaker. He is the founder of Bad Hat Harry Productions and has produced almost all of the films he has directed. After graduating from the University of Southern California, Singer directed his first short film, Lion's Den . On the basis of that film, he received financing for his next film, Public Access , which was a co-winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. In the mid-1990s, Singer received critical acclaim for directing the neo-noir crime thriller The Usual Suspects . He followed this with another thriller, Apt Pupil , an adaptation of a Stephen King novella about a boy's fascination with a Nazi war criminal.
Go to Profile#26764
Chris Byrd
#26775
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Christopher Cornelius Byrd is an American former professional boxer who competed from 1993 to 2009. He is a two-time world heavyweight champion, having first won the WBO title in 2000 after an upset corner stoppage over then-undefeated Vitali Klitschko. In his first title defense later that year, he lost to Vitali's brother Wladimir Klitschko. In 2002, Byrd defeated Evander Holyfield to win the IBF heavyweight title for his second reign as world champion. He made four successful defenses until losing his title again to Wladimir Klitschko in a 2006 rematch. He was ranked by BoxRec as the world...
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P. N. Furbank
#26776
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Philip Nicholas Furbank FRSL was an English biographer, critic and academic. His most significant biography was the well-received life of his friend E. M. Forster. Career After Reigate Grammar School, Furbank entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. After graduating with a First in English, he served in the army. He became a corporal in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and was in Italy in 1945. He returned to Emmanuel as a teaching Fellow in 1947. While in Cambridge Furbank became a close friend of the novelist E. M. Forster, and also of the mathematician Alan Turing, whose literar...
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Sheikha Abdulla Al-Misnad
#26777
Overall Influence
Sheikha Abdulla Al-Misnad is a Qatari academic who has occupied numerous positions in teaching, administration, and research for over three decades. She assumed presidency of Qatar University in 2003 serving to 2015 replaced by Hassan Rashid Al-Derham. Before assuming presidency, she served the university as Vice President for Research and Community Development , Head of the Department of Foundations of Education , and as a member of the University Council .
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Lou van den Dries
#26778
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Laurentius Petrus Dignus "Lou" van den Dries is a Dutch mathematician working in model theory. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Education Van den Dries began his undergraduate studies in 1969 at Utrecht University, and in 1978 completed his PhD there under the supervision of Dirk van Dalen with a dissertation entitled Model Theory of Fields.
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Jacques Bidet
#26779
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Jacques Bidet is a French philosopher and social theorist who is currently professor emeritus in the Philosophy Department at the Université de Paris X - Nanterre. His works are mainly devoted to the construction of a theory of modern society under the name of Meta/structural theory . Modern nation-states, as elements of world system, are structured on both market and organisation, supposedly rational mediations, as co-implied class factors. The philosophical, sociological, historical, legal-political and cultural aspects of this paradigm are developed in the sense of an Altermarxism, by cont...
Go to Profile#26769
Barry Bergdoll
#26780
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of art history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and from 2007 to 2019 a curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where from 2007 to 2013 he served as Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. He serves, since 2018, as President of the Board of the Center for Architecture in New York City and a member of the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury since 2019.
Go to Profile#26770
L. Gregory Jones
#26781
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Lorentz Gregory Jones is an American theologian and academic administrator who is currently the President of Belmont University, serving since June 2021. He was previously the executive vice president and provost of Baylor University and Dean of the Duke Divinity School at Duke University. He also formerly served as vice president and vice provost for global strategy and programs at Duke University . He is also A. Morris and Ruth W. Williams distinguished professor of theology in the Duke Divinity School. In addition, he serves as senior fellow for Leadership Education at Duke Divinity, and senior fellow at the Fuqua-Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics.
Go to Profile#26771
Edward Fudge
#26782
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Edward William Fudge was an American Christian theologian and lawyer, best known for his book The Fire That Consumes in which he argues for an annihilationist Biblical interpretation of Hell. He has been called "one of the foremost scholars on hell" by The Christian Post. He is the subject of the 2012 independent film Hell and Mr. Fudge.
Go to Profile#26772
David Bell
#26783
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Sir David Robert Bell is a public policy analyst who is Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of the University of Sunderland. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading for six years. Prior to that, he was Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education and its predecessor departments from January 2006 until 2012. Before that he was Chief Inspector of Schools at the Office for Standards in Education from 2002.
Go to Profile#26773
Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson
#26784
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Hannes Hólmsteinn Gissurarson is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Iceland and a frequent commentator on current affairs in the Icelandic media. He is best known as a staunch spokesman for free market policies, and for neoliberalism or classical liberalism, as well as for his frequent climate change denial.
Go to Profile#26774
Sam Hocevar
#26785
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Samuel Hocevar is a French software and video game developer. He was the project leader of the Debian operating system from 17 April 2007 to 16 April 2008, and one of the founding members of Goatse Security.
Go to Profile#26775
Yve-Alain Bois
#26786
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Yve-Alain Bois is a professor of Art History at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Education Bois received an M.A. from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1973 for his work on El Lissitzky's typography, and a Ph.D. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1977 for his work on Lissitzky's and Malevich's conceptions of space. Both of his degrees were supervised under Roland Barthes.
Go to Profile#26776
Geoffrey Boycott
#26787
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sir Geoffrey Boycott is a former Test cricketer, who played cricket for Yorkshire and England. In a prolific and sometimes controversial playing career from 1962 to 1986, Boycott established himself as one of England's most successful opening batsmen, a dogged grafter.
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Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley
#26788
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley is an American religious studies scholar and historian of religion known for her work on Mandaeism and Gnosticism. She was a former Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College. She is known for translating the Scroll of Exalted Kingship and other Mandaean texts, as well as for her various books on the Mandaean religion and people.
Go to Profile#26778
Gregory S. Forbes
#26789
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Gregory Stanley Forbes is The Weather Channel's long-time severe weather expert and has a significant research background in the areas of severe convective storms and tornadoes. Born and raised near Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Forbes earned a B.S. degree in meteorology at Pennsylvania State University . He studied tornadoes and severe thunderstorms at the University of Chicago, where he obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. There, Forbes studied under tornado scientist Ted Fujita and his thesis was regarding the 1974 Super Outbreak where he and Fujita did aerial and ground investigations documenting tornado paths and furthering ideas of the tornado family and of multiple-vortex tornadoes.
Go to Profile#26779
Robin Marshall
#26790
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Robin Marshall is an Emeritus professor of Physics & Biology in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester. He currently lives in the village of Castillon-du-Gard in the region of Occitanie, where he writes and paints.
Go to Profile#26780
Kiki Bertens
#26791
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Kiki Bertens is a Dutch former professional tennis player. Her career-high WTA singles ranking was world No. 4, which she reached on 13 May 2019, becoming the highest ranked Dutch female player ever. Her career-high doubles ranking of world No. 16, she achieved in April 2018. She won ten singles and ten doubles titles on the WTA Tour including 2018 Cincinnati Open and 2019 Madrid Open. Bertens was widely regarded as a clay court specialist, but also was successful on hardcourt.
Go to Profile#26781
Marilyn Kozak
#26792
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Marilyn S. Kozak is an American professor of biochemistry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. She was previously at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey before the school was merged. She was awarded a PhD in microbiology by Johns Hopkins University studying the synthesis of the Bacteriophage MS2, advised by Daniel Nathans. In her original faculty job proposal, she sought to study the mechanism of eukaryotic translation initiation, a problem long thought to have already been solved by Joan Steitz. While in the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Pittsbu...
Go to Profile#26782
Hugo Weaving
#26793
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Hugo Wallace Weaving is a British actor. He is the recipient of six Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards and has also been recognised as an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia. Born in Colonial Nigeria to English parents, he has resided in Australia for the entirety of his career.
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Huguette Clark
#26794
Overall Influence
1906 - 2011 (105 years)
Huguette Marcelle Clark was an American painter, heiress, and philanthropist, who became well known again late in life as a recluse, living in hospitals for more than 20 years while her various mansions remained unoccupied.
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Christian Gouriéroux
#26795
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Christian Gouriéroux is an econometrician who holds a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics from the University of Rouen. He has the Professor exceptional level title from France. Gouriéroux is now a professor at University of Toronto and CREST, Paris [Center for Research in Economics and Statistics].
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Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger
#26796
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger FBA is a German historian. She mainly researches the early modern period and has held the chair for early modern history at the University of Münster. Stollberg-Rilinger is one of the leading representatives of research that examines the constitutional history of the Holy Roman Empire on the basis of symbolic-ritual forms of communication. Her work on rituals, symbolic communication and ceremonial influenced research on the exercise of power in the pre-modern era.
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Meg Russell
#26797
Overall Influence
Meg Russell is a constitutional scholar of British politics. She is Professor of British and Comparative Politics at University College London. Biography Russell worked in the House of Commons and for the British Labour Party before taking up a role with UCL at the Constitution Unit. In 2006 she was awarded the Richard Rose Prize from the Political Studies Association. She has served as an advisor to the Select Committee on Reform of the House of Commons and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee. Russell is a senior fellow at the UK in a Changing Europe research institute and an Associate of the Institute for Government.
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Kurt Mandelbaum
#26798
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Kurt Mandelbaum was a German-British economist well known for his pioneering contribution in the field of the economics of development. Kurt Mandelbaum was one of a group of emigre economists from Central Europe who played a large role in founding the discipline of development economics in the UK, during and shortly after World War II. In general these economists doubted the usefulness of neoclassical economics with its presumptions of smoothly operating markets and saw the role of the state as being key to the development process. The industrialization debates in the USSR in the 1920s were their starting point.
Go to Profile#26788
Rachel Harrison
#26799
Overall Influence
Rachel Harrison is a British computer scientist and software engineer whose research interests include mobile apps and object-oriented design. She is a professor of computer science at Oxford Brookes University.
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Ron Harper
#26800
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Ronald Harper Sr. is an American former professional basketball player. He played for four teams in the National Basketball Association between 1986 and 2001 and is a five-time NBA champion. Early life Ronald Harper Sr. was born on January 20, 1964, in Dayton, Ohio. Harper and his twin brother were the youngest of six children raised in a single-parent household by their mother. She worked several jobs to support the family, including as a school teacher and on an assembly line at a General Motors plant.
Go to Profile#26790
Shay Given
#26801
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Séamus John James Given is an Irish former professional footballer who played as a goalkeeper. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Irish goalkeepers of all time. With 134 caps, he is the second-highest capped Republic of Ireland player.
Go to Profile#26791
Tom Kirkwood
#26802
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Thomas Burton Loram Kirkwood CBE FMedSci is an English biologist who made his contribution to the biology of ageing by proposing the disposable soma theory of aging. He is currently a researcher and Associate Dean for Ageing in Newcastle University and he headed the Institute for Ageing and Health in its school of clinical medical sciences. He is the author of Time of Our Lives: The Science of Human Aging , The End of Age: Why Everything About Aging Is Changing , and co-author of Chance, Development, and Aging . In 2001 he gave the annual Reith Lectures.
Go to Profile#26792
M. Elizabeth Cannon
#26803
Overall Influence
Margaret Elizabeth Cannon is a Canadian engineer specializing in geomatics engineering and president Emerita of the University of Calgary. From 2010 to 2018, she served as the university's eighth president and vice-chancellor, the first alumna to hold that position.
Go to Profile#26793
Kurt Baldinger
#26804
Overall Influence
1919 - 2007 (88 years)
Kurt Baldinger was a Swiss linguist and philologist who made important contributions to Romance studies in the Gallo-Romanic and Ibero-Romanic branches, with works of lexicography, historical linguistics, etymology and semantics.
Go to Profile#26794
Jean Dalibard
#26805
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Jean Dalibard is a French physicist, Professor at the École Polytechnique, member of the French Academy of Sciences and a researcher at the École Normale Supérieure. In 2009, Dalibard received the Blaise Pascal medal of the European Academy of Sciences for "his outstanding and influential works in atomic physics and quantum optics". In 2012, he received the Max Born Award and Davisson–Germer Prize. He was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 2018. In 2020, he was honoured to be an international member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#26795
Alan Torrance
#26806
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Alan Torrance is professor of systematic theology at St Mary's College of the University of St Andrews. Previously he lectured at King's College London from 1993–1998, where he was also Director of the Research Institute in Systematic Theology. During this time he served as Senior Research Fellow at the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame. He previously lectured at Knox Theological Hall and the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Go to Profile#26796
Tetsuya Mizuguchi
#26807
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Tetsuya Mizuguchi is a Japanese video game designer, producer, and businessman. Along with ex-Sega developers he is one of the co-founders of the video game development firm Q Entertainment. He formerly worked for Sega as a producer in their Sega AM3 'arcade machines' team, developing games like Sega Rally Championship and Sega Touring Car Championship, before moving on to become the head of Sega's United Game Artists division, the team responsible for Rez and Space Channel 5. Mizuguchi is better known for creating video games that incorporate interactive synesthesia into his game design, rega...
Go to Profile#26797
Robert McRuer
#26808
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Robert McRuer is an American theorist who has contributed to fields in transnational queer and disability studies. McRuer is known as being one of the founding scholars involved in forming the field of queer disability studies, particularly for a theoretical outlook known as crip theory. He is currently professor of English at The George Washington University in Washington, DC.
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Marion M. Bradford
#26809
Overall Influence
1946 - 2021 (75 years)
Marion Mckinley Bradford was an American scientist who developed and patented the Bradford protein assay, a method to quickly quantify the amount of protein in a sample. His paper describing the method is among the most cited scholarly articles of all time.
Go to Profile#26799
Richard Hunt
#26810
Overall Influence
1951 - 1992 (41 years)
Richard Hunt was an American puppeteer, best known as a Muppet performer on Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, and other projects for The Jim Henson Company. His roles on The Muppet Show included Scooter, Statler, Janice, Beaker, and Sweetums and characters on Sesame Street include Gladys the Cow, Don Music, and Forgetful Jones.
Go to Profile#26800
Agnès Barthélémy
#26811
Overall Influence
Agnès Barthélémy is a French physicist. She is an expert on nanostructures. She is a professor at Université Paris-Sud and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Education and career Agnès Barthélémy received her PhD in 1991 from Université Paris-Sud, where she worked under the supervision of Albert Fert.
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