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
#29701
Noël O'Sullivan
#29713
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Noël O'Sullivan is currently Research Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Hull. He studied at the London School of Economics and Harvard University. In 1967 he joined the Politics Department at Hull University. In 1992 he was given a personal chair in political philosophy at Hull.
Go to Profile#29702
Karl Hobbs
#29714
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Karl Bernard Hobbs II is an American men's college basketball coach, currently the associate head coach at Georgia Tech. He is the former head coach of the George Washington University Colonials men's basketball team. During his tenure, the Colonials won two Atlantic 10 Conference championships and made three consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances from 2005–07. Hobbs is known for his high-energy, frenetic coaching style.
Go to Profile#29703
Thalappil Pradeep
#29715
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Thalappil Pradeep is an institute professor and professor of chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He is also the Deepak Parekh Chair Professor. In 2020 he received the Padma Shri award for his distinguished work in the field of Science and Technology. He has received the Nikkei Asia Prize , The World Academy of Sciences prize , and the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2008 by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.
Go to Profile#29704
Mathias Dewatripont
#29716
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Mathias François Dewatripont is a Belgian economist and professor at the and visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He studied economics at the ULB, and obtained a PhD at Harvard University in 1986 . He is a member of the Economic Advisory Group for Competition Policy of the DG Competition , since 2004. He is a member of European Commission President José Manuel Durão Barroso's Group of Economic Policy Analysis, since 2005. In 2005, he was President of the European Economic Association. He is a member of the Econometric Society and Research Director at CEPR.
Go to Profile#29705
Nicholas Christakis
#29717
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Nicholas A. Christakis is a Greek-American sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and on the socioeconomic, biosocial, and evolutionary determinants of human welfare . He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab. He is also the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science.
Go to Profile#29706
Mo Farah
#29718
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Sir Mohamed Muktar Jama Farah is a British-Somali retired long-distance runner. Considered one of the greatest runners of all time, his ten global championship gold medals make him the most successful male track distance runner ever, and he is the most successful British track athlete in modern Olympic Games history. Farah is the first ever global Goodwill Ambassador of the International Organisation for Migration as announced on 28 November 2023 at the 114th Session of the IOM Council.
Go to Profile#29707
Justus Haucap
#29719
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Justus Haucap is a German economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at the University of Düsseldorf, where he directs the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics . The focus of his research is on competition and antitrust as well as the regulation of network industries and the digital economy. In 2015, Haucap was awarded the Gustav Stolper Prize for his contributions to competition policy in Germany.
Go to Profile#29708
Hanspeter Pfister
#29720
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Hanspeter Pfister is a Swiss computer scientist. He is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. His research in visual computing lies at the intersection of scientific visualization, information visualization, computer graphics, and computer vision and spans a wide range of topics, including biomedical image analysis and visualization, image and video analysis, and visual analytics in data science.
Go to Profile#29709
Michael Grade
#29721
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Michael Ian Grade, Baron Grade of Yarmouth, is an English television executive and businessman. He has held a number of senior roles in television, including controller of BBC1 , chief executive of Channel 4 , chairman of the board of governors of the BBC , and executive chairman of ITV plc . Since 2011, he has been a Conservative Party life peer in the House of Lords.
Go to Profile#29710
Aly Raisman
#29722
Overall Influence
1994 - Present (32 years)
Alexandra Rose Raisman is an American retired artistic gymnast and two-time Olympian. She was captain of both the 2012 "Fierce Five" and 2016 "Final Five" U.S. women's Olympic gymnastics teams, which won their respective team competitions.
Go to Profile#29711
Carlo La Vecchia
#29723
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Carlo La Vecchia is an Italian epidemiologist. He is doing research on chronic diseases, where he contributed to the understanding of the risks related to diet, tobacco, oral contraceptive use and occupational or environmental exposure to toxic substances in cancer and other chronic diseases development.
Go to Profile#29712
Paul Johnson
#29724
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Paul Gavin Johnson CBE is a British economist and civil servant, currently serving as director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a member of the Committee on Climate Change, and a visiting professor in Economics at the Department of Economics, University College London.
Go to Profile#29713
Alex Ross
#29725
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Nelson Alexander Ross is an American comic book writer and artist known primarily for his painted interiors, covers, and design work. He first became known with the 1994 miniseries Marvels, on which he collaborated with writer Kurt Busiek for Marvel Comics. He has since done a variety of projects for both Marvel and DC Comics, such as the 1996 miniseries Kingdom Come, which Ross co-wrote. Since then he has done covers and character designs for Busiek's series Astro City, and various projects for Dynamite Entertainment. His feature film work includes concept and narrative art for Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 , and DVD packaging art for the M.
Go to Profile#29714
Leung Chun-ying
#29726
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Leung Chun-ying , also known as CY Leung, is a Chinese politician from Hong Kong and a chartered surveyor, who has served as vice-chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference since March 2017. He was previously the third Chief Executive of Hong Kong between 2012 and 2017.
Go to Profile#29715
Peter Koslowski
#29727
Overall Influence
1952 - 2012 (60 years)
Peter Koslowski was a professor of philosophy, especially philosophy of management and organisation and history of modern philosophy, at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam . Biography He was born in Göttingen, Germany, in 1952, and studied at University of Tübingen, University of Munich, and Virginia Tech. He earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1979 and his master's degree in economics 1980 .1985-87 Professor and director, Institute for the Studium fundamentale, Witten/Herdecke University. Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Political Economy 1987-20041987-2001 Founding director, Forschungs...
Go to Profile#29716
James Trefil
#29728
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
James Stanley Trefil is an American physicist and author of nearly fifty books. Much of his published work focuses on science for the general audience. He has served as Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia and, since 1988, as Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason University. Among his books is Are We Unique?, an argument for human uniqueness in which he questions the comparisons between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Trefil has also given presentations to judges and public officials about the intersections between science and the law.
Go to Profile#29717
Thierry Bianquis
#29729
Overall Influence
1935 - 2014 (79 years)
Thierry Bianquis was a French Orientalist and Arabist. His main interest was the medieval Islamic Middle East, most notably the Fatimid era of Egypt and Syria, which was the subject of his dissertation.
Go to Profile#29718
Martin Vechev
#29730
Overall Influence
Martin Vechev is a professor at the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich working in the fields of programming languages, machine learning, and security. He leads the Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab , part of the Department of Computer Science. He is known for his pioneering works in machine learning for code , where he introduced statistical programming engines trained on large codebases, reliable and trustworthy artificial intelligence, where he introduced abstract interpretation methods for reasoning about deep neural networks to enable the verification of large machine...
Go to Profile#29719
Scott Skiles
#29731
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Scott Allen Skiles Sr. is an American former basketball coach and player. He coached the Phoenix Suns, Chicago Bulls, Milwaukee Bucks and Orlando Magic. A first-round draft pick out of Michigan State University, Skiles played ten seasons as a point guard in the NBA. He holds the NBA record for assists in one game with 30, set in his fifth season in the league and second with Orlando, in which he also earned the 1990–91 NBA Most Improved Player Award.
Go to Profile#29720
Charles Cogan
#29732
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Charles G. "Chuck" Cogan was an American academic and intelligence officer who served in the Central Intelligence Agency from 1954 to 1991. Background Cogan was born in Melrose, Massachusetts. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Harvard University and served in the United States Army during the Korean War.
Go to Profile#29721
Catherine Day
#29733
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Catherine Day is a former European civil servant from Ireland. Appointed in November 2005 as Secretary-General of the European Commission, she served two terms with President Jose Manuel Barroso and continued with his successor, Mr Jean-Claude Juncker until she retired in September 2015. She was the first woman to hold the post of Secretary General of the European Commission.
Go to Profile#29722
Eli Shamir
#29734
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Eliahu Shamir is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist, the Jean and Helene Alfassa Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Biography Shamir earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in 1963, under the supervision of Shmuel Agmon. After briefly holding faculty positions at the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University, he returned to the Hebrew University in 1966, and was promoted to full professor in 1972.
Go to Profile#29723
Shoaib Akhtar
#29735
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Shoaib Akhtar is a Pakistani former international cricketer and commentator. Nicknamed the "Rawalpindi Express", he is the fastest bowler in cricketing history, with an unbeaten 161.3 kmph delivery. Akhtar made his Test match debut in November 1997 as an opening fast bowler and played his first One Day International three months later. He has been involved in several controversies during his career, often accused of unsportsmanlike conduct. Akhtar was sent home during a Test match series in Australia in 2005 for alleged poor attitude and a year later received a ban after testing positive for the performance-enhancing substance nandrolone.
Go to Profile#29724
Karlene Faith
#29736
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
Karlene Faith was a Canadian writer, feminist, scholar, and human rights activist. She was a professor emerita at the Simon Fraser University School of Criminology. Early life and career Karlene Faith was born in Aylsham, Saskatchewan in 1938. She was the oldest of six children and her father was a United Church Minister. After moving to a small town in Montana near a jail, Faith often witnessed police brutality.
Go to Profile#29725
Hiroshi Haruki
#29737
Overall Influence
Hiroshi Haruki was a Japanese mathematician. A world-renowned expert in functional equations, he is best known for discovering Haruki's theorem and Haruki's lemma in plane geometry. Some of his published work, such as: "On a Characteristic Property of Confocal Conic Sections" is available on Project Euclid.
Go to Profile#29726
Gerard F. Gilmore
#29738
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gerard Francis Gilmore FRS FRAS FInstP is Emeritus Professor of Experimental Philosophy, in the Institute of Astronomy, at the University of Cambridge. His research has centred on studying stars in the Galaxy to understand its structure and evolutionary history.
Go to Profile#29727
Santiago Carrillo
#29739
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Santiago José Carrillo Solares was a Spanish politician who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain from 1960 to 1982. During the Civil War, he was placed at the head of a Republican militia and was in charge of maintaining public order in Madrid. Some hold him responsible for the massacres of Franco's prisoners that took place at the end of 1936.
Go to Profile#29728
Kevin Michael Richardson
#29740
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Kevin Michael Richardson is an American actor. Known for his distinctively deep voice, he has mostly voiced villainous characters in animation and video games. In film, Richardson voiced Goro in Mortal Kombat and reprises in Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge , Captain Gantu in the Lilo & Stitch franchise, Kamek in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Autobot Wrecker Bulkead from Transformers: Prime, and Deus Ex Machina in The Matrix Revolutions . He has also voiced characters on Seth MacFarlane's shows Family Guy, The Cleveland Show, and American Dad!, as well as several characters on The Si...
Go to Profile#29729
Timothy White
#29741
Overall Influence
Timothy White is an American celebrity photographer. He has photographed film actors and music artists, and shot for movie posters, magazine and music album covers. He has directed advertising campaigns and television commercials. He has published books of his photography works.
Go to Profile#29730
Margaret Slade
#29742
Overall Influence
Margaret E. Slade is Professor Emeritus at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and was a council member of the Royal Economic Society from 2004 to 2008. Slade is best known for her work on Industrial Economics, serving as the President of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics from 2001 to 2003.
Go to Profile#29731
Jane Kramer
#29743
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Jane Kramer is an American journalist. She began her writing career at the Village Voice, moving to The New Yorker in 1964, where she remains a staff writer. Her books Allen Ginsberg in America and Honor to the Bride , based on her travels in Morocco, were developed from long-form New Yorker articles.
Go to Profile#29732
Donald W. Meinig
#29744
Overall Influence
1924 - 2020 (96 years)
Donald William Meinig was an American geographer. He was Maxwell Research Professor Emeritus of Geography at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Career Meinig studied foreign service at Georgetown University, and then earned graduate degrees in geography from the University of Washington in 1950 and 1953, under the supervision of Howard H. Martin; he was also strongly influenced by historian Carroll Quigley and Australian geographer Graham H. Lawton.
Go to Profile#29733
Richard E. Morgan
#29745
Overall Influence
1937 - 2014 (77 years)
Richard Ernest Morgan was a conservative author, contributing editor of City Journal, and the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Government at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, United States. His areas of academic interest included the history, law and politics of the First Amendment. At the time of his death, Morgan was one of the leading conservatives of his generation.
Go to Profile#29734
Douglas T. Kenrick
#29746
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Douglas T. Kenrick is professor of psychology at Arizona State University. His research and writing integrate three scientific syntheses of the last few decades: evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and dynamical systems theory. He is author of over 170 scientific articles, books, and book chapters, the majority applying evolutionary ideas to human cognition and behavior.
Go to Profile#29735
Ernst Hiesmayr
#29747
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
Ernst Hiesmayr was an Austrian architect, artist and former rector of the Technical University Vienna. Life As a student in his high school years Ernst Hiesmayr already worked on construction sites, where he appropriated his material, construction and practical orientation. During the Second World War, he worked at the labor service and as an officer in the German Wehrmacht. Between 1945 and 1948 Hiesmayr studied architecture at the Graz University of Technology in the class of Friedrich Zotter.
Go to Profile#29736
Sammo Hung
#29748
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Sammo Hung Kam-bo is a Hong Kong actor, martial artist, film producer and director, known for his work in martial arts films, Hong Kong action cinema, and as a fight choreographer for other actors such as Jackie Chan.
Go to Profile#29737
Erin Arvedlund
#29749
Overall Influence
Erin E. Arvedlund is a financial journalist who has written for Barron's, The Wall Street Journal, The Moscow Times, The New York Times, TheStreet.com, and Portfolio.com. On Feb. 1, 2011, her "Your Money" column debuted in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Go to Profile#29738
Marian Dawkins
#29750
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Marian Stamp Dawkins is a British biologist and professor of ethology at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include vision in birds, animal signalling, behavioural synchrony, animal consciousness and animal welfare.
Go to Profile#29739
Catherine Cesarsky
#29751
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Catherine Jeanne Cesarsky is an Argentine and French astronomer, known for her successful research activities in several central areas of modern astrophysics. She was formerly president of the International Astronomical Union and the director general of the European Southern Observatory . In 2017 she became Chairman of the Board of the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project.
Go to Profile#29740
Kathleen Sullivan
#29752
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Kathleen Sullivan is an American television journalist. She was hired as a news anchor for the newly founded news channel CNN in 1980, when she was 27 years old, and she has also worked for ABC News, CBS News, and The Huffington Post.
Go to Profile#29741
Stuart Tave
#29753
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (103 years)
Stuart Malcolm Tave is an American literary scholar. Tave graduated from Columbia University, earned a master's degree at Harvard University, and completed a D. Phil at the University of Oxford. Tave taught at the University of Chicago, where he served as chair of the English department, dean of the Division of the Humanities, and William Rainey Harper Professor. He received a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the institution in 1958, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. Upon his retirement in 1993, Tave was granted emeritus status. In 2000, the Univers...
Go to Profile#29742
Ben Rhodes
#29754
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Benjamin J. Rhodes is an American writer, political commentator and former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting under President Barack Obama. With Jake Sullivan, he is the co-chair of National Security Action, a political NGO. He contributes to NBC News and MSNBC regularly as a political commentator. He is also a Crooked Media contributor, and co-host of the foreign policy podcast Pod Save the World.
Go to Profile#29743
Raymond Ranjeva
#29755
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Raymond Ranjeva served as a judge on the International Court of Justice from February, 1991 until February, 2009. He holds the following degrees: Bachelor's degree in law , University of Madagascar, Antananarivo; diplôme from Madagascar National School of Administration ; trainee in the Judicial Division of the Conseil d'Etat, Paris ; diplôme d'études supérieures de sciences politiques, University of Paris, Faculty of Law and Economic Science ; diplôme d'études supérieures de droit public, University of Madagascar ; Doctorate of Law, Panthéon-Assas University ; agrégé of the Faculties of Law ...
Go to Profile#29744
Janeane Garofalo
#29756
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Janeane Marie Garofalo is an American comedian, actress, and former co-host on Air America Radio's The Majority Report. Garofalo began her career as a stand-up comedian and became a cast member on The Ben Stiller Show, The Larry Sanders Show, and Saturday Night Live, then appeared in more than 50 movies, with leading or major roles in The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Wet Hot American Summer, The Matchmaker, Reality Bites, The Wild, Steal This Movie!, Clay Pigeons, Sweethearts, Mystery Men, The Minus Man, and The Independent. She has been a series regular on television programs such as Wet Hot...
Go to Profile#29745
Gert Spaargaren
#29757
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Gert Spaargaren is a Dutch professor at the Wageningen University, author, and editor. Spaargaren is from Aalsmeer, Netherlands, and is currently teaching Environmental Policy for sustainability and patterns of consumption in the Department of Social Sciences. His fields of expertise are Consumer Studies and Environmental policy.
Go to Profile#29746
Jawid Mojaddedi
#29758
Overall Influence
Jawid Mojaddedi is an Afghan researcher and professor. Early life Mojaddedi was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. At age five, along with his mother and brother, he moved to Great Britain. During the 1990s, Jawid Mojaddedi attended University of Manchester, where he earned his BA and PhD in Middle Eastern Studies.
Go to Profile#29747
Anthony Pagden
#29759
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Anthony Robin Dermer Pagden is an author and professor of political science and history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Biography Anthony Pagden is the son of John Brian Dermer Pagden and Joan Mary Pagden. Mr Pagden was educated at the Grange School in Santiago de Chile and Westminster School in London. He attended the University of Barcelona from 1964 to 1967. From 1967 to 1969 he worked as an assistant editor at the Trianon Press , and as a free-lance translator. He also spent some time in Cyprus in 1967 and 1968. Admitted in 1969 to Oriel College, Oxford to read Persian and Arabic, he changed the following year to History and Spanish.
Go to Profile#29748
Barbara J. Fields
#29760
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Barbara Jeanne Fields is an American historian. She is a professor of American history at Columbia University. Her focus is on the history of the American South, 19th century social history, and the transition to capitalism in the United States.
Go to Profile#29749
Davor Džalto
#29761
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Davor Džalto is an artist, art historian, theologian and philosopher of Bosnian-Herzegovinian origin. Biography Džalto was born in Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He graduated from the School of Art in Niš, Serbia. As an 18-year-old student he published his first book – On Writing as an Artistic, Historical, Social and Cultural Phenomenon.
Go to Profile#29750
Gunther Uhlmann
#29762
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Gunther Alberto Uhlmann Arancibia is a mathematician whose research focuses on inverse problems and imaging, microlocal analysis, partial differential equations and invisibility. Education and career Uhlmann studied mathematics as an undergraduate at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, gaining his Licenciatura degree in 1973. He continued his studies at MIT where he received a PhD in 1976. He held postdoctoral positions at MIT, Harvard and NYU, including a Courant Instructorship at the Courant Institute in 1977–1978. In 1980, he became Assistant Professor at MIT and then moved in 1985 to the University of Washington.
Go to Profile