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
#28951
Warren Hoburg
#28962
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Warren Woodrow "Woody" Hoburg is an American engineer and NASA astronaut. Early life and education Warren Hoburg was born on September 16, 1985, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Jim and Peggy Hoburg. While attending North Allegheny High School he participated in the first-ever Team America Rocketry Challenge and competed in the national finals. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008. He earned a Master of Science in 2011, followed by a Ph.D. in 2013, in electrical engineering and computer science at the Un...
Go to Profile#28952
James P. Collman
#28963
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
James P. Collman is an American chemist who is the George A. and Hilda M. Daubert Professor of Chemistry, emeritus at Stanford University. Collman's research focused on organometallic bioinorganic chemistry. Collman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#28953
Helen Tiffin
#28964
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Helen M. Tiffin is an adjunct professor of English at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and an influential writer in post-colonial theory and literary studies. Tiffin returned to Australia from Canada to take up her present post at the University of Tasmania. She was formerly Professor of English and Canada Research Chair in English and Post-Colonial Studies at Queen's University. Prior to her move to Canada, Tiffin held the post of Professor in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland, where she was a founder member of the Postcolonial Re...
Go to Profile#28954
Claude Allègre
#28965
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Claude Allègre is a French politician and scientist. Scientific work The main scientific area of Claude Allègre was geochemistry. Allègre co-authored an Introduction to geochemistry in 1974. Since the 1980s, he mainly publishes popular science and political books.
Go to Profile#28955
Charles Epstein
#28966
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Charles L. Epstein is a Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Research interests Epstein is an analyst and applied mathematician. His interests include microlocal analysis and index theory; boundary value problems; nuclear magnetic resonance and medical imaging; and mathematical biology.
Go to Profile#28956
Frank Shorter
#28967
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Frank Charles Shorter is an American former long-distance runner who won the gold medal in the marathon at the 1972 Summer Olympics and the silver medal at the 1976 Summer Olympics. His Olympic success, along with the achievements of other American runners, is credited with igniting the running boom in the United States during the 1970s.
Go to Profile#28957
Ilhan Omar
#28968
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Ilhan Abdullahi Omar is an American politician serving as the U.S. representative for since 2019. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Before her election to Congress, Omar served in the Minnesota House of Representatives from 2017 to 2019, representing part of Minneapolis. Her congressional district includes all of Minneapolis and some of its first-ring suburbs.
Go to Profile#28958
Halil Güven
#28969
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Halil Guven is a Cypriot-born professor, currently serving as the Dean of San Diego State University - Georgia. He was a Vice Dean of SDSU Georgia for four years before then and was one of the coordinators of the project at the time of its conception. Dr. Güven served as a Rector at three different universities in Turkey and in Cyprus. He served as the rector of Istanbul Bilgi University appointed in the academic year of 2009–2010, Eastern Mediterranean University , North Cyprus in 2004–2007, and Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1999–2003. He received his B.S. degree from Boğaziçi University , his M.S.
Go to Profile#28959
Charlie Haden
#28970
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Charles Edward Haden was an American jazz double bass player, bandleader, composer and educator whose career spanned more than 50 years. Building on the work of predecessors such as Jimmy Blanton and Charles Mingus, Haden helped to revolutionize the harmonic concept of bass playing in jazz, evolving a style that sometimes complemented the soloist, and other times moved independently, liberating bassists from a strictly accompanying role, to allow more direct participation in group improvisation.
Go to Profile#28960
Cecil R. Reynolds
#28971
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Cecil Randy Reynolds is an American psychology professor best known for his work in psychological testing and assessment. Early life Reynolds was born on February 7, 1952, at the US Naval Hospital in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. His father, Cecil C. Reynolds, was a career marine, enlisting in 1929 and retiring in 1960. His mother, Daphne, owned and taught at a private preschool and kindergarten for 25 years, later becoming a published poet and author of children's books. Reynolds attended New Hanover High School, graduating in 1969, and turned down a Presidential appointment to the United States Naval Academy by Richard Nixon, after being drafted by the New York Mets.
Go to Profile#28961
Lane Smith
#28972
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Lane Smith is an American illustrator and writer of children's books. He is the Kate Greenaway medalist known for his eclectic visuals and subject matter, both humorous and earnest, such as the contemplative Grandpa Green, which received a Caldecott Honor in 2012, and the outlandish Stinky Cheese Man, which received a Caldecott Honor in 1992.
Go to Profile#28962
Richard Harries, Baron Harries of Pentregarth
#28973
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Richard Douglas Harries, Baron Harries of Pentregarth, FLSW is a retired bishop of the Church of England and former British Army officer. He was the Bishop of Oxford from 1987 to 2006. From 2008 until 2012 he was the Gresham Professor of Divinity.
Go to Profile#28963
Michael Aspel
#28974
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Michael Terence Aspel is a retired English television presenter and newsreader. He hosted programmes such as Crackerjack, Ask Aspel, Aspel & Company, Give Us a Clue, This is Your Life, Strange but True? and Antiques Roadshow.
Go to Profile#28964
Riitta Hari
#28975
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Riitta Kyllikki Hari is a Finnish neuroscientist, physician and professor at Aalto University. She has led the Brain Research Unit at the Low Temperature Laboratory since 1982. Hari was appointed as Academician of Science on 26 November 2010.
Go to Profile#28965
Ranjit Chandra
#28976
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Ranjit Kumar Chandra is an Indian-born Canadian researcher and self-proclaimed "father of nutritional immunology" who committed scientific and health care fraud. Chandra's misconduct was the subject of a 2006 documentary by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation . A libel trial in July 2015, concluded that the allegations of fraud against Chandra were truthful; he was ordered to pay $1.6 million to cover CBC's legal fees, and later that year was stripped of his membership in the Order of Canada. As of 2020, four of Chandra's research publications have been retracted, and one has been corrected...
Go to Profile#28966
Mark Leonard
#28977
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Mark Hugo Leonard is a British political scientist and author. He is the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations , which he founded in 2007. He has been writing for Project Syndicate, an international media organization, since 2004.
Go to Profile#28967
Claudia de Rham
#28978
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Claudia de Rham is a Swiss theoretical physicist working at the interface of gravity, cosmology and particle physics. She is based at Imperial College London. She was one of the UK finalists in the Physical Sciences and Engineering category of the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in 2018 for revitalizing the theory of massive gravity, and won the award in 2020.
Go to Profile#28968
Mohamed Elmasry
#28979
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Mohamed Elmasry is a Canadian engineering professor, imam, and Muslim community leader. Biography He was born in Cairo, Egypt and received his Bachelor of Science in 1965 from Cairo University. He continued his studies in Canada earning masters and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Ottawa in 1970 and 1974. He has worked in the area of digital integrated microchip design for over four decades.
Go to Profile#28969
David Estlund
#28980
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
David Estlund is the Lombardo Family Professor of Philosophy at Brown University, where he has taught since 1991. He works primarily in political philosophy. Education and career Estlund earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and taught briefly at the University of California, Irvine, before moving to Brown. He has spent fellowship years at the Program in Ethics at Harvard University and at Australian National University. His research interests center on liberalism, justice, and especially democracy. He sits on the editorial board of the academic journal Representation.
Go to Profile#28970
Paul Jewell
#28981
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Paul Jewell is an English football manager and former player, who was most recently director of football at Swindon Town. Jewell began his playing career with Liverpool, continued at Wigan Athletic and concluded in a ten-year spell with Bradford City, apart from a short loan spell with Grimsby Town. When his playing career ended, he became part of the coaching staff at Bradford City.
Go to Profile#28971
Louis B. Sohn
#28982
Overall Influence
1914 - 2006 (92 years)
Louis Bruno Sohn was an Austrian–American legal scholar. Biography Sohn was born in Lemberg, in what was then Austria-Hungary, later Poland and now Ukraine. He earned his first law degree at John Casimir University in Lwow in 1939, leaving for the United States to take up a Harvard University research fellowship two weeks before Nazi Germany invaded Poland. He was a longtime scholar of international law and advocate of international institutions.
Go to Profile#28972
M. Margaret McKeown
#28983
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Mary Margaret McKeown is a Senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit based in San Diego. McKeown has served on the Ninth Circuit since her confirmation in 1998.
Go to Profile#28973
Ken Birman
#28984
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Kenneth P. Birman is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He currently holds the N. Rama Rao Chair in Computer Science. Education Birman received his B.S. from Columbia University and Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#28974
Jaime Teevan
#28985
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Jaime Teevan is an American computer scientist and Microsoft executive known for her work on AI and productivity. Education and background Teevan received a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University. As an undergraduate, she sold her senior thesis to Infoseek, an early web search engine. In it she invented an early approach to using the web link graph to support information seeking.
Go to Profile#28975
Joël Bellassen
#28986
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Joël "Marc" Bellassen or Bel Lassen is a former professor of Chinese at and the first Inspector General in the field of Chinese Language Teaching at the Ministry of Education . He has been well known in his field in France since he co-wrote the book , which became one of the main textbooks used to teach Chinese in French secondary schools. He is now the President of the European Association for Chinese Teaching.
Go to Profile#28976
Carl Albert
#28987
Overall Influence
1908 - 2000 (92 years)
Carl Bert Albert was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 46th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1971 to 1977 and represented Oklahoma's 3rd congressional district as a Democrat from 1947 to 1977.
Go to Profile#28977
Mack Wilberg
#28988
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Mack J. Wilberg is an American composer, arranger, conductor, and choral clinician who has been the music director of the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square since 2008. Early life and education Wilberg was born in Price and raised in Castle Dale, Utah. Wilberg learned how to play the piano at the age of four. He served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in South Korea where he was part of New Horizons, a vocal group made up of LDS missionaries.
Go to Profile#28978
Ashok K. Chandra
#28989
Overall Influence
1948 - 2014 (66 years)
Ashok K. Chandra was a computer scientist at Microsoft Research in Mountain View, California, United States, where he was a general manager at the Internet Services Research Center. Chandra received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, an MS from University of California, Berkeley, and a BTech from IIT Kanpur. He was previously Director of Database and Distributed Systems at IBM Almaden Research Center.
Go to Profile#28979
Piotr Kowalski
#28990
Overall Influence
1927 - 2004 (77 years)
Piotr Kowalski was a Polish artist, sculptor, and architect. Kowalski worked in non-traditional materials including electronic and mechanical devices, neon art, large earth works, explosions and other natural phenomena including plant growth and gravity. Kowalski attended MIT in order to study mathematics, but turned to architecture, and then to sculpture. He immigrated to France as an architect for UNESCO and spent most of the rest of his life in Paris. Along with gallery works, he installed several large outdoors projects.
Go to Profile#28980
David Jason
#28991
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Sir David John White , known professionally by his stage name David Jason, is an English actor. He has played Derek "Del Boy" Trotter in the BBC sitcom Only Fools and Horses, Detective Inspector Jack Frost in A Touch of Frost, Granville in Open All Hours and Still Open All Hours, and Pop Larkin in The Darling Buds of May, as well as voicing Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows, the BFG in the 1989 film, and the title characters of Danger Mouse and Count Duckula.
Go to Profile#28981
Robin Williams
#28992
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Robin Williams is a British soil scientist who is Professor of Social Research on Technology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and director of the Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation. He is an interdisciplinary researcher in the field of Science and Technology Studies and contributed much to the social shaping of technology by studying the interplay between 'social' and 'technical' factors in the design and implementation of a range of technologies.
Go to Profile#28982
Jamal Crawford
#28993
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Aaron Jamal Crawford is an American former professional basketball player who played in the National Basketball Association from 2000 to 2020. He is regarded as one of the best ball handlers in NBA history. Although never voted to an All-Star team, he was named NBA Sixth Man of the Year three times, a record he shares with Lou Williams.
Go to Profile#28983
Lee Smith
#28994
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Lee Smith is an American fiction writer who often incorporates her background from the American South in her works. She has received many writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award.
Go to Profile#28984
Horace Mitchell Miner
#28995
Overall Influence
1912 - 1993 (81 years)
Horace Mitchell Miner was an American anthropologist, particularly interested in those languages of his time that were still closely tied to the earth and agricultural practices. During World War II, he served as a counterintelligence agent in Italy and Japan. In 1937, he earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago, going on to teach there, as well as at other universities in the United States, and on a Fulbright Fellowship at a college in Uganda. He later worked elsewhere in Africa, and in South America.
Go to Profile#28985
Michael P. Johnson
#28996
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Michael Paul Johnson is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and African and African American Studies at Penn State, where he taught sociology and women’s studies for over thirty years and was designated an Alumni Teaching Fellow, Penn State’s highest teaching award. He is an internationally recognized expert on domestic violence, invited to speak at conferences and universities throughout the United States and around the world.
Go to Profile#28986
Reeves Gabrels
#28997
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Reeves Gabrels is an American guitarist, songwriter and record producer. A member and guitarist of British band the Cure since 2012, Gabrels worked with David Bowie from 1987 to 1999 and was a member of the band Tin Machine. He has lived in New York, Boston, London, Los Angeles, Nashville, and New York's Hudson Valley. His Nashville-based band since 2007, Reeves Gabrels & His Imaginary Friends, features Gabrels on guitar and vocals.
Go to Profile#28987
Dennis Green
#28998
Overall Influence
1949 - 2016 (67 years)
Dennis Earl Green was an American football coach. During his National Football League career, Green coached the Minnesota Vikings for 10 seasons. He coached the Vikings to eight playoff appearances in nine years, despite having seven different starting quarterbacks in those postseasons. He was posthumously inducted into the Minnesota Vikings Ring of Honor in 2018.
Go to Profile#28988
Heath Ledger
#28999
Overall Influence
1979 - 2008 (29 years)
Heath Andrew Ledger was an Australian actor. After playing roles in several Australian television and film productions during the 1990s, he moved to the United States in 1998 to further develop his film career. His work consisted of 20 films in a variety of genres, including 10 Things I Hate About You , The Patriot , A Knight's Tale , Monster's Ball , Casanova , Lords of Dogtown , Brokeback Mountain , Candy , I'm Not There , The Dark Knight , and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus , the latter two of which were posthumously released. He also produced and directed music videos and aspired to ...
Go to Profile#28989
John Lloyd
#29000
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Nicol Fortune Lloyd is a British journalist who is currently contributing editor at the Financial Times and an Associate Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. Background Lloyd was born and raised in Anstruther, Fife, by his grandparents and his mother, a beautician. He was educated at Waid Academy in the town and, after spending a short period working as a caddie in Canada, attended the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated with an upper-second class MA degree in English literature in 1967.
Go to Profile#28990
Sherman Jackson
#29001
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Sherman A. Jackson, also known as Abdul Hakim Jackson is an American scholar of Islam. Career Jackson is the King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture and Professor of Religion and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Jackson was formerly the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Near Eastern Studies, visiting professor of law and professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#28991
David Talmage
#29002
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
David Wilson Talmage was an American immunologist. He made significant contributions to the clonal selection theory. Career Talmage was born to American Presbyterian missionaries in Japanese-controlled Korea. He was educated by home school and mission school until attending a boarding school in Pyongyang for secondary education. Talmage received his BS from Davidson College in 1941 and his MD from Washington University in St. Louis in 1944. From 1952 to 1959 he was associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago. From 1959 he was professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, professor of microbiology from 1960 to 1986, and distinguished professor starting in 1986.
Go to Profile#28992
John Ross
#29003
Overall Influence
John Ross is a British economist and blogger, known for his leadership of the Trotskyist party Socialist Action and his support for the Chinese government. He is better known in China as his Chinese name Luo Siyi . Ross currently contributes to multiple Chinese news media including CGTN and China Daily.
Go to Profile#28993
Hannah Dee
#29004
Overall Influence
Hannah-Mary Dee is a British cognitive scientist and computer scientist specialising in computer vision, with specialisms in plant science, navigation, art, and medical imaging. In 2014, she was one of 30 women identified by the British Computer Society in the "BCS Women in IT Campaign.
Go to Profile#28994
Gnassingbé Eyadéma
#29005
Overall Influence
1935 - 2005 (70 years)
Gnassingbé Eyadéma was a Togolese military officer and politician who was the president of Togo from 1967 until his death in 2005, after which he was immediately succeeded by his son, Faure Gnassingbé.
Go to Profile#28995
Thierry Aubin
#29006
Overall Influence
1942 - 2009 (67 years)
Thierry Aubin was a French mathematician who worked at the Centre de Mathématiques de Jussieu, and was a leading expert on Riemannian geometry and non-linear partial differential equations. His fundamental contributions to the theory of the Yamabe equation led, in conjunction with results of Trudinger and Schoen, to a proof of the Yamabe Conjecture: every compact Riemannian manifold can be conformally rescaled to produce a manifold of constant scalar curvature. Along with Yau, he also showed that Kähler manifolds with negative first Chern classes always admit Kähler–Einstein metrics, a result closely related to the Calabi conjecture.
Go to Profile#28996
Josh Kun
#29007
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Josh Kun is an American author, academic and music critic. Kun is Professor of Communication and Journalism and chair in Cross-Cultural Communication in the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California. He also holds a joint appointment at USC's Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. He is the director of USC Annenberg's School of Communication, director of The Popular Music Project at USC Annenberg's the Norman Lear Center and co-editor of the book series "Refiguring American Music" for Duke University Press.
Go to Profile#28997
Hideo Hosono
#29008
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
is a Japanese material scientist most known for the discovery of iron-based superconductors. Career and research Hosono is also a pioneer in developing transparent oxide semiconductors: he proposed a material design concept for a transparent amorphous oxide semiconductor with large electron mobility, demonstrated the excellent performance of TAOS thin film transistors for next generation displays and successfully converted a cement constituent 12CaO·7Al2O3 into transparent semiconductor, metal, and eventually superconductors.
Go to Profile#28998
Hugh Mellor
#29009
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
David Hugh Mellor was a British philosopher. He was a Professor of Philosophy and Pro-Vice-Chancellor, later Professor Emeritus, of Cambridge University. Biography Mellor was born in London on 10 July 1938, and educated at Manchester Grammar School. He studied chemical engineering at Pembroke College, Cambridge . His first formal study of philosophy was at the University of Minnesota where he took a minor in Philosophy of Science under Herbert Feigl. From Minnesota he obtained an MSc in 1962. He obtained his PhD in philosophy, with a thesis written under the supervision of Mary Hesse, at Pembroke in 1968.
Go to Profile#28999
Yoram Rabin
#29010
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Yoram Rabin is an Israeli law scholar. He is the president of the College of Management in Israel, the country's first and largest private college. In October 2015 Rabin was appointed legal adviser of the Israeli State Comptroller. Rabin has written and edited several books on public law, human rights and criminal law. He is one of the founding members of the Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel. In 2003/4, he was a member of the National Committee for Reform of Education .
Go to Profile#29000
Osayuki Godwin Oshodin
#29011
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Osayuki Godwin Oshodin, was a Nigerian academic who was the vice-chancellor of the University of Benin from 2009 to 2014. He was a professor of health education and published several journals and books concerning health and education.
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