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
#28601
David Cone
#28612
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
David Brian Cone is an American former Major League Baseball pitcher, and current color commentator for the New York Yankees on the YES Network and WPIX as well as for ESPN on Sunday Night Baseball. A third round draft pick of the Kansas City Royals in 1981 MLB Draft, he made his MLB debut in 1986 and continued playing until 2003, pitching for five different teams. Cone batted left-handed and threw right-handed.
Go to Profile#28602
Daniel W. Bradley
#28613
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Daniel W. Bradley is an important American virologist who, along with Michael Houghton, Qui-Lim Choo and George Kuo at Chiron Corporation, worked to help isolate the Hepatitis C virus in 1989. He graduated from San José State University in 1964 before going on to receive a master's degree in biochemistry from the University of California and a doctorate from the University of Arizona. He worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention starting in 1971. He received the Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award of the American Association of Blood Banks in 1992, the Robert Koch Prize in 1993, a...
Go to Profile#28603
Thomas F. Glick
#28614
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Thomas F. Glick is an American academic who taught in the departments of history and gastronomy at Boston University from 1972 to 2012. He served as the history department's chairperson from 1984 to 1989, and again from 1994 to 1995. He has also been the director of the Institute for Medieval History at Boston University since 1998. Dr. Glick's course offerings for the history department covered the topics of medieval Spain, medieval science and medieval technology, and the history of modern science. For the gastronomy department he taught a number of classes, including "Readings in Food H...
Go to Profile#28604
Myra Marx Ferree
#28615
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Myra Marx Ferree is a former professor of sociology and director of the Center for German and European Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she was also a member of the Women's Studies Program. In 2005 she was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and in 2004 the Maria-Jahoda Visiting professor at the Ruhr University Bochum. Ferree retired in 2018.
Go to Profile#28605
Norman Hackerman
#28616
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Norman Hackerman was an American chemist, professor, and academic administrator who served as the 18th President of the University of Texas at Austin and later as the 4th President of Rice University . He was an internationally known expert in metal corrosion.
Go to Profile#28606
Sidney Greenbaum
#28617
Overall Influence
1929 - 1996 (67 years)
Sidney Greenbaum was a British scholar of the English language and of linguistics. He was Quain Professor of English language and literature at the University College London from 1983 to 1990 and Director of the Survey of English Usage, 1983–96. With Randolph Quirk and others, he wrote A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language . He also wrote Oxford English Grammar .
Go to Profile#28607
Gerhard Wanner
#28618
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Gerhard Wanner is an Austrian mathematician. Education and career Wanner grew up in Seefeld in Tirol and studied mathematics at the University of Innsbruck, where he received his doctorate in 1965 with advisor Wolfgang Gröbner and dissertation Ein Beitrag zur numerischen Behandlung von Randwertproblemen gewöhnlicher Differentialgleichungen . He taught in Innsbruck and from 1973 at the University of Geneva.
Go to Profile#28608
Lynne Isbell
#28619
Overall Influence
Lynne A. Isbell is an American ethologist and primatologist, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Isbell has served as president of the American Society of Primatologists and is the originator of the snake detection theory, which suggests that snakes have contributed to the evolution of the visual system of primates.
Go to Profile#28609
Jack F. Matlock Jr.
#28620
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Jack Foust Matlock Jr. is an American former ambassador, career Foreign Service Officer, a teacher, a historian, and a linguist. He was a specialist in Soviet affairs during some of the most tumultuous years of the Cold War, and served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991.
Go to Profile#28610
Danny Miller
#28621
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Danny Miller is a Canadian economist and Strategy Professor at HEC Montréal. He also teaches at the Chair in Family Enterprise and Strategy at the University of Alberta. According to a statement by HEC, Miller is the fifth-most cited management researcher in the world.
Go to Profile#28611
Michelle Craske
#28622
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Michelle G. Craske is an Australian academic who is currently serving as Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Behavioral Sciences, Miller Endowed Chair, Director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center, and Associate Director of the Staglin Family Music Center for Behavioral and Brain Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is known for her research on anxiety disorders, including phobia and panic disorder, and the use of fear extinction through exposure therapy as treatment. Other research focuses on anxiety and depression in childhood and adolescence and the use of cognitive behavioral therapy as treatment.
Go to Profile#28612
Lal Zimman
#28623
Overall Influence
Lal Zimman is a linguist who works on sociocultural linguistics, sociophonetics, language, gender and identity, and transgender linguistics. Education Zimman received his BA in Philosophy and MA in English with a Linguistics concentration from San Francisco State University. He received his PhD in linguistics from University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012 where he worked under Kira Hall. His dissertation, Voices in Transition: Testosterone, Transmasculinity, and the Gendered Voice among Female-to-Male Transgender People, used both ethnographic and sociophonetic methods to explore the effects ...
Go to Profile#28613
Mahmoud Khatami
#28624
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Mahmoud Khatami is an Iranian philosopher. Life Mahmoud Khatami grew up in Tehran. Showing an early interest in humanities, he attended the Seminary of Islamic Studies, which gained him the traditional degree of Ijtihad, the highest level in Islamic religious and theological learning. Concurrently, he attended the University of Tehran to pursue his secular education for the BA, MA and MS degrees. He also received two PhD degrees in philosophy from Iranian institutions, one in 1987 and one in 1992. Afterwards, he furthered his education in England, where he was awarded a further PhD in the fie...
Go to Profile#28614
Asafa Powell
#28625
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Asafa Powell, CD is a retired Jamaican sprinter who specialised in the 100 metres. He set the 100 metres world record twice, between June 2005 and May 2008 with times of 9.77 and 9.74 seconds. Powell has consistently broken the 10-second barrier in competition, with his personal best of 9.72 s ranking fourth on the all-time list of men's 100-metre athletes. As of 1 September 2016, Powell has broken the ten-second barrier more times than anyone else—97 times. He currently holds the world record for the 100-yard dash with a time of 9.09 s, set on 27 May 2010 in Ostrava, Czech Republic. In 2016,...
Go to Profile#28615
John C. Harrison
#28626
Overall Influence
John C. Harrison is an American legal scholar who is the James Madison Distinguished Professor of Law and Joseph C. Carter, Jr. Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. Early life and education Harrison graduated from the University of Virginia with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1977. He earned his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1980. While in law school, Harrison served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and as articles editor for the The Yale Journal of International Law.
Go to Profile#28616
Joseph Newhouse
#28627
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Joseph P. Newhouse is an American economist and the John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard University, as well as the Director of the Division of Health Policy Research and of the Interfaculty Initiative on Health Policy. At Harvard, he is a member of the four faculties at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Harvard Medical School in Boston, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, and Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge.
Go to Profile#28617
David Poeppel
#28628
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
David Poeppel is Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University . From 2014 until the end of 2021, he was the Director of the Department of Neuroscience at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics . In 2019, he co-founded the Center for Language, Music and Emotion an international joint research center, co-sponsored by the Max Planck Society and New York University. Since 2021, he is the Managing Director of the Ernst Strüngmann Institute.
Go to Profile#28618
William W. Hallo
#28629
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
William Wolfgang Hallo was professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature and curator of the Babylonian collection at Yale University. He was born in Kassel, Germany. Hallo was a Master of Morse College, one of the twelve residential colleges at Yale University, between 1982 and 1987.
Go to Profile#28619
William Sears
#28630
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
William Penton Sears , also referred to as Dr. Bill, is an American pediatrician and the author or co-author of parenting books. Sears is a celebrity doctor, and has been a guest on various television talk shows. Sears is a proponent of the attachment parenting philosophy, and is most well known for authoring The Baby Book, which popularized that style of parenting.
Go to Profile#28620
Timothy Barnes
#28631
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Timothy David Barnes, is a British classicist. Biography Barnes was born in Yorkshire on 13 March 1942. He was educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield, until 1960, going up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Literae Humaniores, taking his BA in 1964 and MA in 1967. He was Harmsworth Senior Scholar of Merton College, Oxford, 1964–66 and Junior Research Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford 1966–70. He was awarded his DPhil in 1970. In 1974 the University of Oxford conferred upon him the Conington prize.
Go to Profile#28621
Rosanna Warren
#28632
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Rosanna Phelps Warren is an American poet and scholar. Biography Warren is the daughter of poet, novelist, literary critic and Poet Laureate Robert Penn Warren and writer Eleanor Clark. She graduated from Yale University, where she was a member of Manuscript Society, in 1976, with a degree in painting, and then in 1980 received an M.A. from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Until July 2012 she was the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities and a University Professor at Boston University.
Go to Profile#28622
Elayne Angel
#28633
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Elayne Angel is an American professional body piercer. Early life and education Angel attended Canoga Park High School and Chatsworth High School. In 1982, she earned an associate degree in Sign Language Interpreting from Los Angeles Pierce College. She has a certificate from the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#28623
Frank B. Salisbury
#28634
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Frank Boyer Salisbury was an American plant physiologist who served for a time as head of the Utah State University department of plant science. Career Salisbury held a B.S. and M.A. from the University of Utah. He received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He taught for eleven years as a professor at Colorado State University before joining the faculty of USU.
Go to Profile#28624
Stuart B. Levy
#28635
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Stuart Blank Levy was a researcher and physician at Tufts University. He was among the first to advocate for greater awareness of antibiotic resistance and founded the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics.
Go to Profile#28625
Fernando Nottebohm
#28636
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Fernando Nottebohm is a neuroscientist and the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Professor at Rockefeller University, as well as being head of the Laboratory of Animal Behavior and director of the Field Research Center for Ecology and Ethology.
Go to Profile#28626
Phyllis Eisenstein
#28637
Overall Influence
1946 - 2020 (74 years)
Phyllis Eisenstein was an American author of science fiction and fantasy short stories as well as novels. Her work was nominated for both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. Early life Eisenstein was born Phyllis Leah Kleinstein in 1946 in Chicago, Illinois, and lived there most of her life. While studying psychology at the University of Chicago in 1963, she met her future husband Alex at a weekly gathering of Chicago's science fiction fandom. In 1966, shortly after attending Tricon, the 24th World Science Fiction Convention, they were married. She continued college until Alex entered the U. S....
Go to Profile#28627
S. Lochlann Jain
#28638
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
S. Lochlann Jain is an author and artist, in addition to being a professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University, where they teach medical and legal anthropology, and a visiting professor of social medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London.
Go to Profile#28628
Ouida Ramón-Moliner
#28639
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Ouida Ramón-Moliner was an Irish-born Canadian anaesthetist. She began working at Montreal General Hospital, helping Wilder Penfield perform awake craniotomies and the anaemia cure pioneer Harold Griffith. Ramón-Moliner also worked at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C, Université Laval and the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the Université de Sherbrooke. She received the Quebec Lieutenant Governor's Seniors Medal in 2012 and a scholarship issued by Champlain Regional College is named after her.
Go to Profile#28629
Paul Lee
#28640
Overall Influence
Paul Lee was a professor of existential and religious philosophy living in Santa Cruz, California. He was chair of the Romero Institute . While an assistant professor of Humanities at MIT in the 1960s, Lee was a founding editor of the infamous Psychedelic Review, started by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard.
Go to Profile#28630
Allen Feldman
#28641
Overall Influence
Allen Feldman is an anthropologist and professor. He is Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He has taught at Central European University in Budapest, the Institute of Humanities Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. He received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at New School for Social Research, where he also received his M.A. and B.A.
Go to Profile#28631
Gary Speed
#28642
Overall Influence
1969 - 2011 (42 years)
Gary Andrew Speed was a Welsh professional footballer and manager. As manager of Wales, Speed is often credited as being the catalyst for the change in fortunes of the national team and as setting the pathway to future successes.
Go to Profile#28632
Benny Chor
#28643
Overall Influence
1956 - 2021 (65 years)
Ben-Zion Chor was an Israeli computer scientist. He was known for his research in cryptography, including traitor tracing, randomness extractors, private information retrieval, the security level and single-bit security of RSA encryption, and secret sharing. Beyond cryptography, he also made important contributions in distributed shared-memory consensus and in the discovery of patterns in gene expression data.
Go to Profile#28633
Vladik Kreinovich
#28644
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Vladik Kreinovich is a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at El Paso. He was educated at Leningrad State University and received a doctorate in mathematics from the Sobolev Institute of Mathematics, affiliated with Novosibirsk State University in Novosibirsk.
Go to Profile#28634
Bill Pickering
#28645
Overall Influence
1910 - 2004 (94 years)
William Hayward Pickering was a New Zealand-born aerospace engineer who headed Pasadena, California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 22 years, retiring in 1976. He was a senior NASA luminary and pioneered the exploration of space. Pickering was also a founding member of the United States National Academy of Engineering.
Go to Profile#28635
Charles Mungoshi
#28646
Overall Influence
1947 - 2019 (72 years)
Charles Lovemore Mungoshi , was a Zimbabwean writer. Life and career Mungoshi was born on 2 December 1947 at Manyene, near Chivhu . He was educated at St Augustine's, Penhalonga. After leaving school, he worked with the Forestry Commission before joining Textbook Sales in Harare. From 1975 to 1981 he worked at the Literature Bureau as an editor and then moved to the Zimbabwe Publishing House.
Go to Profile#28636
Martin Holdgate
#28647
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Sir Martin Wyatt Holdgate is an English biologist and environmental scientist. Early life Holdgate was born in Horsham, England on 14 January 1931, grew up in Blackpool, and was educated at Arnold School. He then attended Cambridge University as an undergraduate at Queens' College, Cambridge from 1949, graduating in 1952 with degrees in zoology and botany and, subsequently, a doctorate in insect physiology.
Go to Profile#28637
Helen Reichert
#28648
Overall Influence
1901 - 2011 (110 years)
Helen Reichert was an American talk show personality, New York University professor, founder of The Round Table of Fashion Executives, and the oldest living alumnus of Cornell University at the time of her death at age 109, just seven weeks before she would have become a supercentenarian.
Go to Profile#28638
Susan Boyle
#28649
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Susan Magdalane Boyle is a Scottish singer. She rose to fame in 2009 after appearing as a contestant on the third series of Britain's Got Talent, singing "I Dreamed a Dream" from . Boyle's debut studio album, I Dreamed a Dream, was released in November 2009; it became the UK's best-selling debut album of all time, beating the previous record held by Spirit by Leona Lewis, and set a record for first-week sales by a debut album, according to the Official Charts Company. In her first year of fame, Boyle made £5 million with the release of I Dreamed a Dream and its lead-off singles, "I Dreamed a Dream" and "Wild Horses".
Go to Profile#28639
Philip Stott
#28650
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Philip Stott is a professor emeritus of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a former editor of the Journal of Biogeography. Background In the early 1970s, Stott and his wife, a historian and biographer, lived in Thailand and he was carrying out field research at Kalasin. He has two daughters.
Go to Profile#28640
C. Raymond Perrault
#28651
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Charles Raymond Perrault is an artificial intelligence researcher and a Distinguished Computer Scientist at SRI International. He was a co-principal investigator of the CALO project, which is the predecessor for several AI technologies including Siri.
Go to Profile#28641
Yaroslav Hrytsak
#28652
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Yaroslav Hrytsak is a Ukrainian historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences and professor of the Ukrainian Catholic University. He is also the director of the Institute for Historical Studies of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. He is chief editor of the scientific journal "Ukraine Modern" and is a nember of the editorial board of the journals Ab Imperio, Critique, Slavic Review, and a member of the supervisory board of Harvard Ukrainian Studies. He is an honorary professor of National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He was a guest professor at Central European University in Budapest ...
Go to Profile#28642
Alan MacEachren
#28653
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Alan M. MacEachren is an American geographer, Professor of Geography and Director, GeoVISTA Center, Department of Geography, The Pennsylvania State University. He is known for his cross-disciplinary work in the fields of human-centered geographic visualization, scientific and information visualization, and in statistics.
Go to Profile#28643
Gregory Eskin
#28654
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Gregory Eskin is a Russian-Israeli-American mathematician, specializing in partial differential equations. Eskin received in 1963 his Ph.D. from Moscow State University with thesis advisor Georgiy Shilov. In 1974 Eskin immigrated with his family to Israel and became a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1983 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians at Warsaw. In 1982 he with his family emigrated from Israel to the USA and he became a professor at UCLA. He was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2014.
Go to Profile#28644
R. Rox Anderson
#28655
Overall Influence
1950 - 2007 (57 years)
Richard Rox Anderson, FAAD , is a Boston-based dermatologist and entrepreneur. Education and career Anderson earned his BS degree from MIT, and then pursued his MD degree graduating magna cum laude from the joint MIT-Harvard medical program, Health Sciences and Technology. Anderson completed his residency in dermatology and research fellowship at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#28645
Werner Romberg
#28656
Overall Influence
1909 - 2003 (94 years)
Werner Romberg was a German mathematician and physicist. Romberg studied mathematics and physics form 1928 in Heidelberg and Munich and completed his doctorate in 1933 at Munich University under the supervision of Arnold Sommerfeld; his thesis was entitled "Zur Polarisation des Kanalstrahllichtes" ["On the polarisation of channel light beams"]. In Munich he studied mathematics under, among others, Oskar Perron and Constantin Carathéodory. In 1933, as a so-called "half-Jew" in the terminology of the new National Socialist government of Germany, he sought to emigrate to the Soviet Union. From 1934 to 1937 he worked as a theoretical physicist in the university of Dnipro .
Go to Profile#28646
Louis Zamperini
#28657
Overall Influence
1917 - 2014 (97 years)
Louis Silvie Zamperini was an American World War II veteran, an Olympic distance runner and a Christian Evangelist. He took up running in high school and qualified for the United States in the 5,000 m race for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, finishing 8th while setting a new lap record in the process.
Go to Profile#28647
Misael Acosta Solís
#28658
Overall Influence
1911 - 1994 (83 years)
Misael Acosta Solís was an Ecuadorian naturalist. He earned a doctorate degree from the School of Natural Science of the Central University of Ecuador. In 1939 he became a corresponding member of the National Geographic Society of Washington DC. He was the Botanical Director of the Cinchona Mission in Ecuador of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He founded the Forestry Department of Ecuador. He was a professor of Botany and Ecology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador. He wrote the 5-volume resource encyclopedia Los recursos naturales del Ecuador y su conservación , which was aw...
Go to Profile#28648
Peter Forrest
#28659
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Peter Richard Haddow Forrest is an Australian philosopher. Early life and education Forrest was born in 1948 in Liverpool, England, and was educated at Ampleforth College. His undergraduate work was at Balliol College, Oxford, in mathematics, and he gained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in mathematics from Harvard University. After moving to Australia he gained a Master of Arts degree in philosophy at the University of Tasmania, then in 1984 a PhD degree at the University of Sydney, where he was influenced by philosophers David Stove and David Armstrong. He was Professor of Philosophy at the...
Go to Profile#28649
Jimmy Cheek
#28660
Overall Influence
Jimmy G. Cheek is Chancellor Emeritus and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Higher Education in Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Former Director of the Postsecondary Education Research Center. He is also Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida. As the state's flagship research campus, UT Knoxville is currently ranked as a Top 50 public institution.
Go to Profile#28650
Robert Bartholomew
#28661
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Robert Emerson Bartholomew is an American medical sociologist, journalist and author living in New Zealand. He is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. In addition to publishing more than 60 academic papers, he has written or co-written 16 popular science and skeptical non-fiction books. He writes for several newspapers and journals on sociological and fringe science topics, including Psychology Today, Skeptical Inquirer, and British magazines The Skeptic and Fortean Times.
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