Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#28701

Helen Verran

#28712

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Helen Verran is an Australian historian and empirical philosopher of science, primarily working in the Social Studies of Science and Technology , and currently Adjunct Professor at Charles Darwin University.

#28702

Michèle Artigue

#28713

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Michèle Artigue is a French expert in mathematics education, a professor emeritus at Paris Diderot University and the former president of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction. Early life and education Artigue was born in 1946 in Bordères-sur-l'Échez, a small town in the Pyrenees. She was the daughter of a kindergarten teacher, and writes that she was "always interested in mathematics". She attended the lycée in Tarbes, the nearest town large enough for that level of school, and then spent two years in a preparatory mathematics course for entrance to the grandes écoles in T...

#28703

Geoffrey Hellman

#28714

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Geoffrey Hellman is an American professor and philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He obtained his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy from Harvard University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

#28704

George Frederick James Temple

#28715

Overall Influence

1901 - 1992 (91 years)

Dom George Frederick James Temple FRS OSB was an English mathematician, recipient of the Sylvester Medal in 1969. He was President of the London Mathematical Society in the years 1951–1953. Temple took his first degree as an evening student at Birkbeck College, London, between 1918 and 1922, and also worked there as a research assistant. In 1924 he moved to Imperial College as a demonstrator, where he worked under the direction of Sydney Chapman. After a period spent with Eddington at Cambridge, he returned to Imperial as reader in mathematics. He was appointed professor of mathematics at Kin...

#28705

Hunter Rouse

#28716

Overall Influence

1906 - 1996 (90 years)

Hunter Rouse was a hydraulician known for his research on the mechanics of fluid turbulence. Rouse was a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, from 1929 until 1933, when he moved to Columbia University. He was at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena , and in 1939 he joined the staff of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, where he was dean of the college of engineering from 1966 to 1972. His work includes hydraulic studies of similitude, efflux and overflow, jet diffusion, boundary roughness, and sediment suspension.

#28706

E. J. H. Corner

#28717

Overall Influence

1906 - 1996 (90 years)

Edred John Henry Corner FRS was an English mycologist and botanist who occupied the posts of assistant director at the Singapore Botanic Gardens and Professor of Tropical Botany at the University of Cambridge . Corner was a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College from 1959.

#28707

Kōji Morimoto

#28718

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Kōji Morimoto is a Japanese anime director. Some of his works include being an animator in the Akira film; shorts in Robot Carnival, Short Peace, My Last Day and The Animatrix; and key animation in anime such as Kiki's Delivery Service, City Hunter, and Fist of the North Star. He is the co-founder of Studio 4°C. He has hosted the independent creative team 'phy' since 2009.

#28708

Àlex Corretja

#28719

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (52 years)

Àlex Corretja Verdegay is a Spanish former professional tennis player. During his career, he was twice a major runner-up at the French Open , won the Tour Finals in 1998, reached a career-high singles ranking of world No. 2 in 1999, and captured Masters titles at the 1997 Italian Open and 2000 Indian Wells Masters. Corretja also played a key role in helping Spain win its first Davis Cup title in 2000.Post-retirement, Corretja became a temporary coach of Andy Murray in April 2008 for the duration of the clay-court season, resuming the role on a permanent basis between 2009 and 2011. From 2012 ...

#28709

Max Beauvoir

#28720

Overall Influence

1936 - 2015 (79 years)

Max Gesner Beauvoir was a Haitian biochemist and houngan. Beauvoir held one of the highest titles of Voudou priesthood, Ati or "Supreme Serviteur" , a title given to Houngans and Mambos who have a great and very deep knowledge of the religion, and status within the religion. As Supreme Serviteur, Max was seen as a high authority within Vodou.

#28710

Lawrence Shepp

#28721

Overall Influence

1936 - 2013 (77 years)

Lawrence Alan Shepp was an American mathematician, specializing in statistics and computational tomography. Shepp obtained his PhD from Princeton University in 1961 with a dissertation titled Recurrent Sums of Random Variables. His advisor was William Feller. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1962. He joined Rutgers University in 1997. He joined University of Pennsylvania in 2010.

#28711

Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari

#28722

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari is an Iranian cleric, researcher, journalist, reformist and former political prisoner. He has been described as "an active supporter of the revolution" who became "an outspoken and influential critic of the current Iranian version of theocracy."

#28712

Stefan Knapp

#28723

Overall Influence

1921 - 1996 (75 years)

Stefan Knapp was a Polish painter and sculptor, who worked in Great Britain. He developed and patented a technique of painting with enamel paint on steel, facilitating decorating public architectural structures.

#28713

Wei Ji Ma

#28724

Overall Influence

Wei Ji Ma is a professor at New York University in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Neural Science. Ma focuses on the areas of perception, decision-making, and memory. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics from University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Ma is the 2021 recipient of the Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building from the Cognitive Science Society.

#28714

Sophie Postel-Vinay

#28725

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Sophie Postel-Vinay is a French physician and scientist at the Institut Gustave Roussy where she has led an ATIP-Avenir team since 2018. She works on oncology and the development of new drugs and is an expert in early clinical trials. She was the 2019 winner of the Irène Joliot-Curie Prize in the “young woman scientist” category.

#28715

John E. Toews

#28726

Overall Influence

John E. Toews is a Canadian historian in the U.S., and Director of the Comparative History of Ideas Program, University of Washington from 1981 to 2010. He graduated from Harvard University, with a Ph.D. in 1973.

#28716

Moshe Gil

#28727

Overall Influence

1921 - 2014 (93 years)

Moshe Gil was an Israeli historian. Academic career Moshe Gil specialized in the historical interaction between Islam and the Jews, including the history of Palestine under the Islamic domination, the institution of the Exilarchate, and Jewish merchants such as the Radhanites. Gil was professor emeritus of the Chaim Rosenberg School of Jewish Studies at Tel Aviv University and held the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Chair in the History of the Jews in Muslim Lands.

#28717

Rivka Oxman

#28728

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Rivka Oxman is an Israeli architect, researcher, and professor at the Technion Institute in Haifa. Her research interests are related to design and computation, including digital architecture and methods, and exploring their contribution to the emergence of new paradigms of architectural design and practice.

#28718

Flavor Flav

#28729

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

William Jonathan Drayton Jr. , known by his stage name Flavor Flav , is an American rapper and hype man. Known for his yells of "Yeah, boyeeeeee!" when performing, he was a founding member of the rap group Public Enemy alongside Chuck D; with them he has earned six Grammy Award nominations, and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

#28719

Chris Chelios

#28730

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Christos Kostas Chelios is an American former professional ice hockey defenseman. He was one of the longest tenured players in the National Hockey League , and is a three-time Stanley Cup champion—one with the Montreal Canadiens and two with the Detroit Red Wings.

#28720

Kevin J Worthen

Kevin J Worthen

#28731

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Kevin J Worthen is an American professor who served as the 13th president of Brigham Young University from 2014 to 2023. From 2010 to 2021, he also served as an area seventy in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . Worthen served previously at BYU as the Advancement Vice President and as dean of the J. Reuben Clark Law School .

#28721

Kurt Baier

#28732

Overall Influence

1917 - 2010 (93 years)

Kurt Baier was an Austrian moral philosopher who taught for most of his career in Australia and the United States. Life and career Born in Vienna, Austria, Baier studied law at the University of Vienna. In 1938, after the Anschluss he had to abandon his studies, and went to the United Kingdom as a refugee, where he was interned as a "friendly enemy alien" and sent to Australia on the Dunera. There he began studying philosophy. Baier received his B.A. from the University of Melbourne in 1944, and his M.A. in 1947. In 1952, he received his DPhil at Oxford University.

#28722

David Edmonds

#28733

Overall Influence

1964 - Present (62 years)

David Edmonds is a British philosopher, and a radio feature maker at the BBC World Service. He studied at Oxford University, has a PhD in philosophy from the Open University and has held fellowships at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Edmonds is the author of Caste Wars: A Philosophy of Discrimination and co-author with John Eidinow of Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers and Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time.

#28723

David Crighton

#28734

Overall Influence

1942 - 2000 (58 years)

David George Crighton, FRS was a British mathematician and physicist. Life Crighton was born in Llandudno, North Wales, where his mother, Violet Grace Garrison, had been sent because of the bombing of London during the Second World War. He did not become interested in mathematics until his last two years at Watford Grammar School for Boys. He entered St John's College, Cambridge, in 1961 and started lecturing at Woolwich Polytechnic in 1964, having completed only his bachelor's degree.

#28724

Yuk Hui

#28735

Overall Influence

Yuk Hui is a Hong Kong philosopher and professor of philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is known for his writings on philosophy and technology. Hui has been described as one of the most interesting contemporary philosophers of technology.

#28725

Alfonso Soriano

#28736

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Alfonso Guilleard Soriano is a Dominican former professional baseball left fielder and second baseman. He played in Major League Baseball for the New York Yankees, Texas Rangers, Washington Nationals, and Chicago Cubs, and in Nippon Professional Baseball for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp.

#28726

Charles Ray

#28737

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Charles Ray is a Los Angeles-based American sculptor. He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer's perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways. Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Ray's "career as an artist…is easily among the most important of the last twenty years."

#28727

Princess Akiko of Mikasa

Princess Akiko of Mikasa

#28738

Overall Influence

1981 - Present (45 years)

Princess Akiko of Mikasa is a member of the Imperial House of Japan and the elder daughter of Prince Tomohito of Mikasa and Princess Tomohito of Mikasa . Biography Education Princess Akiko graduated from Gakushuin University in Tokyo with a bachelor's degree in History. While she was at Gakushuin, she spent the 2001–2002 academic year studying abroad at Merton College, Oxford to major in Japanese art history.

#28728

Udo Di Fabio

#28739

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Udo Di Fabio is a German jurist. He is a former judge of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, Germany's highest court, where he served as a member of the Second Senate from December 1999 until December 2011.

#28729

Alenush Terian

#28740

Overall Influence

1920 - 2011 (91 years)

Ālenush Teriān was an Iranian-Armenian astronomer and physicist and is called 'Mother of Modern Iranian Astronomy'. Early life She was born on November 9, 1921, to an Armenian family in Tehran, Iran. Her father, Arto, was a stage director, poet and translator who had translated Shahnameh, from Persian to Armenian. Her mother, Varto Terian, was a stage actress and director.

#28730

Andrew Wachtel

#28741

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Andrew Wachtel is an American scholar, translator and educator. He is Director of Compass College in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. He was Rector of Narxoz University in Almaty, Kazakhstan between 2018 and 2020. Previously, he served as president of the American University of Central Asia and as the Dean of The Graduate School, Northwestern University . Wachtel was elected to the Council on Foreign Relations 2001 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

#28731

Joachim Remak

#28742

Overall Influence

1920 - 2001 (81 years)

Joachim Remak was a historian of Modern Europe, especially of Germany and World War I. Born in Berlin, Germany, he fled Nazi Germany in 1938 for the United States. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942 and 1946. He worked for the State Department in Germany and the United Kingdom and then returned to the United States for doctoral study and earned his Ph.D. in history at Stanford University in 1955; his dissertation dealt with "Germany and the United States, 1933–1939." He married Roberta Anne Remak in 1948.

#28732

David Plaisted

#28743

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

David Alan Plaisted is a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Research interests Plaisted's research interests include term rewriting systems, automated theorem proving, logic programming, and algorithms. His research accomplishments in theorem proving include work on the recursive path ordering, the associative path ordering, abstraction, the simplified and modified problem reduction formats, ground reducibility, nonstandard clause form translations, rigid E-unification, Knuth–Bendix completion, replacement rules in theorem proving, instance-based th...

#28733

Michael Davis

#28744

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Michael Davis is an American philosopher specializing in professional ethics. He is Professor of Philosophy at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Senior Fellow at its Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions.

#28734

Toeti Heraty

#28745

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Toeti Heraty was an Indonesian poet. She has been singled out as the "only woman amongst the leading contemporary Indonesian poets". Biography Toeti Heraty was born in Bandung, Java on 27 November 1933. Her father was a well-known engineering expert Roosseno Soerjohadikoesomo and her siblings all work in the hard sciences. Following her family tradition, she pursued medicine at the University of Indonesia from 1951 until 1955. Then she took an advanced degree in psychology in 1962 and wrote her thesis on Simone de Beauvoir. At Leiden University, Netherlands she took her degree in Philosophy and produced a dissertation on "The I/Ego in Culture" or "Aku Dalam Budaya".

#28735

Willy Maley

#28746

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

William Timothy "Willy" Maley is a Scottish literary critic, editor, teacher and writer. Maley is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow, Fellow of the English Association , and founder, with Philip Hobsbaum, of Glasgow's Creative Writing programme. He is a prolific author on subjects including early modern English literature from Spenser to Milton, and on modern Scottish and Irish writing.

#28736

Luis Nishizawa

#28747

Overall Influence

1918 - 2014 (96 years)

Luis Nishizawa Flores was a Mexican artist known for his landscape work and murals, which often show Japanese and Mexican influence. He began formal training as an artist in 1942 at the height of the Mexican muralism movement but studied other painting styles as well as Japanese art.

#28737

Eric Sykes

#28748

Overall Influence

1923 - 2012 (89 years)

Eric Sykes was an English radio, stage, television and film writer, comedian, actor and director whose performing career spanned more than 50 years. He frequently wrote for and performed with many other leading comedy performers and writers of the period, including Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper, Peter Sellers, John Antrobus and Johnny Speight. Sykes first came to prominence through his many radio credits as a writer and actor in the 1950s, most notably through his collaboration on The Goon Show scripts. He became a TV star in his own right in the early 1960s when he appeared wit...

#28738

David Puttnam

#28749

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

David Terence Puttnam, Baron Puttnam, CBE, HonFRSA, HonFRPS, MRIA is a British-Irish film producer, educator, environmentalist and former member of the House of Lords. His productions include Chariots of Fire, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, The Mission, The Killing Fields, Local Hero, Midnight Express and Memphis Belle. In 1982, he received the BAFTA for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema, and in 2006 he was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

#28739

Lionel Blue

#28750

Overall Influence

1930 - 2016 (86 years)

Lionel Blue was a British Reform rabbi, journalist and broadcaster, described by The Guardian as "one of the most respected religious figures in the UK". He was best known for his longstanding work with the media, most notably his wry and gentle sense of humour on Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. He was the first British rabbi publicly to declare his homosexuality.

#28740

Michael J. Larsen

Michael J. Larsen

#28751

Overall Influence

Michael Jeffrey Larsen is an American mathematician, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Indiana University Bloomington. Academic biography In high school, Larsen tied with four other competitors for the top score in the 1977 International Mathematical Olympiad in Belgrade, winning a gold medal. As an undergraduate mathematics student at Harvard University, Larsen became a Putnam Fellow in 1981 and 1983. He graduated from Harvard in 1984, and earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1988, under the supervision of Gerd Faltings. After working at the Institute for Advanced Study he ...

#28741

Karl Schweizer

#28752

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Karl Wolfgang Schweizer is a historian specialising in eighteenth century European history. Education and academic career Schweizer was born in Germany and was educated at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, where he graduated with a BA in 1969, and in 1970 he earned his MA at the University of Waterloo. In 1976, he was awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he studied with Herbert Butterfield. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Frederick the Great, William Pitt and Lord Bute: The Origin, Development and Dissolution of the Anglo-Prussian Alliance, 1756–6...

#28742

Leonard Gross

#28753

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Leonard Gross is an American mathematician and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Cornell University. Gross has made fundamental contributions to mathematics and the mathematically rigorous study of quantum field theory.

#28743

Maia Sandu

#28754

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Maia Sandu is a Moldovan politician who has been the President of Moldova since 24 December 2020. She is the founder and former leader of the Party of Action and Solidarity and former Prime Minister of Moldova from 8 June 2019 until 14 November 2019, when the government collapsed after a vote of no-confidence. Sandu was Minister of Education from 2012 to 2015 and member of the Parliament of Moldova from 2014 to 2015, and again in 2019. Sandu was elected President of Moldova in a landslide victory during the 2020 Moldovan presidential election. The first female president of Moldova, Sandu is ...

#28744

Faron Moller

#28755

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Faron George Moller is a Canadian-born British computer scientist and expert on theoretical computer science, particularly infinite-state automata theory and temporal logic. His work has focussed on structural decomposition techniques for analysing abstract models of computing systems. He is founding Director of the Swansea Railway Verification Group; Director of Technocamps; and Head of the Institute of Coding in Wales. In 2023, he was elected General Secretary of the Learned Society of Wales.

#28745

Mohammad Jafar Mahallati

#28756

Overall Influence

Mohammad Jafar Mahallati is an Iranian scholar of Islamic studies and a former diplomat. He is currently serving as the Nancy Schrom Dye Chair in Middle East and North African Studies at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. He was Iran's ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1987 to 1989.

#28746

Jim Webb

#28757

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

James Henry Webb Jr. is an American politician and author. He has served as a United States senator from Virginia, Secretary of the Navy, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs, Counsel for the United States House Committee on Veterans' Affairs and is a decorated Marine Corps officer.

#28747

James Arness

#28758

Overall Influence

1923 - 2011 (88 years)

James Arness was an American actor, best known for portraying Marshal Matt Dillon for 20 years in the series Gunsmoke. Arness has the distinction of having played the role of Dillon in five decades: 1955 to 1975 in the weekly series, then in Gunsmoke: Return to Dodge and four more made-for-television Gunsmoke films in the 1990s. In Europe, Arness reached cult status for his role as Zeb Macahan in the Western series How the West Was Won. He was the older brother of actor Peter Graves.

#28748

Paulo Sousa

#28759

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Paulo Manuel Carvalho de Sousa is a Portuguese football manager and former professional player who played as a defensive midfielder. Starting his career at Benfica, he also represented Sporting CP in his country, where he amassed Primeira Liga totals of 117 matches and three goals in five years. From there onwards, he competed mainly in Italy and Germany, winning the Champions League with Juventus and Borussia Dortmund and the Intercontinental Cup with the latter side. Injuries severely hampered his later career.

#28749

Shobhana Chelliah

#28760

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Shobhana Chelliah is an Indian-American linguist who specializes in Sino-Tibetan languages. She is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Associate Dean of Research and Advancement at the College of Information, University of North Texas. Her research focuses on the documentation of the Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India.

#28750

Betty Stöve

#28761

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Betty Flippina Stöve is a Dutch former professional tennis player. She is best remembered for reaching the ladies' singles final, the ladies' doubles final and the mixed doubles final during the same year at Wimbledon in 1977. She also won ten Grand Slam titles in women's doubles and mixed doubles.

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