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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#27501

Kris Crummett

#27512

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Kris Crummett is an American record producer and owner of Interlace Audio in Portland, Oregon. Crummett started recording in 2002. He has worked with many notable indie music record labels, including Rise Records, Epitaph Records, Fearless Records, Sumerian Records, Equal Vision Records, and Sony Japan. He is best known for his work with bands such as Sleeping With Sirens, Issues, Dance Gavin Dance, Drop Dead, Gorgeous and Alesana.

#27502

Marc Angenot

#27513

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Marc Angenot is a Belgian-Canadian social theorist, historian of ideas and literary critic. He is a professor of French literature at McGill University, Montreal, and holder of the James McGill Chair of Social Discourse Theory there. He is a leading exponent of the sociocritical approach to literature.

#27503

Deshaun Watson

#27514

Overall Influence

1995 - Present (31 years)

Derrick Deshaun Watson is an American football quarterback for the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League . He played college football at Clemson, where he led the team to a national championship in 2016. Watson was selected in the first round of the 2017 NFL Draft by the Houston Texans.

#27504

Yanhong Annie Liu

#27515

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Yanhong Annie Liu is a computer scientist and professor of computer science at Stony Brook University where she works on new programming languages, software systems, algorithms, program design, optimizing, analysis, and transformations, intelligent systems, distributed computing systems, and computer security.

#27505

Jane Asher

#27516

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Jane Asher is an English actress and author. She achieved early fame as a child actress and has worked extensively in film and TV throughout her career. Asher has appeared in TV shows and films such as Deep End , The Masque of the Red Death , Alfie , The Mistress, Crossroads, Death at a Funeral , and The Old Guys. She also appeared in two episodes of the 1950s TV series The Buccaneers alongside Robert Shaw. She was well known as the partner of Paul McCartney from 1963 to 1968.

#27506

Eric Reeves

#27517

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Eric Reeves is an American academic who is professor emeritus of English language and literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Reeves has carried out research into the politics and human rights situation in Sudan.

#27507

Takahiro Shiota

#27518

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Takahiro Shiota is a Japanese mathematician at Kyoto University. In 1986, he proved Novikov's conjecture about the Riemann–Schottky problem by characterization of Jacobian varieties. Shiota obtained his doctorate at Harvard University in 1984.

#27508

Daan Frenkel

#27519

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Daan Frenkel is a Dutch computational physicist in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. Education Frenkel completed his PhD at the University of Amsterdam in 1977 in experimental physical chemistry.

#27509

Andy Field

#27520

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Andy Field is an English academic currently serving as Professor of Quantitative Methods at the University of Sussex. Field is noted as the author of several textbooks about statistics, which typically deal with software application of statistical theory in SPSS and the R programming language. His books are characterised by an irreverent, sometimes outrageous, writing style that is atypical of academic texts. His student-friendly approach to writing led to The Times Higher Education Supplement dubbing him 'the Harry Potter of the social sciences'.

#27510

Mary L. Boas

#27521

Overall Influence

1917 - 2010 (93 years)

Mary Layne Boas was an American mathematician and physics professor best known as the author of Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences , an undergraduate textbook that was still widely used in college classrooms as of 1999.

#27511

Harry C. Triandis

#27522

Overall Influence

1926 - 2019 (93 years)

Harry Charalambos Triandis was Professor Emeritus at the Department of Psychology of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He was considered a pioneer of cross-cultural psychology and his research focused on the cognitive aspects of attitudes, norms, roles and values in different cultures.

#27512

Herbert Haag

#27523

Overall Influence

1915 - 2001 (86 years)

Herbert Haag was a Swiss Roman Catholic theologian and biblical scholar of German origin. Haag was born in Singen am Hohentwiel. After studying theology in Paris for the diocese of Basel in 1940, he was ordained a priest and worked for several years as a pastor in Lucerne. In 1942, Haag attained his PhD at the University of Fribourg. From 1948 to 1960, he taught Old Testament studies at the Theological Faculty of Lucerne, and from 1960 to 1980 he held the chair of Old Testament at the Catholic Theological Faculty at the University of Tübingen. Haag in particular as biblical scholars and exegete known, among other things, he published a well-known Bible dictionary.

#27513

Peter Hochachka

#27524

Overall Influence

1937 - 2002 (65 years)

Peter William Hochachka, was a Canadian professor and zoologist at the University of British Columbia . He is known for his foundational work in creating the new field of adaptational biochemistry, connecting metabolic biochemistry with comparative physiology.

#27514

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

#27525

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is an American historian and cultural critic. She is a scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders. Ben-Ghiat is professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. Biography Born in the United States to an Israeli-born Sephardi father and a Scottish mother, she grew up in Pacific Palisades, California. She graduated in history at UCLA and obtained a PhD in comparative history at Brandeis University. A member of the American Historical Association since 1990, she is professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. She regularly writes for CNN, The A...

#27515

Len Cook

#27526

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Leonard Warren Cook CBE CRSNZ is a professional statistician who was Government Statistician of New Zealand from 1992 to 2000, and National Statistician and Director of the United Kingdom Office for National Statistics, and Registrar General for England and Wales from 2000 to 2005. He served as Families Commissioner in New Zealand from 2015 to 2018.

#27516

Karen Wetterhahn

Karen Wetterhahn

#27527

Overall Influence

1948 - 1997 (49 years)

Karen Elizabeth Wetterhahn , also known as Karen Wetterhahn Jennette, was an American professor of chemistry at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, who specialized in toxic metal exposure. She died of mercury poisoning at the age of 48 due to accidental exposure to the extremely toxic organic mercury compound dimethylmercury . Protective gloves in use at the time of the incident provided insufficient protection, and exposure to only a few drops of the chemical absorbed through the gloves proved to be fatal after less than a year.

#27517

Phillip Berryman

#27528

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Phillip E. Berryman is the author of several books on both liberation theology and the Christian experience in Latin America. After his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest in 1963, he spent two years at a church in Pasadena, California, before working in pastoral ministry in the Panama City barrio of El Chorrillo from 1965–1973.

#27518

Jerry Farber

#27529

Overall Influence

1935 - Present (91 years)

Gerald H. 'Jerry' Farber is an American educator, writer, activist and former child actor. Early life and education Farber was born in El Paso, Texas in 1935. As an undergraduate student at UCLA in December 1954, he was nominated by the senior staff of the UCLA Daily Bruin to be city editor of the student newspaper, but he and the other four staff nominees for editorial positions were rejected by a special two-man committee composed of student body president Skip Byrne and a representative of the university administration. In the spring term 1955, he and four other students , issued and distributed an underground newspaper called The Observer on the UCLA campus.

#27519

Marshawn Lynch

#27530

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Marshawn Terrell Lynch is an American former football running back who played in the National Football League for 12 seasons. Nicknamed "Beast Mode", he spent the majority of his career with the Seattle Seahawks. Lynch played college football for the California Golden Bears, earning first-team All-American honors and becoming the school's second all-time career rusher. He was selected by the Buffalo Bills in the first round of the 2007 NFL Draft and played three full seasons before joining Seattle during the 2010 season.

#27520

Charles Lipson

#27531

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Charles H. Lipson is an American political scientist who is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago. His areas of specialization include international relations, international political economy and modern international history.

#27521

Axel Meyer

#27532

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Axel Meyer is a German evolutionary biologist and a professor of zoology and evolutionary biology at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Meyer is best known for his work on the evolution and adaptive radiation of African cichlid fishes, fish-specific genome duplications, molecular phylogenetics of vertebrates, and the role of ecological and sexual selection in speciation.

#27522

Dale Bumpers

#27533

Overall Influence

1925 - 2016 (91 years)

Dale Leon Bumpers was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 38th Governor of Arkansas and in the United States Senate . He was a member of the Democratic Party. He was counsel at the Washington office of law firm Arent Fox LLP, where his clients included Riceland Foods and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

#27523

Elisa Pérez Vera

#27534

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Elisa Pérez Vera is a Spanish jurist, a professor of Private International Law at the National University of Distance Education and magistrate of the Constitutional Court of Spain from 2001 to 2012. In 1982 she was appointed Rector of the UNED, becoming the first woman rector at a Spanish public university. The UNED has instituted the Elisa Pérez Vera Award to recognize research work on gender or feminism.

#27524

Lisa Goldberg

#27535

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Lisa Goldberg is a financial economist and statistician who serves at the University of California, Berkeley as director of research at the Center for Risk Management Research and as Adjunct Professor of Statistics. She is also the Co-Director for the Consortium for Data Analytics in Risk at UC Berkeley.

#27525

Meir Sternberg

#27536

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

Meir Sternberg is an Israeli literary critic and biblical scholar. He is Artzt Professor of Poetics and Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. Along with Robert Alter and Adele Berlin, Sternberg is one of the most prominent practitioners of a literary approach to the Bible.

#27526

Bill Ayers

#27537

Overall Influence

1944 - Present (82 years)

William Charles Ayers is an American retired professor and former militant organizer. In 1969, Ayers co-founded the far-left militant organization the Weather Underground, a far-left revolutionary group modeled that sought to overthrow what they viewed as American imperialism. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Weather Underground conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings in opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The bombings caused no fatalities, except for three members killed when one of the group's devices accidentally exploded. The FBI described the Weather Underground as a domestic terrorist group.

#27527

Marina Rodnina

#27538

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Marina V. Rodnina is a German biochemist. Life Born in Kyiv, Rodnina studied biology at the University of Kyiv and obtained her PhD in molecular biology and genetics in 1989. From 1990 to 1992, she was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Witten/Herdecke University. Afterwards, she was a research assistant at the same university and she received her habilitation in 1997. From 1998 to 2008, she was a professor at the Witten/Herdecke University. Since 2008, she is a scientific member and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry.

#27528

James Griffin

#27539

Overall Influence

1933 - 2019 (86 years)

James Patrick Griffin was an American-born philosopher, who was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2019. Education Griffin was educated at Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, and Yale University, obtaining a BA in 1955. He was then a Rhodes Scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford , then a senior scholar at St Antony's College, Oxford , obtaining his doctorate under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle in 1960.

#27529

Hans Joachim Schneider

#27540

Overall Influence

1928 - 2015 (87 years)

Hans Joachim Schneider was a German jurist, criminologist and psychologist. He taught as Professor of Criminology at the University of Münster. Life Hans Joachim Schneider was born in Biedenkopf, a small market town in the hills between Cologne and Kassel. From 1940 till 1949 he attended the Christian Rauch School at nearby Arolsen.

#27530

Conway Twitty

#27541

Overall Influence

1933 - 1993 (60 years)

Harold Lloyd Jenkins , better known by his stage name Conway Twitty, was an American singer and songwriter. Initially a part of the 1950s rockabilly scene, Twitty was best known as a country music performer. From 1971 to 1976, Twitty received a string of Country Music Association awards for duets with Loretta Lynn. He was inducted into both the Country Music and Rockabilly Halls of Fame.

#27531

Eldridge M. Moores

#27542

Overall Influence

1938 - 2018 (80 years)

Eldridge Moores was an American geologist. He specialized in the understanding of ophiolites and the geology of the continental crust of the Western United States and Tethyan belt, the geology of Greece, Cyprus, and Pakistan, and the tectonic development of the Sierra Nevada and the Alpine - Himalayan systems.

#27532

Marilena de Souza Chaui

#27543

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Marilena de Souza Chaui is a Brazilian philosopher and Professor of Modern Philosophy in the University of São Paulo. She is a scholar of Baruch Spinoza and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Chaui is one of the founding members of Workers' Party and an assiduous critic of the capitalist model.

#27533

David Bradley

#27544

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

David J. Bradley is one of the twelve engineers who worked on the original IBM PC, developing the computer's ROM BIOS code. Bradley is credited for implementing the "Control-Alt-Delete" key combination that was used to reboot the computer. Bradley joined IBM in 1975 after earning his doctorate in electrical engineering from Purdue University with a dissertation on computer architectures.

#27534

Samuel T. Durrance

Samuel T. Durrance

#27545

Overall Influence

1943 - 2023 (80 years)

Samuel Thornton Durrance was an American scientist who flew aboard two NASA Space Shuttle missions as a payload specialist. Background Durrance was born September 17, 1943, in Tallahassee, Florida, but grew up in Tampa, Florida. He attended Wilson Junior High and graduated from Plant High School in 1961, lettering in American football for three years and playing both defense and offense. He received a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Science degree in physics , at California State University, Los Angeles , 1972 and 1974, respectively, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in astro-geophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 1980.

#27535

Maurice Gibb

#27546

Overall Influence

1949 - 2003 (54 years)

Maurice Ernest Gibb was a British musician. He achieved worldwide fame as a member of the pop group Bee Gees. Although his elder brother Barry Gibb and fraternal twin brother Robin Gibb were the group's main lead singers, most of their albums included at least one or two songs featuring Maurice's lead vocals, including "Lay It on Me", "Country Woman" and "On Time". The Bee Gees are one of the most successful pop-rock groups of all time.

#27536

Victor Premasagar

Victor Premasagar

#27547

Overall Influence

1927 - 2005 (78 years)

Victor Premasagar was the fourth successor of Frank Whittaker as Bishop in Medak. He was an Indian churchman and Old Testament scholar who made major contributions to research on the Old Testament and to the field of theology. Premasagar's articles appeared in the Expository Times , the Vetus Testamentum , the International Review of Mission , and the Indian Journal of Theology and cited in major works relating to the theme of Promise in the Bible and critical works on Psalms LXXX and the Hebrew word HOQ in the Tanakh.

#27537

Glenn Davies

#27548

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Glenn Naunton Davies is an Australian Anglican bishop. Since August 2022 he has served as bishop of the Diocese of the Southern Cross, an Anglican diocese set up outside of the Anglican Church of Australia. He previously served as the Archbishop of Sydney and Metropolitan of the Province of New South Wales in the Anglican Church of Australia from 23 August 2013 to 26 March 2021.

#27538

Joel Schwartz

#27549

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Joel Schwartz is an American epidemiologist, and Professor of Environmental Epidemiology, at Harvard University, School of Public Health. He graduated from Brandeis University with a Ph.D. in 1980. He identified the environmental exposure of lead in gasoline, which led to its ban.

#27539

Anna Karina

#27550

Overall Influence

1940 - 2019 (79 years)

Anna Karina was a Danish-French film actress, director, writer, model, and singer. She was French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard's collaborator in the 1960s, performing in several of his films, including The Little Soldier, A Woman Is a Woman, My Life to Live, , , and Alphaville. For her performance in A Woman Is a Woman, Karina won the Silver Bear Award for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival.

#27540

Howard Colvin

#27551

Overall Influence

1919 - 2007 (88 years)

Sir Howard Montagu Colvin was a British architectural historian who produced two of the most outstanding works of scholarship in his field: A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840 and The History of the King's Works.

#27541

Rafael Cadenas

#27552

Overall Influence

1930 - Present (96 years)

Rafael Cadenas is a Venezuelan poet and essayist. Career He taught for many years at the Central University of Venezuela. He received the National Prize for Literature , Guadalajara's International Book Fair prize of literature and García Lorca Prize . Cadenas was awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 2022, the first Venezuelan to receive the award. On April 24, 2023, he received the 2022 Cervantes Prize, the highest recognition for contributions to literature in the Spanish language.

#27542

Michael Thompson

#27553

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Sir Michael Warwick Thompson , is a British academic, who served as vice-chancellor of the Universities of East Anglia and Birmingham. He was educated at the University of Liverpool, where he graduated with a first in physics. He was a D.Sc. in physics in 1963 from the University of Liverpool. His academic work included early research on atomic collisions in solids.

#27543

Miri Rubin

#27554

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Miri Rubin is a historian and Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. She was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge, where she gained her doctorate and was later awarded a research fellowship and a post-doctoral research fellowship at Girton College. Rubin studies the social and religious history of Europe between 1100 and 1500, concentrating on the interactions between public rituals, power, and community life.

#27544

Tom Flores

#27555

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Thomas Raymond Flores is an American former professional football player in the American Football League and coach in the National Football League . He played as a quarterback for nine seasons in the NFL, primarily with the Oakland Raiders. After his retirement as a coach, he was a radio announcer for more than twenty years.

#27545

Samuel Hollander

#27556

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Samuel Hollander, is a British/Canadian/Israeli economist. Born in London, he received a B.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics in 1959. In 1961 he received an AM and a Ph.D. in 1963 from Princeton University. He started with the University of Toronto becoming an Assistant Professor , Associate Professor , Professor , University Professor , and upon his retirement in 1998, University Professor Emeritus. Since 2000 he has been a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He became a citizen of Canada in 1967 and of Israel in 2000.

#27546

Boris Altshuler

#27557

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Boris Leonidovich Altshuler is a professor of theoretical physics at Columbia University. His specialty is theoretical condensed matter physics. Education and career Altshuler attended State Secondary School 489 in Saint Petersburg. He received his diploma in physics from Leningrad State University in 1976. Altshuler continued on at the Leningrad Institute for Nuclear Physics, where he was awarded his Ph.D. in physics in 1979. Altshuler stayed at the institute for the next ten years as a research fellow.

#27547

Michael Wishnie

#27558

Overall Influence

Michael Wishnie is a Clinical Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Clinical work Wishnie teaches two clinics at Yale Law School. The "9/11 Clinic," known formally as "Balancing Civil Liberties and National Security after September 11," represents detainees in civil rights cases. The Workers and Immigrants Advocacy Clinic handles a host of immigrants' and workers' rights issues, including state and local law enforcement of civil immigration law, mandatory detention, labor trafficking, bilingual education, and access to welfare, in both the litigation and non-litigation context.

#27548

Hal Finney

#27559

Overall Influence

1956 - 2014 (58 years)

Harold Thomas Finney II was an American software developer. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. Finney later worked for PGP Corporation. He also was an early bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

#27549

Karen Ho

#27560

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Karen Ho is an American anthropologist. She contributed to anthropological research in Wall Street culture. Ho is a Marshall Scholar. Life Karen Ho grew up in a middle-class household outside Memphis. Her father was a Taiwanese immigrant and doctor. She earned her undergraduate and master's degrees at Stanford University and got her PhD in anthropology from Princeton University.

#27550

Robert Pattinson

Robert Pattinson

#27561

Overall Influence

1986 - Present (40 years)

Robert Douglas Thomas Pattinson is an English actor. Known for starring in both big-budget and independent films, Pattinson has ranked among the world's highest-paid actors. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and he was featured in the Forbes Celebrity 100 list.

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