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).
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List of the most influential people
#28101
Henry F. Korth
#28112
Overall Influence
Henry Francis Korth is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering and co-director of the Computer Science and Business program at Lehigh University. Early life and education Korth holds an A.B degree in mathematics from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Later he studied at Princeton University and graduated in 1979 for M.A. and M.S.E. degrees. After that he completed his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981. His dissertation title was "Locking Protocols: General Lock Classes and Deadlock Freedom".
Go to Profile#28102
Koichiro Harada
#28113
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
is a Japanese mathematician working on finite group theory. Early life and education The Institute for Advanced Study was Harada's first position in the United States in 1968. He graduated from University of Tokyo in 1972.
Go to Profile#28103
James Elkins
#28114
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
James Elkins is an American art historian and art critic. He is E.C. Chadbourne Chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He also coordinates the Stone Summer Theory Institute, a short term school on contemporary art history based at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Go to Profile#28104
Lionel Naccache
#28115
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Lionel Naccache is a French neurologist and specialist in cognitive neuroscience.
Go to Profile#28105
Frank Hsieh
#28116
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Frank Hsieh Chang-ting is a Taiwanese politician and former defense attorney. A cofounder of the Democratic Progressive Party, he has served on the Taipei City Council, the Legislative Yuan, as the mayor of Kaohsiung City, and as the Premier of the Executive Yuan under president Chen Shui-bian. Hsieh was the DPP nominee in the 2008 presidential election and was defeated by Ma Ying-jeou. Hsieh is currently the head of the Representative of Taiwan to Japan.
Go to Profile#28106
Mario Vegetti
#28117
Overall Influence
1937 - 2018 (81 years)
Mario Vegetti was an Italian historian of philosophy. Education Mario Vegetti was born in Milan in 1937. He graduated with a thesis on Thucydides' historiography at the University of Pavia, as a student at Collegio Ghislieri.
Go to Profile#28107
Alan Fiske
#28118
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Alan Page Fiske is an American professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, known for studying the nature of human relationships and cross-cultural variations between them.
Go to Profile#28108
Lynda Chin
#28119
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Lynda Chin is a Chinese-American medical doctor. She is a board-certified dermatologist who was the founding department chair and professor of genomic medicine at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, as well as scientific director of the MD Anderson Institute for Applied Cancer Science. In late 2012 she was elected as a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.
Go to Profile#28109
Basil Gordon
#28120
Overall Influence
1931 - 2012 (81 years)
Basil Gordon was a mathematician at UCLA, specializing in number theory and combinatorics. He obtained his Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Tom Apostol. Ken Ono was one of his students.
Go to Profile#28110
V. S. Huzurbazar
#28121
Overall Influence
1919 - 1991 (72 years)
Vasant Shankar Huzurbazar was an Indian statistician from Kolhapur. Huzurbazar was the founder head of the department of statistics, University of Pune from 1953 to 1976. From 1979 to 1991, he served as professor at University of Denver, Colorado until his death. He served as visiting professor for two years to the Iowa State University in 1962.
Go to Profile#28111
Bert Meijer
#28122
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Egbert Willem Meijer is a Dutch organic chemist, known for his work in the fields of supramolecular chemistry, materials chemistry and polymer chemistry. Meijer, who is distinguished professor of Molecular Sciences at Eindhoven University of Technology and Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, is considered one of the founders of the field of supramolecular polymer chemistry. Meijer is a prolific author, sought-after academic lecturer and recipient of multiple awards in the fields of organic and polymer chemistry.
Go to Profile#28112
Dale Husemoller
#28123
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Dale Husemöller is an American mathematician specializing in algebraic topology and homological algebra who is known for his books on fibre bundles, elliptic curves, and, in collaboration with John Milnor, symmetric bilinear forms.
Go to Profile#28113
Carol S. Pearson
#28124
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Carol S. Pearson is an American author and educator. She develops new theories and models with an applied practical bent, building on the work of psychiatrist C. G. Jung, psychoanalyst James Hillman, mythologist Joseph Campbell, and other depth psychologists.
Go to Profile#28114
Nikolay Dubinin
#28125
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Nikolay Petrovich Dubinin was a Soviet and Russian biologist and academician. He worked under the supervision of Sergei Chetverikov. He was a Corresponding Member of the Division of Biological Sciences from 1946 and Academician of the Division of the General Biology from 1966.
Go to Profile#28115
David B. Kaplan
#28126
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David B. Kaplan is an American physicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of Washington, where he was director of the Institute for Nuclear Theory during the period 2006–2016 and is now a senior fellow.
Go to Profile#28116
Glynne Wickham
#28127
Overall Influence
1922 - 2004 (82 years)
Glynne William Gladstone Wickham was a British Shakespearean and theatre scholar. Life Wickham was born in Cape Town, and was the great-grandson of William Ewart Gladstone. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. In 1941 he played the title role in Hamlet for the Oxford University Dramatic Society , directed by Nevill Coghill. In 1942–1946, interrupting his undergraduate studies, he served as a navigator in the RAF. He returned to New College in 1946, and became the first postwar president of OUDS. In 1948 Coghill chose him to direct a "complex" production of a masque t...
Go to Profile#28117
Alexander Van der Bellen
#28128
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Alexander Van der Bellen is the current president of Austria. He previously served as a professor of economics at the University of Vienna, and after joining politics, as the spokesman of the Austrian Green Party.
Go to Profile#28118
Piet Schoonenberg
#28129
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Piet Schoonenberg, SJ was a Dutch Jesuit priest, theologian and professor of theology. Closely associated with the nouvelle théologie movement, he is best known for his major contributions to the Dutch Catechism of 1966.
Go to Profile#28119
James R. Beniger
#28130
Overall Influence
1946 - 2010 (64 years)
James Ralph Beniger was an American historian and sociologist and Professor of Communications and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, particularly known for his early work on the history of quantitative graphics in statistics, and his later work on the technological and economic origins of the information society.
Go to Profile#28120
Alan Sepinwall
#28131
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Alan Sepinwall is an American television reviewer and writer. He spent 14 years as a columnist with The Star-Ledger in Newark until leaving the newspaper in 2010 to work for the entertainment news website HitFix. He then wrote for Uproxx, where he worked for two years. Since 2018, he has been the chief TV critic for Rolling Stone.
Go to Profile#28121
Sophie Morel
#28132
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Sophie Morel is a French mathematician, specializing in number theory. She is a CNRS directrice de recherches in mathematics at École normale supérieure de Lyon. In 2012 she received one of the ten prizes of the European Mathematical Society.
Go to Profile#28122
Alain Rouet
#28133
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Alain Rouet is a French theoretical physicist, entrepreneur, poet, and novelist. Education and career At the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, Rouet graduated in 1969 with an engineering degree and in 1974 with a doctorate in theoretical physics. He worked as a postdoc for the academic year 1975–1976 at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich and from 1976 to 1978 at CERN. From 1979 to 1981 he was a scientist at the CNRS at the CPT in Marseille-Luminy. At the same time, he acted in an advisory capacity for Aérospatiale and the French Atomic Energy Commission. From 1981 to 1982 he was Einstein Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Go to Profile#28123
Richard Belzer
#28134
Overall Influence
1944 - 2023 (79 years)
Richard Jay Belzer was an American actor, comedian and author. He was best known for his role as BPD Detective, NYPD Detective/sergeant and investigator John Munch, whom he portrayed for 23 years in the NBC police drama series Homicide: Life on the Street, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and several guest appearances on other series.
Go to Profile#28124
Sotiris Tsiodras
#28135
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sotiris Tsiodras is a Greek internal medicine physician, specializing in infectiology , in charge of Greece's management of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 crisis. Early years and education Tsiodras was born on 13 October 1965 in Sydney, Australia, into an immigrant family originating from Neohori, Argolis. After the family moved back to Greece, he enrolled into the Ioannina medical school and then transferred to the University of Athens from which he graduated in March 1991 as a pathologist.
Go to Profile#28125
Knut Urban
#28136
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Knut W. Urban is a German physicist. He has been the Director of the Institute of Microstructure Research at Forschungszentrum Jülich from 1987 to 2010. Knut Urban's research focuses on the field of aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy , the examination of structural defects in oxides and the physical properties of complex metallic alloys. He also works on Josephson effects in high-temperature superconductors and the application of these effects in SQUID systems and magnetometers as well as on the application of Hilbert transform spectroscopy in examining the excitation of so...
Go to Profile#28126
Albert Boime
#28137
Overall Influence
1933 - 2008 (75 years)
Albert Boime , was an American art historian and author of more than 20 art history books and numerous academic articles. He was a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles for three decades, until his death.
Go to Profile#28127
Phil Parsons
#28138
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Phillip Parsons is an American former professional stock car racing driver, team owner, and current analyst for FOX NASCAR. After years racing in NASCAR Winston Cup, he returned to the Busch Series where he enjoyed modest success.
Go to Profile#28128
Walter Zenga
#28139
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Walter Zenga is an Italian football manager and former player who last managed Serie A club Cagliari. He was a long-time goalkeeper for Inter Milan and the Italy national team. During his playing career, Zenga was part of the Italian squad that finished fourth at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and was the starting goalkeeper for the Italian team that finished third in the 1990 FIFA World Cup tournament held in Italy, keeping a World Cup record unbeaten streak. A three-time winner of the IFFHS World's Best Goalkeeper Award, Zenga is regarded by pundits as one of the best goalkeepers of all time, and in 2013 was voted the eighth best goalkeeper of the past quarter-century by IFFHS.
Go to Profile#28129
Takashi Hibiki
#28140
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Takashi Hibiki is a Japanese scientist who is a professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at Purdue University and a chair professor of thermal-fluid engineering at City University of Hong Kong. Early life and education Hibiki was born in 1963 at Kyoto in Japan. Hibiki graduated from Osaka University in 1985. He obtained his Ph.D. from Department of Chemical Engineering, Osaka University in 1990 under the supervision of Professor Takashi Katayama.
Go to Profile#28130
Sadiq Jalal al-Azm
#28141
Overall Influence
1934 - 2016 (82 years)
Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm was a Professor Emeritus of Modern European Philosophy at the University of Damascus in Syria and was, until 2007, a visiting professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. His main area of specialization was the work of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, but he later placed a greater emphasis upon the Islamic world and its relationship to the West, evidenced by his contribution to the discourse of Orientalism. Al-Azm was also known as a human rights advocate and a champion of intellectual freedom and free speech.
Go to Profile#28131
Stylianos Antonarakis
#28142
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Stylianos E. Antonarakis is a Greece-born human geneticist. Antonarakis is Professor of Genetic Medicine at the University of Geneva Medical School in Switzerland. From 2012 to 2017 he was the director of the iGE3 institute of Genetics and Genomics in Geneva, which he co-founded. He is the President of the Human Genome Organization , a member of the scientific council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, and chair of the Genetics panel of the European Research Council. Previously he was the President of the European Society of Human Genetics.
Go to Profile#28132
Jonathan Pool
#28143
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jonathan Pool, born 1942 in Chicago, is a political scientist from the United States. He works on the political and economic consequences of linguistic circumstances and language policy. Pool studied political science in Harvard between 1960 and 1964. He then joined the Peace Corps and went to Turkey, where he taught English. After his return he studied in Chicago, where he graduated in 1968 and earned his PhD in 1971.
Go to Profile#28133
Gunther Teubner
#28144
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Gunther Teubner is a German legal scholar and sociologist, best known for his works within the field of Social Theory of Law. His work "stands as one of the most highly evolved positions in the contemporary sociology of law and legal-political norms".
Go to Profile#28134
Enzo Bianchi
#28145
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Enzo Bianchi is an Italian Catholic layman who founded the Bose Monastic Community and served as its first prior from 1965 to 2017. Biography Enzo Bianchi was born on 3 March 1943 in Castel Boglione, Italy. He earned a diploma in accountancy and then studied economics at the University of Turin.
Go to Profile#28135
Chaim Herzog
#28146
Overall Influence
1918 - 1997 (79 years)
Major-General Chaim Herzog was an Irish-born Israeli politician, general, lawyer and author who served as the sixth President of Israel between 1983 and 1993. Born in Belfast and raised primarily in Dublin, the son of Ireland's Chief Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1935 and served in the Haganah Jewish paramilitary group during the 1936–1939 Arab revolt. He returned to Palestine after the war and, following the end of the British Mandate and Israel's Declaration of Independence in 1948, fought in the Battles of Latrun during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He r...
Go to Profile#28136
Big Boi
#28147
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Antwan André Patton , better known by his stage name Big Boi, is an American rapper, record producer, and actor. Born in Savannah, Georgia and raised in Atlanta, he is best known for being one-half of the Southern hip hop duo Outkast, alongside fellow Atlanta-based rapper André 3000.
Go to Profile#28137
Burt Goldberg
#28148
Overall Influence
Burt Goldberg is a Clinical Professor of Chemistry at New York University. Goldberg received his B.S. from Pace University, an M.Phil from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cardiff. Prior to retiring from research, his main area of focus was in microbiology.
Go to Profile#28138
Jian Zhou
#28149
Overall Influence
1957 - 1999 (42 years)
Jian Zhou was a Chinese virologist and cancer researcher, who with fellow researcher Ian Frazer, invented Gardasil and Cervarix, the vaccines for stimulating human immunological resistance to the cervical cancer-inducing human papilloma virus.
Go to Profile#28139
David Usupashvili
#28150
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
David Usupashvili is a Georgian lawyer and politician who was the chairman of the Parliament of Georgia from 2012 to 2016. He served as the chairman of the Republican Party of Georgia from June 27, 2005 to November 3, 2013. Nowadays, he is a chairman of the Political Council of Lelo for Georgia.
Go to Profile#28140
Jean-Pierre Jarier
#28151
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Jean-Pierre Jacques Jarier is a French former Grand Prix racing driver. He drove for Formula One teams including Shadow, Team Lotus, Ligier, Osella and Tyrrell Racing. His best finish was third and he also took three pole positions.
Go to Profile#28141
Danny Jorgensen
#28152
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Danny Lynn Jorgensen is an American professor at the Department of Religious Studies of the University of South Florida, for which he also served as chair from 1999 to 2006. Jorgensen's research interests include Sociology of Culture, Knowledge, and Religion, Science and Religion, Cults and Sects, American religion, Native American religions, new religions, Mormonism, Shakerism, Occultism, Neopaganism, Witchcraft, Scientology, and others.
Go to Profile#28142
Stephen Mulhall
#28153
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Stephen Mulhall is a British philosopher and Fellow of New College, Oxford. His main research areas are Ludwig Wittgenstein and post-Kantian philosophy. Education and career Stephen Mulhall received a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford in 1983. He then pursued an MA in Philosophy from The University of Toronto in 1984, during which time he spent several weeks studying under Sir Isaiah Berlin at Harvard. Between 1984 and 1988, he attended Balliol College and All Souls College, Oxford for his DPhil in Philosophy. From 1986 to 1991 he was a Prize Fellow at All Souls College and in 1991 he became a Reader of Philosophy at the University of Essex.
Go to Profile#28143
Nikolay Devyatkov
#28154
Overall Influence
1907 - 2001 (94 years)
Nikolay Dmitrievich Devyatkov was a Soviet and Russian scientist and inventor of microwave vacuum tubes and medical equipment. Full Member of the USSR/Russian Academy of Sciences . Professor of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
Go to Profile#28144
Dr. Demento
#28155
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Barret Eugene Hansen , known professionally as Dr. Demento, is an American radio broadcaster and record collector specializing in novelty songs, comedy, and strange or unusual recordings dating from the early days of phonograph records to the present. Hansen created the Demento persona in 1970 while working at Pasadena, California station KPPC-FM. He played "Transfusion" by Nervous Norvus on the radio, and DJ "The Obscene" Steven Clean said that Hansen had to be "demented" to play it, and the name stuck. His weekly show went into syndication in 1974 and was syndicated by the Westwood One Radio Network from 1978 to 1992.
Go to Profile#28145
Kathryn Mann
#28156
Overall Influence
Kathryn Mann is a mathematician who has won the Rudin Award, Birman Prize, Duszenko Award, and Sloan Fellowship for her research in geometric topology and geometric group theory. She is an associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#28146
Eric Hooglund
#28157
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Eric James Hooglund is an American political scientist and an expert on contemporary Iran. Since 2010 he has been a senior research professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden.
Go to Profile#28147
David Samuels
#28158
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
David Samuels is an American non-fiction and fiction writer. He is the Editor of County Highway, a magazine in the form of a 19th-century American broadsheet that he founded with Walter Kirn. He is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine; a longtime contributing editor at Harper's Magazine; a contributor to The Atlantic, N+1, The New Yorker and other magazines; and literary editor of Tablet.
Go to Profile#28148
Gregory H. Adamian
#28159
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Gregory Harry Adamian was the President Emeritus and Chancellor of Bentley College, now Bentley University. He served as president of Bentley from 1970 until 1991. Early life and education Adamian was born in Somerville, Massachusetts to a family of Armenian descent. He was raised in Brooklyn, NY and Watertown, MA, served as an Officer in the United States Navy in World War II, serving in the Pacific, and graduated from Harvard University. He then studied law at Boston University.
Go to Profile#28149
Peter Weingart
#28160
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Peter Weingart is a German professor emeritus in sociology and former director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld. Life and academic career Peter Weingart studied sociology and economics from 1961 until 1967 at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and Freie Universität Berlin. Till 1968, he was University Fellow at Princeton University in New Jersey and received a doctorate 1969 at the Freie Universität Berlin. The thesis was about the American scientific lobby in the process of research planning.
Go to Profile#28150
Benedict Ashley
#28161
Overall Influence
1915 - 2013 (98 years)
Benedict M. Ashley, O.P. , was an American theologian and philosopher who had a major influence on 20th century Catholic theology and ethics in America through his writing, teaching, and consulting with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Author of 19 books, Ashley was a major exponent of the River Forest Thomism. Health Care Ethics, which he co-authored in 1975 and now in its fifth edition, continues to be a fundamental text in the field of Catholic Medical Ethics. Ashley taught at numerous institutions and was an active teacher, consultant, and author. He was a faculty member o...
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