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
#28551
Samuel S. Wagstaff Jr.
#28562
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Samuel Standfield Wagstaff Jr. is an American mathematician and computer scientist, whose research interests are in the areas of cryptography, parallel computation, and analysis of algorithms, especially number theoretic algorithms. He is currently a professor of computer science and mathematics at Purdue University who coordinates the Cunningham project, a project to factor numbers of the form bn ± 1, since 1983. He has authored/coauthored over 50 research papers and four books. He has an Erdős number of 1.
Go to Profile#28552
George Szpiro
#28563
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
George Geza Szpiro is an Israeli–Swiss author, journalist, and mathematician. He has written articles and books on popular mathematics and related topics. Life and career Szpiro was born in Vienna in 1950, and moved to Zug, Switzerland, in 1961. He obtained a master's degree in mathematics and physics from ETH Zurich. He also obtained an MBA from Stanford University, in 1975. Afterward, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. In 1984, he obtained a Ph.D. in mathematical economics from Hebrew University.
Go to Profile#28553
Adrienne Kennedy
#28564
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Adrienne Kennedy is an American playwright. She is best known for Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award. She won a lifetime Obie as well. In 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#28554
Heleen Mees
#28565
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Heleen Mees is a Dutch opinion writer, economist, and lawyer. Involved with politics and public policy in the Netherlands and the US, she has also taught at universities in both countries. Biography Mees graduated in Economy and Law at University of Groningen. From 1992 to 1998, she worked for the Dutch Treasury in The Hague, for two years as spokeswoman for former State Secretary Willem Vermeend. She then worked for the European Commission in Brussels from 1998 to 2000. In 2000 she emigrated to the US, where she changed her surname from Nijkamp to Mees.
Go to Profile#28555
Martin Ostwald
#28566
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Martin Ostwald was a German-American classical scholar, who taught until 1992 at Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania. His main field of study was the political structures of Ancient Greece.
Go to Profile#28556
Carol Moseley Braun
#28567
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Carol Elizabeth Moseley Braun, also sometimes Moseley-Braun , is an American diplomat, politician, and lawyer who represented Illinois in the United States Senate from 1993 to 1999. Prior to her Senate tenure, Moseley Braun was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives from 1979 to 1988 and served as Cook County Recorder of Deeds from 1988 to 1992. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992 after defeating Senator Alan J. Dixon in a Democratic primary. Moseley Braun served one term in the Senate and was defeated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald in 1998.
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Peter Alan Sweet
#28568
Overall Influence
1921 - 2005 (84 years)
Peter Alan Sweet was an English astronomer. He was Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow from 1959 until his retirement in 1982. He was also Dean of the Faculty of Science 1973–1975.
Go to Profile#28558
Francisco Márquez Villanueva
#28569
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Francisco Márquez Villanueva was a literary critic and Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Emeritus at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#28559
Katrin Amunts
#28570
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Katrin Amunts is a German neuroscientist. She is the Professor of the C. and O. Vogt Institute for Brain Research at the University of Düsseldorf and is also Director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine in INM-1 in Forschungszentrum Jülich. She is one of the most prominent neuroscientists in brain mapping in the world. She is Scientific Research Director of the Human Brain Project.
Go to Profile#28560
Greta Gerwig
#28571
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Greta Celeste Gerwig is an American actress, writer, and director. Initially known for working on mumblecore films, she has since expanded from acting in and co-writing independent films to directing major studio films. Gerwig was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world in 2018.
Go to Profile#28561
Alfred McClung Lee
#28572
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Alfred McClung Lee was an American sociologist whose research included studies of American journalism, propaganda, and race relations. Biography Lee was born in Oakmont, Pennsylvania in 1906. He obtained an undergraduate and master's degree at the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. from Yale University .
Go to Profile#28562
Steven Ruggles
#28573
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Steven Ruggles is Regents Professor of History and Population Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the director of the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation. He is best known as the creator of IPUMS, the world's largest population database. IPUMS provides information about two billion people residing in 107 countries between 1703 and the present, including every respondent to the surviving U.S. censuses of 1790 to 1940. He served as founding director of the Minnesota Population Center from 2000 to 2016. He served as the 2015 President of the Population Association of America, the first historian to hold the position.
Go to Profile#28563
Marx W. Wartofsky
#28574
Overall Influence
1928 - 1997 (69 years)
Marx W. Wartofsky was an American philosopher, specialising in historical epistemology. He was a professor of philosophy at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the editor of The Philosophical Forum. With Robert S. Cohen, he co-founded the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science, in 1960.
Go to Profile#28564
Song Sang-hyun
#28575
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Song Sang-hyun is a South Korean lawyer and former President of the International Criminal Court . Biography Song attended Seoul National University Law School, graduating with an LL.B. in 1963. He attended Tulane University Law School as a Fulbright Fellow, then obtained a Diploma in Comparative Legal Studies from the University of Cambridge and a J.S.D. from Cornell Law School.
Go to Profile#28565
Kyoji Saito
#28576
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Kyōji Saitō is a Japanese mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry and complex analytic geometry. Education and career Saito received in 1971 his promotion Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen under Egbert Brieskorn, with thesis Quasihomogene isolierte Singularitäten von Hyperflächen . Saito is a professor at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences of Kyoto University.
Go to Profile#28566
Dieter Langewiesche
#28577
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Dieter Langewiesche is a German historian. Langewiesche is one of the leading experts on the history of nationalism and liberalism. In 1996 he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. Works In English Liberalism in Germany. Translated by Christiane Banerji. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 2000, Europe 1848. Revolution and Reform. Edited by Dieter Dowe, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, D. L. and Jonathan Sperber, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001. Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War: Goals, Expectations, Practices. Edited by Marina Cattaruzza, Stefan Dyroff & Dieter Langewiesche.
Go to Profile#28567
John Leguizamo
#28578
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
John Alberto Leguizamo Peláez is an American actor, comedian, and film producer. He has appeared in over 100 films, produced over 20 films and documentaries, made over 30 television appearances, and has produced various television projects. He has also written and performed for the Broadway stage receiving four Tony Award nominations for Freak in 1998, Sexaholix in 2002, and Latin History for Morons in 2018. He received a Special Tony Award in 2018.
Go to Profile#28568
Eduard Schweizer
#28579
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
Eduard Schweizer was a Swiss New Testament scholar who taught at the University of Zurich for an extended period. He won the Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies in 1996. Biography Schweitzer studied Protestant theology at the University of Marburg, the University of Zurich and the University of Basel; in these institutions he was a student of Rudolf K. Bultmann, H. Emil Brunner and Karl Barth. He received his degree in theology in 1938 and became a Protestant Pastor in Nesslau. From 1941 he taught New Testament studies at the University of Zurich , the University of Mainz and the University of Bonn .
Go to Profile#28569
John Hardy
#28580
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Sir John Anthony Hardy is a human geneticist and molecular biologist at the Reta Lila Weston Institute of Neurological Studies at University College London with research interests in neurological diseases.
Go to Profile#28570
Nicholas Orme
#28581
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Nicholas Orme is a British historian specialising in the Middle Ages and Tudor period, focusing on the history of children, and ecclesiastical history, with a particular interest in South West England.
Go to Profile#28571
Stephen Peter Rosen
#28582
Overall Influence
Stephen Peter Rosen is a Harvard College Professor and Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs in the Government Department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and is known as a neoconservative. In addition to his academic work, Rosen was also Master of Harvard College's Winthrop House from 2003 to 2009. He is also Senior Counsellor to the Long Term Strategy Group based in Washington D. C., a defense consulting firm.
Go to Profile#28572
Ussif Rashid Sumaila
#28583
Overall Influence
Ussif Rashid Sumaila is a professor of ocean and fisheries economics at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and the Director of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at the UBC Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries . He is also appointed with the UBC School of Public Policy and Global Affairs. He specializes in bioeconomics, marine ecosystem valuation and the analysis of global issues such as fisheries subsidies, IUU fishing and the economics of high and deep seas fisheries. Sumaila has experience working in fisheries and natural resource projects in Norway, Canada and the North Atla...
Go to Profile#28573
Paul Molitor
#28584
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Paul Leo Molitor , nicknamed "Molly" and "the Ignitor", is an American former professional baseball player and manager. During his 21-year playing career in Major League Baseball , he played for the Milwaukee Brewers , Toronto Blue Jays , and Minnesota Twins . He was known for his exceptional hitting and speed. He made seven All-Star Game appearances, and was the World Series Most Valuable Player in 1993. Molitor currently ranks tenth on the all-time MLB career hits list with 3,319. He is one of only five players in history with 3,000+ hits, a lifetime .300+ batting average, and 500+ career st...
Go to Profile#28574
Kim Sang-jo
#28585
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Kim Sang-jo is a South Korean professor of international trade at Hansung University who served as the top policy aide to President Moon Jae-in and as his first Chairperson of Fair Trade Commission .
Go to Profile#28575
Harley Flanders
#28586
Overall Influence
1925 - 2013 (88 years)
Harley M. Flanders was an American mathematician, known for several textbooks and contributions to his fields: algebra and algebraic number theory, linear algebra, electrical networks, scientific computing.
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Donald Andrews
#28587
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Donald Wilfrid Kao Andrews is a Canadian economist. He is the Tjalling Koopmans Professor of Economics at the Cowles Foundation, Yale University. Born in Vancouver, he received his B.A. in 1977 at the University of British Columbia, his M.A. in 1980 in statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in economics in 1982 also from the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#28577
Robert H. Jackson
#28588
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Robert "Bob" Hill Jackson is an American photographer. In 1964, Jackson, then working for the Dallas Times Herald, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his photograph of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.
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Patricia Arquette
#28589
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Patricia Arquette is an American actress. She made her feature film debut as Kristen Parker in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and has since starred in several film and television productions. She has received several awards including an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards.
Go to Profile#28579
Deb Margolin
#28590
Overall Influence
Deb Margolin is an American performance artist and playwright. She came to prominence in the 1980s in the feminist political theatre troupe Split Britches, which she co-founded with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw. Margolin has since created a string of one-woman shows. A compilation of her texts, Of All The Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO, was published in 1999 by Cassell/Continuum Press. Literary theorist Lynda Hart edited and wrote a commentary on each piece.
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Robert Spitzer
#28591
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Robert James Spitzer is an American political scientist, commentator, and author. Spitzer is the author of numerous books, articles, essays, papers, and op-eds on many topics related to American politics. His areas of specialty include the American presidency and gun politics.
Go to Profile#28581
Nathaniel Deutsch
#28592
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Nathaniel Deutsch is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he holds the Baumgarten Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies. He is also the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies and the Director of the Humanities Institute.
Go to Profile#28582
David Southwood
#28593
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
David John Southwood is a British space scientist who holds the post of Senior Research Investigator at Imperial College London. He was the President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2012–2014, and earlier served as the Director of Science and Robotic Exploration at the European Space Agency . Southwood's research interests have been in solar–terrestrial physics and planetary science, particularly magnetospheres. He built the magnetic field instrument for the Cassini Saturn orbiter.
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Peter A. Carruthers
#28594
Overall Influence
1935 - 1997 (62 years)
Peter Carruthers was an American physicist best known for leading the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1973 until 1980. Early life and education Peter Carruthers was born in Lafayette, Indiana, United States. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology graduating in 1957. He then studied at Cornell University where in 1961 he gained a PhD in theoretical physics. His doctoral advisor was Hans Bethe.
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Frances Spalding
#28595
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Frances Spalding is a British art historian, writer and a former editor of The Burlington Magazine. Life Frances Crabtree studied at the University of Nottingham and gained her PhD for a study of Roger Fry. She taught art history at Sheffield City Polytechnic before becoming a freelance writer and curator. She returned to academic work to take up the post of professor of Art History at Newcastle University in 2000.
Go to Profile#28585
Constant Mews
#28596
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Constant Mews , D. Phil is Professor of Medieval Thought and Director, Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology, Monash University, Melbourne. He is an authority on medieval religious thought, especially on the medieval philosopher and theologian, Peter Abelard, and on interfaith dialogue. He discovered and published what are possibly the original letters exchanged between Peter Abelard and his lover, Heloise.
Go to Profile#28586
Neil McCormick
#28597
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Neil McCormick is a British music journalist, author and broadcaster. He has been Chief Music Critic for The Daily Telegraph since 1996, and presented a music interview show for Vintage TV in the UK, Neil McCormick's Needle Time. McCormick is a close associate of rock band U2.
Go to Profile#28587
William E. Paul
#28598
Overall Influence
1936 - 2015 (79 years)
William Erwin Paul was an American immunologist. He and Maureen Howard discovered interleukin 4, while an independent team led by Ellen Vitetta did the same in 1982. Paul worked on AIDS research for much of his career at the National Institutes of Health . He served as president of the American Association of Immunologists from 1986 to 1987.
Go to Profile#28588
David H. Rosenbloom
#28599
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
David H. Rosenbloom is a scholar in the field of Public Administration. He is the Distinguished Professor of Public Administration at the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. An authority on issues related to administrative law and constitutional aspects of public sector personnel policies, Rosenbloom is known for his approach emphasizing understanding American public administration from the three perspectives associated with the constitutional separation of powers: law, politics and management. He advocates establishing "constitutional competence" as a basic s...
Go to Profile#28589
Alex Bellos
#28600
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Alexander Bellos is a British writer, broadcaster and mathematics communicator. He is the author of books about Brazil and mathematics, as well as having a column in The Guardian newspaper. Education and early life Alex Bellos was born in Oxford and grew up in Edinburgh and Southampton. He was educated at Hampton Park Comprehensive School and Richard Taunton Sixth Form College in Southampton. He went on to study mathematics and philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he was the editor of the student paper Cherwell.
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Gloria Naylor
#28601
Overall Influence
1950 - 2016 (66 years)
Gloria Naylor was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place , Linden Hills and Mama Day . Early life and education Naylor was born in New York on January 25, 1950, the oldest child of Roosevelt Naylor and Alberta McAlpin. The Naylors, who had been sharecroppers in Robinsonville, Mississippi, had migrated to Harlem to escape life in the segregated South and seek new opportunities in New York City. Her father became a transit worker; her mother, a telephone operator. Even though Naylor's mother had little education, she loved to read, and encouraged her daughter to read and keep a journal.
Go to Profile#28591
Danny Dolev
#28602
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Daniel Dolev is an Israeli computer scientist known for his research in cryptography and distributed computing. He holds the Berthold Badler Chair in Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is a member of the scientific council of the European Research Council.
Go to Profile#28592
Roy Harper
#28603
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Roy Harper is an English folk rock singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He has released 22 studio albums across a career that stretches back to 1966. As a musician, Harper is known for his distinctive fingerstyle playing and lengthy, lyrical, complex compositions, reflecting his love of jazz and the poet John Keats. He was also the lead vocalist on Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar.”
Go to Profile#28593
Sudeep Sen
#28604
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Sudeep Sen is an Indian English poet and editor. Early life He was educated at St Columba's School in Delhi and received a degree in English literature from Hindu College, University of Delhi. He received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. Sen also received a master's degree in English and creative writing from Hollins University, and was an international scholar at Davidson College. From 1992 to 1993 he was international poet-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, and in 1995 he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#28594
Mordechai Willig
#28605
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
HaRav Mordechai Yitzchak HaLevi Willig is an Orthodox rabbi and rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University in Washington Heights, Manhattan. He is often known to his students as the Ramu , which is the transliteration of the acronym of the Hebrew letters Reish, Mem, and Vav, which spell out the first letters of Willig's title and name .
Go to Profile#28595
Alexia Massalin
#28606
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Alexia Massalin is an American computer scientist and programmer. She pioneered the concept of superoptimization, and designed the Synthesis kernel, a small kernel with a Unix compatibility layer that makes heavy use of self-modifying code for efficiency.
Go to Profile#28596
K. R. K. Easwaran
#28607
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Kalpathy Ramaier Katchap Easwaran is an Indian molecular biophysicist, academic and a former Astra Chair Professor and chairman of the department of molecular biophysics of the Indian Institute of Science. He is known for his contributions in the development of anti-fungal drugs and for his researches on ionophores and ion-transport across membranes. He is an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swar...
Go to Profile#28597
John Walker
#28608
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
John Walker is an English painter and printmakermaker. He has been called "one of the standout abstract painters of the last 50 years." Education and early work Walker studied in Birmingham at the Moseley School of Art, and later the Birmingham School of Art and Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Some of his early work was inspired by abstract expressionism and post-painterly abstraction, and often combined apparently three-dimensional shapes with "flatter" elements. These pieces are usually rendered in acrylic paint.
Go to Profile#28598
Leopold Flam
#28609
Overall Influence
1912 - 1995 (83 years)
Leopold Flam was a Belgian philosopher. Together with Alphonse De Waelhens, Chaïm Perelman and Rudolf Boehm, he was one of leading philosophers of Belgium from the 1960s until the 1980s. Born in Antwerp, Flam studied social sciences, political history, philosophy at the University of Ghent and obtained a PhD in history. During World War II he was imprisoned in the Dossin Barracks at Mechelen and in the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the war he became a professor at the Free University of Brussels.
Go to Profile#28599
Jan Zwicky
#28610
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Janine Louise Zwicky is a Canadian philosopher, poet, essayist, and musician. She was appointed to the Order of Canada in June 2022. Life and career Zwicky received her BA from the University of Calgary and earned her PhD at the University of Toronto in 1981 where her studies focussed on the philosophy of logic and science. She subsequently taught philosophy at Princeton University; philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities at the University of Waterloo; philosophy at the University of Western Ontario; philosophy, English, and creative writing at the University of New Brunswick; and philos...
Go to Profile#28600
Takero Doi
#28611
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
is a Japanese economist. Doi received his B.A. degree from Osaka University in 1993 and Ph.D. degree from the University of Tokyo in 1999. He is currently associate professor of economics at Keio University from 1999.
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