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
#28251
Arash Abizadeh
#28262
Overall Influence
Arash Abizadeh is an Iranian-Canadian philosopher and Professor at the Department of Political Science and Associate Member of the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. He is known for his expertise on democratic theory and Thomas Hobbes. He is a recipient of Rhodes Scholarship .
Go to Profile#28252
Mark S. Joshi
#28263
Overall Influence
1969 - 2017 (48 years)
Mark Suresh Joshi was British researcher and consultant in mathematical finance. His last position was a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. His research focused on derivatives pricing and interest rate derivatives in particular. He was the author of numerous research articles and seven books; his popular guides, "On becoming a quant" and "How to Get a Quant Job in Finance", are widely read.
Go to Profile#28253
Daniel S. Weld
#28264
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Daniel Sabey "Dan" Weld is the Thomas J. Cable/WRF Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where he does research in automated planning and scheduling, software agents, and Internet information extraction. He is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle-based venture capital firm.
Go to Profile#28254
Jason L. Riley
#28265
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Jason L. Riley is an American conservative commentator and author. He is a member of The Wall Street Journals editorial board. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and has appeared on the Journal Editorial Report, other Fox News programs and C-SPAN. He is Black and writes about his Black experience in America as a conservative.
Go to Profile#28255
Patricia Deegan
#28266
Overall Influence
Patricia E. Deegan is an American disability-rights advocate, psychologist and researcher. She has been described as a "national spokesperson for the mental health consumer/survivor movement in the United States." Deegan is known as an advocate of the mental health recovery movement and is an international speaker and trainer in the field of mental health.
Go to Profile#28256
Zoltán Füredi
#28267
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Zoltán Füredi is a Hungarian mathematician, working in combinatorics, mainly in discrete geometry and extremal combinatorics. He was a student of Gyula O. H. Katona. He is a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences . He is a research professor of the Rényi Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign .
Go to Profile#28257
Eva Hajičová
#28268
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Eva Hajičová is a Czech linguist, specializing in topic–focus articulation and corpus linguistics. In 2006, she was awarded the Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award. She was named a fellow of the ACL in 2011.
Go to Profile#28258
Pankaj Ghemawat
#28269
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Pankaj Ghemawat is an Indian-American economist, professor, global strategist, speaker and author known for his work in the study of globalization. He created the DHL Global Connectedness Index and the CAGE Distance Framework.
Go to Profile#28259
Alain Desrosières
#28270
Overall Influence
1940 - 2013 (73 years)
Alain Desrosières was a statistician, sociologist and historian of science in France, well known for his work in the history of statistics He is the author of The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, published in 1993, translated into several languages, including English in 1998, and subsequently reviewed in the LRB in 2000. This described the origins of statistics as technical machinery for administration in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the attempts to measure human and economic development. The text is an account of the statistics and their use in abstr...
Go to Profile#28260
Charles Royer
#28271
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Charles T. Royer is an American news reporter and politician who served as the 48th mayor of Seattle, Washington from 1978 to 1990. After serving as mayor of Seattle, Royer became the director of the Harvard Institute of Politics.
Go to Profile#28261
Hideo Itokawa
#28272
Overall Influence
1912 - 1999 (87 years)
was a pioneer of Japanese rocketry, popularly known as "Dr. Rocket," and described in the media as the father of Japan's space development. The near-Earth asteroid 25143 Itokawa was named in honor of Itokawa, and is notable as the target of the Hayabusa mission.
Go to Profile#28262
Zbyněk Zeman
#28273
Overall Influence
1928 - 2011 (83 years)
Zbyněk Anthony Bohuslav Zeman was a Czech historian who later became a naturalized British citizen. He published widely on the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. As an academic, he taught at the Universities of St Andrews, Lancaster, Oxford and Prague.
Go to Profile#28263
Michael Brian Schiffer
#28274
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Michael Brian Schiffer is an American archaeologist and one of the founders and pre-eminent exponents of behavioral archaeology. Schiffer's earliest ideas, set out in his 1976 book Behavioral Archeology and many journal articles, are mainly concerned with the formation processes of the archaeological record . His most important early contribution to archaeology was the rejection of the common processualist assumption that the archaeological record is a transparent fossil record of actual ancient societies. In fact, he argues, artifacts and sites undergo, respectively post-use and post-occupat...
Go to Profile#28264
Carolyn D. Wright
#28275
Overall Influence
1949 - 2016 (67 years)
Carolyn D. Wright was an American poet. She was a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island. Background C. D. Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas, to a chancery judge and a court reporter. She earned a BA in French from Memphis State University in 1971 and briefly attended law school before leaving to pursue an MFA from the University of Arkansas, which she received in 1976. Her poetry thesis was titled Alla Breve Loving.
Go to Profile#28265
Edin Džeko
#28276
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Edin Džeko is a Bosnian professional footballer who plays as a striker for and captains both Süper Lig club Fenerbahçe and the Bosnia and Herzegovina national team. Džeko was named Bosnian Footballer of the Year for three years in a row. He has been nicknamed "Bosnian Diamond" or simply "Diamond" by football fans and journalists in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Prior to joining Fenerbahçe, he played for Manchester City, Roma and Inter Milan, but he made a name for himself while playing for German club VfL Wolfsburg, with whom he won the Bundesliga in the 2008–09 season. He was the second-highest goalscorer with 26 goals.
Go to Profile#28266
Jean-Christophe Yoccoz
#28277
Overall Influence
1957 - 2016 (59 years)
Jean-Christophe Yoccoz was a French mathematician. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1994, for his work on dynamical systems. Yoccoz died on 3 September 2016 at the age of 59. Biography Yoccoz attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, during which time he was a silver medalist at the 1973 International Mathematical Olympiad and a gold medalist in 1974. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1975, and completed an agrégation in mathematics in 1977.
Go to Profile#28267
Jay Cantor
#28278
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Jay Cantor is an American novelist and essayist. He graduated from Harvard University with a BA, and from University of California, Santa Cruz with a Ph.D. He teaches at Tufts University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace.
Go to Profile#28268
Ole A. Sæther
#28279
Overall Influence
1936 - 2013 (77 years)
Ole Anton Sæther was a Norwegian entomologist. He was scientific assistant and university lecturer at Department of Limnology, University of Oslo, from 1960 to 1966; research scientist at Freshwater Institute, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada from 1966 to 1977; and professor of systematic zoology in the Museum of Zoology at the University of Bergen from 1977 to his retirement in 2006. He specialized in aquatic Diptera, especially Chironomidae and Chaoboridae. He penned about 265 academic publications ; authored or co-authored 3 subfamilies, 42 genera or subgenera, and more than 300 species; and was...
Go to Profile#28269
William Klemperer
#28280
Overall Influence
1927 - 2017 (90 years)
William A. Klemperer was an American chemist, chemical physicists and molecular spectroscopists. Klemperer is most widely known for introducing molecular beam methods into chemical physics research, greatly increasing the understanding of nonbonding interactions between atoms and molecules through development of the microwave spectroscopy of van der Waals molecules formed in supersonic expansions, pioneering astrochemistry, including developing the first gas phase chemical models of cold molecular clouds that predicted an abundance of the molecular HCO+ ion that was later confirmed by radio...
Go to Profile#28270
Jonah Shacknai
#28281
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Jonah Shacknai is an American pharmaceutical executive. He was the founder of Illustris Pharmaceuticals and was the founder, chairman and CEO of Medicis Pharmaceutical Corporation. He also served as chief aide to the US House of Representatives' committee for health policy.
Go to Profile#28271
Robert Cava
#28282
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert Joseph Cava is a solid-state chemist at Princeton University where he holds the title Russell Wellman Moore Professor of Chemistry. Previously, Professor Cava worked as a staff scientist at Bell labs from 1979–1996, where earned the title of Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff. his research investigates topological insulators, semimetals, superconductors, frustrated magnets and thermoelectrics.
Go to Profile#28272
Allan Jones
#28283
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Allan Jones is a British music journalist and editor. Following university, Jones took a job in the stockroom of Hatchards on Piccadilly. While he was there he applied for a writing job at the music weekly Melody Maker with a letter that concluded, "Melody Maker needs a bullet up its arse. I’m the gun – pull the trigger." He joined the staff in 1974 and became editor ten years later. During Jones's tenure as editor Melody Maker provided early publicity for bands ranging from the Stone Roses to Pearl Jam. One of his most significant early decisions was to resist the publisher's instruction to ...
Go to Profile#28273
Benjamin D. Santer
#28284
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Benjamin David Santer is a climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and former researcher at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. He also worked at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology from 1987 to 1992. He specializes mainly in statistical analysis of climate data sets, and detection/attribution of climate change forcings.
Go to Profile#28274
Joel Spruck
#28285
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Joel Spruck is a mathematician, J. J. Sylvester Professor of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, whose research concerns geometric analysis and elliptic partial differential equations. He obtained his PhD from Stanford University with the supervision of Robert S. Finn in 1971.
Go to Profile#28275
Brian R. Gaines
#28286
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Brian R. Gaines is a British scientist, engineer, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary. Biography Gaines received his Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge, and he is a Chartered Engineer, and Chartered Psychologist.
Go to Profile#28276
Martin Hägglund
#28287
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Martin Hägglund is a Swedish philosopher and scholar of modernist literature. He is the Birgit Baldwin Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is also a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, serving as a Junior Fellow from 2009 to 2012. Hägglund is the author of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom , Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov , Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life , and Kronofobi: Essäer om tid och ändlighet . He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and won the René Wellek Prize in 2020.
Go to Profile#28277
Sade
#28288
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Helen Folasade Adu , known professionally as Sade Adu or simply Sade , is a Nigerian-born British singer, known as the lead vocalist of her band Sade. One of the most successful British female artists in history, she is often recognised as an influence on contemporary music. Her success in the music industry was recognised with the Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2002, and she was made Commander in the 2017 Birthday Honours.
Go to Profile#28278
Ting Wu
#28289
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Chao-ting Wu is an American molecular biologist. After training at Harvard Medical School in genetics with William Gelbart, at Stanford Medical School with David Hogness, and in a fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital in molecular biology, Wu began her independent academic career as an assistant professor in Anatomy and Cellular Biology and then Genetics at Harvard Medical School in 1993. After a period as Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Molecular Medicine at the Boston Children's Hospital, she returned to the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School as a full profes...
Go to Profile#28279
Ted Hankey
#28290
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Edward Hankey is an English former professional darts player. Nicknamed "The Count", he won the BDO World Darts Championship in 2000, was runner-up in 2001, and won the title for a second time in 2009. He moved to the Professional Darts Corporation tour in 2012, but suffered a stroke while playing Michael van Gerwen at the 2012 Grand Slam of Darts, and took three months away from the sport to recuperate. He lost his PDC tour card in 2014, when he was 94th in the world rankings, and returned to the BDO, where he failed to impress in the latter years of his playing career. In 2016, he made his...
Go to Profile#28280
Peter Asher
#28291
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Peter Asher is an English guitarist, singer, manager and record producer. He came to prominence in the 1960s as a member of the pop music vocal duo Peter and Gordon before going on to a successful career as a manager and record producer, helping to foster the recording careers of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt among others. As of 2018, he tours alongside Jeremy Clyde of Chad and Jeremy in a new duo entitled Peter and Jeremy, where they perform hits from both of their respective catalogues. In 2019, Asher published a book The Beatles from A to Zed about his personal reminiscences about the b...
Go to Profile#28281
Larry Lamb
#28292
Overall Influence
1929 - 2000 (71 years)
Sir Albert Lamb , commonly known as Larry Lamb, was a British newspaper editor. He introduced the Page 3 feature to The Sun , which saw a dramatic increase in sale in the 1970s. He also applied the term 'Winter of Discontent' to the series of strikes over the winter of 1978–79. He was Deputy Chairman of News Group from 1979 but was transferred to the Western Mail in Australia in 1981, and edited The Australian in 1982.
Go to Profile#28282
Paul Bechly
#28293
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Paul Lorin Bechly is an American chemical engineer known for his work in the development of an environmentally-oriented perfluorocarbon gas policy for DuPont and other industries. He currently works in the financial industry.
Go to Profile#28283
Charles E. Rosenberg
#28294
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Charles Ernest Rosenberg is an American historian of medicine. He is Professor of the History of Science and Medicine and the Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#28284
Sanath Jayasuriya
#28295
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Deshabandu Sanath Teran Jayasuriya , is a former Sri Lankan cricketer and captain, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest ever to play the game. A left arm opening batsman, an orthodox spinner and a dynamic fielder, Jayasuriya together with his opening partner Romesh Kaluwitharana is credited for having revolutionized one-day international cricket with his explosive batting in the mid-1990s, which initiated the hard-hitting modern-day batting strategy of all nations. He was a key member of the Sri Lankan team that won 1996 Cricket World Cup. Under his captaincy Sri Lanka become joint ch...
Go to Profile#28285
James Berardinelli
#28296
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
James Berardinelli is an American film critic and former engineer. His reviews are mainly published on his blog ReelViews. Approved as a critic by the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, he has published two collections of reviews of movies on DVD and video. He is also a fantasy novelist, publishing a trilogy from 2015 through 2016 known as The Last Whisper of the Gods.
Go to Profile#28286
Ari Luotonen
#28297
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Ari Luotonen is a Finnish software developer and author. He studied for M.Sc. in Tampere University of Technology, but cut his studies short with an Equivalent of B.Sc. in Computer Science. In July 1993, he moved to Geneva to work for CERN. There, he wrote a large proportion of CERN httpd, especially HTTP caching support. In addition, Luotonen contributed to the implementation of numerous CGI applications, the most famous being the WIT - W3 Interactive Talk.
Go to Profile#28287
Matthias Gross
#28298
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Matthias Gross is a German sociologist and science studies scholar. He currently is Full Professor of Environmental Sociology at the University of Jena, and by joint appointment, at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ in Leipzig, Germany.
Go to Profile#28288
Laura Poitras
#28299
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Laura Poitras is an American director and producer of documentary films. Poitras has received numerous awards for her work, including the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden, while My Country, My Country received a nomination in the same category in 2007. She won the 2013 George Polk Award for national security reporting related to the NSA disclosures. The NSA reporting by Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman contributed to the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service awarded jointly to The Guardian and The Washington Post.
Go to Profile#28289
Robert Crouse
#28300
Overall Influence
1930 - 2011 (81 years)
Robert Darwin Crouse was a Canadian religious philosopher and Anglican priest. Early life and education Crouse received his primary and secondary education in the village school of Crousetown and at King’s Collegiate School in Windsor. He arrived at Dalhousie University and King’s College in 1947, the year James Doull began teaching in the Classics Department. He graduated in Classics in 1951 and then spent a year studying philosophy at Dalhousie and theology at King’s.
Go to Profile#28290
James Gunn
#28301
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
James Francis Gunn Jr. is an American filmmaker and studio executive. He began his career as a screenwriter in the mid-1990s, starting at Troma Entertainment with Tromeo and Juliet . He then began working as a director, starting with the horror-comedy film Slither , and moving to the superhero genre with Super , Guardians of the Galaxy , Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 , The Suicide Squad , and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . In 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery hired Gunn and Peter Safran to become co-chairmen and co-CEOs of DC Studios. Under DC Studios, Gunn will co-produce and executive produce...
Go to Profile#28291
Mridu Rai
#28302
Overall Influence
Mridu Rai is an Indian historian who serves as a professor at Presidency University, Kolkata. Rai is the author of the prizewinning book Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir .
Go to Profile#28292
Duke Snider
#28303
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Edwin Donald "Duke" Snider , nicknamed "the Silver Fox" and "the Duke of Flatbush", was an American professional baseball player. Primarily a center fielder, he spent most of his Major League Baseball career playing for the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers , later playing one season each for the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants .
Go to Profile#28293
Richard Alley
#28304
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
#28294
Koulsy Lamko
#28305
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Koulsy Lamko is a Chadian-born playwright, poet, novelist and university lecturer. Born in Dadouar, Lamko left his country for Burkina Faso in 1979 due to the beginning of the civil war. There, he became acquainted with Thomas Sankara and involved with the Institute of Black Peoples in Ouagadougou. Lamko spent ten years promoting community theater in Burkina Faso through the Theater of the Community and helped found the International Festival of Theatre for Development. Some of his poetry was published in Revue Noire in 1994. In 1997 he co-released the album Bir Ki Mbo of mixed poetry and music in tribute to Sankara in collaboration with Stéphane Scott and Rémi Stengel.
Go to Profile#28295
Sam Smith
#28306
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Sam Smith is an NBA writer for the Chicago Bulls website bulls.com. He is the author of multiple articles and books, including The New York Times bestseller, The Jordan Rules. Career Sam was born on January 24, 1948, in Brooklyn, New York City. Smith attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn and Pace University in New York City, graduating with a bachelor's degree in accounting in 1970. He worked two years on the auditing staff of Arthur Young & Co. and then earned a master's degree in journalism from Ball State University. He is in the journalism Hall of Fame at Ball State. He was a sta...
Go to Profile#28296
Suriya
#28307
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Saravanan Sivakumar , known by his stage name Suriya, is an Indian actor and film producer. He primarily works in Tamil cinema where he is one of the highest paid actors. He has received numerous awards including two National Film Awards, six Filmfare Awards South, three Tamil Nadu State Film Awards and two South Indian International Movie Awards. Suriya has featured six times in the Celebrity 100 list of Forbes India, which takes into account the earnings of Indian celebrities.
Go to Profile#28297
Anthony Esolen
#28308
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Anthony M. Esolen is a writer, social commentator, translator of classical poetry, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at [Thales College]. He taught at Furman University, Providence College, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts. He was invited to join the faculty at Thales College as Distinguished Professor of Humanities in 2023.
Go to Profile#28298
Julius Adler
#28309
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Julius Adler is an American biochemist. He has been an Emeritus Professor of biochemistry and genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 1997. Early life Adler was born in Edelfingen, Germany in 1930. He came to the United States in 1938 at the age of 8 and became a naturalized citizen in 1943. His family settled in Grand Forks, North Dakota where their relatives were among the first Europeans to arrive in 1880. Since he was child, Adler had been fascinated by how organisms sense and respond to the environment.
Go to Profile#28299
Naeem Ahmad Khan
#28310
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
Naeem Ahmad Khan , , was a Pakistani nuclear physicist and a professor of physics who was known for his work in developing techniques using the solid-state nuclear track detector and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance. Although he worked with the Government of Pakistan for most of his career, he also taught physics at a number of Pakistani universities and was the civilian scientist of the Pakistan Air Force until his death.
Go to Profile#28300
Luis M. Rocha
#28311
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Luis M. Rocha is the George J. Klir Professor of Systems Science at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science, Binghamton University . He has been director of the NSF-NRT Complex Networks and Systems graduate Program in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He is also director of the Center for Social and Biomedical Complexity, between Binghamton University and Indiana University, Bloomington, a Fulbright Scholar, and Principal Investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal. His research is on complex systems and networks, computational and s...
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