Search People Result | Academic Influence

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

#27351

Suraj N. Gupta

#27362

Overall Influence

1924 - Present (102 years)

Suraj Narayan Gupta was an Indian-born American theoretical physicist, notable for his contributions to quantum field theory. Early life and career was born on 1 December 1924 in Punjab, British India. He received his M.Sc. from St. Stephen's College, Delhi, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and worked at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies from 1948 to 1949. From 1951 to 1953 he served as ICI Fellow at the University of Manchester. In 1953 Gupta joined as a visiting professor at Purdue University and remained there until 1956. From 1956, he served as a professor at Wayne St...

#27352

John C. Stennis

#27363

Overall Influence

1901 - 1995 (94 years)

John Cornelius Stennis was an American politician who served as a U.S. senator from the state of Mississippi. He was a Democrat who served in the Senate for over 41 years, becoming its most senior member for his last eight years. He retired from the Senate in 1989, and is, to date, the last Democrat to have been a U.S. senator from Mississippi. Furthermore, at the time of his retirement, Stennis was the last United States senator to have served during the presidency of Harry S. Truman.

#27353

Howard Shelanski

Howard Shelanski

#27364

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Howard Shelanski is an American attorney, economist, and legal scholar. He is a professor of law at Georgetown University, where he holds the Sheehy Chair in Antitrust Law and Trade Regulation, and a partner in the law firm of Davis, Polk & Wardwell. He served in the Obama administration as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs , part of the Office of Management and Budget.

#27354

Phillip Barron

#27365

Overall Influence

Phillip Barron is an American poet and philosopher who teaches at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. His poetry has won the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award for philosophical literature and has been featured in many national journals including The Brooklyn Rail, New American Writing, and Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts. Barron also has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Connecticut.

#27355

Terence Ranger

#27366

Overall Influence

1929 - 2015 (86 years)

Terence "Terry" Osborn Ranger was a prominent British Africanist, best known as a historian of Zimbabwe. Part of the post-colonial generation of historians, his work spanned the pre- and post-Independence period in Zimbabwe, from the 1960s to the present. He published and edited dozens of books and wrote hundreds of articles and book chapters, including co-editing The Invention of Tradition with Eric Hobsbawm. He was the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at the University of Oxford and the first Africanist fellow of the British Academy.

#27356

Karl August Folkers

Karl August Folkers

#27367

Overall Influence

1906 - 1997 (91 years)

Karl August Folkers was an American biochemist who made major contributions to the isolation and identification of bioactive natural products. Career Folkers graduated from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois in 1928. In 1986, the institution awarded him its Alumni Achievement Award.

#27357

Klaus Fiedler

#27368

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Klaus Fiedler is a German psychologist who teaches as a professor for social psychology at the Universität Heidelberg. Biography Fiedler studied psychology at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen getting his diploma in 1975. He continued to work there as a research fellow and did his doctorate in 1979. One year later he got a two-year stipend at the German Research Foundation that was followed by his employment as an assistant professor in Giessen. His habilitation took place in 1984. In 1987 he was named Professor for Cognitive and Social-cognitive Psychology. After a professorship at the Un...

#27358

Raghavendra Rau

#27369

Overall Influence

Raghavendra Rau holds the Sir Evelyn de Rothschild Professorship of Finance at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge and the Mercer’s School Memorial Professor of Commerce at Gresham College. He is a founding director of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

#27359

Bruce Kapferer

#27370

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Bruce Kapferer is an Australian anthropologist. He is best known for his work on Sri Lanka, Australia and Zambia. He has been at the forefront of anthropological debate for over three decades. He was honoured with Huxley Prize in 2011 by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain.

#27360

Karl Butzer

#27371

Overall Influence

1934 - 2016 (82 years)

Karl W. Butzer was a German-born American geographer, ecologist, and archaeologist. He received two degrees at McGill University, Montreal: the B.Sc. in Mathematics in 1954 and later his master's degree in Meteorology and Geography. Afterwards in the 1950s he returned to Germany to the University of Bonn to obtain a doctorate in physical geography. He obtained a master's degree in Meteorology and Geography from McGill University and a doctorate in physical geography from the University of Bonn in Germany.

#27361

Harris Isbell

#27372

Overall Influence

1910 - 1994 (84 years)

Harris Isbell was an American pharmacologist and the director of research for the NIMH Addiction Research Center at the Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky from 1945 to 1963. He did extensive research on the physical and psychological effects of various drugs on humans . Early work investigated aspects of physical dependence with opiates and barbiturates, while later work investigated psychedelic drugs, including LSD. The research was extensively reported in academic journals such as the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Psychopharmacologia, and the ...

#27362

Muggsy Bogues

#27373

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Tyrone Curtis "Muggsy" Bogues is an American former basketball player. The shortest player ever to play in the National Basketball Association , the Bogues played point guard for four teams during his 14-season career in the NBA. Although best known for his ten seasons with the Charlotte Hornets, he also played for the Washington Bullets, Golden State Warriors, and Toronto Raptors. Bogues finished in the top seven in assists in six consecutive seasons , and in the top ten in steals in three of those seasons. He had 146 career NBA double-doubles. After his NBA career, he served as head coach of the now-defunct Charlotte Sting of the WNBA.

#27363

Jeremy Rickard

#27374

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Jeremy Rickard, also known as J. C. Rickard or J. Rickard, is a British mathematician who deals with algebra and algebraic topology. He researches modular representation theory of finite groups and related questions of algebraic topology, representation theory of finite algebras and homological algebra. Rickard or derived equivalences as a generalization of Morita equivalences of rings and algebras are named after him.

#27364

Alison Bass

#27375

Overall Influence

Alison Bass is an American journalist and author of three books: her memoir, Brassy Broad: How one Journalist helped pave the way to #MeToo ; Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law and Side Effects: A Prosecutor, A Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial. Side Effects won the National Association of Science Writers' Science in Society Award and its film rights were recently optioned.

#27365

Martin J. Blaser

#27376

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Martin J. Blaser is the director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences and the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome and Professor of Medicine and Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.

#27366

Michael Russell

#27377

Overall Influence

Michael Russell is a British geologist who works on the origin of life. Russell is the originator of the theory that life emerged at alkaline submarine hydrothermal vents. Russell's theory is that hydrogen, hydrogen sulfide, and methane, released from submarine alkaline hydrothermal vents, acted upon nitrate, ferrous and ferric iron, carbon dioxide, and protons in ambient ocean waters to form simple organic molecules Russell studied 360-million-year-old mineral deposits in Ireland, which led to his insight that iron sulfide and hydroxide cells may have provided three-dimensional molds for the ...

#27367

Pedro Lasch

#27378

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Pedro Lasch is a visual artist born in Mexico City, and based in the U.S. since 1994. He produces works of conceptual art, institutional critique, social practice, and site-specific art, as well as paintings, photographs, prints, and works in traditional media.

#27368

Ralph H. Turner

#27379

Overall Influence

1919 - 2014 (95 years)

Ralph Herbert Turner was an American sociologist who researched collective behavior and social movements. He served as president of the American Sociological Association and editor of Sociometry and the Annual Review of Sociology. He was the recipient of both a Fulbright grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

#27369

Stephen Brookfield

#27380

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Stephen Brookfield is a scholar in adult education who has held positions at the University of British Columbia, Columbia University, Harvard University and the University of Saint Thomas. He is currently Distinguished Scholar at Antioch University, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, and Emeritus Professor at the University of St. Thomas.

#27370

Tony Martin

#27381

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Anthony Francis Martin is a New Zealand comedian, writer and actor, who has had a successful TV, radio, stand-up and film career in Australia. Career 1980s A former stand-up comedian and commercial voice-over-man, Tony Martin moved to Brisbane, Australia, from New Zealand when he was 21 to work as a radio copywriter. Having worked in radio and amateur theatre back in NZ, Martin approached the ABCTV's The D-Generation in 1986 to work as a writer only to be told that filming on the first series had been completed. In the interim, he was invited to work as a researcher on ABC-TV's The Gillies Republic which was the follow-up to the highly successful political satire The Gillies Report .

#27371

Ann Wilson

#27382

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Ann Dustin Wilson is an American singer and songwriter best known as the lead singer of the rock band Heart. Wilson has been a member of Heart since the early 1970s; her younger sister, Nancy, is also a member of the band. The first hard rock band fronted by women, Heart released numerous albums between 1976 and 2016; the early Heart albums Dreamboat Annie , and Little Queen generated classic hard rock singles such as "Magic Man", "Crazy on You", and "Barracuda". All told, Heart has sold over 35 million records worldwide, placed 29 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, and has scored top 10 albu...

#27372

Barry Loewer

#27383

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Barry Loewer is a distinguished professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and director of the Rutgers Center for Philosophy and the Sciences. Education and career He obtained his BA from Amherst College and his PhD from Stanford University in 1975 . He taught first at the University of South Carolina before joining Rutgers University in 1989.

#27373

John Witte Jr.

#27384

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

John Witte Jr. is a Canadian-American academic. He is a Robert W. Woodruff University Professor and a McDonald Distinguished Professor at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia, and is director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion there.

#27374

Hidetoshi Nakata

#27385

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

is a Japanese former professional footballer and holds the record for most goals scored by an Asian in Serie A. He is also known as the first Asian player to be nominated for the Ballon d'Or. He is widely considered to be one of the best Asian players of all time.

#27375

Gary McAllister

#27386

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

Gary McAllister MBE is a Scottish professional football coach and former player. McAllister played primarily as a midfielder in a career spanning over nineteen years. He started his career at local side Motherwell before moving south of the border to Leicester City at the age of 20. He then went on to play for Leeds United, where he won the English league championship in 1991–92. McAllister later had spells at Premier League sides Coventry City, where he was credited with his role in helping the club avoid relegation repeatedly, and Liverpool, where he won a cup treble in 2000–01 at the age o...

#27376

Kristen Wiig

#27387

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Kristen Carroll Wiig is an American actress, comedian, screenwriter and producer. First breaking through as a performer with the Los Angeles comedy troupe The Groundlings, Wiig achieved nationwide stardom during her seven-season tenure on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 2005 to 2012.

#27377

Mark Goodacre

#27388

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Mark S. Goodacre is a New Testament scholar and Professor at Duke University's Department of Religion. He has written extensively on the Synoptic Problem; that is, the origins of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He has defended the Farrer hypothesis, and thus accepts Markan priority but rejects Q.

#27378

Tim Roth

#27389

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Timothy Simon Roth is an English actor and producer. He was among a group of prominent British actors known as the "Brit Pack". Roth was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer in his film debut The Hit . Since then, he gained more attention for his roles in films, including The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, , Vincent & Theo , and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead . Roth collaborated with Quentin Tarantino on several films, such as Reservoir Dogs , Pulp Fiction , Four Rooms and The Hateful Eight . For his performance in Rob Roy , Roth won a BAFTA Award, and was n...

#27379

Annette Weiner

#27390

Overall Influence

1933 - 1997 (64 years)

Annette Barbara Weiner née Cohen was an American anthropologist, Kriser Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, chair of the Anthropology Department, dean of the social sciences, and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. She was known for her ethnographic work in the Trobriand Islands and her development of the concept of inalienable wealth in social anthropological theory.

#27380

Stephan Dabbert

#27391

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Stephan Dabbert is an agricultural economist and Rector of the University of Hohenheim. Biography The agricultural economist Stephan Dabbert studied agriculture at Christian-Albrecht University in Kiel, followed by a Master of Science degree in agricultural economics at Pennsylvania State University.

#27381

Beatrice de Graaf

#27392

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Beatrice A. de Graaf is a Dutch history professor at the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. Her areas of expertise are terrorism, international relations and security and the modern history of Europe.

#27382

Theodore Long

#27393

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Theodore Robert Rufus Long is an American former professional wrestling referee, manager and authority figure best known for his tenures in NWA, WCW and WWE. Long began his career in the National Wrestling Alliance and made his WWE debut in 1998 as a referee. He transitioned to be an on-screen manager in 2003 and later served as general manager of SmackDown for two tenures lasting a combined six years as well as one stint as ECW general manager.

#27383

Juan Sebastián Verón

Juan Sebastián Verón

#27394

Overall Influence

1975 - Present (51 years)

Juan Sebastián Verón is an Argentine former professional footballerer and current chairman of Estudiantes de La Plata, where he had served as Director of Sports. A former midfielder, Verón's career started in Estudiantes, continued in Argentina's Boca Juniors, and included stints in several clubs in the Italian Serie A , and England's Manchester United and Chelsea. In 2006, Verón returned to Estudiantes, where he remained until his retirement in 2014, aside from a brief spell with Brandsen. He announced his short return to first team football would occur in the 2017 Copa Libertadores.

#27384

Joseph J. Sisco

Joseph J. Sisco

#27395

Overall Influence

1919 - 2004 (85 years)

Joseph John Sisco was a diplomat who played a major role in then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. His career in the State Department spanned five presidential administrations.

#27385

Naoki Urasawa

#27396

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Naoki Urasawa is a Japanese manga artist and musician. He has been drawing manga since he was four years old, and for most of his professional career has created two series simultaneously. The stories to many of these were co-written in collaboration with his former editor, Takashi Nagasaki. Urasawa has been called one of the artists that changed the history of manga and has won numerous awards, including the Shogakukan Manga Award three times, the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize twice, and the Kodansha Manga Award once. South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho called him "the greatest storyteller of o...

#27386

Michael Cuscuna

#27397

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Michael Cuscuna is an American jazz record producer and writer. He is the co-founder of Mosaic Records and a discographer of Blue Note Records. Cuscuna played drums, saxophone and flute while young, but placed his emphasis on founding his own record label. He had a jazz show on WXPN and worked for ESP-Disk late in the 1960s, in addition to writing for Jazz & Pop Magazine and Down Beat. He moved from WXPN to WMMR in 1970, then onto WABC-FM as a progressive rock DJ at both stations. He took a position as a producer with Atlantic Records in the 1970s, recording Dave Brubeck and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

#27387

Dora Barrancos

#27398

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Dora Beatriz Barrancos is an Argentine researcher, sociologist, historian, feminist, and politician. She was part of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council board of directors until May 2019, when she resigned in protest over a budget reduction that severely affected the institution.

#27388

John Shelton Reed

#27399

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

John Shelton Reed is an American sociologist and essayist, author or editor of 23 books, most of them dealing with the contemporary American South. Reed has also written for a variety of non-academic publications such as The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Oxford American. He was graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1971. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1969 until his retirement, in 2000, as William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of sociology and director of the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science.

#27389

Paul E. Marik

#27400

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (68 years)

Paul Ellis Marik is a medical doctor and former professor of medicine who until his resignation in January 2022 served as chair of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia, and was also a critical care doctor at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. His research interests include sepsis and tissue oxygenation. In August 2023 the American Board of Internal Medicine informed Marik his certification was to be revoked for spreading misinformation.

#27390

Ebrahim Raisi

#27401

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Sayyid Ebrahim Raisolsadati , commonly known as Ebrahim Raisi , is an Iranian Principlist politician, Muslim jurist, and the eighth and current president of Iran since 3 August 2021, having been elected to the presidency in the 2021 election.

#27391

Gregory Woods

#27402

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Gregory Woods is a British poet. He was the Chair in Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University from 1998 to 2013. He is the author of five books of literary and LGBT studies criticism, and seven poetry collections.

#27392

Geoff Downes

#27403

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Geoffrey Downes is an English keyboardist who gained fame as a member of the new wave group the Buggles with Trevor Horn, the progressive rock band Yes, and the supergroup Asia. Born in Stockport, Downes moved to London to pursue a music career. In 1977, he formed the Buggles with Horn and enjoyed success with their first album The Age of Plastic which included the worldwide hit single "Video Killed the Radio Star". In May 1980, Downes joined Yes with Horn and recorded Drama . After Yes disbanded in 1981, Downes helped Trevor Horn to produce a second Buggles album, Adventures in Modern Recor...

#27393

Robb Kulin

#27404

Overall Influence

1983 - Present (43 years)

Robb Michael Kulin is an American aerospace engineer, entrepreneur, and former NASA astronaut candidate. He was a member of NASA Astronaut Group 22 but resigned before completing astronaut training.

#27394

Jill Mikucki

#27405

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Jill Ann Mikucki is an American microbiologist, educator and Antarctic researcher, best known for her work at Blood Falls demonstrating that microbes can grow below ice in the absence of sunlight. She is a leader of international teams studying study ecosystems under the ice.

#27395

Oleg Khlevniuk

#27406

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Oleg Vitalyevich Khlevniuk is a Russian historian and a senior researcher at the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow. Much of his writing on Stalinistist Soviet Union is based on newly released archival documents, including personal correspondence, drafts of Central Committee paperwork, new memoirs, and interviews with former functionaries and the families of Politburo members. Gleb Pavlovsky has characterized him as a "leading Russian historian of Stalinism." He also a corresponding fellow of Royal Historical Society.

#27396

James Crumley

#27407

Overall Influence

1939 - 2008 (69 years)

James Arthur Crumley was an American author. He was the author of violent hardboiled crime novels and several volumes of short stories and essays, as well as published and unpublished screenplays. He has been described as "one of modern crime writing's best practitioners", who was "a patron saint of the post-Vietnam private eye novel" and a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hunter S. Thompson. His book The Last Good Kiss has been described as "the most influential crime novel of the last 50 years."

#27397

Arundhati Virmani

#27408

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Arundhati Virmani is an Indian historian. She was a reader in history at Delhi University until 1992. She teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseille. Biography Arundhati Virmani was born in New Delhi, on 26 June 1957. She did her schooling from Lady Irwin School and Convent of Jesus and Mary, Delhi. She graduated with a degree in history from Indraprastha College. As a student of Delhi University, she obtained a French fellowship in 1981 to prepare her Ph.D. thesis in French history at the Sorbonne in Paris. Under the supervision of Maurice Agulhon, Professor at ...

#27398

René Clément

#27409

Overall Influence

1913 - 1996 (83 years)

René Clément was a French film director and screenwriter. He is known for directing the films The Battle of the Rails , Forbidden Games , Gervaise , Purple Noon , and Is Paris Burning . He received numerous accolades including five prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and the Honorary César in 1984.

#27399

Dany Heatley

#27410

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Daniel James Heatley is a Canadian former professional ice hockey winger. Originally drafted by the Atlanta Thrashers second overall in the 2000 NHL Entry Draft, he won the Calder Memorial Trophy as the National Hockey League rookie of the year in 2002. However, Heatley's time with the Thrashers was derailed when he was at the wheel in a car crash in September 2003 that killed teammate Dan Snyder. Heatley, who was also seriously injured but eventually made a full recovery, pled guilty to second-degree vehicular homicide and received probation.

#27400

Wilbur Mills

#27411

Overall Influence

1909 - 1992 (83 years)

Wilbur Daigh Mills was an American Democratic politician who represented in the United States House of Representatives from 1939 until his retirement in 1977. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee from 1958 to 1974, he was often called "the most powerful man in Washington".

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