The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people
#27951
Keith Jarrett
#27962
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Keith Jarrett is an American pianist and composer. Jarrett started his career with Art Blakey and later moved on to play with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis. Since the early 1970s, he has also been a group leader and solo performer in jazz, jazz fusion, and classical music. His improvisations draw from the traditions of jazz and other genres, including Western classical music, gospel, blues, and ethnic folk music.
Go to Profile#27952
Ricardo Baeza Rodríguez
#27963
Overall Influence
Ricardo Baeza Rodríguez is a Chilean mathematician who works as a professor at the University of Talca. He earned his Ph.D. in 1970 from Saarland University, under the joint supervision of Robert W. Berger and Manfred Knebusch. His research interest is in number theory.
Go to Profile#27953
Nancy Hubbard
#27964
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Nancy Anne Hubbard is an American author, public relations consultant. She is the dean of the College of Business at University of Lynchburg. Hubbard was previously the director of the Goucher College Center for Education, Business and Professional Studies and the Miriam Katowitz Chair of Management and Accounting.
Go to Profile#27954
Carol Z. Perez
#27965
Overall Influence
Carol Zelis Perez is a career Foreign Service Officer, who previously served as the Director General of the Foreign Service. Perez served as the U.S. Ambassador to Chile from October 2016 to January 2019.
Go to Profile#27955
Alice Adams
#27966
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
Alice Adams was an American short story writer and novelist. In 1982 she became the third author of only four to receive the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement for her short stories .
Go to Profile#27956
Gastón Gaudio
#27967
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Gastón Norberto Gaudio is an Argentine former professional tennis player. He won eight singles titles and achieved a career-high ATP singles ranking of world No. 5 in April 2005. Gaudio's most significant title win came at the 2004 French Open, the last French Open before the Rafael Nadal era, when he defeated fellow Argentine Guillermo Coria in five sets in the final.
Go to Profile#27957
Willi H. Hager
#27968
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Willi H. Hager is a Swiss civil engineer and Professor at the ETH Zurich, Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, known for his work on hydraulics. Biography Born in 1951, Hager obtained his engineering degree from the ETH Zurich in 1976, were in 1981 he also obtained his PhD at its VAW Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology.
Go to Profile#27958
Robert van Voren
#27969
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Robert van Voren is a Dutch human rights activist, sovietologist and historian. He is a professor of Soviet and post-Soviet studies in the Ilia State University in Tbilisi and in the Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas as well as a visiting professor at University of Silezia, Katowice, Poland. He is also Chief Executive of the international foundation Human Rights in Mental Health-Federation Global Initiative on Psychiatry and Executive Director of the Andrei Sakharov Research Center for Democratic Development at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania.
Go to Profile#27959
Kara DioGuardi
#27970
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Kara Elizabeth DioGuardi is an American songwriter, record producer, music publisher, A&R executive, and singer. She writes music primarily in the pop rock genre. DioGuardi has worked with many popular artists; sales of albums on which her songs appear exceed 160 million worldwide. DioGuardi is a 2011 NAMM Music for Life Award winner, 2009 NMPA Songwriter Icon Award winner, 2007 BMI Pop Songwriter of the Year, and has received 20 BMI Awards for co-writing the most performed songs on the radio.
Go to Profile#27960
James Clancy Phelan
#27971
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
James Clancy Phelan , known professionally as James Phelan, is an Australian writer of thrillers and young adult novels, including Fox Hunt, The Last 13 series for teens, and the Jed Walker and Lachlan Fox thrillers. He has also written short stories and the non-fiction book Literati.
Go to Profile#27961
Stephen Schwartz
#27972
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
#27962
Denis Crouzet
#27973
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Denis Bertrand Yves Crouzet is a French historian specialising in the history of the early modern period and particularly in the French Wars of Religion during the reformation. He is a professor at Paris-Sorbonne University where he holds the chair in History of the 16th Century. He is married to the historian Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan.
Go to Profile#27963
Benjamin Valentino
#27974
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Benjamin Andrew Valentino is a political scientist and professor at Dartmouth College. His 2004 book Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, adapted from his PhD thesis and published by Cornell University Press, has been reviewed in several academic journals.
Go to Profile#27964
Kaisa Nyberg
#27975
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Kaisa Nyberg is a Finnish cryptographer and computer security researcher. Contributions Nyberg's research includes the theory of perfect nonlinear S-boxes , provably secure block cipher design Education and career Nyberg received her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1980 from the University of Helsinki. Her dissertation, On Subspaces of Products of Nuclear Fréchet Spaces, was in topology, and was supervised by Edward Leonard Dubinsky.
Go to Profile#27965
Irving Zola
#27976
Overall Influence
1935 - 1994 (59 years)
Irving Kenneth Zola was an American activist and writer in medical sociology and disability rights. Early life and education Zola came from a working class Jewish family. His mother was of Polish origin and his father Russian, both arriving in the US as immigrants as young children. He graduated from Boston Latin School and went on to enroll at Harvard College in 1956, and four years later went on to receive his Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University Department of Social Relations.
Go to Profile#27966
Larry Doby
#27977
Overall Influence
1923 - 2003 (80 years)
Lawrence Eugene Doby was an American professional baseball player in the Negro leagues and Major League Baseball who was the second black player to break baseball's color barrier and the first black player in the American League. A native of Camden, South Carolina, and three-sport all-state athlete while in high school in Paterson, New Jersey, Doby accepted a basketball scholarship from Long Island University. At 17 years of age, he began his professional baseball career with the Newark Eagles as the team's second baseman. Doby joined the United States Navy during World War II. His military ...
Go to Profile#27967
Miriam Feirberg
#27978
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Miriam Feirberg-Ikar is an Israeli politician currently serving as the mayor of Netanya, a city in the Central District of Israel. Feirberg is the first female mayor in Netanya and one of the few women who have served as mayors of Israeli cities.
Go to Profile#27968
Robert M. Thrall
#27979
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
Robert McDowell Thrall was an American mathematician and a pioneer of operations research. Biography Thrall graduated in 1935 with BA from Illinois College and in 1937 with MA and PhD in mathematics from the University of Illinois. From 1937 to 1969 he was a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1969 he became a professor in the newly founded department of Mathematical Sciences at Rice University. He chaired the department from 1969 to 1974. In 1977 he received a joint appointment in Rice's newly established Graduate School of Business, where he taught decision analysis to MBA Students.
Go to Profile#27969
Timothy Gorringe
#27980
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Timothy Jervis Gorringe is an English Anglican priest and theologian who is St Luke's Professor of Theological Studies at the University of Exeter, Devon, England. Life Born in 1946, Timothy Gorringe was educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford , and Sarum Theological College . He was ordained deacon in 1972 and priest in 1973 and served as Assistant Curate at Chapel Allerton and Oxford St Mary the Virgin with St Cross and St Peter . From 1979 until 1986, he taught theology at Tamilnadu Theological Seminary. He was Official Fellow, Chaplain, and Tutor in Theology at St John's College, Oxford, 1986...
Go to Profile#27970
Colin Escott
#27981
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Colin Escott is a British music historian and author specializing in early U.S. rock and roll and country music. His works include a biography of Hank Williams, histories of Sun Records and The Grand Ole Opry, liner notes for more than 500 albums and compilations, and major contributions to stage and television productions. Honors include multiple Grammy Awards and a Tony Award nomination.
Go to Profile#27971
Harold Ramis
#27982
Overall Influence
1944 - 2014 (70 years)
Harold Allen Ramis was an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. His best-known film acting roles were as Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II , and as Russell Ziskey in Stripes ; he also co-wrote those films. As a director, his films include the comedies Caddyshack , National Lampoon's Vacation , Groundhog Day , Analyze This and Analyze That . Ramis was the original head writer of the television series SCTV, on which he also performed, as well as a co-writer of Groundhog Day and National Lampoon's Animal House . The final film that he wrote, produced, directed, and acted in ...
Go to Profile#27972
Joanna Aizenberg
#27983
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Joanna Aizenberg is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University. She is the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the co-director of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. She is a prominent figure in the field of biologically inspired materials science, having authored 90 publications and holding 25 patents.
Go to Profile#27973
David Fleay
#27984
Overall Influence
1907 - 1993 (86 years)
David Howells Fleay was an Australian scientist and biologist who pioneered the captive breeding of endangered species, and was the first person to breed the platypus in captivity. He died on 7 August 1993 aged 86.
Go to Profile#27974
Esmail Zanjani
#27985
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Esmail D. Zanjani is a professor and medical researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research involves growing human cells within sheep embryos. In March 2007, it was announced that Zanjani had created a human-sheep chimera. Zanjani has stated that his work involves sheep because of the blood-forming systems of sheep and humans are similar.
Go to Profile#27975
Sourav Pal
#27986
Overall Influence
Sourav Pal is an Indian theoretical chemist and former professor of chemistry at IIT Bombay, and former director of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata. He was a director of the CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory in Pune and an adjunct professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune.
Go to Profile#27976
Margrit Kennedy
#27987
Overall Influence
1939 - 2013 (74 years)
Margrit Kennedy was a German architect, professor, environmentalist, author and advocate of complementary currencies and an interest- and inflation-free economy. In 2011, she initiated the movement Occupy Money.
Go to Profile#27977
Rob Liefeld
#27988
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Robert Liefeld is an American comic book creator. A prominent writer and artist in the 1990s, he is known for co-creating the character Cable with writer Louise Simonson and the character Deadpool with writer Fabian Nicieza. In the early 1990s, Liefeld gained popularity due to his work on Marvel Comics' The New Mutants and later X-Force. In 1992, he and several other popular Marvel illustrators left the company to found Image Comics, which started a wave of comic books owned by their creators rather than by publishers. The first book published by Image Comics was Liefeld's Youngblood #1.
Go to Profile#27978
Alexander L. George
#27989
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Alexander L. George was an American behavioral scientist. He was the Graham H. Stuart Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Stanford University. He made influential contributions to political psychology, international relations, and social science methodology.
Go to Profile#27979
Stacy Keach
#27990
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Walter Stacy Keach Jr. is an American actor, active in theatre, film and television since the 1960s. Keach first distinguished himself in Off-Broadway productions and remained a prominent figure in American theatre across his career, particularly as a noted Shakespearean. He is the recipient of several theatrical accolades, four Drama Desk Awards, two Helen Hayes Awards and two Obie Awards for Distinguished Performance by an Actor. He was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his performance in Arthur Kopit's 1969 production of Indians.
Go to Profile#27980
Achi Brandt
#27991
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Achiezer Brandt is an Israeli mathematician, noted for his pioneering contributions to multigrid methods. Background Achi Brandt earned his Ph.D. degree at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1965, under the supervision of Joseph Gillis, with a thesis on numerical methods in hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics. He is a faculty member of the Weizmann Institute, and has taught at several universities in the United States, including the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Stanford University.
Go to Profile#27981
O. Meredith Wilson
#27992
Overall Influence
1909 - 1998 (89 years)
Owen Meredith Wilson was an American historian and academic administrator. He served as president of the University of Oregon from 1954 to 1960 and as president of the University of Minnesota from 1960 to 1967.
Go to Profile#27982
Francis Longstaff
#27993
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Francis A. Longstaff is an American educator and pioneer in quantitative finance. He serves as the Allstate Professor of Insurance and Finance at the Anderson School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles, and the former Finance Area Chair.
Go to Profile#27983
E. J. Mishan
#27994
Overall Influence
1917 - 2014 (97 years)
Ezra J. Mishan was an English economist best known for his work criticising economic growth. Between 1956 and 1977 he worked at the London School of Economics where he became Professor of Economics. In 1965, while at the LSE, he wrote his seminal work The Costs of Economic Growth, but was unable to find a publisher until 1967. In this work he expanded on his original 1960 thesis which stated that the “precondition of sustained growth is sustained discontent”, warning developing nations that “the thorny path to industrialisation leads, after all, only to the waste land of Subtopia”. The Costs...
Go to Profile#27984
A A Mamun
#27995
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Abdullah Al Mamun is a Bangladeshi physicist who is a professor of physics at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Early life and education A A Mamun was born in Dhamrai Upazila, Dhaka, East Pakistan on 31 December 1966, and he passed the Secondary School Certificate and Higher Secondary Certificate examinations, respectively, from Kushura Abbas Ali High School and Government Science College in 1981 and 1983, respectively. Mamun attended Jahangirnagar University, and passed Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in physics in 1986 and 1987 , respectively. On the basis of...
Go to Profile#27985
Patrick Magee
#27996
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Patrick Joseph Magee is a former Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer, best known for planting a bomb in the Brighton Grand Hotel targeting Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet, which killed five people. He is often referred to as the Brighton bomber.
Go to Profile#27986
David Childs
#27997
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
David Haslam Childs FRSA is a British academic and political historian, who is Professor Emeritus of Politics at the University of Nottingham. His research chiefly concerns the modern German state and the field of German studies, and helping the public develop a greater knowledge of the history and politics of the former East and West Germany.
Go to Profile#27987
Mario Balotelli
#27998
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (36 years)
Mario Balotelli Barwuah is an Italian professional footballer who plays as a striker for Süper Lig club Adana Demirspor. Balotelli started his professional football career in 2005 at Lumezzane, before joining Inter Milan in 2007. He won the treble in 2010. Balotelli reunited with Inter manager Roberto Mancini at Manchester City in 2010, helping them win a Premier League title and FA Cup. He moved back to Italy in January 2013, signing for AC Milan, before returning to the Premier League with Liverpool 18 months later. Following a return to Milan on loan, Balotelli departed to France, playing for Nice and Marseille in Ligue 1.
Go to Profile#27988
Richard Arum
#27999
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Richard Arum is an American sociologist of education and stratification, best known for his research on student learning, school discipline, race, and inequality in K-12 and higher education. Arum has a B.A. in Political Science from Tufts University, an M.Ed. in Teaching and Curriculum from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#27989
Sunil Khilnani
#28000
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Sunil Khilnani is a professor of politics and history at Ashoka University, India. Previously, he was a professor of politics and the Director of the King's College London India Institute. He is a scholar of Indian history and politics best known as the author of The Idea of India . He was the presenter of a BBC Radio 4 series entitled Incarnations: India in 50 Lives, which was later published as a book in 2016. He was a 2010 Berlin Prize Fellow, and he was also a recipient of the Indian government's 2005 Pravasi Bharatiya Samman award.
Go to Profile#27990
Leonard Marsak
#28001
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Leonard Marsak was a scholar of Modern European History, especially intellectual history. Biography After military service during World War II, Marsak earned his B.S. in Literature at Cornell University in 1948, . He became the first Jewish graduate student in History at Cornell University and earned his M.A. in History at Cornell in 1949. While writing his dissertation under the direction of Henry Guerlac at Cornell, Marsak accepted a position as Instructor of History and the Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1953. While teaching at Reed College in 1954, Marsak was questioned...
Go to Profile#27991
Christine Orengo
#28002
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Christine Anne Orengo is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London known for her work on protein structure, particularly the CATH database. Orengo serves as president of the International Society for Computational Biology , the first woman to do so in the history of the society.
Go to Profile#27992
Michel Piccoli
#28003
Overall Influence
1925 - 2020 (95 years)
Jacques Daniel Michel Piccoli was a French actor, producer and film director with a career spanning 70 years. He was lauded as one of the greatest French character actors of his generation who played a wide variety of roles and worked with many acclaimed directors, being awarded with a Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival and a Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin Film Festival.
Go to Profile#27993
Elsa Reichmanis
#28004
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Elsa Reichmanis is an American chemist, who was the 2003 president of the American Chemical Society. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1995 for the discovery, development, and engineering leadership of new families of lithographic materials and processes that enable VLSI manufacturing. She was also inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2020. She is currently the Anderson Endowed Chair in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Lehigh University. She previously served on the faculty at The Georgia Institute of Technology. Reichmanis is noted for h...
Go to Profile#27994
Ernst-Ludwig von Thadden
#28005
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Ernst-Ludwig von Thadden is a German economist, professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Mannheim, and has been president of Mannheim University since October 2012. Previously he was professor of Economics at the Département d'Econométrie et Economie Politique at the University of Lausanne.
Go to Profile#27995
Marcus Chown
#28006
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Marcus Chown is a science writer, journalist and broadcaster, currently cosmology consultant for New Scientist magazine. Biography He graduated from the Queen Mary University of London in 1980 with a Bachelor of Science in physics . In 1982 he graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a Master of Science in astrophysics. Chown studied under Richard Feynman at the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#27996
Peter France
#28007
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Peter France, FBA, FRSE , is a British academic and scholar of French literature, who served as Professor of French at the University of Edinburgh from 1980 to 1990. Life The son of Edgar France, he attended Bradford Grammar School before going up to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated as BA and DPhil. He was appointed a Lecturer in French at the University of Sussex in 1963, later being promoted as Reader. In 1980 he transferred to the University of Edinburgh where he took up the professorial chair in French, which he relinquished in 1990, becoming a University Endowment Fellow bef...
Go to Profile#27997
Nicklas Lidström
#28008
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Erik Nicklas Lidström is a Swedish former professional ice hockey defenceman and current vice president of hockey operations for the Detroit Red Wings. He played 20 seasons in the National Hockey League for the Detroit Red Wings from 1991 to 2012, which he captained for the final six seasons of his career. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest defencemen in NHL history and nicknamed "The Perfect Human."
Go to Profile#27998
Martin Warnke
#28009
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Martin Warnke was a German art historian. Life and work Warnke grew up in a German pastor's family in Brazil. He studied art history, history and German literature at the universities of Munich, Madrid and Berlin. In 1963, he wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Peter Paul Rubens at the Free University of Berlin under Hans Kauffmann. In 1964 and 1965, he worked at the Berlin museums. In 1970, he completed his Habilitationsschrift on court art at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. From 1971 to 1978 he was a professor of art history at the University of Marburg. In 1979, he moved to the Universi...
Go to Profile#27999
Srećko Horvat
#28010
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Srećko Horvat is a Croatian philosopher, author and political activist. The German weekly Der Freitag called him "one of the most exciting voices of his generation" and he has been described as a "fiery voice of dissent in the Post-Yugoslav landscape". His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Der Spiegel, Jacobin, Newsweek and The New York Times.
Go to Profile#28000
Agnes Wold
#28011
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Agnes Wold, born January 7, 1955, is a professor of clinical bacteriology specializing in the normal flora of the body, at the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. She is a nationally known commentator on television, radio and in newspapers on issues related to infectious disease and women in science.
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