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
#28201
Malcolm Jeeves
#28212
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Malcolm Alexander Jeeves is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of St Andrews, and was formerly President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He established the Department of Psychology at St Andrews and his research interests centre on cognitive psychology and neuropsychology.
Go to Profile#28202
Francesca Gino
#28213
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Francesca Gino is an Italian-American behavioral scientist. In June 2023, after an investigation concluded that she had falsified data in her research, she was placed on unpaid administrative leave from her position as Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and as head of HBS's Negotiation, Organizations and Markets unit.
Go to Profile#28203
Herbert Stachowiak
#28214
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Herbert Stachowiak was a German philosopher. From 1973 to 1986 he taught as a full professor at the University of Paderborn. Life After a commercial apprenticeship in the aircraft industry, Stachowiak obtained his Abitur in 1941 through the second educational path. He continued to work in industry and as a teacher at a night school before he was drafted for military service in 1944. From 1946, he studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Berlin, first at what is now Humboldt University and later at the Free University, which had been newly founded in 1948 because of the political conditions in the west of the city.
Go to Profile#28204
Steve Carlip
#28215
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Steven Jonathan Carlip is an American professor of physics at the University of California, Davis. He is known for his work on -dimensional quantum gravity, the quantum gravitational basis of black hole thermodynamics, and causal dynamical triangulations. Carlip graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1975. In 1987, he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a Doctor of Philosophy under the direction of Bryce DeWitt. After a post-doctoral period at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he has been teaching — since 1990 — at Univ...
Go to Profile#28205
John L. Phillips
#28216
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
John Lynch Phillips is a NASA astronaut. Phillips is also a Naval Aviator and retired captain, United States Navy Reserve. Phillips has received numerous awards and special honors. He is a National Merit Scholar, graduated 2nd in his class of 906 people at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1972. Phillips has also been awarded the NASA Space Flight Medal, NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the Gagarin Medal and several others. Phillips has logged over 4,400 flight hours and 250 aircraft carrier landings, flying the A-7 Corsair II carrier-based light attack aircraft while on active duty in the Regular Navy and subsequently during his time as a Navy Reservist from 1982 to 2002.
Go to Profile#28206
Andrew Blauvelt
#28217
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Andrew Blauvelt is a Japanese-American curator, designer, educator, and writer. Since 2015 he has served as director of the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Biography Blauvelt received an MFA in design from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1988, and a BFA from the Herron School of Art, Indiana University in 1986.
Go to Profile#28207
Hans Thewissen
#28218
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Johannes Gerardus Marie Thewissen is a Dutch-American paleontologist known for his significant contributions to the field of whale evolution. Thewissen's fieldwork has led to the discovery of key fossils that have shed light on the transition of whales from land to water, including the discovery of Ambulocetus, Pakicetus, Indohyus, and Kutchicetus. In addition to his work on fossil discoveries, Thewissen also studies modern bowhead and beluga whales in Alaska, focusing on their biology and the implications of this knowledge for management and conservation efforts. His research has been instru...
Go to Profile#28208
Nissim Francez
#28219
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Nissim Francez is an Israeli professor, emeritus in the computer science faculty at the Technion, and former head of computational linguistics laboratory in the faculty. Early life and education Nissim Francez was born in Bulgaria. His family emigrated to Israel in 1949. He received his B.Sc. in mathematics and philosophy from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem in 1965. After his military service in the IDF, he studied at the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, and received his M.sc. in 1971.
Go to Profile#28209
Lawrence W. Green
#28220
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Lawrence W. Green is an American specialist in public health education. He is best known by health education researchers as the originator of the PRECEDE model and co-developer of the PRECEDE-PROCEED model, which has been used throughout the world to guide health program intervention design, implementation, and evaluation and has led to more than 1000 published studies, applications and commentaries on the model in the professional and scientific literature.
Go to Profile#28210
Miloslav Stingl
#28221
Overall Influence
1930 - 2020 (90 years)
Miloslav Stingl was a Czech ethnologist, traveller and author. He is an expert on Mayan culture and the history of pre-Columbian America. Stingl was born in Bílina. He studied international law at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University before switching to ethnography. He worked for ten years at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences from 1962 to 1972. Stingl was a signatory of the , a condemnation of Charter 77. However Stingl signed unaware of the content of the Charter, and later regretted his participation.
Go to Profile#28211
Carl Wilson
#28222
Overall Influence
1946 - 1998 (52 years)
Carl Dean Wilson was an American musician who co-founded the Beach Boys. He was their lead guitarist, the youngest sibling of bandmates Brian and Dennis, and the group's de facto leader in the early to mid-1970s. He was also the band's musical director on stage from 1965 until his death.
Go to Profile#28212
Don D'Ammassa
#28223
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Donald Eugene D'Ammassa is an American fantasy, science fiction and horror critic and author. He is chiefly known for his numerous reviews, written over a period of more than thirty years. He writes as Don D'Ammassa.
Go to Profile#28213
Lou Ferrigno
#28224
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Louis Jude Ferrigno Sr. is an American actor and retired professional bodybuilder. As a bodybuilder, Ferrigno won an IFBB Mr. America title and two consecutive IFBB Mr. Universe titles; and appeared in the documentary film Pumping Iron. As an actor, he is best known for his title role in the CBS television series The Incredible Hulk and vocally reprising the role in subsequent animated and computer-generated incarnations. He has also appeared in European-produced fantasy-adventures such as Sinbad of the Seven Seas and Hercules, and as himself in the sitcom The King of Queens and the 2009 come...
Go to Profile#28214
Eric Roberts
#28225
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Eric Anthony Roberts is an American actor and the older brother of actress Julia Roberts. His career began with a leading role in King of the Gypsies for which he received his first Golden Globe Award nomination. He was nominated again at the Golden Globes for his acclaimed role as Paul Snider in Bob Fosse's Star 80 . Roberts' performance in Runaway Train , as prison escapee Buck McGeehy, earned him a third Golden Globe nod and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Go to Profile#28215
Peter Dervan
#28226
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Peter B. Dervan is the Bren Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. The primary focus of his research is the development and study of small organic molecules that can sequence-specifically recognize DNA, a field in which he is an internationally recognized authority. The most important of these small molecules are pyrrole–imidazole polyamides. Dervan is credited with influencing "the course of research in organic chemistry through his studies at the interface of chemistry and biology" as a result of his work on "the chemical principles involved in sequence-specific recognition of double helical DNA".
Go to Profile#28216
Stormy Daniels
#28227
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Stephanie A. Gregory Clifford , known professionally as Stormy Daniels, is an American pornographic film actress and director and former stripper. She has won many industry awards and is a member of the NightMoves Hall of Fame, AVN Hall of Fame and XRCO Hall of Fame. In 2009 a recruitment effort led her to consider challenging incumbent David Vitter in the 2010 Senate election in her native Louisiana.
Go to Profile#28217
Shekhar Kapur
#28228
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Shekhar Kulbhushan Kapur is an Indian filmmaker and actor. Born into the Anand-Sahni family, Kapur is the recipient of several accolades, including a BAFTA Award, a National Film Award, a National Board of Review Award and three Filmfare Awards, in addition to nomination for a Golden Globe Award.
Go to Profile#28218
Don Knotts
#28229
Overall Influence
1924 - 2006 (82 years)
Jesse Donald Knotts was an American actor and comedian. He is widely known for his role as Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, a 1960s sitcom for which he earned five Emmy Awards. He also played Ralph Furley on the highly rated sitcom Three's Company from 1979 to 1984. He starred in multiple comedic films, including the leading roles in The Incredible Mr. Limpet and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken . In 2004, TV Guide ranked him number 27 on its 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time list.
Go to Profile#28219
Rafael Palmeiro
#28230
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Rafael Palmeiro Corrales is a Cuban-American former Major League Baseball first baseman and left fielder. Palmeiro was an All-American at Mississippi State University before being drafted by the Chicago Cubs in 1985. He played for the Cubs , Texas Rangers , and the Baltimore Orioles .
Go to Profile#28220
Raymond Daudel
#28231
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Raymond Daudel was a French theoretical and quantum chemist. Trained as a physicist, he was an assistant to Irène Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute. Daudel spent almost the entirety of his career as professor at the Sorbonne and director of a laboratory of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique . He is quoted as saying that the latter "was much better because the CNRS was very rich". This allowed Daudel to attract many co-workers from elsewhere in France and internationally.
Go to Profile#28221
Yuko Shimizu
#28232
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Yuko Shimizu is the Japanese designer who created Hello Kitty. She was born in Japan. After graduating from Musashino Art University, she joined Sanrio. She designed the first original Sanrio character, Coro Chan, a bear which was introduced in 1973. In 1974 she made the original design for Hello Kitty, Sanrio's most successful and best known character. She left Sanrio in 1976 to get married and has been working as a freelance designer ever since. She did not make a lot of money from Hello Kitty.
Go to Profile#28222
John Adams
#28233
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
John Coolidge Adams is an American composer and conductor whose music is rooted in minimalism. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, which are often centered around recent historical events. Apart from opera, his oeuvre includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic and piano music.
Go to Profile#28223
Robert Qiu
#28234
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Robert Caiming Qiu is a Chair Professor at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for his contributions to ultra-wideband wireless communications.
Go to Profile#28224
Farouk El Okdah
#28235
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Farouk Abd El Baky El Okdah was the Governor of the Central Bank of Egypt "CBE" from December 2003 to February 2013. Academic Qualifications - B.S. In Commerce Accounting Major from Ain Shams University 1965
Go to Profile#28225
Trude Dothan
#28236
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Trude Dothan was an Israeli archaeologist who focused on the Late Bronze and Iron Ages in the region, in particular in Philistine culture. Biography Trude Krakauer was born in Vienna. She immigrated with her parents to Mandatory Palestine at the age of one. In Jerusalem, they joined the local community of intellectuals and artists, many of them German speakers. Her father, Leopold Krakauer , was an artist and architect who designed several Bauhaus-style buildings for Jerusalem's "garden city" of Rehavia; her mother Grete was a painter. She attended the Rehavia Gymnasium for her high school ...
Go to Profile#28226
Rainer Froese
#28237
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Rainer Froese is a senior scientist at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel, formerly the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences , and a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation. He obtained an MSc in Biology in 1985 at the University of Kiel and a PhD in Biology in 1990 from the University of Hamburg. Early in his career, he worked at the Institute of Marine Sciences on computer-aided identification systems and the life strategies of fish larvae. His current research interests include fish information systems, marine biodiversity, marine biogeography, and the population dynamics of fishe...
Go to Profile#28227
Arturo Casadevall
#28238
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Arturo Casadevall is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the Alfred and Jill Sommer Professor and Chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is an internationally recognized expert in infectious disease research, with a focus on fungal and bacterial pathogenesis and basic immunology of antibody structure-function. He was elected a member ...
Go to Profile#28228
Jacques Lemaire
#28239
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Jacques Gerard Lemaire is a Canadian former ice hockey forward and head coach who was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1984. He spent his entire twelve-year National Hockey League playing career with the Montreal Canadiens and was a part of eight Stanley Cup championship teams in 1968, 1969, 1971, 1973, 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1979. In 2017, Lemaire was named one of the "100 Greatest NHL Players".
Go to Profile#28229
Andrei Kanchelskis
#28240
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Andrei Antanasovich Kanchelskis is a professional football manager and former player. He was most recently the manager of Navbahor Namangan in the Uzbekistan Super League. During his playing career, he won two Premier League titles in England and two Scottish Premier Leagues.
Go to Profile#28230
Joseph Levine
#28241
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Joseph Levine is an American philosopher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who received his PhD from Harvard University in 1981. He works on philosophy of mind and is best known for formulating the explanatory gap argument against a materialist explanation for consciousness. This has been cited as a precursor to David Chalmers's formulation of the hard problem of consciousness and as one of the main objections materialist theories in philosophy of mind must address. The idea of the explanatory gap is that an unbridgeable gap exists when trying to comprehend consciousness from the per...
Go to Profile#28231
John A. Swets
#28242
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
John A. Swets was a psychologist. He played a key role in the adaptation of signal detection theory first to the psychology of perception and later as a central tool in medical diagnostics. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#28232
David Karoly
#28243
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
David John Karoly is an Australian atmospheric scientist, currently based at CSIRO. Education and academic career In the early 1970s David Karoly enrolled in applied mathematics at Monash University, Melbourne, but later became interested in meteorology. In 1980 he was awarded a doctorate in meteorology from the University of Reading in Reading, England.
Go to Profile#28233
Alexander Rabinowitch
#28244
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Alexander Rabinowitch is an American historian. He is Professor Emeritus of History at the Indiana University, Bloomington, where he taught from 1968 until 1999, and Affiliated Research Scholar at the St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences, since 2013. He is recognized internationally as a leading expert on the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Russian Civil War.
Go to Profile#28234
Jüri Engelbrecht
#28245
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Jüri Engelbrecht is an Estonian mechanics scientist. Since 1963, he is teaching at Tallinn University of Technology. From 1994 to 2004, he was President of Estonian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#28235
Mohamed Bennouna
#28246
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Mohamed Bennouna is a Moroccan diplomat and jurist. He worked as a professor at the Mohammed V University, as a permanent representative of his native country at the United Nations from 1998 to 2001, and as a Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Since 2006, he is a judge of the International Court of Justice.
Go to Profile#28236
Alex Wayman
#28247
Overall Influence
1921 - 2004 (83 years)
Alex Wayman was a Tibetologist and Indologist and worked as a professor of Sanskrit at Columbia University. He was of Jewish background. After finishing his B.A. , M.A. and Ph. D. at the University of California, Los Angeles he came to Columbia as a visiting professor in 1966. In 1967 he was made professor of Sanskrit and remained in this position until his retirement in 1991.
Go to Profile#28237
Jonathan Keating
#28248
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Jonathan Peter Keating is a British mathematician. As of September 2019, he is the Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and from 2012 to 2019 was the Henry Overton Wills Professor of Mathematics at the University of Bristol, where he served as Dean of the Faculty of Science . He has made contributions to applied mathematics and mathematical physics, in particular to quantum chaos, random matrix theory and number theory.
Go to Profile#28238
Lutz Raphael
#28249
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Lutz Raphael is a German historian and historiographer. He is a professor at the University of Trier. Life Lutz Raphael was born in Essen. He studied History, Romance studies, Philosophy and Sociology at Münster and Paris between 1974 and 1984. It was at Münster that he received his doctorate with a doctorate entitled "Partei und Gewerkschaft" on the trades union strategies of the Communist Parties in Italy and France since 1970. Between 1987 and 1996 he was employed as an academic research assistant at TU Darmstadt. In 1994 his habilitation, received from the TU, opened the way to a lifelong academic career.
Go to Profile#28239
Geordie Williamson
#28250
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Geordie Williamson is an Australian mathematician at the University of Sydney. He became the youngest living Fellow of the Royal Society when he was elected in 2018 at the age of 36. Education Educated at Chevalier College, Williamson graduated in 1999 with a UAI of 99.45. He studied at the University of Sydney and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 2003 and then at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg, where he received his doctorate in 2008 under the supervision of Wolfgang Soergel. Williamson is the brother of the late James Williamson, a World Solo 24-hour mountain bike champion ...
Go to Profile#28240
Romeo Crennel
#28251
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Romeo Crennel is a former American football coach, who was the senior advisor for football performance for the Houston Texans of the National Football League . A former long-time coaching assistant to Bill Parcells, Crennel served as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns from 2005 to 2008 and the Kansas City Chiefs in 2012, as well an assistant coach for six NFL teams and four collegiate teams. He has over 50 years of coaching experience, which has included consistently being employed as a coach for all but two seasons since 1970, only taking the 2009 and 2013 seasons off following both of his tenures as a permanent head coach.
Go to Profile#28241
Miriam Solomon
#28252
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Miriam Solomon is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department as well as Affiliated Professor of Women's Studies at Temple University. Solomon's work focuses on the philosophy of science, social epistemology, medical epistemology, medical ethics, and gender and science. Besides her academic appointments, she has published two books and a large number of peer reviewed journal articles, and she has served on the editorial boards of a number of major journals.
Go to Profile#28242
Murray Brennan
#28253
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sir Murray Frederick Brennan is a New Zealand surgeon, oncologist, cancer researcher, and academic. From 1985 to 2006, he was chairman of the surgery department of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, United States.
Go to Profile#28243
Gary Dorrien
#28254
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Gary John Dorrien is an American social ethicist and theologian. He is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and Professor of Religion at Columbia University, both in New York City, and the author of 18 books on ethics, social theory, philosophy, theology, politics, and intellectual history.
Go to Profile#28244
Hadyn Ellis
#28255
Overall Influence
1945 - 2006 (61 years)
Hadyn Ellis CBE DSc was a Welsh psychologist who was influential in the field of face processing and who had some 160 publications to his name. For the largest part of his career he worked at Cardiff University, where he became pro-vice chancellor for research in 1994. He also made significant contributions to research strategy at the ESRC.
Go to Profile#28245
Jim Bellows
#28256
Overall Influence
1922 - 2009 (87 years)
Jim Bellows was an American journalist of the 20th century. Bellows has been credited with the inspiration and nurture of many leading writers of the New Journalism during the 1960s and 1970s. Early life Bellows was born to a successful Detroit salesman and his family in 1922. While he was a child, his parents moved to the Cleveland, Ohio, area. Following a common practice of families with "aspirations", and with financial assistance from an aunt, he was sent at 13 years of age to attend South Kent School — a private college-preparatory boarding school for boys in South Kent, Connecticut, graduating in 1940.
Go to Profile#28246
Peter Pedroni
#28257
Overall Influence
Peter Louis Pedroni is an American econometrician and Professor of Economics at Williams College. An active researcher in economics and econometrics, his areas of expertise include stationary and non-stationary panel time series methods, international finance, economic development, and economic growth.
Go to Profile#28247
Yehuda Levi
#28258
Overall Influence
1926 - 2019 (93 years)
Yehuda Levi was a German-born American-Israeli Haredi rabbi, physicist, writer and educator. He was Rector and Professor of Electro-optics at the Jerusalem College of Technology. Levi was best known as the author of several books on Science and Judaism, and Judaism in contemporary society, as well as on physics.
Go to Profile#28248
Robert Rynasiewicz
#28259
Overall Influence
Robert Rynasiewicz is a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and an adjunct professor in philosophy and the Committee on History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Maryland.
Go to Profile#28249
David A. Whetten
#28260
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
David Allred Whetten is an American organizational theorist and Professor of Organizational Leadership and Strategy at the Marriott School of Management at the Brigham Young University. He is known for his work on organizational identity research methodology, and organizational effectiveness.
Go to Profile#28250
Jean-Luc Margot
#28261
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Jean-Luc Margot is a Belgian-born astronomer and a UCLA professor with expertise in planetary sciences and SETI. Career Margot has discovered and studied several binary asteroids with radar and optical telescopes. His discoveries include Sylvia I Romulus, Kalliope I Linus, S/2003 1, Alauda I Pichi üñëm, and the binary nature of Hermes.
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