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
#28001
Katharina Sieverding
#28012
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Katharina Sieverding is a German photographer known for her self-portraiture. Sieverding lives and works in Berlin and Düsseldorf. She is a professor emeritus at the University of the Arts, Berlin.
Go to Profile#28002
Ursula Martin
#28013
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Ursula Hilda Mary Martin is a British computer scientist, with research interests in theoretical computer science and formal methods. She is also known for her activities aimed at encouraging women in the fields of computing and mathematics. Since 2019, she has served as a professor at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#28003
Scott Rudin
#28014
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Scott Rudin is an American film, television and theatre producer. His films include the Academy Award-winning Best Picture No Country for Old Men, as well as Uncut Gems, Lady Bird, Fences, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Social Network, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, School of Rock, Zoolander, The Truman Show, Clueless, The Addams Family, and eight Wes Anderson films. On Broadway, he has won 17 Tony Awards for shows such as The Book of Mormon, Hello, Dolly!, The Humans, A View from the Bridge, Fences and Passion.
Go to Profile#28004
Colin S. Smith
#28015
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Colin S. Smith is an American evangelical pastor and author. Smith is currently the senior pastor of The Orchard Evangelical Free Church in Illinois, where he has been since 1996. The Orchard Evangelical Free Church has Seven campus locations: Arlington Heights, Barrington, Itasca, Marengo, Chicago, Northfield and Vernon Hills.
Go to Profile#28005
Michael Lynch
#28016
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Michael Lynch is the Director of the Biodesign Institute for Mechanisms of Evolution at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. Biography He held a Distinguished Professorship of Evolution, Population Genetics and Genomics at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Besides over 250 papers, especially in population genetics, he has written a two volume textbook with Bruce Walsh. Alongside this textbook he has also published two other books. He promotes neutral theories to explain genomic architecture based on the effects of population sizes in different lineages; he presented this point of view in his 2007 book "The Origins of Genome Architecture".
Go to Profile#28006
Tom Colbert
#28017
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Tom Colbert is a former Associate Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court. He was appointed to the Court's District 6 seat in 2004, by Governor Brad Henry, becoming the first African-American to serve on the court. On January 4, 2013, he was sworn in as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and served In that post until January 2015. After completing his two-year term as Chief Justice, he resumed his previous position on the court as Associate Justice representing the 6th Judicial District. On January 19, 2021, Colbert’s retirement was announced by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, effective February 1...
Go to Profile#28007
Lee Westwood
#28018
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Lee John Westwood is an English professional golfer. Noted for his consistency, he is one of the few golfers who has won tournaments on five continents – Europe, North America, Asia, Africa and Oceania – including victories on the European Tour and the PGA Tour. He has also won tournaments in four decades, the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and 2020s. He was named European Tour Golfer of the Year for the 1998, 2000, 2009 and 2020 seasons. He has won the 2000 European Tour Order of Merit, and the renamed 2009 and 2020 Race to Dubai. He has frequently been mentioned as one of the best golfers without a m...
Go to Profile#28008
Juwan Howard
#28019
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Juwan Antonio Howard is an American former professional basketball player and current head coach of the Michigan Wolverines men's team. A one-time All-Star and one-time All-NBA power forward, he began his NBA career as the fifth overall pick in the 1994 NBA draft, selected by the Washington Bullets. Before he was drafted, he starred as an All-American on the Michigan Wolverines men's basketball team. At Michigan he was part of the Fab Five recruiting class of 1991 that reached the finals of the NCAA tournament in 1992 and 1993.
Go to Profile#28009
Élisabeth Borne
#28020
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Élisabeth Borne is a French politician who has served as Prime Minister of France since May 2022. She is a member of President Emmanuel Macron's party Renaissance. Borne is the second woman to hold the position of Prime Minister after Édith Cresson, who served from 1991 to 1992.
Go to Profile#28010
Sigrid D. Peyerimhoff
#28021
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Sigrid Doris Peyerimhoff is a theoretical chemist and Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Bonn, Germany. Education After completing her abitur, Peyerimhoff studied physics at the University of Gießen, completing her degree in 1961 and receiving her doctorate under supervision of Bernhard Kockel in 1963. After researching at the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, and Princeton University, she returned to Germany and gained her habilitation at the University of Gießen in 1967. She became professor for theoretical chemistry a...
Go to Profile#28011
J. Yellowlees Douglas
#28022
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Jane Yellowlees Douglas is a pioneer author and scholar of hypertext fiction. She began writing about hypermedia in the late 1980s, very early in the development of the medium. Her 1993 fiction I Have Said Nothing, was one of the first published works of hypertext fiction.
Go to Profile#28012
Sodiq Safoyev
#28023
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Sodiq Solihovich Safoyev , also known as Sodyq Safayev is first deputy chairperson of the Senate of Uzbekistan's Parliament, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Uzbekistan from 14 March 2003 until 4 February 2005.
Go to Profile#28013
Helen Stokes-Lampard
#28024
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Dame Helen Jayne Stokes-Lampard , FLSW is a British medical academic and a medical general practitioner. She is Chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges a GP principal and Chair of the National Academy for Social Prescribing . She was Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners from November 2016 to November 2019. She is also a professor of GP Education at Birmingham University and holds a visiting chair at St George's, University of London.
Go to Profile#28014
Isabelle Rapin
#28025
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
Isabelle Juliette Martha Rapin, M.D. , was a Professor of both Neurology and Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. She was a leading authority on autism for decades, and a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology.
Go to Profile#28015
Neville Southall
#28026
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Neville Southall is a Welsh former international footballer. He has been described as one of the best goalkeepers of his generation and won the FWA Footballer of the Year award in 1985. He joined Bury from Winsford United for a £6,000 fee in 1980, and turned professional in his early 20s after a number of years as a semi-professional and amateur player. During his teenage years he worked as a binman, waiter and hod carrier. He moved on to Everton for £150,000 in 1981 and established himself as the club's first-choice goalkeeper by the 1983–84 season. He went on to make a club record 578 appe...
Go to Profile#28016
Renee Rabinowitz
#28027
Overall Influence
1934 - 2020 (86 years)
Renee Ginsburg Rabinowitz Wagner was an American-Israeli psychologist and lawyer. She was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Antwerp, Belgium, but fled with her family to the United States in 1941, following the outbreak of World War II, and grew up in New York City. Her parents were Marcus "Max" Charles Ginsburg and Helena "Hella" Zimmet. She had one brother named Herbert "Herbie" Ginsburg. She earned a doctorate in educational psychology at the University of Chicago, and a law degree at Notre Dame University. She taught psychology at Indiana University, and later served as in-house legal counsel at Colorado College.
Go to Profile#28017
Edwin E. Tozer
#28028
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Edwin Ellis Tozer is a British retired management and IT consultant and SF author, particularly known for his early work on business information systems in the 1970s and 1980s. Life and work Tozer started his career in the manufacturing and mining industry. In 1969 he became junior systems analyst at the management consultancy firm Scicon in London; a subsidiary of British Petroleum, originally known as Scientific Control Systems, chaired by Sir Maurice Kendall. After spells with other consulting firms, he worked with James Martin's European operation from 1982 to 1984.
Go to Profile#28018
Greg Turk
#28029
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Greg Turk is an American-born researcher in the field of computer graphics and a professor at the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology . His paper "Zippered polygon meshes from range images", concerning the reconstruction of surfaces from point data, brought the "Stanford bunny", a frequently used example object in computer graphics research, into the CGI lexicon. Turk actually purchased the original Stanford Bunny and performed the initial scans on it. He is also known for his work on simplification of surfaces, and on reaction–diffusion-based texture synthesis.
Go to Profile#28019
John Burnside
#28030
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
John Burnside FRSL FRSE is a Scottish writer. He is one of only three poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book . In 2023 he won the David Cohen Prize.
Go to Profile#28020
Jack Mahoney
#28031
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
John Aloysius "Jack" Mahoney SJ is a Scottish Jesuit, moral theologian, and academic, specialising in applied ethics and business ethics. He was principal of Heythrop College, London from 1976 to 1981, F. D. Maurice Professor of Moral and Social Theology at King's College, London from 1986 to 1993, and Dixons Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility at the London Business School from 1993 to 1998. He was also Gresham Professor of Commerce between 1988 and 1993.
Go to Profile#28021
James Z. Wang
#28032
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
James Ze Wang is a Chinese-American computer scientist. He is a distinguished professor of the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. He is also an affiliated professor of the Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences Program; the Computational Science Graduate Minor; and the Social Data Analytics Graduate Program. He is co-director of the Intelligent Information Systems Laboratory. He was a visiting professor of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University from 2007 to 2008. In 2011 and 2012, he served as a program manager in the Office of International Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation.
Go to Profile#28022
Akira Tonomura
#28033
Overall Influence
1942 - 2012 (70 years)
was a Japanese physicist, best known for his development of electron holography and his experimental verification of the Aharonov–Bohm effect. Biography Tonomura was born in Hyōgo, Japan, and graduated from the University of Tokyo with a degree in physics. Upon graduation he joined the Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, where he later attained the title "Fellow" in 1999.
Go to Profile#28023
Steven A. Benner
#28034
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Steven Albert Benner is an American chemist. He has been a professor at Harvard University, ETH Zurich, and most recently at the University of Florida, where he was the V.T. & Louise Jackson Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. In 2005, he founded The Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology and the Foundation For Applied Molecular Evolution. Benner has also founded the companies EraGen Biosciences and Firebird BioMolecular Sciences LLC.
Go to Profile#28024
Paul Fiddes
#28035
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Paul Stuart Fiddes is an English Baptist theologian and novelist. Fiddes is Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology in the University of Oxford, Principal Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow of Regent's Park College, Oxford , and a former Chairman of the Oxford Faculty of Theology.
Go to Profile#28025
Anatol Hrytskievich
#28036
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Anatol Hrytskievich was a Belarusian historian. He was a correspondent member of the International Academy of Science of Eurasia , doctor of history , professor . He was born in Minsk. Anatol Hrytskievich graduated in 1950 from the Minsk Medical Institute and in 1955 — from the Minsk Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages and in 1958 from the Belarusian State University history faculty.
Go to Profile#28026
Alan Curbishley
#28037
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Llewellyn Charles "Alan" Curbishley is an English former football player and manager. He played as a midfielder for West Ham United, Birmingham City, Aston Villa, Charlton Athletic and Brighton & Hove Albion and has worked in the Premier League in management roles at Charlton Athletic and West Ham United. In December 2013 he was appointed technical director at Fulham only to be removed from the role in February 2014. He again joined Fulham's coaching staff in March 2015.
Go to Profile#28027
Harold Larwood
#28038
Overall Influence
1904 - 1995 (91 years)
Harold Larwood was a professional cricketer for Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club and the England cricket team between 1924 and 1938. A right-arm fast bowler who combined extreme speeds with great accuracy, he was considered by many players and commentators to be the finest and the fastest fast bowler of his generation and one of the fastest bowlers of all time. He was the main exponent of the bowling style known as "bodyline", the use of which during the Marylebone Cricket Club tour of Australia in 1932–33 caused a furore that brought about a premature and acrimonious end to his internat...
Go to Profile#28028
Alanna Schepartz
#28039
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Alanna Schepartz is an American professor and scientist. She is currently the T.Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Chair in Chemistry at University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly the Sterling Professor of Chemistry at Yale University.
Go to Profile#28029
David Pilbeam
#28040
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
David Pilbeam is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and curator of paleoanthropology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University.
Go to Profile#28030
Scotty McLennan
#28041
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
William L. McLennan, Jr. , better known as Scotty McLennan, is an American Unitarian Universalist minister, lawyer, professor, published author, public speaker and senior administrator at Stanford University in Stanford, California. From January 1, 2001 until August 2014, McLennan served as the Dean for Religious Life at Stanford University, where he oversaw campus-wide religious affairs, supervised over 30 university student groups that constituted the Stanford Associated Religions, and was the minister of Stanford Memorial Church. He currently teaches about the moral and ethical aspects of...
Go to Profile#28031
Than Shwe
#28042
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Than Shwe is a Burmese strongman politician who was the head of state of Myanmar from 1992 to 2011 as Chairman of the State Peace and Development Council . During this period, he held key positions of power including Prime Minister of Myanmar, Commander-in-chief of Myanmar Defense Services and head of the Union Solidarity and Development Association. In March 2011 he officially stepped down as head of state in favour of his hand-picked successor, Thein Sein, and as head of the Armed Forces, being replaced by general Min Aung Hlaing. He continues to retain great power in the military.
Go to Profile#28032
Bill O'Reilly
#28043
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
William James O'Reilly Jr. is an American conservative commentator, journalist, author, and television host. O'Reilly's broadcasting career began during the late 1970s and 1980s, when he reported for local television stations in the United States and later for CBS News and ABC News. He anchored the tabloid television program Inside Edition from 1989 to 1995. O'Reilly joined the Fox News Channel in 1996 and hosted The O'Reilly Factor until 2017. The O'Reilly Factor had been the highest-rated cable news show for 16 years, and he was described by media analyst Howard Kurtz as "the biggest star in the 20-year history at Fox News" at the time of his ousting.
Go to Profile#28033
Eilaf Egap
#28044
Overall Influence
Eilaf Egap is an assistant professor of Materials Science at Rice University. She works on imaging techniques and biomaterials for early diagnostics and drug delivery. She was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology MLK Visiting Scholar in 2011.
Go to Profile#28034
Richard C. Perry
#28045
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Richard Cayne Perry is an American hedge fund manager whose firm, Perry Capital LLC invested in several companies and, starting in 2012, owned a controlling interest in Barneys New York. Perry sold his controlling interest in Barneys New York in August 2019.
Go to Profile#28035
Alexandru Roșca
#28046
Overall Influence
1906 - 1996 (90 years)
Alexandru Roṣca was a Romanian psychologist and professor. In 1991, he was elected a titular member of the Romanian Academy. Works Psihopatologia deviaților morali Adaptarea socială Motivele acțiunii umane Tehnica psihologiei experimentale și practice Tratat de psihologie experimentală Psihologia muncii industriale Metodologie și tehnici experimentale în psihologie Psihologie generală Sinteze de psihologie contemporană
Go to Profile#28036
George Albee
#28047
Overall Influence
1921 - 2006 (85 years)
George Wilson Albee was an American academic who was a pioneer in clinical psychology, who believed societal factors such as unemployment, racism, sexism, and all the myriad forms of exploitation of people by people were the major cause of mental illness. He was one of the leading figures in the development of community psychology. Albee was an advocate for coping with adversity, strengthening individual resources, and social change.
Go to Profile#28037
Nomar Garciaparra
#28048
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Anthony Nomar Garciaparra is an American former Major League Baseball player and current SportsNet LA analyst. After playing parts of nine seasons as an All-Star shortstop for the Boston Red Sox, he played shortstop, third base and first base for the Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, and the Oakland Athletics. Garciaparra is one of 13 players in Major League history to hit two grand slams during a single game, and the only player to achieve the feat at his home stadium.
Go to Profile#28038
Stockard Channing
#28049
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Stockard Channing is an American actress. She played Betty Rizzo in the film Grease and First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the NBC television series The West Wing . She also originated the role of Ouisa Kittredge in the stage and film versions of Six Degrees of Separation; the 1993 film version earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She was also one of two comic foils of The Number Painter on Sesame Street.
Go to Profile#28039
Philip Jefferson
#28050
Overall Influence
Philip Nathan Jefferson is an American economist who serves as vice chair of the Federal Reserve. He has been a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors since 2022. He was nominated for the position by President Joe Biden in January 2022, and was confirmed by the Senate in May 2022. Upon taking office, he became the fourth Black man to serve on the board.
Go to Profile#28040
Bea Arthur
#28051
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Beatrice Arthur was an American actress and comedienne. She began her career on stage in 1947, attracting critical acclaim before achieving worldwide recognition for her work on television beginning in the 1970s as Maude Findlay in the popular sitcoms All in the Family and Maude and later in the 1980s and 1990s as Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls .
Go to Profile#28041
James Mallet
#28052
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
James Mallet is an evolutionary zoologist specialising in entomology. He was educated at Winchester College. He became professor of biological diversity at the Department of Biology, University College London. He was co-director of the Centre for Ecology and Evolution, a centre of excellence in research and teaching formed by University College London, the Institute of Zoology , Natural History Museum, Imperial College, Queen Mary, Royal Holloway and Kew Gardens. In 2013 he was distinguished lecturer on Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His research has included wor...
Go to Profile#28042
Layna Mosley
#28053
Overall Influence
Layna Mosley is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. She studies international relations, particularly the relationship between domestic politics and the global economy.
Go to Profile#28043
John Shine
#28054
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Shine is an Australian biochemist and molecular biologist. Shine and Lynn Dalgarno discovered a nucleotide sequence, called the Shine-Dalgarno sequence, necessary for the initiation of protein synthesis. He directed the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney from 1990 to 2011. From 2018 to 2022, Shine was President of the Australian Academy of Science.
Go to Profile#28044
Adrian Del Caro
#28055
Overall Influence
Adrián del Caro is an American historian of German and Austrian literature, currently a Distinguished Humanities Professor at University of Tennessee. He has written several monographs on Friedrich Nietzsche and translated several books by Nietzsche into English. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
Go to Profile#28045
Didier Bigo
#28056
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Didier Bigo is a French academic from Lille and Professor of International Relations at King's College London and at Sciences Po, Paris. He has authored two books, Polices en réseaux. L'expérience européenne and Pouvoir et obéissance en Centrafrique and has been the editor for many others.
Go to Profile#28046
Chuu-Lian Terng
#28057
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Chuu-Lian Terng is a Taiwanese-American mathematician. Her research areas are differential geometry and integrable systems, with particular interests in completely integrable Hamiltonian partial differential equations and their relations to differential geometry, the geometry and topology of submanifolds in symmetric spaces, and the geometry of isometric actions.
Go to Profile#28047
Mateusz Morawiecki
#28058
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Mateusz Jakub Morawiecki is a Polish economist, historian and politician who has served as prime minister of Poland since 2017. A member of the Law and Justice party, he previously served in the cabinet of prime minister Beata Szydło as deputy prime minister from 2015 to 2017, Minister of Development from 2015 to 2018 and Minister of Finance from 2016 to 2018. Prior to his political appointment, Morawiecki had an extensive business career.
Go to Profile#28048
Leah Boustan
#28059
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Leah Platt Boustan is an economist who is currently a professor of economics at Princeton University. Her research interests include economic history, labour economics, and urban economics. Biography Leah Platt Boustan earned a BA in Economics from Princeton University in 2000, and her PhD in 2006 from Harvard University. Her dissertation, "The Effect of Black Migration on Northern Cities and Labor Markets, 1940-1970,” won the Economic History Association's Allan Nevins Prize for the best dissertation in US economic history that year.
Go to Profile#28049
Saxby Chambliss
#28060
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Clarence Saxby Chambliss is an American lawyer and retired politician who was a United States Senator from Georgia from 2003 to 2015. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a U.S. Representative from 1995 to 2003.
Go to Profile#28050
Ricardo Montalbán
#28061
Overall Influence
1920 - 2009 (89 years)
Ricardo Gonzalo Pedro Montalbán y Merino, KSG was a Mexican and American film and television actor. Montalbán's career spanned seven decades, during which he became known for performances in a variety of genres, from crime and drama to musicals and comedy.
Go to Profile