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
#28901
Paul B. Thompson
#28912
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Paul B. Thompson is Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University, where he held the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural Food and Community Ethics before retiring in 2022. Thompson was born in 1951 in Springfield, Missouri. He earned his B.A. at Emory University before going on to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He formerly taught at Texas A&M University and Purdue University before joining MSU, where he continues to do research on ethical and philosophical questions dealing with agriculture and food and especially the development of agricultural...
Go to Profile#28902
Boris Diaw
#28913
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Boris Babacar Diaw-Riffiod , better known as Boris Diaw, is a French basketball executive and former player who is the president of Metropolitans 92 of LNB Pro A. Diaw began his playing career in Pro A and returned to that league after 14 seasons in the National Basketball Association . He played mostly at the power forward position. In 2006, Diaw was named the NBA's Most Improved Player as a member of the Phoenix Suns. He won an NBA championship with the San Antonio Spurs in 2014.
Go to Profile#28903
Henryka Bochniarz
#28914
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Henryka Teodora Bochniarz is a Polish economist and administrator who is a former Minister of Industry and Trade in the Government of Poland. Bochniarz is also the founder and head of the Polish Confederation of Private Employers ‘Lewiatan’ and president for Central and Eastern Europe Region of Boeing International Co.
Go to Profile#28904
Bede Liu
#28915
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Bede Liu is a professor emeritus at Princeton University. He was born in Shanghai, China in 1934. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at National Taiwan University. He earned his master's degree and doctorate in 1956 and 1960, respectively, in electrical engineering, from what is now called New York University Tandon School of Engineering.
Go to Profile#28905
Antonio Brown
#28916
Overall Influence
1988 - Present (38 years)
Antonio Tavaris Brown Sr. , nicknamed "AB", is an American football wide receiver who is a free agent. A draft steal in the sixth round of the 2010 NFL Draft by the Pittsburgh Steelers, Brown is regarded as one of the best receivers of the 2010s, accumulating the most first-team All-Pro selections at his position throughout the decade with four consecutive selections , all as a member of the Steelers. He amassed more receptions than any other player in the league from his rookie season in 2010 through 2018. He played college football at Central Michigan University, where he earned All-American honors in 2008 and 2009 as a punt returner.
Go to Profile#28906
Liam Brady
#28917
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
William Brady is an Irish former footballer and pundit. He found success both in England with Arsenal, where he won an FA Cup in 1979, and in Italy with Juventus, winning two Serie A titles. Brady was capped 72 times for the Ireland national team.
Go to Profile#28907
Stuart Geman
#28918
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Stuart Alan Geman is an American mathematician, known for influential contributions to computer vision, statistics, probability theory, machine learning, and the neurosciences. He and his brother, Donald Geman, are well known for proposing the Gibbs sampler, and for the first proof of convergence of the simulated annealing algorithm.
Go to Profile#28908
Felice Frankel
#28919
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Felice Frankel is a photographer of scientific images who has received multiple awards, both for the aesthetic quality of her science photographs and for her ability to effectively communicate complex scientific information in images.
Go to Profile#28909
John R. Steel
#28920
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
John Robert Steel is an American set theorist at University of California, Berkeley . He has made many contributions to the theory of inner models and determinacy. With Donald A. Martin, he proved projective determinacy, assuming the existence of sufficient large cardinals. He earned his Ph.D. in Logic & the Methodology of Science at Berkeley in 1977 under the joint supervision of John West Addison Jr. and Stephen G. Simpson.
Go to Profile#28910
Andry Rajoelina
#28921
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Andry Nirina Rajoelina is a French-Malagasy politician and businessman who served as the seventh President of Madagascar from 2009 to 2014 and the ninth from 2019 to 2023. He was previously president of a provisional government from 2009 to 2014 following a political crisis and military-backed coup, having held the office of Mayor of Antananarivo for one year prior. Before entering the political arena, Rajoelina was involved in the private sector, including a printing and advertising company called Injet in 1999 and the Viva radio and television networks in 2007.
Go to Profile#28911
Doreen Kimura
#28922
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Doreen Kimura was a Canadian psychologist who was professor at the University of Western Ontario and professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University. Kimura was recognized for her contributions to the field of neuropsychology and later, her advocacy for academic freedom. She was the founding president of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship.
Go to Profile#28912
Tom Burns
#28923
Overall Influence
1913 - 2001 (88 years)
Tom Burns FBA was an English sociologist, author and founder of the Sociology department at Edinburgh University. Early life Burns was born on 16 January 1913 in Bethnal Green, East London. He attended Hague Street LCC elementary school and Parmiter's foundation school before reading English Literature at Bristol University.
Go to Profile#28913
Robert T. Knight
#28924
Overall Influence
Robert Thomas Knight is an American neurologist and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience as well as Neurology and Neurosurgery . His work is focused on attention and memory, neuropsychology, physiology, and cognitive neuroscience. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Go to Profile#28914
Lyman Page
#28925
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Lyman Alexander Page, Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He is an expert in observational cosmology and one of the original co-investigators for the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe project that made precise observations of the electromagnetic radiation from the Big Bang, known as cosmic background radiation.
Go to Profile#28915
Jan Bernard Szlaga
#28926
Overall Influence
1940 - 2012 (72 years)
Jan Bernard Szlaga was the Roman Catholic bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pelplin, Poland. He was born the youngest of six children of Jan and Helena Szlaga. Education and early career From 1947 to 1953 Szlaga attended elementary school in Gdynia and then went attended Collegium Leoninum in Wejherowo and Collegium Marianum in Pelplin. He studied at the Pelplin Higher Seminary and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in Chelmno in 1963. From 1965 to 1969 Father Szlaga continued his biblical studies at the Catholic University of Lublin and from 1972 to 1973 at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome.
Go to Profile#28916
James N. Miller
#28927
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
James Northey Miller Jr. is the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory's Assistant Director for Policy and Analysis and also serves on the National Security Council staff as U.S. Coordinator for the Australia-United Kingdom-United States security agreement. He previously served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from February 18, 2012 until January 8, 2014 and as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense from April 2009 to February 2012.
Go to Profile#28917
Arsenio Balisacan
#28928
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Arsenio Molina Balisacan is a Filipino economist and academician currently serving as the Secretary of the National Economic and Development Authority . Balisacan first served as the NEDA Secretary from May 2012 to January 2016 under the Benigno Aquino III administration. He then served under the Duterte administration as the Chairperson of the Philippine Competition Commission from February 1, 2016 to June 30, 2022. He was again appointed as NEDA Secretary under the Bongbong Marcos administration. During his first term in 2012, he concurrently served as NEDA Secretary and as Chairman of the...
Go to Profile#28918
Morgen Witzel
#28929
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Morgen Witzel is a Canadian historian, business theorist, consultant, lecturer and author of management books, especially known from his work on "Doing business in China" and on "Managing in virtual organizations".
Go to Profile#28919
Huang Hongjia
#28930
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Huang Hongjia was a Chinese scientist. He was an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences , and a professor at Shanghai University. Life and career Huang developed coupling wave theory in the field of microwave theory. He led a research team that successfully developed single-mode optical fibers in 1980.
Go to Profile#28920
Maciej Henneberg
#28931
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Maciej Henneberg is a Polish-Australian Wood Jones Professor of Anthropological and Comparative Anatomy at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He has held this position since 1996 and specialises in human evolution, forensic science, human anatomy, as well as physical anthropology. He has held various academic positions at the University of Oxford, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Cape Town, and the University of Zurich.
Go to Profile#28921
Kevin Ford
#28932
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Kevin B. Ford is an American mathematician working in analytic number theory. Education and career He has been a professor in the department of mathematics of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2001. Prior to this appointment, he was a faculty member at the University of South Carolina.
Go to Profile#28922
Keith Winstein
#28933
Overall Influence
Keith Jonathan Winstein is a U.S. computer scientist and journalist. He is currently a professor at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Claude E. Shannon Research Assistant at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's Networks and Mobile Systems group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pursuing a Ph.D. under Hari Balakrishnan. Winstein is best known as the author of Mosh, the mobile shell, a UDP-based ssh replacement optimized for mobile users featuring predictive local echo, automatic roaming, and high network resiliency.
Go to Profile#28923
Steny Hoyer
#28934
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Steny Hamilton Hoyer is an American politician and attorney who has served as the U.S. representative for since 1981. He was also a House Majority Leader from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023. Hoyer first attained office through a special election on 19 May 1981. As of 2023, he is in his 22nd House term. His district includes a large swath of rural and suburban territory southeast of Washington, D.C. Hoyer is the dean of the Maryland congressional delegation and the most senior Democrat in the House.
Go to Profile#28924
Richard T. Snodgrass
#28935
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Richard Thomas Snodgrass is an American computer scientist and writer and is professor emeritus at the University of Arizona. He is best known for his work on temporal databases, query language design, query optimization and evaluation, storage structures, database design, and ergalics .
Go to Profile#28925
Okan Ersoy
#28936
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Okan Kadri Ersoy is a professor of electrical engineering and director of Statistical and Computational Intelligence Laboratory at Purdue University, West Lafayette School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of OSA and a Fellow of ISIBM. Ersoy contributed to the research and education in computer science and engineering, artificial intelligence and bioinformatics. He is on the editorial boards of International Journal of Functional Informatics and Personalized Medicine and International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design. He is also on the ad...
Go to Profile#28926
Arthur Rubin
#28937
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Arthur Leonard Rubin is an American mathematician and aerospace engineer. He was named a Putnam Fellow on four consecutive occasions from 1970 to 1973. Life and career Rubin's mother was Jean E. Rubin, a professor of mathematics at Purdue University, and his father was Herman Rubin, a professor of statistics at the same university. Arthur co-authored his first paper with his mother in 1969 at the age of 13. He earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1978, under the direction of Alexander S. Kechris.
Go to Profile#28927
Lynn S. Beedle
#28938
Overall Influence
1917 - 2003 (86 years)
Dr. Lynn S. Beedle was an American structural engineer, the founder and the director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, and known for his design and building of skyscrapers. The New York Times has called him "an expert on tall buildings".
Go to Profile#28928
Kostas Karamanlis
#28939
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Konstantinos A. Karamanlis , commonly known as Kostas Karamanlis , is a Greek retired politician who served as the 10th Prime Minister of Greece from 2004 to 2009. He was also president of the centre-right New Democracy party, founded by his uncle Konstantinos Karamanlis, from 1997 to 2009, and as member of the Hellenic Parliament from 1989 to 2023.
Go to Profile#28929
Paul Reubens
#28940
Overall Influence
1952 - 2023 (71 years)
Paul Reubens was an American actor and comedian, widely known for creating and portraying the character Pee-wee Herman. Reubens joined the Los Angeles troupe the Groundlings in the 1970s, and started his career as an improvisational comedian and stage actor. It was with the Groundlings that Reubens developed the Pee-wee character. After a failed audition for Saturday Night Live, Reubens debuted a stage show starring Pee-wee, The Pee-wee Herman Show, in 1981. Pee-wee became an instant cult figure and, for the next decade, Reubens was completely committed to his character, doing all of his public appearances and interviews as Pee-wee.
Go to Profile#28930
Toe Blake
#28941
Overall Influence
1912 - 1995 (83 years)
Joseph Hector "Toe" Blake, was a Canadian ice hockey player and coach in the National Hockey League . Blake played in the NHL from 1935 to 1948 with the Montreal Maroons and Montreal Canadiens. He led the NHL in scoring in 1939, while also winning the Hart Trophy for most valuable player, and served as captain of the Canadiens from 1940 to his retirement. He won the Stanley Cup three times as a player: in 1935 with the Maroons, and in 1944 and 1946 with the Canadiens. While with the Canadiens Blake played on a line with Elmer Lach and Maurice Richard which was dubbed the Punch line, as all three were highly-skilled players.
Go to Profile#28931
Trevor J. Barnes
#28942
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Trevor John Barnes, FBA is a British geographer and Professor of Economic geography at the University of British Columbia. Background Trevor Barnes received his Ph.D. in 1983 at University of Minnesota with a thesis under the supervision of Eric Sheppard titled The Geography of Value, Production, and Distribution: Theoretical Economic Geography after Sraffa. Barnes began his career as a spatial scientist, but in recent years his interest has moved to the history of economic geography. His current projects concern the history of geography's quantitative revolution; epistemological pluralism in...
Go to Profile#28932
Michael Thalbourne
#28943
Overall Influence
1955 - 2010 (55 years)
Michael Anthony Thalbourne was an Australian psychologist who worked in the field of parapsychology. He was educated at the University of Adelaide and the University of Edinburgh. His books include: A glossary of terms used in parapsychology , The common thread between ESP and PK , and Parapsychology in the Twenty-First Century: Essays on the future of Psychical Research .
Go to Profile#28933
David LaChapelle
#28944
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
David LaChapelle is an American photographer, music video director and film director. He is best known for his work in fashion, photography, which often references art history and sometimes conveys social messages. His photographic style has been described as "hyper-real and slyly subversive" and as "kitsch pop surrealism". Once called the Fellini of photography, LaChapelle has worked for international publications and has had his work exhibited in commercial galleries and institutions around the world.
Go to Profile#28934
Guido Tonelli
#28945
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Guido Tonelli is an Italian particle physicist who was involved with the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. He is a professor of General Physics at the University of Pisa and a CERN visiting scientist.
Go to Profile#28935
Anne Fausto-Sterling
#28946
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Anne Fausto-Sterling is an American sexologist who has written extensively on the social construction of gender, sexual identity, gender identity, gender roles, and intersexuality. She is the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University.
Go to Profile#28936
Charles Rees
#28947
Overall Influence
1927 - 2006 (79 years)
Charles Wayne Rees CBE FRS FRSC was a British organic chemist. Early life and education Rees was born in Egypt, and educated in England at Farnham Grammar School. After three years as a laboratory technician at the Royal Aircraft Establishment he went to University College at Southampton where he graduated in 1950. He took his PhD there with Professor A. Albert of the Australian National University – at Euston Road, London.
Go to Profile#28937
Norman I. Platnick
#28948
Overall Influence
1951 - 2020 (69 years)
Norman Ira Platnick was an American biological systematist and arachnologist. At the time of his death, he was a professor emeritus of the Richard Gilder Graduate School and Peter J. Solomon Family Curator Emeritus of the invertebrate zoology department of the American Museum of Natural History. A 1973 Ph.D. recipient at Harvard University, Platnick described over 1,800 species of spiders from around the world, making him the second most prolific spider taxonomist in history, behind only Eugène Simon. Until 2014 he was also the maintainer of the World Spider Catalog, a website formerly host...
Go to Profile#28938
Jaap Doek
#28949
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Jaap Egbert Doek is a Dutch jurist, specialising in family and juvenile law. He is a professor of law at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where he was the dean of the law faculty from 1988 to 1992. He is a deputy justice in the Court of Appeal of Amsterdam and he was a juvenile court judge in the district court of Alkmaar and the Hague .
Go to Profile#28939
Reinhard Breymayer
#28950
Overall Influence
1944 - 2017 (73 years)
Reinhard Breymayer was a German philologist, researcher into pietism and specialist on the history of rhetoric. His published output is considerable. Life Early years Breymayer was born in Urach, a small town in the hilly countryside between Stuttgart and Ulm. He grew up in nearby Unterweissach and Hülben, and attended the Evangelical Seminaries of Maulbronn and Blaubeuren. These were secondary schools with an unusually intensive focus on classical and humanistic education. He passed his school leaving exams in 1963, which opened the way to university level education. He studied successively at the universities of Tübingen, Cologne, Bonn and Bochum.
Go to Profile#28940
Stephen Page
#28951
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Stephen George Page is an Australian choreographer, film director and former dancer. He is the former artistic director of the Bangarra Dance Theatre, an Indigenous Australian dance company. Page is descended from the Nunukul people and the Munaldjali of the Yugambeh people from southeast Queensland, Australia.
Go to Profile#28941
Armand de Ricqlès
#28952
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Armand de Ricqlès is a French paleontologist best known for his work in bone histology and its implications for the growth of dinosaurs . Biography Early life He was born on 23 December 1938 in Brussels, Belgium. He obtained his first university degree in natural sciences from the University of Paris in 1960, and his doctorate in 1963. His thesis was supervised by Marcel Prenant, and focused on histology.
Go to Profile#28942
William G. Schneider
#28953
Overall Influence
1915 - 2013 (98 years)
William George Schneider, was a Canadian chemist and research administrator, who was president of the National Research Council of Canada from 1967 to 1980. He was president of IUPAC in 1983–1985.
Go to Profile#28943
Richard Berman
#28954
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Richard B. Berman is an American lawyer, public relations executive, and former lobbyist. Through his public affairs firm, Berman and Company, he ran several industry-funded, non-profit organizations such as the Center for Consumer Freedom, the Center for Union Facts, and the Employment Policies Institute.
Go to Profile#28944
Carmen Boullosa
#28955
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Carmen Boullosa is a Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. It has been praised by a number of writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Alma Guillermoprieto, Roberto Bolaño and Elena Poniatowska, as well as publications such as Publishers Weekly.
Go to Profile#28945
Taylor Hawkins
#28956
Overall Influence
1972 - 2022 (50 years)
Oliver Taylor Hawkins was an American musician, best known as the drummer of the rock band Foo Fighters, with whom he recorded eight studio albums between 1999 and 2021. Before joining the band in 1997, he was a touring drummer for Sass Jordan and Alanis Morissette, as well as the drummer of the progressive experimental band Sylvia.
Go to Profile#28946
Saleh Al Maghamsi
#28957
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Saleh bin Awad al Maghamsi is a sunni Islamic scholar from Saudi Arabia. He was the Imam of the Quba Mosque of Medina. He was a student of Ibn Baaz among other Islamic scholars. Early life and education Bin Awad al Maghamsi was born in 1963 in Al Madinah Region of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He grew up and was educated in the Medina region. He attended King Abdul Aziz University where he graduated in Arabic language and Islamic studies. He then studied under a number of Islamic scholars such as Mohammed Attia Salem, Abu Bakr Aljazairi, Saleh Mohammed Ibn Othaymeen, and Ibn Baaz.
Go to Profile#28947
Eugene Lawler
#28958
Overall Influence
1933 - 1994 (61 years)
Eugene Leighton Lawler was an American computer scientist and a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Academic life Lawler came to Harvard as a graduate student in 1954, after a three-year undergraduate B.S. program in mathematics at Florida State University. He received a master's degree in 1957, and took a hiatus in his studies, during which he briefly went to law school and worked in the U.S. Army, at a grinding wheel company, and as an electrical engineer at Sylvania from 1959 to 1961. He returned to Harvard in 1958, and completed his Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1962 under the supervision of Anthony G.
Go to Profile#28948
Thomas Nordegren
#28959
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Carl Axel Thomas Nordegren is a Swedish journalist and writer. Nordegren was born in Helsingborg. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for Swedish National Radio in Helsinki, Brussels, and later in Berlin and Washington, D.C. . He has been a visiting professor at New York University. Currently, he has a radio talk show, together with Louise Epstein, called Nordegren och Epstein i P1. Previously he had his own show Nordegren i P1. Nordegren is the father of Elin Nordegren and former father-in-law of golfer Tiger Woods.
Go to Profile#28949
Dominique Fernandez
#28960
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Dominique Fernandez is a French writer of novels, essays and travel books. Much of his writing explores homosexual experience and creativity. In 1982 he won the Prix Goncourt for his novel about Pier Paolo Pasolini; and in 2007 he was elected a member of the Académie Française.
Go to Profile#28950
Satoshi Fujii
#28961
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Satoshi Fujii is a Japanese civil engineer, economist and social critic, who served as a special advisor to the Abe cabinet until his voluntary Retirement. He is Professor of civil engineering at Kyoto University and the editor-in-chief of Hyogensha Criterion, an academic journal in Japan.
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