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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#27551
Noé Jitrik
#27562
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Noé Jitrik was an Argentine literary critic. Jitrik was born in Argentina on 23 January 1928. He was director of the Instituto de literatura hispanoamericana at the University of Buenos Aires, and was a notable participant in the cultural journal Contorno in the 1950s in Argentina.
Go to Profile#27552
Dieudonné Nzapalainga
#27563
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Dieudonné Nzapalainga, CSSp is a Central African Catholic cardinal, the Archbishop of Bangui and a member of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit. Nzapalainga served as the apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese of Bangui from 2009 until mid-2012 when Pope Benedict XVI appointed him as its metropolitan archbishop; since 2013 he has served as the President of the Central African Episcopal Conference.
Go to Profile#27553
Cecilia Heyes
#27564
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Cecilia Heyes is a British psychologist who studies the evolution of the human mind. She is a Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical Life Sciences at All Souls College, and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oxford. She is also a Fellow of the British Academy , and President of the Experimental Psychology Society.
Go to Profile#27554
Iain Scobbie
#27565
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Iain Girvan Mann Scobbie is a British scholar of international law who is the Chair of International Law at the University of Manchester, where he lectures on public international law, international courts and tribunals, and the use of force. He was previously the Sir Joseph Hotung Research Professor in Law, Human Rights and Peace Building in the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where he remains affiliated.
Go to Profile#27555
Alain Le Mehaute
#27566
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Alain Le Mehaute is a French engineer-chemist and inventor. He has written numerous scientific researches and academic literature on Geometry, Physics and Chemistry. Alain Le Mehaute, Olivier de Witte and Jean Claude André were the first to file their patent for the stereolithography process, but officially the title of inventor of stereolithography and 3D printing technology on the whole belongs to Chuck Hull
Go to Profile#27556
K. Ullas Karanth
#27567
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Kota Ullas Karanth is a conservation zoologist and a leading tiger expert based in Karnataka, India. He was the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's India Programme. He is notable for pioneering the scientific use of camera traps in population density studies of large wild mammals in India. He was a Senior Conservation Scientist with the New York based Wildlife Conservation Society and Technical Director of the WCS Tiger Conservation Program.
Go to Profile#27557
Talât Sait Halman
#27568
Overall Influence
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
Talât Sait Halman, GBE was a Turkish poet, translator and cultural historian. He was the first Minister of Culture of Turkey. From 1998 onward, he taught at Bilkent University as the dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Letters.
Go to Profile#27558
Julian Cope
#27569
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Julian David Cope is an English musician and author. He was the singer and songwriter in Liverpool post-punk band The Teardrop Explodes and has followed a solo career since 1983 in addition to working on musical side projects such as Queen Elizabeth, Brain Donor and Black Sheep.
Go to Profile#27559
François Cooren
#27570
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
François Cooren is a French and Canadian communication scholar and was, from 2005 to 2008, the editor of Communication Theory. He completed his Ph.D. at the Department of communication of the Université de Montréal in 1996, under the supervision of James R. Taylor. He was chairman of that same department from 2006 to 2015, where he is full professor. Cooren also completed a postdoc at the Université de Louvain-la-Neuve, in Belgium.
Go to Profile#27560
Marko Attila Hoare
#27571
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Marko Attila Hoare is a British historian of the former Yugoslavia who also writes about current affairs, especially Southeast Europe, including Turkey and the Caucasus. Marko is Associate Professor of History at the University Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, in Sarajevo.
Go to Profile#27561
Mark Wainberg
#27572
Overall Influence
1945 - 2017 (72 years)
Mark Arnold Wainberg, was a Canadian HIV/AIDS researcher and HIV/AIDS activist. He was the Director of the McGill University AIDS Centre at the Montreal Jewish General Hospital and Professor of Medicine and of Microbiology at McGill University. His laboratory primarily studies HIV reverse transcriptase, the molecular basis for drug resistance, and gene therapy. He received a B.Sc. from McGill University in 1966, a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1972, and did his post-doctoral research at Hadassah Medical School of the Hebrew University.
Go to Profile#27562
Anatol Roshko
#27573
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Anatol Roshko was a Canadian-born physicist and engineer. He was the Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. Roshko is known for his contributions to gas dynamics. He along with H. W. Liepmann is the co-author of the widely used textbook Elements of Gasdynamics. He has made research contributions to problems of separated flow; bluff-body aerodynamics; structure of turbulent shear flow.
Go to Profile#27563
Dinesh Manocha
#27574
Overall Influence
Dinesh Manocha is an Indian-American computer scientist and the Paul Chrisman Iribe Professor of Computer Science at University of Maryland College Park, formerly at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests are in scientific computation, robotics, self-driving cars, affective computing, virtual and augmented reality and 3D computer graphics.
Go to Profile#27564
Anthony Cheetham
#27575
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Sir Anthony Kevin Cheetham is a British materials scientist. From 2012 to 2017 he was Vice-President and Treasurer of the Royal Society. Education Cheetham was educated at Stockport Grammar School and read chemistry at St Catherine's College, Oxford, matriculating in 1965, and graduated with first class honours in 1969. He started his doctorate at Wadham College, Oxford in the same year, with a thesis on 'The Structures of some Non-stoichiometric Compounds'; his doctorate was awarded in 1972.
Go to Profile#27565
John Russell
#27576
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
John Russell CBE was an English art critic. Life and career John Russell was born in Fleet, Hampshire, England, in 1919. He attended St Paul's School and then Magdalen College, Oxford. He was an unpaid intern at the Tate Gallery in 1940, but moved to the country after the gallery was bombed. During World War II he worked in Naval Intelligence for the Admiralty. There he met Ian Fleming, who helped to secure Russell a reviewing position at The Sunday Times. Russell succeeded a fired critic at The Sunday Times in 1950.
Go to Profile#27566
Sébastien Grosjean
#27577
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Sébastien René Grosjean is a French former professional tennis player. Grosjean reached the semifinals at the 2001 Australian and French Openss, and at Wimbledon in 2003 and 2004. He finished eight consecutive seasons ranked in the top 30 , peaking at world No. 4 in October 2002. Grosjean retired from professional tennis in May 2010.
Go to Profile#27567
Subodh Chandra Sengupta
#27578
Overall Influence
1903 - 1998 (95 years)
Subodh Chandra Sengupta was an Indian scholar, academic and critic of English literature, known for his scholarship on Shakespearean works. His books on William Shakespeare, which included Aspects of Shakespearian Tragedy, Shakespearian Comedy and Shakespeare's Historical Plays are critically acclaimed for scholarship and academic rigor. He was a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Presidency College , Calcutta, and after retirement from Presidency College, became Professor of English Language and Literature at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, as well as a professo...
Go to Profile#27568
Chris Sander
#27579
Overall Influence
Chris Sander is a computational biologist based at the Dana-Farber Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School. Previously he was chair of the Computational Biology Programme at the Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. In 2015, he moved his lab to the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute and the Cell Biology Department at Harvard Medical School.
Go to Profile#27569
Claus Montonen
#27580
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Claus Kalevi Montonen is a Finnish theoretical physicist, most known for his work with British physicist David Olive in proposing the Montonen–Olive duality. Life Claus Montonen received his MSc from the University of Helsinki in 1968 and his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1974, where he was taught by David Olive before he left for CERN. He held research fellowships at Orsay, CNRS and CERN. From 1974 he has held various research and teaching positions at the University of Helsinki and Helsinki Institute of Physics.
Go to Profile#27570
Naser Kamalian
#27581
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (105 years)
Nasser Kamalian is an Iranian medical scholar who can be considered the father of modern neuropathology in Iran. He has published around 60 major articles in prominent Iranian and international medical journals, and has for 40 years been associated with Tehran University.
Go to Profile#27571
John Vernon Lord
#27582
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
John Vernon Lord is an illustrator, author and teacher. He is widely recognized for his illustrations of various texts such as Aesop's Fables,The Nonsense Verse of Edward Lear; the Folio Society's Myths and Legends of the British Isles. He has also illustrated classics of English literature, including the works of Lewis Carroll and James Joyce. Lord has written and illustrated several children's books, which have been published and translated into multiple languages. His book The Giant Jam Sandwich has been in print since 1972
Go to Profile#27572
Lee Spetner
#27583
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
Dr Lee M. Spetner is an American and Israeli creationist author, mechanical engineer, applied biophysicist, and physicist, known best for his disagreements with the modern synthesis. In spite of his opposition to neo-Darwinism, Spetner accepts a form of non-random evolution outlined in his 1996 book "Not By Chance! Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution".
Go to Profile#27573
Peter J. Fleming
#27584
Overall Influence
Peter John Fleming is a professor of Industrial Systems and Control in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, and till June 2012 he was the director of the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre for Control and Systems Engineering. He works in the field of control and systems engineering and is known for his work on evolutionary computation applied to systems engineering. Fleming is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Systems Science.
Go to Profile#27574
Michael Maccoby
#27585
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Michael Maccoby was an American psychoanalyst and anthropologist globally recognized as an expert on leadership for his research, writing and projects to improve organizations and work. He authored or co-authored fourteen books and consulted to companies, governments, the World Bank, unions, research and development centers and laboratories, universities and orphanages or taught in 36 countries. Maccoby's article, Narcissistic Leaders: the Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons written in January 2000, was awarded a McKinsey Award from the Harvard Business Review.
Go to Profile#27575
Duane Litfin
#27586
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
A. Duane Litfin is an American academic administrator and evangelical minister. He was the seventh president of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Early life and education Litfin was born on November 14, 1945. He holds an undergraduate degree in biblical studies from the Philadelphia College of Bible and a master's degree in theology from Dallas Theological Seminary. His two doctoral degrees are from Purdue University and Oxford . He came to Wheaton in 1993 from Memphis, Tennessee, where he served the First Evangelical Church as senior pastor. Prior to that, he was an associate professor at Dallas Theological Seminary.
Go to Profile#27576
Marc Lipsitch
#27587
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Marc Lipsitch is an American epidemiologist and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he is the Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. He has worked on modeling the transmission of Coronavirus disease 2019 .
Go to Profile#27577
Jarl-Thure Eriksson
#27588
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jarl-Thure Eriksson is Doctor of Science in Technology, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Rector of Tampere University of Technology in Finland between the years 1997–2008. During Eriksson's period as rector, the university expanded vigorously and its scientific publishing activity amplified. Due to his scientific merits, Eriksson has been a member of the Finnish Academy of Technology since 1989 and of the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in Finland since 1997. His perhaps most significant position of trust outside the university is membership in the Governing Board of the Millennium Prize Foundation since 2003.
Go to Profile#27578
Brian Carney
#27589
Overall Influence
Brian M. Carney is a senior executive at Rivada Networks. He is formerly an editor, journalist and member of the Editorial Board at The Wall Street Journal. From August 2009 until early 2014 , he lived in London and served as editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe. He is the coauthor, with Isaac Getz, of Freedom, Inc., published by Crown Business on October 13, 2009. He has won the Gerald Loeb Award for business journalism and the Frederic Bastiat Journalism Prize.
Go to Profile#27579
Clarence F. Stephens
#27590
Overall Influence
1917 - 2018 (101 years)
Clarence Francis Stephens was the ninth African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. He is credited with inspiring students and faculty at SUNY Potsdam to form the most successful United States undergraduate mathematics degree programs in the past century. Stephens was recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2018 Honoree.
Go to Profile#27580
Johanna Konta
#27591
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Johanna Konta is a retired British professional tennis player, having represented Australia until 2012. She won four singles titles on the WTA Tour, as well as 11 singles and four doubles titles on the ITF Women's Circuit. She was British 1 and reached a career-high singles ranking of world No. 4 on 17 July 2017. She reached the semifinals of the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the French Open.
Go to Profile#27581
Gerald Feldman
#27592
Overall Influence
1937 - 2007 (70 years)
Gerald Donald Feldman was an American historian who specialized in 20th-century German history. He was Professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and received several prizes and honors, including the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Go to Profile#27582
Amélie Kuhrt
#27593
Overall Influence
1944 - 2023 (79 years)
Amélie Kuhrt FBA was a British historian and specialist in the history of the ancient Near East. Kuhrt was educated at King's College London, University College London and SOAS. Professor Emerita at University College London, she specialised in the social, cultural and political history of the region from c. 3000–100 BC, especially the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and Seleucid empires.
Go to Profile#27583
Colin Rallings
#27594
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Colin Rallings is a British academic, Professor of Politics in the School of Sociology, Politics & Law at the University of Plymouth. Rallings’ first degree was in Politics and Modern History from the University of Manchester. Subsequently, he was awarded a master's degree in Politics by the University of Strathclyde and, in 1979, a Ph.D. by the University of Essex for a thesis on electoral behaviour. He joined the then Plymouth Polytechnic in 1976, being appointed Professor of Politics in 1997. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Queensland, and the Australian National University, Canberra.
Go to Profile#27584
Stan Allen
#27595
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Stan Allen is an American architect, theorist and former dean of Princeton University School of Architecture. Biography He received a B.A. from Brown University, a B.Arch. from Cooper Union and an M.Arch. from Princeton University. He has worked in the offices of Richard Meier and Rafael Moneo, and was formerly the director, with landscape architect James Corner at Field Operations. The work of this interdisciplinary collaboration was recognized with first prizes in invited competitions for the re-use of Fresh Kills in Staten Island , and the Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, California . His pra...
Go to Profile#27585
Michael Kimmel
#27596
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael Scott Kimmel is an American retired sociologist specializing in gender studies. He was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University in New York and is the founder and editor of the academic journal Men and Masculinities. Kimmel is a spokesman of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism and a longtime feminist. In 2013, he founded the at Stony Brook University, where he is Executive Director. In 2018 he was publicly accused of sexual harassment. He filed for retirement while Title IX charges were pending; no charges were subsequently filed.
Go to Profile#27586
Robin Popplestone
#27597
Overall Influence
1938 - 2004 (66 years)
Robin John Popplestone was a pioneer in the fields of machine intelligence and robotics. He is known for developing the COWSEL and POP programming languages, and for his work on Freddy II with Pat Ambler at the University of Edinburgh Artificial Intelligence laboratory.
Go to Profile#27587
George Edgar Slusser
#27598
Overall Influence
1939 - 2014 (75 years)
George Edgar Slusser was an American scholar, professor and writer. Slusser was a well-known science fiction critic. A professor emeritus of comparative literature at University of California, Riverside, he was the first curator of the Eaton collection.
Go to Profile#27588
Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl
#27599
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl is an Iranian-American academic, structural engineer and professor at University of California, Berkeley. He was one of the leading structural engineers to investigate the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on the September 11 attacks.
Go to Profile#27589
Helen Hobbs
#27600
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Helen Haskell Hobbs is an American medical researcher who is professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, who won a 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the 2018 Harrington Prize for Innovation in Medicine. She and Jonathan C. Cohen found that people with hypomorphic PCSK9 mutations had lower LDL-cholesterol levels and were almost immune to heart disease. This finding led to the development of a new class of cholesterol-lowering drugs that mimic the effects of the PCSK9 mutations. She and Cohen also identified t...
Go to Profile#27590
John Worrall
#27601
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Worrall is a professor of philosophy of science at the London School of Economics. He is also associated with the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the same institution. Education Worrall attended Leigh Grammar School in Leigh, Lancashire and originally planned to join the school's Scholarship Stream in order to then apply for university admission to Oxbridge. He later described his change of mind, saying: "Think The History Boys – it then meant an additional year in the Sixth Form, and so another year in Leigh and I just couldn't face that!" After receiving a singl...
Go to Profile#27591
Terence Stamp
#27602
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Terence Henry Stamp is an English actor. Known for his sophisticated villain roles, he was named by Empire as one of the 100 Sexiest Film Stars of All Time in 1995. He has received various accolades including a Golden Globe Award, a Cannes Film Festival Award, and a Silver Bear as well as nominations for an Academy Award and two BAFTA Awards.
Go to Profile#27592
Frits van Oostrom
#27603
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Frits van Oostrom is university professor for the Humanities at Utrecht University. In 1999 he was a visiting professor at Harvard for the Erasmus Chair. From September 2004 to June 2005, he was a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study . He was awarded the Spinozapremie in 1995. In May 2005 he became president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for a three-year period. He had been member of the same institution since 1994.
Go to Profile#27593
Christopher Deninger
#27604
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Christopher Deninger is a German mathematician at the University of Münster. Deninger's research focuses on arithmetic geometry, including applications to L-functions. Career Deninger obtained his doctorate from the University of Cologne in 1982, under the supervision of Curt Meyer. In 1992 he shared a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize with Michael Rapoport, Peter Schneider and Thomas Zink. In 1998 he was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1998 in Berlin. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#27594
Lyman Ray Patterson
#27605
Overall Influence
1929 - 2003 (74 years)
Lyman Ray Patterson was an American law professor and an influential copyright scholar and historian. Biography Patterson was born in Macon, Georgia. He graduated from Mercer University, and obtained a master's degree in English from Northwestern University. After teaching English at Middle Georgia College, he joined the Army where he studied Russian at the Army Language School. During the Korean War he served as a translator of Russian radio broadcasts. Following the Army he attended law school at Mercer University. After practicing law for two years with the firm of Matthews, Maddox, Wal...
Go to Profile#27595
Joakim Noah
#27606
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Joakim Simon Noah is a former professional basketball player. Born in New York, Noah was a member of the French national team and played college basketball for the Florida Gators, winning back-to-back NCAA championships in 2006 and 2007. The Chicago Bulls selected Noah with the ninth overall pick in the 2007 NBA draft. Noah is a two-time NBA All-Star and was named to the All-NBA First Team in 2014 when he also was named the NBA Defensive Player of the Year.
Go to Profile#27596
François Grosjean
#27607
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
François Grosjean is a Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Language and Speech Processing Laboratory at the University of Neuchâtel . His specialty is psycholinguistics and his domains of interest are the perception, comprehension and production of language, be it speech or sign language, in monolinguals and bilinguals. He also has interests in biculturalism, applied linguistics, aphasia, sign language, and natural language processing. He is better known for his work on bilingualism in which he has investigated the holistic view of bilingualism, language mode, the complementarity principle, and the processing of code-switching and borrowing.
Go to Profile#27597
Roberto Benigni
#27608
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Roberto Remigio Benigni is an Italian actor, comedian, screenwriter and director. He gained international recognition for writing, directing and starring in the Holocaust comedy-drama film Life Is Beautiful , for which he received the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best International Feature Film. Benigni was the first actor to win the Best Actor Academy Award for a non–English language performance.
Go to Profile#27598
Yuan Chang
#27609
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Yuan Chang is a Taiwanese-American virologist and pathologist who co-discovered together with her husband, Patrick S. Moore, the Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus and Merkel cell polyomavirus, two of the seven known human oncoviruses.
Go to Profile#27599
Herwig Kogelnik
#27610
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Herwig Kogelnik is an Austrian-American electrical and optical engineer. He is best known for his fundamental contributions to the developments in laser technology, optoelectronics, photonics and lightwave communications systems. His work over a 40-year career at Bell Labs earned him the Marconi Prize, the IEEE Medal of Honor, the National Medal of Technology and many other awards.
Go to Profile#27600
Zoriana Skaletska
#27611
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Zoriana Stepanivna Skaletska is a Ukrainian lawyer, activist and politician and former Minister of Healthcare of Ukraine. Biography Skaletska graduated from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy . She studied at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University . Doctor of Law.
Go to Profile