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).
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List of the most influential people
#28801
David Gates
#28812
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
David Gates is an American journalist and novelist. His works have been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Education Gates obtained his B.A. from the University of Connecticut in 1972.
Go to Profile#28802
John M. Oesterreicher
#28813
Overall Influence
1904 - 1993 (89 years)
Monsignor John Maria Oesterreicher , born Johannes Oesterreicher, was a Catholic theologian and a leading advocate of Jewish–Catholic reconciliation. He was one of the architects of Nostra aetate or "In Our Age," a declaration which was issued by the Second Vatican Council in 1965 and which repudiated antisemitism.
Go to Profile#28803
Forest Dewey Dodrill
#28814
Overall Influence
1902 - 1997 (95 years)
Forest Dewey Dodrill was a medical doctor at Harper University Hospital at Wayne State University in Michigan who performed the first successful open heart surgery using a mechanical pump. Biography Dodrill was born in Webster Springs, West Virginia and attended West Virginia University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1925, he attended Harvard Medical School, graduating in 1930. Dodrill was an intern and resident at Harper Hospital in Detroit where he became a staff surgeon. He did a thoracic surgical residency at the University of Michigan in the early 1940s, receiving a M.Ch. degr...
Go to Profile#28804
Hayward Alker
#28815
Overall Influence
1937 - 2007 (70 years)
Hayward R. Alker was a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California School of International Relations, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and Yale University. Alker was also former President of the International Studies Association and John A. McCone Chair in International Security at the School of International Relations, University of Southern California. Dr. Alker specialized in research methods, core international relations theory, international politics, and security.
Go to Profile#28805
Chris Hoofnagle
#28816
Overall Influence
Chris Jay Hoofnagle is an American professor at the University of California, Berkeley who teaches information privacy law, computer crime law, regulation of online privacy, internet law, and seminars on new technology. Hoofnagle has contributed to the privacy literature by writing privacy law legal reviews and conducting research on the privacy preferences of Americans. Notably, his research demonstrates that most Americans prefer not to be targeted online for advertising and despite claims to the contrary, young people care about privacy and take actions to protect it. Hoofnagle has written scholarly articles regarding identity theft, consumer privacy, U.S.
Go to Profile#28806
Ryszard Engelking
#28817
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Ryszard Engelking was a Polish mathematician. He was working mainly on general topology and dimension theory. He is the author of several influential monographs in this field. The 1989 edition of his General Topology is nowadays a standard reference for topology. Engelking died on 16 November 2023, his 88th birthday.
Go to Profile#28807
Russel J. Reiter
#28818
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Russel J. Reiter is an American researcher and Professor of Cell Systems and Anatomy at the University of Texas Health Science Center. He is one of the top highly cited researchers according to webometrics.
Go to Profile#28808
Maja Haderlap
#28819
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Maja Haderlap Life Her grandmother who was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. At ten years old, Haderlap's father was tortured by the Nazis to disclose where his father, who joined Slovene Partisans, was hiding. Her father often wanted to kill himself because of the way Austrian majority treated him. The family waited until he passed out, then pried his fingers from the gun. After reading her grandmother’s diary, she was “afraid of being overrun by the past, of being crushed by its weight.” She made a conscious decision to write about her family’s history in a novel.
Go to Profile#28809
Ronald Paulson
#28820
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (96 years)
Ronald Howard Paulson is an American professor of English, a specialist in English 18th-century art and culture, and the world's leading expert on English artist William Hogarth. Education Paulson earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1952, where he was an editorial associate of campus humor magazine The Yale Record. He earned his doctorate degree from Yale in 1958.
Go to Profile#28810
Bensalem Himmich
#28821
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Bensalem Himmich is a Moroccan novelist, poet and philosopher with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Paris, who teaches at the Mohammed V University, Rabat. He served as Minister of Culture from 29 July 2009 to 3 January 2012.
Go to Profile#28811
Peter Willcox
#28822
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Peter Willcox is an American sea captain best known for his activism with the environmental organization Greenpeace. He was on board as captain of the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed and sunk by the DGSE in New Zealand in 1985.
Go to Profile#28812
Chip Heath
#28823
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Chip Heath is an American academic. He is the Thrive Foundation for Youth Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the co-author of several books. Early life Heath graduated from Texas A&M University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial engineering. He subsequently earned a PhD in psychology from Stanford University.
Go to Profile#28813
Zhang Qianfan
#28824
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Zhang Qianfan is a constitutional law professor at Peking University Law School, and an activist who advocates constitutionalism in China and has called for China's general political and judicial reform.
Go to Profile#28814
Anne Monique Nuyt
#28825
Overall Influence
Anne Monique Nuyt is a Canadian paediatrician who is Professor of Neonatology and Canada Research Chair in Prematurity and Developmental Origins of Cardiovascular Health and Diseases at the Université de Montréal. Her research considers how perinatal oxidative stress can alter the structural development and function of the cardiovascular system.
Go to Profile#28815
Wolfgang Walter
#28826
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Wolfgang Ludwig Walter was a German mathematician, who specialized in the theory of differential equations. His textbook on ordinary differential equations became a standard graduate text on the subject at many institutions.
Go to Profile#28816
Diana Furchtgott-Roth
#28827
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Diana Furchtgott-Roth is an American economist who is adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University and a columnist. She served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology at the United States Department of Transportation during the Trump administration. She previously served as Acting Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Go to Profile#28817
Victor Ninov
#28828
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Victor Ninov is a Bulgarian physicist and former researcher who worked primarily in creating superheavy elements. He is known for the co-discoveries of elements 110, 111, and 112 . Ninov also claimed the creation of elements 116 and 118; however, an investigation concluded that he had falsified the evidence. The repercussions of the affair had an impact on the guidelines of conduct for several research institutions.
Go to Profile#28818
David Schmeidler
#28829
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
David Schmeidler was an Israeli mathematician and economic theorist. He was a Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the Ohio State University. Biography David Schmeidler was born in 1939 in Kraków, Poland. He spent the war years in Russia and moved back to Poland at the end of the war and to Israel in 1949. From 1960 to 1969 he studied mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , the advanced degrees under the supervision of Robert Aumann. He visited the Catholic University of Louvain and University of California at Berkeley before joining Tel-Aviv University in 1971, holding p...
Go to Profile#28819
Sukh Dev
#28830
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (103 years)
Sukh Dev FNA, FASc is an Indian organic chemist, academic, researcher and writer, known for his contributions in the development of Guggulsterone, a plant-derived steroid used as a therapeutic and nutritional agent. He has conducted advanced research in biomedical science and natural products chemistry and holds 55 patents for his findings.
Go to Profile#28820
Phil Jones
#28831
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Philip Douglas Jones is a former director of the Climatic Research Unit and a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia from 1998, having begun his career at the unit in 1976. He retired from these positions at the end of 2016, and was replaced as CRU director by Tim Osborn. Jones then took up a position as a Professorial Fellow at the UEA from January 2017.
Go to Profile#28821
Anton Formann
#28832
Overall Influence
1949 - 2010 (61 years)
Anton K. Formann was an Austrian research psychologist, statistician, and psychometrician. He is renowned for his contributions to item response theory , latent class analysis, the measurement of change, mixture models, categorical data analysis, and quantitative methods for research synthesis .
Go to Profile#28822
James Doty
#28833
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
James R. Doty, M.D., FACS, FICS, FAANS is a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, an affiliate of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. He is the author of a self-help book called Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart. Doty is also the Senior Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science .
Go to Profile#28823
Barbara W. Newell
#28834
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Barbara Warne Newell is an economist, career professor, and higher education administrator. Notably, she served as the tenth President of Wellesley College from 1972 to 1980 and was the first female chancellor of the State University System of Florida from 1981 to 1985.
Go to Profile#28824
İlter Turan
#28835
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Adil İlter Turan is a Turkish academic. He is a professor of Political Science in the Department of International Relations at Istanbul Bilgi University. He was Rector of the University from 1998 to 2001. He was the Program Chair of the 21st World Congress of Political Science, organized by the International Political Science Association in 2009.
Go to Profile#28825
Juanes
#28836
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Juan Esteban Aristizábal Vásquez , known professionally as Juanes, is a Colombian musician who was a member of the rock band Ekhymosis and is now a solo artist. Since releasing his solo debut album Fíjate Bien in 2000, Juanes has won 26 Latin Grammy Awards and sold more than 15 million albums worldwide.
Go to Profile#28826
Peter Trawny
#28837
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Peter Trawny is a German philosopher and professor at the University of Wuppertal. Life Peter Trawny studied philosophy, musicology and art history at the Ruhr University Bochum, where he the Magisterium graduated in 1992, after a guest stay at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg in Breisgau and at the University of Basel. In 1995, he received his doctorate under Klaus Held with a dissertation on Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of the world. With a doctoral scholarship from the Study Foundation of the German people, he was promoted and awarded in 1997 with the Second Prize of all faculties of the University of Wuppertal.
Go to Profile#28827
George Feher
#28838
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
George Feher was an American biophysicist working at the University of California San Diego. Birth and education George Feher was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in 1924. Fehér is a hungarian name and his birth town was ceeded from Hungary 4 years before his birth. So Fehér was a hungarian jew.
Go to Profile#28828
Peter Capaldi
#28839
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Peter Dougan Capaldi is a Scottish actor and director. He portrayed the twelfth incarnation of the Doctor in the science fiction series Doctor Who and Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It , for which he received four British Academy Television Award nominations, winning Best Male Comedy Performance in 2010. When he reprised the role of Tucker in the feature film In the Loop, Capaldi was honoured with several film critic award nominations for Best Supporting Actor.
Go to Profile#28829
William G. Anderson
#28840
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (99 years)
William G. Anderson D.O. was the first African-American who was a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Osteopathic Association for twenty years where he also served as president. He was best known for his role in the Albany Movement, which Anderson led, was formed by local activists in Albany, Georgia in 1961.
Go to Profile#28830
Alfredo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena
#28841
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Alfredo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena is a Mexican lawyer who serves as a justice of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. Studies Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena earned his law degree at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and his graduate degree, LL.M. and International Tax Certificate from Harvard University. As a graduate student, he was awarded a scholarship from the Fulbright-García Robles Foundation.
Go to Profile#28831
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt
#28842
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt is an American archaeologist and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago. She studies human evolution and long-term human-environment interaction. She is one of the leading American archeologists studying Paleoindians in the Amazon basin. Her field research has included significant findings at Marajo Island and Caverna da Pedra Pintada in Brazil. She does additional field work in the Congo Basin. She is the great-granddaughter of United States President Theodore Roosevelt.
Go to Profile#28832
Lise Menn
#28843
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Lise Menn is an American linguist who specializes in psycholinguistics, including the study of language acquisition and aphasia. Professional history Menn earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1962 from Swarthmore College and a master's degree from Brandeis University in 1964. After changing fields, she earned a master's, and later a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1976.
Go to Profile#28833
J. W. Burrow
#28844
Overall Influence
1935 - 2009 (74 years)
John Wyon Burrow, FBA was an English historian of intellectual history. His published works include assessments of the Whig interpretation of history and of historiography generally. According to The Independent: "John Burrow was one of the leading intellectual historians of his generation. His pioneering work marked the beginning of a more sophisticated approach to the history of the social sciences, one that did not treat the past as being of interest only in so far as it anticipated the present."
Go to Profile#28834
Anna Patterson
#28845
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Anna Patterson is a software engineer and a contributor to search engines. Education Patterson received her B.S. in Computer Science and another in Electrical Engineering from McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and was a Research Scientist at Stanford University in artificial intelligence working with John McCarthy on Phenomenal Data Mining and Carolyn Talcott on theorem provers.
Go to Profile#28835
Kristina Olson
#28846
Overall Influence
Kristina Reiss Olson is a psychologist and a professor at Princeton University. She is known for her research on the development of social categories, transgender youth, and variation in human gender development. Olson was recipient of the 2016 Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science for transformative early career contributions, and the 2014 SAGE Young Scholars Award. Olson received the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation in 2018, and was the first psychological scientist to receive this prestigious award honoring early-career scientists.
Go to Profile#28836
Erik Møse
#28847
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Erik Møse is a Norwegian judge. Møse has been a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda , Supreme Court of Norway, and the European Court of Human Rights . At the ICTR, he served as Vice President and later President. Having retired from his judicial career, he is currently serving as Chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine.
Go to Profile#28837
Peter Landweber
#28848
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Peter Steven Landweber is an American mathematician working in algebraic topology. Landweber studied at the University of Iowa and Harvard University , where he graduated in 1965 after studying under Raoul Bott . He was then Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia and at Yale University from 1968 to 1970. From 1967 to 1968 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1970, he became Associate Professor at Rutgers University, where he taught from 1974 until his retirement in 2007. From 1974 to 1975 he was a NATO fellow at the University of Cambridge. Sin...
Go to Profile#28838
Eugene Levy
#28849
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Eugene Levy is a Canadian actor and comedian. Known for portraying flustered and unconventional figures, Levy has won multiple accolades throughout his career including four Primetime Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2011, and was made Companion of the Order of Canada in 2022.
Go to Profile#28839
Charles George Broyden
#28850
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Charles George Broyden was a mathematician who specialized in optimization problems and numerical linear algebra. While a physicist working at English Electric Company from 1961–1965, he adapted the Davidon–Fletcher–Powell formula to solving some nonlinear systems of equations that he was working with, leading to his widely cited 1965 paper, "A class of methods for solving nonlinear simultaneous equations". He was a lecturer at UCW Aberystwyth from 1965–1967. He later became a senior lecturer at University of Essex from 1967–1970, where he independently discovered the Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno method.
Go to Profile#28840
Wilhelm Leber
#28851
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Wilhelm Leber is a German mathematician and formerly chief apostle in the New Apostolic Church. Life Wilhelm Leber was born in Herford in Westphalia. In 1975 he earned his doctorate in mathematics at the Goethe University Frankfurt with a dissertation entitled Konvergenzbegriffe für lineare Operatoren und Stabilitätsaussagen. After earning his degree, he began working at the University of Hamburg.
Go to Profile#28841
Frank Farian
#28852
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Frank Farian is a German record producer who founded the 1970s disco-pop group Boney M., the Latin pop band No Mercy and the pop band Milli Vanilli. He frequently created vocal groups in which the publicised members merely lip-synced to songs sung by session members. According to the 2023 documentary directed by Luke Kormen, he used this model to make money off black artists. He owns the record label MCI and several subsidiaries. Over the course of his career, Farian has sold over 850 million records and earned 800 gold and platinum certifications.
Go to Profile#28842
Scott Boorman
#28853
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Scott Archer Boorman is a mathematical sociologist at Yale University. Life His father, Howard L. Boorman, was a Foreign Service Officer in Beijing, China, and he was born there as Chinese Communists troops entered the city. He received no formal education before enrolling at Harvard College, and had largely completed work on his book, The Protracted Game, which was published in 1971.
Go to Profile#28844
David Schwimmer
#28855
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
David Lawrence Schwimmer is an American actor, director and producer. He gained worldwide recognition for portraying Ross Geller in the sitcom Friends, for which he received a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series in 1995. While still acting in Friends, his first leading film role was in The Pallbearer , followed by roles in Kissing a Fool, Six Days, Seven Nights, Apt Pupil , and Picking Up the Pieces . He was then cast in the miniseries Band of Brothers as Herbert Sobel.
Go to Profile#28845
Michel Grosclaude
#28856
Overall Influence
1926 - 2002 (76 years)
Michel Grosclaude was a French linguist, and an author of works on grammar, lexicography and Occitan onomastics. Biography Born on 8 July 1926 in Nancy. He was the son of Pierre Grosclaude, an academic. He studied in Lyon and in Marseille and spent time in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon during the war, which had some significance for his humanistic ideas. He finished his training in Latin, Greek, and philosophy at the Sorbonne.
Go to Profile#28846
Yves Bréchet
#28857
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Yves Bréchet is a physicist, specialist of materials science, former High Commissioner for Atomic Energy of France, current Scientific Director of Saint Gobain, professor at Monash University, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#28847
Jason Johnson
#28858
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Jason Johnson is an American political scientist, commentator and writer. He is the author of the book Political Consultants and Campaigns: One Day to Sell. Johnson is an associate professor of communication and journalism at Morgan State University. He is a regular political contributor to MSNBC and CNN.
Go to Profile#28848
Lalita Ramakrishnan
#28859
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Lalita Ramakrishnan is an Indian-born American microbiologist who is known for her contributions to the understanding of the biological mechanism of tuberculosis. she serves as a professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and a practicing physician. Her research is conducted at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology , where she serves as the Head of the Molecular Immunity Unit of the Department of Medicine embedded at the MRC LMB. Working with Stanley Falkow at Stanford, she developed the strategy of using Mycobacterium marinum infection as a model for tuberculosis.
Go to Profile#28849
Hooshang Seyhoun
#28860
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Houshang Seyhoun, was an Iranian architect, sculptor, painter, scholar and professor. He studied fine arts at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and earned a degree in architecture from University of Tehran. Seyhun is noted specially for his innovative and creative architectural design. His architectural legacy includes countless monuments and over one thousand private villas. After the Iranian Revolution he moved to Vancouver and lived in exile until his death. Seyhoon became famous for his design work in the 1950s in Iran, including: Tehran's Central Railway Station and tombs of scientific/literary figures .
Go to Profile#28850
Henry T. Wright
#28861
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Henry Tutwiler Wright is an American archeologist and educator. Wright has had significant contributions to the field of archaeology through his fieldwork, publications, and teaching. He serves as the Albert Clanton Spaulding Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, and Curator of Near Eastern Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a member of the Santa Fe Institute's Science Board.
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