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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#2901
David Bellamy
#2905
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
David James Bellamy was an English botanist, television presenter, author and environmental campaigner. Early and personal life Bellamy was born at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in London to parents Winifred May and Thomas Bellamy on 18 January 1933. He was raised in a Baptist family and retained a strong Christian faith throughout his life. As a child, he had hoped to be a ballet dancer, but he concluded that his rather large physique regrettably precluded him from pursuing the training.
Go to Profile#2902
David Brion Davis
#2906
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Go to Profile#2903
Ante Gotovina
#2907
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Ante Gotovina is a Croatian retired lieutenant general and former French senior corporal who served in the Croatian War for Independence. He is noted for his primary role in the 1995 Operation Storm. In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia indicted him on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges in connection with that operation and its aftermath. After spending four years in hiding, he was captured in the Canary Islands in December 2005.
Go to Profile#2904
Virgil Abloh
#2908
Overall Influence
1980 - 2021 (41 years)
Virgil Abloh was an American fashion designer and entrepreneur. He began his own line of luxury streetwear clothing, Pyrex Vision, in 2012, and became the chief executive officer of the Milan-based label Off-White, a fashion house he founded in 2013. Abloh was also the artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear collection beginning in 2018, and was given increased creative responsibilities across the LVMH brand in early 2021.
Go to Profile#2905
Walter Isard
#2909
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Walter Isard was a prominent American economist, the principal founder of the discipline of regional science, as well as one of the main founders of the discipline of peace studies and Peace economics.
Go to Profile#2906
Martha Gellhorn
#2910
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. Gellhorn reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. She was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945. She died in 1998 by apparent suicide at the age of 89, ill and almost completely blind. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after her.
Go to Profile#2907
Peter Sarnak
#2911
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
#2908
Robert Fano
#2912
Overall Influence
1917 - 2016 (99 years)
Roberto Mario "Robert" Fano was an Italian-American computer scientist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a student and working lab partner to Claude Shannon, whom he admired zealously and assisted in the early years of Information Theory.
Go to Profile#2909
Rita Dove
#2913
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position . Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.
Go to Profile#2910
Fang Lizhi
#2914
Overall Influence
1936 - 2012 (76 years)
Fang Lizhi was a Chinese astrophysicist, vice-president of the University of Science and Technology of China, and activist whose liberal ideas inspired the pro-democracy student movement of 1986–87 and, finally, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Because of his activism, he was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party in January 1987. For his work, Fang was a recipient of the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award in 1989, given each year. He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980, but his position was revoked after 1989.
Go to Profile#2911
Philippe Van Parijs
#2915
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Philippe Van Parijs is a Belgian political philosopher and political economist, best known as a proponent and main defender of the concept of an unconditional basic income and for the first systematic treatment of linguistic justice.
Go to Profile#2912
Ben Feringa
#2916
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
#2913
Bennet Omalu
#2917
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Dr. Bennet Ifeakandu Omalu is a Nigerian and American physician, forensic pathologist and neuropathologist who was the first to discover and publish findings on chronic traumatic encephalopathy in American football players while working at the Allegheny County coroner's office in Pittsburgh. He later became the chief medical examiner for San Joaquin County, California, and is a professor at the University of California, Davis, department of medical pathology and laboratory medicine. He is currently the President and Medical Director of Bennet Omalu Pathology.
Go to Profile#2914
Paul Kennedy
#2918
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Paul Michael Kennedy is a British historian specialising in the history of international relations, economic power and grand strategy. He has published on the history of British foreign policy and great power struggles, emphasizing the changing economic power base that undergirds military and naval strength, noting how declining economic power leads to reduced military and diplomatic weight.
Go to Profile#2915
Alexander Wang
#2919
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Alexander Wang is an American fashion designer. Wang launched his eponymous fashion brand in 2005 and came to prominence after being awarded the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2008. He is known for his urban-inspired designs and use of black.
Go to Profile#2916
Philip Selznick
#2920
Overall Influence
1919 - 2010 (91 years)
Philip Selznick was professor of sociology and law at the University of California, Berkeley. A noted author in organizational theory, sociology of law and public administration, Selznick's work was groundbreaking in several fields in such books as The Moral Commonwealth, TVA and the Grass Roots, and Leadership in Administration.
Go to Profile#2917
Peter Jenner
#2921
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Peter Julian Jenner is a British music manager and a record producer. Jenner, Andrew King and the original four members of Pink Floyd were partners in Blackhill Enterprises. Early career Peter Jenner is the son of William Jack Jenner, a vicar, and grandson of British Labour Party Politician Frank Wise. Jenner was educated at Westminster School and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he attained a first-class honours degree in Economics in 1963, aged 20. Appointed as a lecturer at the London School of Economics, after four years he left to manage the then up-and-coming band Pink Floyd. Jen...
Go to Profile#2918
Robert Skidelsky
#2922
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Robert Jacob Alexander, Baron Skidelsky, is a British economic historian. He is the author of a three-volume award-winning biography of British economist John Maynard Keynes . Skidelsky read history at Jesus College, Oxford, and is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick, England.
Go to Profile#2919
Robert Smigel
#2923
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Robert Smigel is an American actor, comedian, writer, director, producer, and puppeteer, known for his Saturday Night Live "TV Funhouse" cartoon shorts and as the puppeteer and voice behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. He also co-wrote the first two Hotel Transylvania films, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, and Leo, all starring Adam Sandler.
Go to Profile#2920
Joseph Papp
#2924
Overall Influence
1921 - 1991 (70 years)
Joseph Papp was an American theatrical producer and director. He established The Public Theater in what had been the Astor Library Building in Lower Manhattan. There Papp created a year-round producing home to focus on new plays and musicals. Among numerous examples of these were the works of David Rabe, Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody , and Papp's production of Michael Bennett's Pulitzer Prize–winning musical A Chorus Line. Papp also founded Shakespeare in the Park, helped to develop other off-...
Go to Profile#2921
Frank Yates
#2925
Overall Influence
1902 - 1994 (92 years)
Frank Yates FRS was one of the pioneers of 20th-century statistics. Biography Yates was born in Manchester, England, the eldest of five children of seed merchant and botanist Percy Yates and his wife Edith. He attended Wadham House, a private school, before gaining a scholarship to Clifton College in 1916. In 1920, he obtained a scholarship at St John's College, Cambridge, and four years later graduated with a First Class Honours degree.
Go to Profile#2922
David Chaum
#2926
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
David Lee Chaum is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertation "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups" is the first known proposal for a blockchain protocol. Complete with the code to implement the protocol, Chaum's dissertation proposed all but one element of the blockchain later detailed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. He has been referred to as "the father of online anonymity", a...
Go to Profile#2923
Doron Zeilberger
#2927
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Doron Zeilberger is an Israeli mathematician, known for his work in combinatorics. Education and career He received his doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1976, under the direction of Harry Dym, with the thesis "New Approaches and Results in the Theory of Discrete Analytic Functions." He is a Board of Governors Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University.
Go to Profile#2924
Nicholas Lemann
#2928
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Nicholas Berthelot Lemann is an American writer and academic, and is the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Lemann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
Go to Profile#2925
Hermann Zapf
#2929
Overall Influence
1918 - 2015 (97 years)
Hermann Zapf was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include Palatino, Optima, and Zapfino. He is considered one of the greatest type designers of all time.
Go to Profile#2926
Terrence Deacon
#2930
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Terrence William Deacon is an American neuroanthropologist . He taught at Harvard for eight years, relocated to Boston University in 1992, and is currently Professor of Anthropology and member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#2927
Jean-Luc Godard
#2931
Overall Influence
1930 - 2022 (92 years)
Jean-Luc Godard was a Franco-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Demy. He was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era. According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork. His most acclaimed films include Breathless , Vivre sa vie , Contempt , Band of Outsiders , Alphaville , Pierrot l...
Go to Profile#2928
Jil Sander
#2932
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Heidemarie Jiline "Jil" Sander is a German minimalist fashion designer and the founder of the Jil Sander fashion house. Early life and education Heidemarie Jiline Sander was born in Wesselburen, Germany on 27 November 1943.
Go to Profile#2929
E. C. George Sudarshan
#2933
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan was an Indian American theoretical physicist and a professor at the University of Texas. Prof.Sudarshan has been credited with numerous contributions to the field of theoretical physics, including Glauber–Sudarshan P representation, V-A theory, tachyons, quantum Zeno effect, open quantum system and quantum master equations, spin–statistics theorem, non-invariance groups, positive maps of density matrices, and quantum computation.
Go to Profile#2930
Owen Chamberlain
#2934
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Owen Chamberlain was an American physicist who shared with Emilio Segrè the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the antiproton, a sub-atomic antiparticle. Biography Born in San Francisco, California, Chamberlain graduated from Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia in 1937. He studied physics at Dartmouth College, where he was a member of Alpha Theta chapter of Theta Chi fraternity, and at the University of California, Berkeley. He remained in school until the start of World War II, and joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, where he worked with Segrè, both at Berkeley and in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Go to Profile#2931
Neil Strauss
#2935
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Neil Darrow Strauss , also known by the pen names Style and Chris Powles, is an American author, journalist and ghostwriter. He is best known for his book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, in which he describes his experiences in the seduction community in an effort to become a "pickup artist." He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and also wrote regularly for The New York Times.
Go to Profile#2932
Robert S. Boyer
#2936
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Robert Stephen Boyer is an American retired professor of computer science, mathematics, and philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin. He and J Strother Moore invented the Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm, a particularly efficient string searching algorithm, in 1977. He and Moore also collaborated on the Boyer–Moore automated theorem prover, Nqthm, in 1992. Following this, he worked with Moore and Matt Kaufmann on another theorem prover called ACL2.
Go to Profile#2933
Per Martin-Löf
#2937
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Per Erik Rutger Martin-Löf is a Swedish logician, philosopher, and mathematical statistician. He is internationally renowned for his work on the foundations of probability, statistics, mathematical logic, and computer science. Since the late 1970s, Martin-Löf's publications have been mainly in logic. In philosophical logic, Martin-Löf has wrestled with the philosophy of logical consequence and judgment, partly inspired by the work of Brentano, Frege, and Husserl. In mathematical logic, Martin-Löf has been active in developing intuitionistic type theory as a constructive foundation of mathema...
Go to Profile#2934
Michael Ledeen
#2938
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Michael Arthur Ledeen is an American historian and neoconservative foreign policy analyst. He is a former consultant to the United States National Security Council, the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense. He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a scholar for twenty years and now holds the similarly named chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was very close to Antonio Martino.
Go to Profile#2935
Arvind Subramanian
#2939
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Arvind Subramanian is an Indian economist and the former Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, having served from 16 October 2014 to 20 June 2018. Subramanian is currently a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He previously served as Professor of Economics at Ashoka University and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Center for Global Development.
Go to Profile#2936
Bernd Sturmfels
#2940
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Bernd Sturmfels is a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and is a director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig since 2017.
Go to Profile#2937
Andrei Sinyavsky
#2941
Overall Influence
1925 - 1997 (72 years)
Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky was a Russian writer and Soviet dissident known as a defendant in the Sinyavsky–Daniel trial of 1965. Sinyavsky was a literary critic for Novy Mir and wrote works critical of Soviet society under the pseudonym Abram Tertz published in the West to avoid censorship in the Soviet Union. Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were convicted of Anti-Soviet agitation in a show trial, becoming the first Soviet writers convicted solely for their works and for fiction, and served six years at a Gulag camp. Sinyavsky emigrated to France in 1973 where he became a professor of Russian lit...
Go to Profile#2938
W. S. Merwin
#2942
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.
Go to Profile#2939
Arthur Newell Strahler
#2943
Overall Influence
1918 - 2002 (84 years)
Arthur Newell Strahler was a geoscience professor at Columbia University who in 1952 developed the Strahler Stream Order system for classifying streams according to the power of their tributaries. Strahler was largely responsible for the shift from qualitative to quantitative geomorphology during the mid 20th century.
Go to Profile#2940
Robert Cialdini
#2944
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Robert Beno Cialdini is an American psychologist. He is the Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and was a visiting professor of marketing, business and psychology at Stanford University.
Go to Profile#2941
Richard R. Schrock
#2945
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Richard Royce Schrock is an American chemist and Nobel laureate recognized for his contributions to the olefin metathesis reaction used in organic chemistry. Education Born in Berne, Indiana, Schrock went to Mission Bay High School in San Diego, California. He holds a B.A. from the University of California, Riverside and a Ph.D. from Harvard University under the direction of John A. Osborn .
Go to Profile#2942
Edward Nelson
#2946
Overall Influence
1932 - 2014 (82 years)
Edward Nelson was an American mathematician. He was professor in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University. He was known for his work on mathematical physics and mathematical logic. In mathematical logic, he was noted especially for his internal set theory, and views on ultrafinitism and the consistency of arithmetic. In philosophy of mathematics he advocated the view of formalism rather than platonism or intuitionism. He also wrote on the relationship between religion and mathematics.
Go to Profile#2943
Edward Heath
#2947
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Sir Edward Richard George Heath , commonly known as Ted Heath, was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 to 1975. Heath also served for 51 years as a Member of Parliament from 1950 to 2001. Outside politics, Heath was a yachtsman, a musician, and an author.
Go to Profile#2944
Theodore Hesburgh
#2948
Overall Influence
1917 - 2015 (98 years)
Theodore Martin Hesburgh, CSC was an American Catholic priest and academic who was a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross. He is best known for his service as the president of the University of Notre Dame for thirty-five years .
Go to Profile#2945
Al Feldstein
#2949
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Albert Bernard Feldstein was an American writer, editor, and artist, best known for his work at EC Comics and, from 1956 to 1985, as the editor of the satirical magazine Mad. After retiring from Mad, Feldstein concentrated on American paintings of Western wildlife.
Go to Profile#2946
Bianca Jagger
#2950
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Bianca Jagger is a Nicaraguan social and human rights advocate and a former actress. Jagger currently serves as a Council of Europe goodwill ambassador, founder and chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, member of the Executive Director's Leadership Council of Amnesty International USA, and a trustee of the Amazon Charitable Trust.
Go to Profile#2947
Salvador Minuchin
#2951
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Salvador Minuchin was a family therapist born and raised in San Salvador, Entre Ríos, Argentina. He developed structural family therapy, which addresses problems within a family by charting the relationships between family members, or between subsets of family . These charts represent power dynamics as well as the boundaries between different subsystems. The therapist tries to disrupt dysfunctional relationships within the family, and cause them to settle back into a healthier pattern.
Go to Profile#2948
Paul Rudolph
#2952
Overall Influence
1918 - 1997 (79 years)
Paul Marvin Rudolph was an American architect and the chair of Yale University's Department of Architecture for six years, known for his use of reinforced concrete and highly complex floor plans. His most famous work is the Yale Art and Architecture Building , a spatially-complex Brutalist concrete structure. He is one of the modernist architects considered an early practitioner of the Sarasota School of Architecture.
Go to Profile#2949
Jim Gray
#2953
Overall Influence
1944 - 2012 (68 years)
James Nicholas Gray was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation".
Go to Profile#2950
Bas van Fraassen
#2954
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen is a Dutch-American philosopher noted for his contributions to philosophy of science, epistemology and formal logic. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University.
Go to Profile